[PDF] Germany As A Culture Of Remembrance eBook

Author : Alon Confino
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 11,49 MB
Release : 2017-03-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1469620286

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An acknowledged authority on German history and memory, Alon Confino presents in this volume an original critique of the relations between nationhood, memory, and history, applied to the specific case of Germany. In ten essays (three never before published and one published only in German), Confino offers a distinct view of German nationhood in particular and of nationhood in general as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that exist in the nation. The first group of essays centers on the period from 1871 to 1990 and explores how Germans used conceptions of the local, or Heimat, to identify what it meant to be German in a century of ideological upheavals. The second group of essays comprehensively critiques and analyzes the ways laypersons and scholars use the notion of memory as a tool to understand the past. Arguing that the case of Germany contains particular characteristics with broader implications for the way historians practice their trade, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance examines the limits and possibilities of writing history.

Author : Susan Neiman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 432 pages
File Size : 45,37 MB
Release : 2019-08-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0374715521

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As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

Author : Alon Confino
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 15,64 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 9780252027178

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Coming to terms with a troubled past is the mark of the modern condition. But how does memory operate? This powerful collection of original essays probes this question by focusing on Germany, where historical trauma and political turbulence over the past century have deeply scarred modern memory and identity. Tracing the role of memory in German history between the Reformation and reunification, contributors show how memory has a history and the presence of the past has historical context. With scholarly zeal and keen insight, these essays draw on ghost stories and the postwar fiction of Heinrich Böll, among other memory sites, escorting the reader through the streets of Alt Hildesheim and the grocery aisles of East Germany. By historicizing memory, this volume surpasses the efforts of previous memory scholarship in confronting Germany's National Socialist past. Standard approaches to memory in modern Germany have explored how the past represents social relations and is commemorated in literature, art, and personal narrative. In taking memory "out of the museum" and "beyond the monument," The Work of Memory investigates the ways memory forms social relations and is integral to the construction of identities, communities, and policies. Profound and provocative, The Work of Memory contributes to a much-needed anthropology of memory in modern Germany.

Author : Neil MacGregor
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 628 pages
File Size : 23,97 MB
Release : 2015-09-29
Category : History
ISBN : 1101875674

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For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Wolfgang von Geothe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years. German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places that still resonate in the new Germany—porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald—to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it.

Author : B. Niven
Publisher : Springer
Page : 430 pages
File Size : 41,23 MB
Release : 2009-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0230248500

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Difficult Pasts provides a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary Germany's rich memorial landscape. It discusses the many memorials to German losses during the Second World War, to the victims of National Socialism and to those of GDR socialism. With up-to-date coverage of many less well-known memorials as well as the most publicised ones.

Author : Jörg Echternkamp
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 11,99 MB
Release : 2019-01-02
Category : Art
ISBN : 1789201276

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Twenty-first-century views of historical violence have been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. Within Europe, one of the key sites for such representation has been the vast array of museums and memorials that reflect contemporary ideas of war, the roles of soldiers and civilians, and the self-perception of those who remember. This volume takes a historical perspective on museums covering the Second World War and explores how these institutions came to define political contexts and cultures of public memory in Germany, across Europe, and throughout the world.

Author : Gilad Margalit
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 405 pages
File Size : 12,25 MB
Release : 2010
Category : History
ISBN : 0253353769

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Unresolved tensions in German postwar memorials

Author : Jane Kramer
Publisher : Random House (NY)
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 30,97 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Current Events
ISBN :

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In the Politics of Memory Jane Kramer surveys the moral and political landscape of today's Germany, where the reunification of East and West has brought into conflict two vastly different memories of what it means to "be" German. These essays cut straight to the Zeitgeist of Europe's most politically and economically influential country. Self-styled anarchists destroy a filmmaker's Berlin restaurant to protest its "bourgeois" nature, but their ruthless call for freedom is simply German fascism repackaged. A young East German who escapes to the West doesn't know what to do with himself once he gets there - an example of the deep passivity that is perhaps the Communists' most troubling legacy to the "new" Germany. And the bizarre story of a German holocaust memorial reveals a revisionist desire to portray the country as a victim of World War II by "turning the twelve dark years of Hitler into twelve years of resistance to Hitler and occupation by Hitler; an abandonment, for the sake of settling the past into 'history, ' of the very plain historical truth that Germany had chosen Hitler".

Author : Jan Assmann
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 43,45 MB
Release : 2011-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0521763819

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Pt. 1. The theoretical basis -- Memory culture -- Written culture -- Cultural identity and political imagination -- pt. 2. Case studies -- Egypt -- Israel and the invention of religion -- The birth of history from the spirit of the law -- Greece and disciplined thinking -- Cultural memory : a summary.

Author : Rudy J. Koshar
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 439 pages
File Size : 16,73 MB
Release : 2000-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0807862622

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Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings--from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history. Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans' efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany's intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.