War Stories

by Moeller, Robert G.

• ISBN13: 9780520239104
• ISBN10: 0520239105
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that--according to some contemporary accounts--were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Listening to War Stories	1	(20)
Accounting for the Past	21	(30)
Driven into Zeitgeschichte: Historians and the ``Expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe''	51	(37)
Prisoners of Public Memory: ``Homecoming 1955''	88	(35)
Heimat, Barbed Wire, and ``Papa's Kino'': Expellees and POWs at the Movies	123	(48)
Epilogue	171	(28)
Notes	199	(78)
Bibliography	277	(44)
Index	321