German Memory Contests

by Fuchs, Anne; Cosgrove, Mary; Grote, Georg

• ISBN13: 9781571133243
• ISBN10: 1571133240
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-01
• Publisher: Camden House

Summary

Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of "Vergangenheitsbew+ltigung," or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of "memory contests," which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative, the contributions offer a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Contributors: Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Elizabeth Boa, Stefan Willer, Chloe E. M. Paver, Matthias Fiedler, J. J. Long, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Cathy S. Gelbin, Jennifer E. Michaels, Mary Cosgrove, Andrew Plowman, Roger Woods. Anne Fuchs is professor of modern German literature and Georg Grote is lecturer in German history, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Germany's Memory Contests and the Management of the Past	1	(24)
Anne Fuchs
Mary Cosgrove
Positions
What Exactly Is Vergangenheitsbewaltigung? Narrative and Its Insufficiency in Postwar Germany	25	(16)
Peter Fritzsche
The Tinderbox of Memory: Generation and Masculinity in Vaterliteratur by Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leupold	41	(26)
Anne Fuchs
Telling It How It Wasn't: Familial Allegories of Wish-Fulfillment in Postunification Germany	67	(20)
Elizabeth Boa
Mediations
Being Translated: Exile, Childhood, and Multilingualism in G.-A. Goldschmidt and W. G. Sebald	87	(20)
Stefan Willer
``Ein Stuck langweiliger als die Wehrmachtsausstellung, aber dafur reprasentativer'': The Exhibition Fotofeldpost as Riposte to the ``Wehrmacht Exhibition''	107	(20)
Chloe E. M. Paver
German Crossroads: Visions of the Past in German Cinema after Reunification	127	(20)
Matthias Fiedler
Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory	147	(22)
J. J. Long
Ethnicity/Hybridity
Imagined Identities: Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors in Literature	169	(24)
Dagmar C. G. Lorenz
Of Stories and Histories: Golem Figures in Post--1989 German and Austrian Culture	193	(16)
Cathy S. Gelbin
Multi-Ethnicity and Cultural Identity: Afro-German Women Writers' Struggle for Identity in Postunification Germany	209	(20)
Jennifer E. Michaels
Memory Politics
The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W. G. Sebald's Work	229	(24)
Mary Cosgrove
Between ``Restauration'' and ``Nierentisch'': The 1950s in Ludwig Harig, F. C. Delius, and Thomas Hettche	253	(18)
Andrew Plowman
On Forgetting and Remembering: The New Right since German Unification	271	(16)
Roger Woods
A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur	287	(16)
Anne Fuchs
Works Cited	303	(26)
Notes on the Editors and Contributors	329	(4)
Index	333