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The Icon Curtain
The Iron Curtain did not exist. Instead, it comprised multiple regional segments, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. The first cultural studies account of the border's landscape, 'The Icon Curtain' straddles the Bohemian Forest to uncover a far-reaching genealogy of one such section and debunk the stereotype of the unprecedented mid-twentieth-century partition. There, between the 1950s and 1980s, West German locals and Sudeten German expellee newcomers shaped a civilian rampart, the 'prayer wall'.
Bombs Away!
Prompted by recent challenges to and debates about the relative public silence concerning the effects of the Allied air war over Europe during World War II, this collection of essays examines literary, visual (film and photography), and institutional (museums) representations of the bombing of civilian targets, predominantly in Germany. The authors examine narrative strategies of both well-known and relatively little known works as well as the moral and ideological presuppositions of the varied representations of the depredations of total war. The introduction and afterword by the editors invite the readers to expand the contours and historical context of the debates about the German public discourse on the bombing war beyond the narrow confines of perpetrators and victims. The volume will be of interest to literary scholars, historians, and the general reading public interested in warfare and its effects on civilian populations.
After the Nazis
A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germany—from literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts After World War II a mood of despair and impotence pervaded the arts in West Germany. The culture and institutions of the Third Reich were abruptly dismissed, yet there was no immediate return to the Weimar period’s progressive ideals. In this moment of cultural stasis, how could West Germany’s artists free themselves from their experiences of Nazism? Moving from 1945 to reunification, Michael H. Kater explores West German culture as it emerged from the darkness of the Third Reich. Examining periods of denial and complacency as well as attempts to reckon with the past, he shows how all postwar culture was touched by the vestiges of National Socialism. From the literature of Günter Grass to the happenings of Joseph Beuys and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s innovations in electronic music, Kater shows how it was only through the reinvigoration of the cultural scene that West Germany could contend with its past—and eventually allow democracy to reemerge.
Representing the "good German" in Literature and Culture After 1945
Essays analyzing postwar literary, cultural, and historical representations of "good Germans" during the Second World War and the Nazi period. In the aftermath of the Second World War, both the allied occupying powers and the nascent German authorities sought Germans whose record during the war and the Nazi period could serve as a counterpoint to the notion of Germans asevil. That search has never really stopped. In the past few years, we have witnessed a burgeoning of cultural representations of this "other" kind of Third Reich citizen - the "good German" - as opposed to the committed Nazi or genocidal maniac. Such representations have highlighted individuals' choices in favor of dissenting...
The Collapse of the Conventional
"Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape."---Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds --Book Jacket.
The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum
The Second World War is omnipresent in contemporary memory debates. As the war fades from living memory, this study is the first to systematically analyze how Second World War museums allow prototypical visitors to comprehend and experience the past. It analyzes twelve permanent exhibitions in Europe and North America – including the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the House of European History in Brussels, the Imperial War Museums in London and Manchester, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans – in order to show how museums reflect and shape cultural memory, as well as their cognitive, ethical, emotional, and aesthetic ...
W. G. Sebald
The novelist, poet, and essayist W. G. Sebald (1944 – 2001) was perhaps the most original German writer of the last decade of the 20th century (“Die Ausgewanderten”, “Austerlitz”, “Luftkrieg und Literatur”). His writing is marked by a unique ‘hybridity’ that combines characteristics of travelogue, cultural criticism, crime story, historical essay, and dream diary, among other genres. He employs layers of literary and motion picture allusions that contribute to a sometimes enigmatic, sometimes intimately familiar mood; his dominant mode is melancholy. The contributions of this anthology examine W. G. Sebald as narrator and pensive observer of history. The book includes a previously unpublished interview with Sebald from 1998.
Mountains and the German Mind
The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.Mountains have occupied a central place in German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectual culture for centuries. This volume offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen key texts from the Germanophone tradition of engagement with mountains. The selected texts span over 450 years, ranging from the early modern period to the postmodern era, and encompass several discursive modes of the mountain experience including geographical descriptions, philosophical meditations, aesthetic deliberations, and autobiogr...
A Companion to Werner Herzog
A Companion to Werner Herzog showcases over two dozen original scholarly essays examining nearly five decades of filmmaking by one of the most acclaimed and innovative figures in world cinema. First collection in twenty years dedicated to examining Herzog’s expansive career Features essays by international scholars and Herzog specialists Addresses a broad spectrum of the director’s films, from his earliest works such as Signs of Life and Fata Morgana to such recent films as The Bad Lieutenant and Encounters at the End of the World Offers creative, innovative approaches guided by film history, art history, and philosophy Includes a comprehensive filmography that also features a list of the director’s acting appearances and opera productions Explores the director’s engagement with music and the arts, his self-stylization as a global filmmaker, his Bavarian origins, and even his love-hate relationship with the actor Klaus Kinski
German Memory Contests
Since unification in 1990, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in a sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the long-term effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," or coming to terms with the Nazi past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of "memory contests," which sees all forms of memory, public or private, as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present. Touching on gender, generations, memory and p...
