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.
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; S.Taberner
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.
