Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts

313 Pages·2016·5.248 MB·English

by  Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, Christiane Wienand

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in
Germany and Beyond

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in
Germany and Beyond
Disturbing Pasts
Edited by
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner
and Christiane Wienand
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published 2016
© Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, Christiane Wienand and Contributors, 2016
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4185-4
ePDF: 978-1-4742-4186-1
ePub: 978-1-4742-4187-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bird, Stephanie, editor. | Fulbrook, Mary, 1951- editor. | Wagner,
Julia, editor. | Wienand, Christiane, editor.
Title: Reverberations of Nazi violence in Germany and beyond : disturbing
pasts / edited by Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and
Christiane Wienand.
Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015030700 | ISBN 9781474241854 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781474241861 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474241878 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945–Atrocities. |
World War,1939-1945–Concentration camps. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) |
War crimes. | National socialism–Moral and ethical aspects–Germany. |
Collective memory–Germany. | BISAC: HISTORY / Europe / Germany. |
HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century.
Classification: LCC D804.G4 R48 2016 | DDC 940.54/050943–dc23 LC
record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030700
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction: Disturbing Pasts Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook,
Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand 1
Part I Emotional Connections
2 Guilt and Shame among Communities of Experience, Connection
and Identification Mary Fulbrook 15
3 Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans’ Re-education
or a Catalyst for Their Wish to Forget? Ulrike Weckel 33
4 Ashamed about the Past: The Case of Nazi Collaborators and Their
Families in Post-war Dutch Society Ismee Tames 47
5 Autobiography, Moral Witnessing and the Disturbing Memory of
Nazi Euthanasia Susanne C. Knittel 65
Part II Disturbing Narratives
6 Disturbing Mending: On the Imagined Third Generation of Holocaust
Survivors in Israeli Literature of the Second Generation Tsila Ratner 85
7 Disturbing the Past: The Representation of the Waldheim Affair in
Robert Schindel’s Der Kalte Katya Krylova 107
8 The Return of the Jew in Polish Culture Uilleam Blacker 125
Part III Fascination/Pleasure
9 Don’t Mention the War Julian Petley 143
10 ‘However sick a joke ... ’: On Comedy, the Representation
of Suffering, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Melodrama and Volker
Koepp’s Melancholy Stephanie Bird 161
11 Disturbing Anselm Kiefer Caitríona Leahy 181
vi Contents
Part IV Better Futures? (Dis) Placing Identities
12 German Tourists in Europe and Reminders of
a Disturbing Past Julia Wagner 199
13 Reverberations of a Disturbing Past: Reconciliation Activities of
Young West Germans in the 1960s and 1970s Christiane Wienand 215
14 Disturbing Pasts and Better Futures: A Comparison of
Recent Approaches to the Past among Bukovina Jews and
Bukovina Germans Gaëlle Fisher 233
15 How to Cope with It? The Steuben Society of America’s Politics of
Memory and the Holocaust Julia Lange 251
Afterword: Hauntings and Revisitings Lisa Appignanesi 265
Index 273
List of Contributors
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, broadcaster and cultural
commentator. A visiting professor at King’s College London, she is former President
of the campaigning writers association, English PEN and Chair of London’s Freud
Museum. Her award-winning Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind
Doctors from 1800 to the Present appeared to great critical acclaim, and was followed by
the provocative All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. Her new book Trials
of Passion: In the Name of Love and Madness again delves into the history of psychiatry,
investigating the rise of the expert psychiatric witness through remarkable trials of
passion. Her family memoir, Losing the Dead, and her novel, The Memory Man, explore
the war and its hauntings.
Stephanie Bird is Senior Lecturer in German at University College London.
She has published on topics ranging from the interaction of fact and fiction in
the biographical novel, the relationship of female and national identity, and the
representation and ethics of shame. As co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project
‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’, she has been working
on a comparative study exploring the significance of the comical in German-
language cultural representations of suffering. Her latest book, Comedy and Trauma
in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Sider of Mourning, analyses how
the comical interrogates the expectations and ethics of representing suffering and
trauma. It does so by integrating a critique of dominant paradigms, such as that of
trauma and of victim identity. The study focuses on the work of Ingeborg Bachmann,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald, Volker Koepp, Reinhard Jirgl, Ruth Klüger,
Edgar Hilsenrath and Jonathan Littell.
Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe
at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His
research focuses on cultural memory in cities in east-central Europe that experienced
large-scale population shifts and losses as a result of the Second World War. He is a co-
author of Remembering Katyn (2012) and a co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern
Europe (2013).
Gaëlle Fisher is a post-doctoral researcher and associate lecturer in History at the
University of Augsburg in Germany. She studied German, History and Eastern European
Studies at UCL and UCL/SSEES (BA, 2007; MA, 2009) and earned her PhD in History
from UCL in 2015. Her thesis compares the post-war discourses and practices of self-
identifying ‘ethnic Germans’ and Jews from the historical region of Bukovina. This work
was completed within the framework of the UCL-based, AHRC-funded collaborative
viii List of Contributors
research project ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe since 1945’ (2010–14).
She is currently working on transforming her thesis into a book.
Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History and Dean of the Faculty of Social
