German Memory Culture Research Articles

Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy: Remembrance, Politics and the Dialectic of Normality by Caroline Pearce

1194 Reviews der Metapher', painstakingly teasing out his relationship to the origins of poetic inspiration fromHesiod onwards, in the very detail of his poems. Wendy Skinner turns to thedesert as a symbol and literaryplace in Schrott's work and thoughtfully examines theway inwhich the very extremity of the conditions can conjure up a new poetics and gesture towards the sublime. StefanHoppner continues the interest in extreme and almost uninhabitable landscape asmetaphorical trope by comparing the 700-page novel Tristan da Cunha (2003) and Schrott's firstnovel Finis terrae (1995), and setting them in the context of Utopian literature. Two pieces examine the dialogue with the natural sciences: Daniel Rothenbuhler focuses chiefly on Schrott's essays, setting him in context with a range of literature fromHabermas to Kant; and the poet Franz JosefCzernin stages an insightful ironic dialogue pro and contra Schrott's cognitive poetics'. Two pieces then take Schrott to task: Torsten Hoffmann, the guest editor, offers a sceptical reading of Schrott's role-poem 'Petrarca? Mont Ventoux\ from Tropen (1998), accusing him of eithermisunderstanding Petrarch's letter of 1336 or deli berately misleading the reader.Michael P. Streck, an academic specializing in the ancient Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic, offers a devastating critique of Schrott's version of 2001, effectively accusing him of plagiarism. Finally, Dorothea Dieck mann, who herself had crossed swords with Schrott over his Die Erfindung der Poesie (1998), charts the rather unedifying exchange between Schrott andWendelin Schmidt-Dengler of 2003 under the pretext of examining the relationship between literarywork and criticism. Schrott's thirst for knowledge seems to encourage a kind of reception inwhich critics set out either to put him right or to put him in his place. Certainly Schrott's controversy isworth exploring (it is also something he plays with ironically), and there are issues about translation (or versioning) which are genuinely interesting. Nevertheless, it seems strange for this firstvolume on Schrott to give somuch space to his critics that several phases and many aspects of his fascinating work should go under-represented. New College, Oxford Karen Leeder Contemporary Germany and theNazi Legacy: Remembrance, Politics and theDia lectic ofNormality. By Caroline Pearce. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xiv+266 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-23051-804-9. In this volume Caroline Pearce sets out to trace thewealth of debates and disputes on theNazi past that have to some extent defined German politics, society, and culture since themid-1990s. Her focus,more specifically, is on the so-called Berlin Republic, which she holds to have come into being with the election of the Red Green coalition led by Schroder and Fischer in late 1998. Her method is a detailed examination of a series of controversies, includingWalser's 1998 Friedenspreisrede, theLeitkultur andNationalstolz debates, thediscussions surrounding the construc tion of theHolocaust memorial in theheart ofBerlin, various arguments relating to anti-Semitism and the FDP politician Mollemann and, once again, Martin Walser, MLR, 104.4, 2009 1195 and the succession of anniversaries in 2004 and 2005 some sixty years after the Normandy invasions, the liberation of Auschwitz, and the end of thewar. These close readings are setwithin a theoretical framework, outlined in the introduction, which draws on a series of familiar thinkers and familiar discussions regarding collective and individual identity and communicative and cultural memory. There ismuch to commend in this book, and itwill be very useful for under graduate students in particular seeking to familiarize themselves quickly with key debates and issues in contemporary German memory culture. There is a wealth of detail, and a great deal ofwork has clearly gone into thevolume. For theprofessional researcher, however, the book is unlikely to add significantly to an established and substantial body of secondary literature. Unfortunately, the emphasis on 'telling the story, resulting in a wealth of detail which would be praiseworthy if thiswere the first study of the subject, tends to squeeze out analysis and leaves the reader wondering whether there ismuch that is new about the arguments advanced: 'the dialectic of normality', established as thebook's theoretical underpinning, may just be another way of saying thatGermany in the post-unification period is, for the most part, attempting to strike a balance between a less 'burdened' perspective on its past...

Performing the New German Past: The People's Day of Mourning and 27 January as Postunification Commemorations

The article sketches the ruptures in today's German memory culture, concentrating on the Volkstrauertag (People's Day of Mourning) and the Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Remembrance Day for the Victims of National Socialism) on 27 January. It starts with an overview of the history of the Volkstrauertag with its (outward) transformation from a commemoration day for dead German soldiers into one for “all victims of war and violence.” The inclusive model of commemoration that was typical for the Bonn Republic is disintegrating today. In united Germany, the Volkstrauertag and 27 January reflect antagonistic memory strands, that is a memory focussed on the war dead and German suffering or on the Holocaust and German guilt. In light of discussions about commemorating Bundeswehr dead, the article ends by describing a re-heroicizing of the Volkstrauertag and, in a more general way, tries to outline the shifting construction of German national identity.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Culture and the German Past

This article discusses the ways critical debates in West Germany—about the increased production of war films and whether such films were ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’—raised central issues about the relationship between US popular culture and the politics of German cultural memory in two significant war films of the late fifties: David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (USA/GB 1957) and Bernhard Wicki's Die Brucke (The Bridge, FRG 1959). Whereas Kwai was heralded as an ‘anti-war’ epic in Columbia Pictures’ publicity campaign for the film in West Germany, many German commentators saw things differently. They made Kwai the centre of a critical discussion about the ways ostensibly anti-war US productions were ambiguously pro-war in the West German context, focusing attention upon the ways the film's music, its characters, and the symbolic function of the bridge ultimately encouraged a glorification of militarism as German commentators understood it, based upon their own past experiences. In contrast, Wicki's Die Brucke offered a filmic ‘response’ to Kwai’s ultimately ‘Cold War anti-war’ formula through an implicit visual contrast to and critique of the bridge, men and music in Kwai. Overall, an analysis of these two films in terms of the pro-war versus anti-war film debates of the time reveals cross-cultural and transnational dynamics at work in the heretofore exclusively German discussion of the politics of cultural memory in West Germany. Ultimately, this essay argues, these debates encouraged an expansion of West German memory culture rather than a denial of the past.