Format:
1 Online-Ressource (vi, 259 pages)
,
digital, PDF file(s)
ISBN:
9781571137364
Content:
In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of 'ethnic' Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's 'The Air War and Literature' and Grass's 'Crabwalk' are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays is the first in English to examine closely the variety of these texts. An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on 'ordinary Germans,' and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Contributors: Karina Berger, Elizabeth Boa, Stephen Brockmann, David Clarke, Mary Cosgrove, Rick Crownshaw, Helen Finch, Frank Finlay, Katharina Hall, Colette Lawson, Caroline Schaumann, Helmut Schmitz, Kathrin Schödel, and Stuart Taberner. Stuart Taberner is professor of contemporary German literature, culture, and society, and Karina Berger, B.A., M.St., is a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Leeds, UK
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015)
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Introduction
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W.G. Sebald and German wartime suffering
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The natural history of destruction : W.G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied bombings
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Expulsion novels of the 1950s : more than meets the eye?
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"In this prison of the guard room" : Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939-1945 in the context of contemporary debates
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Family, heritage, and German wartime suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm
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Lost Heimat in generational novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath
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"A different family story" : German wartime suffering in women's writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun
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The place of German wartime suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's family text
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"Why only now?" : the representation of German wartime suffering as a "memory taboo" in Günter Grass's novella Im Krebsgang
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Rereading Der Vorleser, remembering the perpetrator
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Narrating German suffering in the shadow of Holocaust victimology : W.G. Sebald, contemporary trauma theory, and Dieter Forte's air raids epic
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Günter Grass's account of German wartime suffering in Beim Haüten der Zwiebel : mind in mourning or boy adventurer?
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Jackboots and jeans : the private and the political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders
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Memory-work in recent German novels : what (if any) limits remain on empathy with the "German experience" of the second World War?
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"Secondary suffering" and victimhood : the "other" of German identity in Bernhard Schlink's "Die Beschneidung" and Maxim Biller's "Harlem holocaust"
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781571133939
Additional Edition:
Print version ISBN 9781571133939
Language:
English
Subjects:
German Studies
URL:
Volltext
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