Download or read book A Nation of Victims written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hitler s Black Victims written by Clarence Lusane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Germans as Victims written by Bill Niven and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-11-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Germans as Victims written by Bill Niven and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book The War in the Empty Air written by Dagmar Barnouw and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Germans written by David B. Stenzel and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2001 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hitler s African Victims written by Raffael Scheck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book The Nazi Genocide of the Roma written by Anton Weiss-Wendt and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.
Download or read book The Germans and the Holocaust written by Susanna Schrafstetter and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did “ordinary” Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.
Download or read book German Victimhood During World War Two A New Chapter in Germany s Coming to Terms with Its Past written by Christopher Reichow and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay from the year 2013 in the subject History of 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.
Download or read book The German Expellees Victims in War and Peace written by Alfred-Maurice De Zayas and published by Springer. This book was released on 1993-07-20 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Narratives of Trauma written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade German culture has been engaged in a re-examination of the traumatic events of the Second World War and their post-war legacy in the public and private sphere. This shift in German memory culture from a focus on responsibility for the Holocaust to a focus on wartime suffering has attracted a lot of critical attention over the past decade, in both Cultural and Literary Studies and History. This volume brings together British, German, Dutch and American scholars from the fields of Cultural Studies, History and Sociology to address the national and international significance of discourses of ‘German wartime suffering’ in post-war and contemporary Germany. The focus of this interdisciplinary volume is both on the historical roots of the ‘Germans as victims’ narratives and the forms of their continuing existence in contemporary public memory and culture. The first three sections of this volume explore the conditions of German victim discourses in a variety of media and public arenas from historiography, sociology, literature and film to monuments, civil defence bunkers and local public memory. The final section sets the contemporary re-articulation of German wartime suffering in an international context with respect to its reception and its reflection in both Western and Eastern Europe and Israel.
Download or read book Between Two Homelands written by Hedda Kalshoven and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1920, at the age of thirteen, Irmgard Gebensleben first traveled from Germany to The Netherlands on a "war-children transport." She would later marry a Dutch man and live and raise her family there while keeping close to her German family and friends through the frequent exchange of letters. Yet during this period geography was not all that separated them. Increasing divergence in political opinions and eventual war between their countries meant letters contained not only family news but personal perspectives on the individual, local, and national choices that would result in the most destructive war in history. This important collection, first assembled by Irmgard Gebensleben's daughter Hedda Kalshoven, gives voice to ordinary Germans in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and in the occupied Netherlands. The correspondence between Irmgard, her friends, and four generations of her family delve into their most intimate and candid thoughts and feelings about the rise of National Socialism. The responses to the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands expose the deeply divided loyalties of the family and reveal their attempts to bridge them. Of particular value to historians, the letters evoke the writers' beliefs and their understanding of the events happening around them. This first English translation of Ik denk zoveel aan jullie: Een briefwisseling tussen Nederland en Duitsland 1920-1949, has been edited, abridged, and annotated by Peter Fritzsche with the assent and collaboration of Hedda Kalshoven. After the book's original publication the diary of Irmgard's brother and loyal Wehrmacht soldier, Eberhard, was discovered and edited by Hedda Kalshoven. Fritzsche has drawn on this important additional source in his preface.
Download or read book The Holocaust in Three Generations written by Gabriele Rosenthal and published by Barbara Budrich. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victims and Perpetrators What form does the dialogue about the family past during the Nazi period take in families of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and in families of Nazi perpetrators and bystanders? What impact does the past of the first generation, and their own way of dealing with it have on the lives of their children and grandchildren? What are the differences between the dialogue about the family past and the Holocaust in families of Nazi perpetrators and in families of Holocaust survivors? This book examines these questions on the basis of selected case studies.
Download or read book German Victimhood During World War Two A New Chapter in Germany s Coming to Terms with Its Past written by Christopher Reichow and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, was once again triggered by Gunter 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 autobiograp
