CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2016 Focussing on German responses to the Holocaust since 1945, Postwar Germany and the Holocaust traces the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung ('overcoming the past'), the persistence of silences, evasions and popular mythologies with regards to the Nazi era, and cultural representations of the Holocaust up to the present day. It explores the complexities of German memory cultures, the construction of war and Holocaust memorials and the various political debates and scandals surrounding the darkest chapter in German history. The book comparatively maps out the legacy of the Holocaust in both East and West Germany, as well as the unified Germany that followed, to engender a consideration of the effects of division, Cold War politics and reunification on German understanding of the Holocaust. Synthesizing key historiographical debates and drawing upon a variety of primary source material, this volume is an important exploration of Germany's postwar relationship with the Holocaust. Complete with chapters on education, war crime trials, memorialization and Germany and the Holocaust today, as well as a number of illustrations, maps and a detailed bibliography, Postwar Germany and the Holocaust is a pivotal text for anyone interested in understanding the full impact of the Holocaust in Germany.

This groundbreaking work examines the long-ignored issue of masculinity and masculine identity in German culture, society, and literature, from 1945 to the present. Utilizing emerging men's studies theories, feminism, psychoanalysis, and literary studies, the book provides a resource for understanding how masculinity informs homosocial, male-female, and adult-child relations. Psychologists, literary scholars, and philosophers survey the current state of men's studies in the German academy, the representation of masculinity in postwar German literature, the psychic legacies of fascism, Turkish-German masculinities, Jewish-German masculinities, Neo-Nazi masculine identity, and the relationship between child sexual abuse and masculinity. Most significantly, the book offers tools for critical reflection on how men maintain power over women and other less powerful groups.

In this an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany.

This book analyzes postwar Germany to show how social movements shape public memory and influence democratization through cooperation and conflict with government.

Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.

The Nazis and their state-sponsored cohorts stole mercilessly from the Jews of Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, returning survivors had to navigate a frequently unclear path to recover their property from governments and neighbors who had failed to protect them and who often had been complicit in their persecution. This book is about the less publicized area of post-Holocaust restitution involving immovable (real) property confiscated from European Jews and others during World War II.

Assesses the past, present, and future of German-Jewish relations in light of recent political charges and the opening up of historical resources

Few scholarly fields have developed in recent decades as rapidly and vigorously as Holocaust Studies. At the start of the twenty-first century, the persecution and murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime have become the subjects of an enormous literature in multiple academic disciplines and a touchstone of public and intellectual discourse in such diverse fields as politics, ethics and religion. Forward-looking and multi-disciplinary, this handbook draws on the work of an international team of forty-seven outstanding scholars. The handbook is thematically divided into five broad sections. Part One, Enablers, concentrates on the broad and necessary contextual conditions for the Holocaust. Part Two, Protagonists, concentrates on the principal persons and groups involved in the Holocaust and attempts to disaggregate the conventional interpretive categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. It examines the agency of the Nazi leaders and killers and of those involved in resisting and surviving the assault. Part Three, Settings, concentrates on the particular places, sites, and physical circumstances where the actions of the Holocaust's protagonists and the forms of persecution were literally grounded. Part Four, Representations, engages complex questions about how the Holocaust can and should be grasped and what meaning or lack of meaning might be attributed to events through historical analysis, interpretation of texts, artistic creation and criticism, and philosophical and religious reflection. Part Five, Aftereffects, explores the Holocaust's impact on politics and ethics, education and religion, national identities and international relations, the prospects for genocide prevention, and the defense of human rights.

Volume 13 deals with the interaction of music and politics, considering a broad range of genres, authors, composers, and artists in Germany since the nineteenth century. A particularly iconic image of German Reunification is that of Mstislav Rostropovich playing from J. S. Bach's cello suites in front of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989. Thirty years on, it is timely to reconsider the cross-fertilization of music and politics within the German-speaking context. Frequently employed as a motivational force, a propaganda tool, or even a weapon, music can imbue a sense of identity and belonging, triggering both comforting and disturbing memories. Playing a key role in the formation of Heimat and "Germanness," it serves ideological, nationalistic, and propagandistic purposes conveying political messages and swaying public opinion. This volume brings together essays by historians, literary scholars, and musicologists on topics concerning the increasing politicization of music, especially since the nineteenth century. They cover a broad spectrum of genres, musicians, and thinkers, discussing the interplay of music and politics in "classical" and popular music: from the rediscovery and repurposing of Martin Luther in nineteenth-century Germany to the exploitation of music during the Third Reich, from the performative politics of German punk and pop music to the influence of the events of 1988/89 on operatic productions in the former GDR - up to the relevance of Ernst Bloch in our contemporary post-truth society.

Focusing on the 1980s-90s, examines how Protestants in Germany interpret their self-understanding as part of the community which is defined by its connection to the Nazi past. Analyzes representations of the Holocaust and of the Christian-Jewish relationship in three German Protestant theological texts: the 1980 statement of the Rhineland synod of the Evangelical Church "Zur Erneuerung des Verhältnisses von Christen und Juden"; Marquardt's theological text "Von Elend und Heimsuchung der Theologie: Prolegomena zur Dogmatik" (1992); and Britta Jüngst's dissertation "Auf der Seite des Todes das Leben" (1996). The analysis of these texts is informed by the development of narratives of collective memory of the Holocaust in German society in the 1980s-90s, from the miniseries "Holocaust" to the Goldhagen controversy. All three texts admit the responsibility of Christianity and Christians for the Holocaust and build theologies that do not reject Jews. Contends that, contrary to their stated intentions, most Holocaust theologians do not truly listen to the Jewish perspective. Calls on practitioners of "theology after Auschwitz" to embrace Jews and Judaism in order to restore the credibility of Christian Churches which abandoned the Jews in Auschwitz.