The trouble is that writing about oneself in the third person is inherently problematic and the novelty rapidly palls. The effect is a curious inversion of Frederick the Great, who habitually addressed servants in the third person. The absolute author, like the absolute monarch, puts his readers in their place by distancing himself from his own actions and thereby evading responsibility for them. So Grass, who has spent his life preaching to the Germans that they must face up to their past, never confronts his own. And by privileging the private paterfamilias over the public intellectual, he dodges potential criticism. Even as a husband and a father, Grass is constantly on the run, pursued by the consequences of his own deeds. Only when he reverts to speaking in his own voice does he speak candidly: "Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that constantly has to be corroborated. That is why, to make you believe me, I must lie."

If Kehlmann represents the future of the German genius and Grass its past, where do we place Friedrich Christian Delius? Now in his late sixties, Delius belongs to the 1968 generation, which Watson insists was "a much bigger set of events [in West Germany] than anywhere else". Whether or not Watson is exaggerating again — and I suspect that the Czechs, the French and the Americans might say that he was — it is certainly true that the "68ers" left a permanent mark on the German political and cultural landscape, which indeed they dominated until recently. They were, of course, the children of the Nazi generation and they romanticised their rebellion as the resistance that should have happened but didn't — a posthumous revenge on Hitler. They caricatured their parents as a generation "incapable of mourning", in the famous phrase of the psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, and mythologised themselves as the true liberators of a still "authoritarian" Germany, ignoring the existence on the other side of the Berlin Wall of a real German dictatorship — of the Left. This self-apotheosis did little harm as long as the rebellion took the form of student antics, but in the 1970s it mutated into terrorism and came close to destabilising the Federal Republic. The older generation took fright and, led by Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, fought a successful rearguard action. Not until 1998 did the lunatics take over the asylum, by which time their leaders — the former 68ers Otto Schily and Joschka Fischer, plus the slightly younger Gerhard Schröder — had become conventional politicians in three-piece suits. Even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the former Danny le Rouge, is a well-heeled MEP, while those artists who survived the lethally self-indulgent lifestyle of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder have become pillars of the German cultural establishment. 

Delius, too, has matured into a novelist and poet of considerable stature, but the first of his books to be translated is his 2006 novella Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman. This is the kind of reckoning with the past that could happen only with the passing of time. A young German woman, heavily pregnant, finds herself in Rome in 1943. Separated from her adored husband, Gert, a corporal in North Africa, she has little to do but await the birth of her child. She decides to walk to a concert in the Lutheran church on the other side of Rome. Her stream of consciousness, a single 125-page sentence, takes about as long to read as the urban stroll that she describes. Reading Portrait is in fact anything but an arduous experience. There is nothing ponderously Germanic about the delicacy with which Delius recreates the longings and fears of the expectant Margarete (her name is revealed only indirectly, when she crosses the Ponte Margharita). The unfolding drama lies in the tension between her sense of patriotic duty and her realisation that this duty stands between her and happiness. Delius gives us an insight into the mind of a typical German of the Third Reich, in whose conscience Nazi indoctrination vies for supremacy with faith, hope and love. In the final pages she listens to a Bach cantata, and the conflict between her Führer and her God comes into focus. She imagines the whole of Europe intoning a mighty chorale against the war, praising God and bringing peace on earth. The reader knows that this not going to happen, that the worst is yet to come, and that, even if they survive the war, mother and child will suffer the just retribution which they, as part of the German people, have brought upon themselves. Heavier than the burden that the mother carries across the Eternal City is the burden of guilt that not only this woman but her child must bear for the crimes committed in their name. Still, at least they have a future, however bleak. If she had been Jewish, she and her baby would have been extremely fortunate to survive at all.