The Miracle Years

by Schissler, Hanna

• ISBN13: 9780691058207
• ISBN10: 0691058202
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-11-13
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Stereotypical descriptions showcase West Germany as an "economic miracle" or cast it in the narrow terms of Cold War politics. Such depictions neglect how material hardship preceded success and how a fascist past and communist sibling complicated the country's image as a bastion of democracy. Even more disappointing, they brush over a rich and variegated cultural history. That history is told here by leading scholars of German history, literature, and film in what is destined to become the volume on postwar West German culture and society. In it, we read about the lives of real people--from German children fathered by black Occupation soldiers to communist activists, from surviving Jews to Turkish "guest" workers, from young hoodlums to middle-class mothers. We learn how they experienced and represented the institutions and social forces that shaped their lives and defined the wider culture. We see how two generations of West Germans came to terms not only with war guilt, division from East Germany, and the Angst of nuclear threat, but also with changing gender relations, the Americanization of popular culture, and the rise of conspicuous consumption. Individually, these essays peer into fascinating, overlooked corners of German life. Together, they tell what it really meant to live in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Volker R. Berghahn, Frank Biess, Heide Fehrenbach, Michael Geyer, Elizabeth Heineman, Ulrich Herbert, Maria Houml;hn, Karin Hunn, Kaspar Maase, Richard McCormick, Robert G. Moeller, Lutz Niethammer, Uta G. Poiger, Diethelm Prowe, Frank Stern, Arnold Sywottek, Frank Trommler, Eric D. Weitz, Juliane Wetzel, and Dorothee Wierling.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction Writing about 1950s West Germany	3	(14)
Hanna Schissler
PART ONE: THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST, NEW BEGINNINGS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL MEMORY	17	(110)
Introduction	19	(2)
The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's ``Crisis Years'' and West German National Identity	21	(36)
Elizabeth Heineman
Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945-1955	57	(26)
Frank Biess
Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s	83	(27)
Robert G. Moeller
Mission to Happiness: The Cohort of 1949 and the Making of East and West Germans	110	(17)
Dorothee Wierling
PART TWO: STIGMA: ``OTHERS'' IN THE SHAPING OF WEST GERMANY	127	(106)
Introduction	129	(2)
An Uneasy Existence: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945	131	(14)
Juliane Wetzel
Heimat in Turmoil: African-American GIs in 1950s West Germany	145	(19)
Maria Hohn
Of German Mothers and ``Negermischlingskinder'': Race, Sex, and the Postwar Nation	164	(23)
Heide Fehrenbach
Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until its Halt in 1973	187	(32)
Ulrich Herbert
Karin Hunn
The Ever-Present Other: Communism in the Making of West Germany	219	(14)
Eric D. Weitz
PART THREE: THE PRESENCE OF THE ABSENT	233	(88)
Introduction	235	(2)
``Normalization'' in the West: Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s	237	(29)
Lutz Niethammer
Film in the 1950s: Passing Images of Guilt and Responsibility	266	(15)
Frank Sten
Memory and Commerce, Gender and Restoration: Wolfgang Staudte's Roses for the State Prosecutor (1959) and West German Film in the 1950s	281	(20)
Richard McCormick
Creating a Cocoon of Public Acquiescence: The Author-Reader Relationship in Postwar German Literature	301	(20)
Frank Trommler
PART FOUR: THE EMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY, MODERNITY'S CLAIMS AND LIMITS	321	(88)
Introduction	323	(3)
Recasting Bourgeois Germany	326	(15)
Volker R. Berghahn
From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from the 1940s to the 1970s	341	(18)
Arnold Sywottek
``Normalization'' as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany during the 1950s	359	(17)
Hanna Schissler
Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons	376	(33)
Michael Geyer
PART FIVE: THE AMBIGUITY OF AMERICAN INFLUENCES, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE BREAKING OF ``HIGH CULTURE'S'' HEGEMONY	409	(50)
Introduction	411	(1)
A New, ``Western'' Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s	412	(16)
Uta G. Poiger
Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, ``Americanization,'' and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture	428	(23)
Kaspar Maase
The ``Miracle'' of the Political-Culture Shift: Democratization Between Americanization and Conservative Reintegration	451	(8)
Diethelm Prowe
Epilogue Rebels in Search of a Cause	459	(10)
Hanna Schissler
Selected Readings	469	(10)
Biographical Note	479	(8)
Index	487