Post war Germany

There seems to be a surge in interest in post war Germany - or perhaps I am just sensitised to it at the moment. I saw The Reader a few months ago, then this week enjoyed Karen Schaupp's one woman show, Lotte's Gift, about her grandmother in post war Germany (broken by her virtuosic guitar performances).
By accident I also picked up a novel on war time/ post war German experiences,"The Dark Room" by Rachel Seiffert, a few nights ago. The writing is spare and the subjects of the three stories bleak but compelling. We are created by the cultural forces around us. Our understandings of our contemporary situation formed by the discourse around us is probably even more pervasive now than then. A man in 1997 Germany in the final story struggles to reconcile his memory of a loving grandfather with what the grandfather almost certainly did as an SS soldier in Belorussia in the war. The young man comes to a tentative acceptance of his grandparents at the end but doesn't seem to understand the multiple and fragmented nature of each and every individual. Who is to say that he/ I wouldn't have been capable of the same actions as the grandfather under pressure of the military and racial discourses of the time and place?