Postsocialist Memory in Contemporary German Culture PDF Download

Author: Michel Mallet
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110732947
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Author: Amieke Bouma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789463726610
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Breaking new ground in the study of post-socialist memory culture, this book explains why former GDR cadres replicate GDR memory culture against their stigmatized status in unified Germany.

Author: Amy Joyce Leech
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Combining cultural studies, literary analysis, and memory theory, I move away from reading these works under the lens of autobiographical trauma, seeking instead to examine the negotiation of post-socialist memory through attending to generic and formal elements of the literary texts. My literary close readings methodologically draw on individual texts, while reflecting how literature is in exchange with other media and also present in the public sphere. Rather than a homogeneous entity, I show, the invoked Europe constitutes a multidirectional network. Through my focus on contexts beyond East Germany and its experience of state socialism, I address the intersections of migration and memory and their relevance for contemporary and future Germany and Europe, while counteracting approaches that traditionally center West Central Europe in discussions of the continent. In dialogue with Michael Rothberg's conceptualization of multidirectional memory, I furthermore contribute to ongoing debates on different histories of violence, such as the current discussion about the relation or interaction between the memories of colonialism and the Holocaust.

Author: Daphne Berdahl
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253221706
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. This volume brings together her essays, from an early study of memory at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., to research on consumption and citizenship undertaken in Leipzig in the years before her untimely death. It serves as a superb introduction to the development of the field of postsocialist cultural studies.

Author: Helmut Schmitz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351933833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through Günter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

Author: A. Fuchs
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230589723
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates. Essays on contemporary German literature are complemented by explorations of heritage films and museum discourse. Together these essays put forward a compelling theory of family narratives and a critical evaluation of generational discourse.

Author: Katherine Stone
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113994X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In recent years, historians have revealed the many ways in which German women supported National Socialism-as teachers, frontline auxiliaries, and nurses, as well as in political organizations. In mainstream culture, however, the women of the period are still predominantly depicted as the victims of a violent twentieth century whose atrocities were committed by men. They are frequently imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the "rubble women" who spiritually and literally rebuilt Germany. This book investigates why the question of women's complicity in the Third Reich has struggled to capture the historical imagination in the same way. It explores how female authors from across the political and generational spectrum (Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Elisabeth Plessen, Gisela Elsner, Tanja D ckers, Jenny Erpenbeck) conceptualize the role of women in the Third Reich. As well as offering innovative re-readings of celebrated works, this book provides instructive interpretations of lesser-known texts that nonetheless enrich our understanding of German memory culture. Katherine Stone is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick.

Author: Alexandra Lloyd
Publisher: Germanic Literatures
ISBN: 9781781885406
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the 1990s and 2000s, at a time when newly-reunified Germany seemed to be turning towards its future, public debates were dominated by those who had spent their early lives under Nazism and were still wrestling with the past. In this wide-ranging study of autobiographical writing, fictional accounts, and film, Alexandra Lloyd examines narratives of childhood and adolescence in the Third Reich within contemporary German cultural memory. The study sheds light on the broader context of post-reunification memory politics through close readings of primary texts by Günter Grass, Günter de Bruyn, Martin Walser, Ruth Klüger, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Günter Kunert, W. G. Sebald, Binjamin Wilkomirski (aka Bruno Doesseker), and Gudrun Pausewang, and filmmakers Dennis Gansel, Agnieszka Holland, and Cate Shortland. It provides a fuller picture of the way this historical experience continues to shape individual and national identity in the present. Alexandra Lloyd is Fellow by Special Election in German at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Author: Sara Jones
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800735960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study highlights the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South.

Author: Jessica Ortner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1640140220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag.