Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond Disturbing Pasts

by Bird, Stephanie; Fulbrook, Mary; Wagner, Julia; Wienand, Christiane

• ISBN13: 9781474241854
• ISBN10: 1474241859
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-02-25
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the legacies that National Socialist violence and genocide perpetrated in Europe continue to have in German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. Furthermore it explores how those legacies are in turn shaped by the present.

The volume also considers conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, made by those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also by different communities in the generations that followed. The contributions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, enrich our understanding of the complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed and instrumentalized by a later present.

Author Biography

Stephanie Bird is Senior Lecturer in German and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London, UK. She is the author of Women Writers and National Identity (2003) and Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (1998).

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at University College London, UK. She is the author or editor of more than 20 books including A Concise History of Germany (3rd edition, 2015) and A History of Germany 1918-2014: The Divided Nation (4th edition, 2014). Her most recent publications include Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011) and the Fraenkel Prize winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012).

Julia Wagner is Research Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London, UK.

Christiane Wienand is Research Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London, UK.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Disturbing the Past/Disturbed by the Past - Stephanie Bird and Mary Fulbrook (both University College London, UK)
Part I - Emotional Connections
2. Troubling Issues: Guilt and Shame among Persecutors and Persecuted - Mary Fulbrook (University College London, UK)
3. Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans' Re-Education or a Catalyst for their Wish to Forget? - Ulrike Weckel (University of Giessen, Germany)
4. Ashamed About the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and their Families
in Postwar Dutch Society Ismee Tames - (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Netherlands)
5. Autobiography, Moral Witnessing, and the Disturbing Memory
of Nazi Euthanasia
Susanne Knittel (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Part II - Disturbing Narratives
6. Disturbing Mending: On the Imagined Third Generation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Literature of the Second Generation - Tsila Ratner (University College London, UK)
7. Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the Waldheim Affair in Robert Schindel's Der Kalte - Katya Krylova (University of Nottingham, UK)
8. The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture - Uilleam Blacker (University College London, UK)
Part III - Fascination / Pleasure
9. Don't Mention the War - Julian Petley (Brunel University, UK)
10. 'However sick a joke…': On Comedy, the Representation of Suffering, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Melodrama and Volker Koepp's Melancholy - Stephanie Bird (University College London, UK)
11. Disturbing Anselm Kiefer - Caitriona Leahy (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Part IV - Better Futures? (Dis)Placing Identities
12. German Tourists in Europe and Reminders of a Disturbing Past - Julia Wagner (University College London, UK)
13. Reverberations of a Disturbing Past: Reconciliation Activities of Young West Germans in the 1960s and 1970s - Christiane Wienand (University College London, UK)
14. Disturbing Pasts and Better Futures? A Comparison of Recent Approaches to the Past among Bukovina Jews and Bukovina Germans - Gaelle Fisher (University College London, UK)
15. How to Cope with It? The Steuben Society of America's Politics of Memory and the Holocaust - Julia Lange (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Afterword: Hauntings and Revisitings across Generations - Lisa Appignanesi (King's College London, UK)
Bibliography
Index