Victims and Perpetrators: 1933-1945

This volume examines the politics of history and memory in Germany today through a review and analysis of seminal developments in the current discourse on 1933 - 1945. An interdisplicinary work, this book examines questions of representing the past from the perspective of literary studies, social psychology, film studies, history, and cultural studies.
Themes include transgenerational memory and remembrance, the air war and German literature, commemoration and silences, transnational reconciliation, and historical consciousness in the German present. The collected essays make clear that as the current discourse contributes toward an historically informed, differentiated understanding of individuals' roles in the Third Reich and World War Two, victim and perpetrator identities cannot be defined as exclusive from one another. The discourse emphasizes personal over collective experience and answers questions of responsibility and guilt on the individual level.

Auteur

Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA; Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

Contenu

Laurel Cohen-Pfister/Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, Introduction: History and the Memory of Suffering: Rethinking 1933-1945 Transgenerational Memory Aleida Assmann, Limits of Understanding: Generational Identities in Recent German Memory Literature; Nikhil Sathe, "Ein Fressen für mein MG": The Problem of German Suffering in Uwe Timm's Am BeispieI rneines Bruders; Rachel Halverson, Mothers, Memories, and Mnemonics: Hanna Johansen's Lena and Judith Kuckart's Lenas Liebe Air War and German Literature Volker Hage, To Write or Remain Silent? The Portrayal of the Air War in German Literature; Susanne Vees-Gulani, The Language of Trauma: Dieter Forte's Memories of the Air War; Thomas Fox, Writing Dresden Across the Generations Jewish Victimization: Silence and Remembrance Elke Segelcke, Breaking the Taboo: Barbara Honigmann's Narrative Quest for a German-Jewish (Family) History; James Martin, A World Turned Upside Down: Role Reversals in the Victim- Perpetrator Complex in Christoph Ransmayr's Morbus Kitahara; Margit Sinka, The "Different" Holocaust Memorial in Berlin's Bayerisches VierteI: Personal and Collective Remembrance Thematizing Perpetrator/Victim Relationships Transnational Reconciliation Valentina Glajar, Victims and Perpetrators: Representations of the German-Czech Conflict in Texts by Peter Härtling, Pavel Kohout, and Jörg Bernig; Pawel Lutomski, Acknowledging Each Other As Victims: An Unmet Challenge in the Process of Polish-German Reconciliation; Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner, Attempts at (Re)Conciliation: Polish-German Relations in Literary Texts by Stefan Chwin, Pawel Huelle, and Olga Tokarczuk Historical Consciousness and the German Present Harald Welzer, The Collateral Damage of Enlightenment: How Grandchildren Understand the History of National Socialist Crimes and Their Grandfathers' Past; Brad Prager, The Haunted Screen (Again): The Historical Unconscious of Contemporary German Thrillers; Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Rape, War, and Outrage: Changing Perceptions on German Victimhood in the Period of Post-Unification; Daniel Becker, Corning to Terms with Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Walser's Sonntagsrede, the Kosovo War, and the Transformation of German Historical Consciousness