Between Mass Death and Individual Loss The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011).
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<em>“Understood as a starting point for further inquiries into practices of mourning, burial and grief, this volume deserves broad attention, not least because it succeeds in embedding its case studies within a broad cultural, social and political history.”</em> <strong>• European History Quarterly</strong></p>
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<em>“Taken together, this volume is a welcome departure from the usual literature on memory and trauma which ignores what came before the war and treats what happened after only in relation to the Holocaust. This excellent volume enables us to look at the history of death as a whole beyond the break of 1945 and to see influences and continuities throughout the last century. The volume delivers on the promise of the introduction to open up new avenues for research and raise new questions and should be a welcome addition to the library of every scholar of modern Germany.”</em> <strong>• German Politics & Society</strong></p>
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<em>“[The volume] offers a significant contribution to theories of death and memory work in German Studies. [It] is clearly organized using theme-based sections, which lead the reader through material culture as well as psychological investigation; the essays are well-researched and cogently written.”</em> <strong>• German Studies Review</strong></p>
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<em>“Taken together, the volume provides more than the sum of its individual contributions and actually succeeds in offering new perspectives on a hitherto neglected topic. Several essays demonstrate persuasively the myriad ways in which the ghosts of the dead haunted the living in twentieth-century Germany…for anybody interested in the social and cultural history of death in Germany, this volume will be an indispensable starting point.”</em> <strong>• German History</strong></p>
Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.
Introduction
Paul Betts, Alon Confino, Dirk Schumann
PART I: BODIES
Chapter 1. How the Germans Learned to Wage War. On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World Wars
Michael Geyer
Chapter 2. The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of the Second World War
Richard Bessel
Chapter 3. Rebuilding and Reburying: Emergency Cemeteries in Berlin after ‘Zero Hour’
Monica Black
PART II: DISPOSAL
Chapter 4. Fanning the Flames – Cremation in Late Imperial and Weimar Germany
Simone Ameskamp
Chapter 5. Disposing of the Dead in East Germany, 1945 – 1990
Felix Robin Schulz
Chapter 6. Death in Munich. The 1972 Olympics
Kay Schiller
Chapter 7. When Cold Warriors Die: The State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht
Paul Betts
PART III: SUBJECTIVITY
Chapter 8. A Common Experience of Death: Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914-1923
Tim Grady
Chapter 9. Laughing about death? `German Humor´ in the Two World Wars
Martina Kessel
Chapter 10. Death, Spiritual Solace, and Afterlife. Between Nazism and Religion
Alon Confino
Chapter 11. Yizkor! Commemoration of the Dead by Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany
Gabriel Finder
PART IV: RUINS
Chapter 12. The Imagination of Disaster. Death and Survival in Postwar West Germany
Svenja Goltermann
Chapter 13. European Melancholy and the Inability to Listen: Sebald, Politics, and Death
Daniel Steuer
Chapter 14. A Cemetery in Berlin
Peter Fritzsche
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011).