The 1990 Literaturstreit (Literary Dispute) focused attention once more on the postwar German tradition of socially committed literature. The ensuing debate about the future of German writing elicited a wide range of responses, with some participants advocating more ‘readable’ books and others calling for a return to the aesthetic complexity of the ‘great’ modern European novel (e.g. Joyce, Mann or Balzac) and a focus on the traditional ‘big’ themes of literary fiction, such as human nature, urban existence and the fascination of evil. Yet there was a general consensus among almost all contributors to the debate that the moralising tone of German literature from 1945 was now obsolete. Many younger authors too appeared to reject the determinedly political focus of the ‘Flakhelfer’ generation of Günter Grass or of writers such as Uwe Timm and F. C. Delius of the generation of ’68 and displayed little ambition to become the ‘conscience of the nation’. This changed attitude is especially evident in portrayals of Germany’s Nazi past. Contemporary representations of the National Socialist period, such as Marcel Beyer’s Spione (Spies, 2000), Ulla Hahn’s Unscharfe Bilder (Blurred Images, 2003), Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (Celestial Bodies, 2003), Reinhard Jirgl’s Die Unvollendeten (The Unfinished, 2003), or Thomas Medicus’s In den Augen meines Großvaters (In My Grandfather’s Eyes, 2004), for instance, tend to be less overtly critical than in the past, displaying greater empathy with the wartime generation. Often, this means taking ‘ordinary Germans’ as their subject and occasionally blurring the boundaries between victim and perpetrator. This shift towards a more open and inclusive, and less politicised view of the Nazi past in post-unification Germany has occurred, at least in part, as a result of the dissolution, or questioning, of the left-liberal consensus more widely, which some felt had institutionalised a form of ‘political correctness’. Indeed, even former ’68ers, including Timm and Delius, have reassessed their perhaps overzealous stance of previous decades and in recent works exhibit a more empathetic attitude towards the dilemmas faced by ordinary Germans during the National Socialist period.