A nation of victims? : representations of German wartime suffering from 1945 to the present / / edited by Helmut Schmitz.

• Superior document: German monitor, no. 67
• TeilnehmendeR: Schmitz, Helmut.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Series: German monitor ; no. 67.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

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 1980's. 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

Table of Contents

Introduction : the return of wartime suffering in contemporary German memory culture, literature, and film / Helmut Schmitz -- Germans in the Lager : reports and narratives about imprisonment in post-war Allied internment camps / Gregor Streim -- "Die, von denen man erzählt hat, dass sie die kleinen Kinder schlachten" : deutsche Leiderfahrung und Bilder von Juden in der deutschen Kultur nach 1945 : zu einigen Texten Wolfgang Weyrauchs / Hans-Joachim Hahn -- The representation of Wehrmacht soldiers as victims in post-war German film : Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? and Der Arzt von Stalingrad / Helen Wolfenden -- The German myth of a victim nation : (re-)presenting Germans as victims in the new debate on their flight and explusion from Eastern Europe / Samuel Salzborn -- Implicit equations in constructions of German suffering / Bill Niven -- Dresden and Hamburg : official memory and commemoration of the victims of Allied air raids in the two Germanies / Gilad Margalit -- Regarding and imagining : contrived immediacy of the Allied bombing campaign in photography, novel, and historiography / Heinz-Peter Preusser -- Lost in translations? : the discourse of "german suffering" and W.G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur / Annette Seidel Arpaci -- Wahrheit und Erinnerung : die Spuren des Jahres 1945 in Texten von Christa Wolf / Odile Jansen -- Historicism, sentimentality, and the problem of empathy : Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders in the context of recent representations of German suffering / Helmut Schmitz -- Literary representations in contemporary German fiction of the expulsions of Germans from the east in 1945 / Stuart Taberner -- Der Untergang (2004) : victims, perpetrators, and the continuing fascination of fascism / Paul Cooke.