Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s

by Edited by Richard Bessel , Dirk Schumann

• ISBN13: 9780521804134
• ISBN10: 0521804132
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-05-05
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays offers a novel approach to the cultural and social history of Europe after the Second World War. In a shift of perspective, it does not conceive of the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a quasi-natural return to previous patterns of societal development but approaches it as an attempt to establish 'normality' upon the lingering memories of experiencing violence on a hitherto unprecedented scale. It views the relationship of the violence of the 1940s to the apparent 'normality' and stability of the 1950s as a key to understanding the history of post-war Europe. While the history of post-war Germany naturally looms large in this collection, the essays deal with countries across Western and Central Europe, offer comparative perspectives on their subjects, and draw upon a wide range of primary and secondary source material.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction: Violence, Normality, and the Construction of Postwar Europe
Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann	1	(14)
1 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II: Can a Psychiatric Concept Help Us Understand Postwar Society?
Alice Förster and Birgát Beck	15	(22)
2 Between Pain and Silence: Remembering the Victims of Violence in Germany after 1949
Sabine Behrenbeck	37	(28)
3 Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews: The Netherlands, France, and West Germany in the 1950's
Ido de Haan	65	(28)
4 Trauma, Memory, and Motherhood: Germans and Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1949
Atina Grossmann	93	(36)
5 Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna in 1945
Andrea Petö	129	(20)
6 "Going Home": The Personal Adjustment of British and American Servicemen after the War
Joanna Bourke	149	(12)
7 Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of the War
Dagmar Herzog	161	(32)
8 Family Life and "Normality" in Postwar British Culture
Pat Thane	193	(18)
9 Continuities and Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950's
Michael Wildt	211	(20)
10 "Strengthened and Purified Through Ordeal by Fire": Ecclesiasrical Triumphalism in the Ruins of Europe
Damian van Melis	231	(12)
11 The Nationalization of Victimhood: Selective Violence and National Grief in Western Europe, 1940-1960
Dieter Lagrou	243	(16)
12 Italy after Fascism: The Predicament of Dominant Narratives
Donald Sassoon	259	(32)
13 The Politics of Post-Fascist Aesthetics: 1950's West and East German Industrial Design
Paul Betts	291	(32)
14 Dissonance, Normality, and the Historical Method: Why Did Some Germans Think of Tourism after May 8, 1945?
Alon Confino	323	(26)
Index	349