For a while now, popular fiction set in the years before 1933 and their long aftermath has been doing very well in Germany. In its own way, it’s become part of how the country remembers — and it’s quietly reshaping how people picture that history. Drawing on two examples – the Gereon Rath crime novels, including the popular Babylon Berlin, which run from the 1920s through to the end of the Nazi regime, and the novel Stella, about a Jewish “catcher” – this conversation looks at what popular fiction can achieve, and where it runs up against its limits.

Sascha Feuchert is a professor of modern German literature, specializing in Holocaust and concentration camp literature, at the University of Giessen. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Copernicus Prize of the German Research Foundation and the Foundation for Polish Science, as well as the Hessian University Prize for Excellence in Teaching.