A Nation of Victims?

A Nation of Victims? PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401204454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the ‘perpetrator collective’ and its legacies. The volume brings together German, English and Israeli literary and film scholars and historians addressing issues surrounding the representation of German wartime suffering from the immediate post-war period to the present in literature, film and public commemorative discourse. Split into four sections, the volume discusses the representation of Germans as victims in post-war literature and film, the current memory politics of the Bund der Vertriebenen, the public commemoration of the air raids on Hamburg and Dresden and their representation in film, photography, historiography and literature, the impact and reception of W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, the representation of flight and expulsion in contemporary writing, the problem of empathy in representations of Germans as victims and the representation of suffering and National Socialism in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang.

A Nation of Victims?

A Nation of Victims? PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401204454
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book

Book Description
The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the ‘perpetrator collective’ and its legacies. The volume brings together German, English and Israeli literary and film scholars and historians addressing issues surrounding the representation of German wartime suffering from the immediate post-war period to the present in literature, film and public commemorative discourse. Split into four sections, the volume discusses the representation of Germans as victims in post-war literature and film, the current memory politics of the Bund der Vertriebenen, the public commemoration of the air raids on Hamburg and Dresden and their representation in film, photography, historiography and literature, the impact and reception of W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, the representation of flight and expulsion in contemporary writing, the problem of empathy in representations of Germans as victims and the representation of suffering and National Socialism in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang.

Hitler's Black Victims

Hitler's Black Victims PDF Author: Clarence Lusane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135955247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Drawing on interviews with the black survivors of Nazi concentration camps and archival research in North America, Europe, and Africa, this book documents and analyzes the meaning of Nazism's racial policies towards people of African descent, specifically those born in Germany, England, France, the United States, and Africa, and the impact of that legacy on contemporary race relations in Germany, and more generally, in Europe. The book also specifically addresses the concerns of those surviving Afro-Germans who were victims of Nazism, but have not generally been included in or benefited from the compensation agreements that have been developed in recent years.

Germans as Victims

Germans as Victims PDF Author: Bill Niven
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403990433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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.

Germans as Victims

Germans as Victims PDF Author: Bill Niven
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350394070
Category : Collective memory
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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 book examines the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration and towards one on German suffering.

The Germans

The Germans PDF Author: David B. Stenzel
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595172652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Germany has acquired a widespread reputation as an aggressor. But this is largely a case of historical myopia. Certainly in the mid-20th Century Germany was guilty of major aggression under the leadership of the Nazis. But during the 1000 years prior to Hitler the Germans were more often the victims of aggression rather than the perpetrators. Settling in the middle of the North European Plain is like camping out in the middle of an inter-state freeway. The Germans have been attacked again and again usually from the West or the East, but also from the North and the South. They have no defensible natural borders except the Alps in the South and the seas in the North. The once proud German Empire of the 13th Century was pummeled into a shattered collection of some 380 sovereign states by the 18th Century. There really was no “Germany” from the 13th Century to 1871. This brief study is the author’s reflection on German history after 30 years of university teaching. It attempts to look at the tempestuous history of Germany in the perspective of 1000 years of history, from Pepin the Short to Kohl the large. This perspective reveals the Germans to be indeed victims of Geography. They, like the Poles, have suffered from a tremendous geographic disadvantage.

Hitler's African Victims

Hitler's African Victims PDF Author: Raffael Scheck
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521857994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Publisher description

The War in the Empty Air

The War in the Empty Air PDF Author: Dagmar Barnouw
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025311182X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"This book will provoke intellectually, ideologically, and emotionally loaded responses in the U.S., Germany, and Israel. Barnouw's critique of the 'enduringly narrow post-Holocaust perspective on German guilt and the ensuing fixation on German remorse' questions taboos that the political and cultural elites in those three countries would rather leave alone.... [Barnouw] makes us understand why the maintenance of a privileged memory of the Nazi period and World War II may not survive much longer." -- Manfred Henningsen, University of Hawai'i In Germany, the reemergence of memories of wartime suffering is being met with intense public debate. In the United States, the recent translation and publication of Crabwalk by GÃ1⁄4nter Grass and The Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald offer evidence that these submerged memories are surfacing. Taking account of these developments, Barnouw examines this debate about the validity and importance of German memories of war and the events that have occasioned it. Steering her path between the notions of "victim" and "perpetrator," Barnouw seeks a place where acknowledgment of both the horror of Auschwitz and the suffering of the non-Jewish Germans can, together, create a more complete historical remembrance for postwar generations.

Learning from the Germans

Learning from the Germans PDF Author: Susan Neiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715521
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

The Other Victims

The Other Victims PDF Author: Ina R. Friedman
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395745151
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Personal narratives of Christians, Gypsies, deaf people, homosexuals, and Blacks who suffered at the hands of the Nazis before and during World War II.

German "Victimhood" During World War Two: A New Chapter in Germany’s Coming to Terms with Its Past?

German Author: Christopher Reichow
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656653488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
Essay from the year 2013 in the subject History Europe - Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 1,0, Diplomatic Academy of Vienna - School of International Studies, language: English, abstract: The Second World War and its historical categorization remains a disputed topic within the German society. Still, the way of how Germans are rethinking their history is in a state of flux. While the question of collective and individual German guilt has attracted increased scientific and popular attention since the late 1960s, more precisely after the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, German intellectuals and the German media have in recent years turned their attention, again, towards German suffering during the war. This can be seen as a recourse within a new framework. Already in the immediate postwar period, Germans depicted themselves as victims of the war and its settlement. The preferred self-image was that of being first a victim of Hitler’s and then of enemies hands. Once again, though very late, Germans today consider their own countrymen as victims. In movies and books, they depict themselves and their ancestors not only as villains, but also as people who endured air bombing, starvation, and expulsion. This revived way of storytelling began around the new millennium and focused espe-cially on Germany’s civilian population. An important stimulus for Germany’s coming to terms with its past, or Vergangenheitsbewältigung, was once again triggered by Günter Grass, born in 1927 in Danzig, one of the country’s most popular and successful authors. Already as a member of the famous Group 47, he had – inter alia – initiated a new concept to rejuvenate German literature, particularly with his book The Tin Drum. He also contested a denial of civic responsibility and guilt in past and present, which he saw occurring in the consumerist-driven Bonn Republic. His first two books written in the new millennium, the novel Crab-walk, published in 2002, and his autobiographic work Peeling the Onion, released in 2006, were widely analyzed and sparked off a heated debate on both German guilt and German suffering. By using both books as a case study, this essay examines the main issues that were addressed by Grass and points out today’s situation of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung.