| Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic Contributor(s): Taberner, Stuart (Editor), Berger, Karina (Editor), Schaumann, Caroline (Contribution by) |
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ISBN: 1571133933 ISBN-13: 9781571133939 Publisher: Camden House (NY) OUR PRICE: $94.05 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: February 2009 Annotation: First comprehensive look at how today's German literary fiction deals with questions of German victimhood. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | European - German - History | Military - World War Ii - History | Europe - Germany |
| Dewey: 830.935 |
| LCCN: 2008048070 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 6.4" W x 9" (1.14 lbs) 268 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, the expulsions of "ethnic" Germans, the mass rapes of German women, and the postwar internment and persecution of Germans. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature (1999) and Grass's I>Crabwalk (2002) are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance acknowledging German victimhood and bearing in mind German perpetration. This book of essays is the first in English to examine closely the variety of these texts. An opening section on the 1950s -- a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration -- provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on ordinary Germans, and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society, and Karina Berger, B.A., M.St., is a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Leeds, UK. |
Contributor Bio(s): Taberner, Stuart: - University of Leeds |