Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany

ISBN-13: 9781403990426 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 304 str.

Bill Niven

Opis

Nearly sixty years after the defeat of Nazism, some in Germany now feel that the Germans were the victims--not least of relentless attempts to remind them of past crimes. This is the first examination of the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration, and towards one on German suffering. Students of German history, politics and culture will find this contextualization of current victim discourse within a wider historical framework invaluable.

Spis treści

Notes on the Contributors.- Maps.- Introduction; B.Niven.- The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany; R.G.Moeller.- Victims in Uniform: West German Combat Movies from the 1950s; R.G.Moeller.- Taboo or Tradition? The 'Germans as Victims' Theme in West Germany until the Early 1990s; R.Wittlinger.- The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood; P.Cooke.- The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the 'Historians' Dispute' to German Suffering; H.Schmitz.- The GDR and Memory of the Bombing of Dresden; B.Niven.- Victims of the Berlin Wall; P.Ahonen.- The Victims of Totalitarianism and the Centrality of Nazi Genocide: Continuity and Change in German .- Commemorative Politics; A.H.Beattie.- Representations of German Wartime Suffering in Recent Fiction; .- Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad; A.Huyssen.- From the Margins to the Centre? The Discourse on Expellees and Victimhood in Germany; K.von Oppen & S.Wolff.- On Taboos, Traumas and Other Myths: Why the Debate About German Victims of the Second World War is not a Historians' Controversy; S.Berger.- Chronology of Victimhood.- Select Bibliography.- Index.

O autorze

BILL NIVEN is Professor of Contemporary German History at The Nottingham Trent University, UK. He is author of Facing the Nazi Past (Routledge 2002) and co-author with Jürgen Thomaneck of Dividing and Uniting Germany (Routledge 2000).

Blurb

Since the 1960s and certainly the 1980s, Germans have been confronting the Nazi past and the legacy of German perpetration. However, over recent years, Germany has become increasingly preoccupied with German suffering during the war and the post-war period. Arguably, it is no longer the Holocaust that takes centre-stage in the contemporary German culture of memory but the trauma caused by Allied bombing of German cities, and by the expulsion of millions of Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the war.

This thought-provoking and lively collection of essays, by a team of leading scholars in the field, explores current memory trends in Germany. What has triggered this preoccupation with German suffering? How dangerous is it? Is it really new, or have the Germans always tended to empathise more with their own losses than with Nazi victims? Together these essays are an invaluable resource for students and teachers, and are essential reading for all with an interest in how Germans, in the new millennium, are facing up to their past.