and History Sciences at UCL. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard universities, she
is the author or editor of more than twenty books. One of her major research areas
has been the GDR, on which she wrote the pioneering Anatomy of a Dictatorship:
Inside the GDR, 1949–89 (1995) as well as The People’s State: East German Society from
Hitler to Honecker (2005), funded by an AHRC collaborative research award. Recent
publications include the Fraenkel-Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz:
Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012), as well as Dissonant Lives: Generations and
Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011), which was supported by a Major
Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Following the AHRC-funded
collaborative research project she directed on ‘Reverberations of War in Germany and
Europe since 1945’, Fulbrook is currently completing a book on Living with a Nazi Past.
Susanne C. Knittel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht
University in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature
from Columbia University, New York (2011). Her book, The Historical Uncanny:
Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2015), explores the cultural
mechanisms by which certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a
country or region while others are erased or forgotten. The Historical Uncanny is a
comparative study of German and Italian post-Second World War memory culture,
with a particular focus on the memory of Nazi euthanasia in Germany and the memory
of fascism and the German occupation in North-Eastern Italy. Her current project,
supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO), revolves around the representation of perpetrators in literature, film and at
sites of memory in Germany and Romania since 1989.
Katya Krylova is an independent researcher based in Nottinghamshire, UK. She
studied German and Italian at Churchill College, Cambridge, where she then completed
an MPhil in European Literature and Culture and a PhD in German Literature in 2011.
From 2010 until 2012, she worked as a researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute
for the History and Theory of Biography in Vienna. Between 2012 and 2015, she held a
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Department of German Studies, University
of Nottingham. She was the recipient of the 2010 Sylvia Naish Research Student
Lecture prize. Her first monograph, Walking through History: Topography and Identity
in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard (2013), was the winner of
the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in German Studies. Her forthcoming
second monograph, The Long Shadow of the Past: Contemporary Austrian Literature,
Film and Culture (2016), examines the treatment of the past and Austrian identity
in the works of Anna Mitgutsch, Ruth Beckermann, Margareta Heinrich, Eduard
Erne, Elfriede Jelinek, Ulrich Seidl, Florian Flicker, Robert Schindel and others. She
is the Secretary of Women in German Studies and an Advisory Board member of the
Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature, University of London.
List of Contributors ix
Julia Lange is a PhD candidate and a lecturer in American Studies at the University
of Hamburg, Germany. She studied American Studies, English Literature and Law
at the University of Hamburg and the University of Oxford. Her MA thesis entitled
‘ “Herman the German”: Das Hermann Monument in der deutsch-amerikanischen
Erinnerungskultur’ was published in 2013. In her dissertation, she examines the
inter-relation between the identity politics of German American organizations and
the Holocaust discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary focus of her work
is on transnational discourses of victimization and reconciliation and the dynamics
of competing memories that have been produced by German American and Jewish
American organizations since the end of the Second World War. Ms Lange was a
visiting fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard
University in 2012, followed by a visiting scholarship at the Department of Germanic
Languages at Columbia University in 2013, a Resident Fellowship at the American
Institute for Contemporary German Studies (Johns Hopkins University) in 2014,
and a short-term fellowship at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 2015. She is
currently a scholar with the German National Academic Foundation.
Caitríona Leahy is a lecturer in Germanic Studies and Fellow of Trinity College
Dublin. She was previously a lecturer in German, University College Dublin and
Toyota Lecturer in Critical Theory in University College Cork. Her publications
include Ingeborg Bachmann (Der wahre Historiker. Ingeborg Bachmann and the
Problem of Witnessing History 2007; Re-acting to Ingeborg Bachmann. New Essays and
Performances 2006) as well as essays in the areas of law and literature, the concept of the
contemporary, biography and metaphor. Her current research is on monumentalism,
in particular, in relation to the work of Anselm Kiefer.
Julian Petley is a professor of Screen Media in the Department of Social Sciences,
Media and Communications at Brunel University. He has a particular interest in media
regulation, not least various forms of censorship, and his publications on this topic
include Freedom of the Word (2007), Freedom of the Moving Image (2008), Censorship:
a Beginner’s Guide (2009) and Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (2011). He
has also written widely about German cinema, his first book being Capital and Culture:
The German Cinema 1933–1945 (1979). He contributed chapters on this subject to
Picture This: Media Representations of Visual Art & Artists (1988/1998), Anglo-German
Attitudes (1995) and The German Cinema Book (2002/2015). He is contemplating a
further book on the cinema of the Third Reich.
Tsila Ratner is Senior Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature at UCL. She is a native
Israeli, who has been living in London since 1985. She took degrees in Hebrew
literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University where she served as a lecturer in the
Department of Hebrew Literature until her move to England. Dr Ratner has taught
Hebrew literature at Cambridge University, Leo Baeck College and UCL. In 1995 she
was appointed Lecturer in Modern Hebrew Literature in UCL’s Department of Hebrew
and Jewish Studies. Dr Ratner has made important contributions to the viability of
Modern Hebrew as a subject in the UK at both university and secondary levels. Her
field of academic interest is Gender Studies and Women’s literature. Her publications