Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany

by Maja Zehfuss

• ISBN13: 9780521873338
• ISBN10: 0521873339
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-19
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

German memories of the Second World War are controversial, and they are used to justify different positions on the use of military force. In this book, Maja Zehfuss studies the articulation of memories in novels in order to discuss and challenge arguments deployed in political and public debate. She explores memories that have generated considerable controversy, such as the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the bombing of German cities and the 'liberation' of Germany in 1945. She shows how memory retrospectively produces a past while claiming merely to invoke it, drawing attention to the complexities and contradictions within how truth, ethics, emotion, subjectivity and time are conceptualised. Zehfuss argues that the tensions and uncertainties revealed raise political questions that must be confronted, beyond the safety net of knowledge. This is a compelling book which pursues an original approach in exploring the politics of invocations of memory.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Speaking of war and memory	p. 1
Speaking of war and memory: political debate	p. 4
Speaking of war: novels	p. 13
Reading memory	p. 20
Speaking of the Second World War (and not the Holocaust)	p. 26
Forgetting to remember?	p. 32
The significance of remembering	p. 33
The significance of forgetting	p. 37
How to remember (and forget)	p. 40
Memories of the flight and expulsion from the East: Grass's Im Krebsgang	p. 41
Multiple memories	p. 55
The imperative to remember and the desire to forget	p. 60
Forgetting to remember	p. 63
The reframed war revisited	p. 68
Concluding thoughts	p. 71
Wounds of memory	p. 76
Don't mention the war?	p. 77
The year of remembrance 1995: time to mourn?	p. 79
Air war and literature: the (im)possibility of truth in fiction	p. 81
Der Brand: inappropriate sentimentality?	p. 87
The problem of victimhood	p. 92
Ledig: Vergeltung	p. 96
Mulisch: Das steinerne Brautbett	p. 101
Victims and perpetrators in one	p. 108
Memories of strategic bombing and the Iraq war	p. 116
Concluding thoughts	p. 121
The truth of memory	p. 126
Never again German war	p. 127
Forgotten Wehrmacht atrocities: the exhibition	p. 129
Recreating immediacy: Ledig's Die Stalinorgel	p. 141
Impossible authenticity: Walser's Ein springender Brunnen	p. 146
Representing war and the political context	p. 151
The truth of fiction	p. 155
Beyond truth? Emotion and ethics	p. 161
Representing war: the other political context	p. 166
Concluding thoughts	p. 171
Times of memory	p. 175
Memory and temporality: between past and present?	p. 176
When we remember: Johnson's Jahrestage	p. 182
Different times: Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5	p. 189
Tensions of time	p. 197
Thinking time differently	p. 208
The future of ethics	p. 213
Concluding thoughts	p. 218
Memory, uncertainty, responsibility	p. 221
Challenges of memory	p. 221
The spectre of horror	p. 228
The spectre of the Holocaust	p. 242
War and the spectre of its Other	p. 251
Speaking of war and memory: uncertainty and responsibility	p. 259
Bibliography	p. 267
Index	p. 285
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