Introduction: Representations of German War Experiences and the Legacy of the Second World War

Abstract

The Study of German War Experiences in Context Questions of how to represent violence and war have strongly influenced the German social, cultural, political, and historical imaginary. Particularly since the early 1990s critical discussions on German war experiences both at the front and at home and their depictions have been a dominant theme in the culture sections of German newspapers as well as in the academy. These discussions focus primarily on Germany during the Second World War with a special emphasis on the experience of German wartime suffering during the air war and during the flight and expulsion from the East (e.g. Assmann; Cohen-Pfister and WienroederSkinner; Cooke and Silberman; Schmitz; Schmitz and Seidel-Arpaci; Taberner and Berger; Vees-Gulani; Wilms and Rasch; cf. also Sus, reviewed by Peter Fritzsche in this issue). While these debates specific to the Second World War are necessary and important, this special issue hopes to expand this discourse beyond its restrictive temporal focus. Taken together, the contributions offer a clearer picture of the continuations, patterns, breaks, and places of German depictions of war and violence and their cultural memorialization from the eighteenth century to the present. It is thus not the aim of the contributions simply to recall the contents of such representations of German war experiences but instead to concentrate on the processes and concerns of war representations. In the included articles, the authors employ tools and concepts that have recently emerged in the interdisciplinary field of cultural war studies, involving numerous disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. Seeking a wider scope than military history, it tackles the origins, nature, and consequences of war and conflict and of the violence that accompanies them in all its complex aspects, including the connection of war to its cultural representation and memorialization. Involvement in war studies reaches from literary studies to psychology, from classics to peace and conflict studies, and is omnipresent in all fields of cultural studies, including gender studies, visual culture, media studies, and aesthetics. Seeing war through such a wide variety of methodologies opens the door to new and systematic approaches to the general representations of war in culture over time.