Professor Of German Research Articles

The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages

What was meant by the medieval popular Bible - what was presented as biblical narrative to an audience largely unable to read the original biblical texts? Presentations in the vernacular languages of Europe of supposedly biblical episodes were more often than not expanded and interpreted, sometimes very considerably. This book looks at the presentation, the use, and the possible lay reception of the book of Genesis, using as wide a range of medieval genres and vernaculars as possible on a comparative basis down to the Reformation. Literatures taken into consideration include Irish, Cornish, English, French, High and Low German, Spanish, Italian and others. Genesis was an important book, and the focus is on those narrative high points which lend themselves most particularly (it is never exclusive) to literal expansion, even though allegory can also work backwards into the literal narrative. Starting with the devil in paradise (who is not biblical), the book examines what Adam and Eve did afterwards, who killed Cain, what happened in the flood or at the tower of Babel, and ends with a consideration of the careers of Jacob and Joseph. The book is based on the Speaker's Lectures, given in 2002 in the University of Oxford. BRIAN MURDOCH is Professor of German at the University of Stirling.

Nazi cinema as enchantment: the politics of entertainment in the Third Reich

The Nazi regime did not merely terrorize its citizens into submission; it also seduced them by offering many of the things they wanted: stability, a traditional value system, a sense of belonging, and the hope of a better standard of living. Nazi cinema's popularity rested on its ability to express positive social fantasies and promote the enchantment of reality, creating a place so delightful that one wanted to share in the dream at any price. Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich is an interdisciplinary study written for scholars in the fields of film studies, German studies, history, critical studies, and political science. It explores how cinema participated in the larger framework of everyday fascism. This book examines how five film genres - the historical musical, the foreign adventure film, the home-front film, the melodrama, and the problem film - enchanted audiences and enacted shared stories that can tell us much about how family, community, history, the nation, and the war were imagined in Nazi Germany. ~~ The book analyzes thirteen motion pictures including the blockbusters Wunschkonzert and Die grosse Liebe; star vehicles for Gustaf Grundgens (Tanz auf dem Vulkan), Zarah Leander (Damals), and Heinrich George (Die Degenhardts); landmark films by prominent directors Veit Harlan (Opfergang), Eduard von Borsody (Kautschuk), Hans H. Zerlett (Robert und Bertram), and Viktor Tourjansky (Verklungene Melodie); and extraordinary and little known films such as Frauen fur Golden Hill, Das Leben kann so schon sein, Der verzauberte Tag, and Via Mala). None of the films analyzed are available with English subtitles. ~~ Based on exhaustive research in German archives, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment examines, in addition to the films themselves, articles from the propaganda ministry's official organ, Der deutsche Film, daily trade sheets such as Licht-Bild-Buhne and Film-Kurier, fan magazines, and even studio press packages for individual stars and films. ~~~~~~~ MARY-ELIZABETH O'BRIEN is Professor of German at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Literature and film in the Third Reich

This book is the first survey in English of literature and film in Nazi Germany. It treats not only works sympathetic to National Socialism, but also works of the so-called Inner Emigration, of the resistance, and those written in prisons and concentration camps. Much of this literature is not easily accessible in German, and not available at all in English translation. Historical and ideological context is provided in chapters covering influential works of the time such as Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Schoeps also analyzes Nazi cultural policies, fascist histories of literature, and the role of German studies and Germanists in the Nazi movement. A major section of the book is devoted to film, then a relatively new medium of communication whose propaganda value was clearly recognized by Goebbels, the minister for propaganda and president of the Reich's Chamber of Culture. One of the most interesting areas of research in recent years is the relationship between Hitler's cultural commissars, in particular Goebbels, and the literature and film production of the Nazi years. This book is based on the revised and expanded second German edition, Literatur im Dritten Reich (1933-1945), but has again been revised and expanded, especially the chapter on film and Nazi policies toward the film industry. The chapter on cultural policies has also been expanded to include Himmler's efforts to meddle in this area. New also are sections dealing with Jewish entertainers in concentration camps (for example, Kurt Gerron) and activities of the Jewish Cultural League. Karl-Heinz Schoeps is professor of German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Arno Schmidt's Zettel's Traum: an analysis

Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) is considered one of the most daring and influential writers of postwar Germany; the Germanist Jeremy Adler has called him a 'giant of postwar German literature.' Schmidt was awarded the Fontane Prize in 1964 and the Goethe Prize in 1973, and his early fiction has been translated into English to high critical acclaim, but he is not a well-known figure in the English-speaking world, where his complex work remains at the margins of critical inquiry. Volker Langbehn's book introduces Schmidt to the English-speaking audience, with primary emphasis on his most famous novel, 'Zettel's Traum'. One reviewer called the book an 'elephantine monster' because of its unconventional size (folio format), length (1334 pages and over 10 million characters), and unique presentation of text in the form of notes, typewritten pages, parallel columns, and collages. The novel narrates the life of the main characters, Daniel Pagenstecher, Paul Jacobi and his wife Wilma, and their teenage daughter Franziska. In discussing the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, the four engage in the problems connected with a translation of Poe. Langbehn's study investigates how literary language can mediate or account for the world of experiences and for concepts. Schmidt's use of unconventional presentation formats challenges us to analyze how we think about reading and writing literary texts. Instead of viewing such texts as a representation of reality, Schmidt's novel destabilizes this unquestioned mode of representation, posing a radical challenge to what contemporary literary criticism defines as literature. No comprehensive study of 'Zettel's Traum' exists in English. Volker Langbehn is associate professor of German at San Francisco State University.

Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies: An Introduction

Few figures have had as much influence on Western thought as Sigmund Freud. His ideas permeate our culture to such a degree that an understanding of them is indispensable. Yet many otherwise well-informed students in the humanities labor under misconceptions about Freudian theory. There are countless introductions to Freudian psychoanalysis but, surprisingly, none that combine a genuinely accessible account of Freud's ideas with an introduction to their use in literary and cultural studies, as this book does. Written specifically for use by advanced undergraduate and graduate students in courses dealing with literary and cultural criticism, it is also of interest to the general reader. The first part of the book explains Freud's key ideas and refutes many popular misconceptions, using examples throughout. The assumption underlying this account is that Freud offers not simply a model of the mind, but an analysis of the relation between the individual and society. The second part addresses the implications of Freudian psychoanalysis for the study of literature and culture, again using plentiful examples. Existing books focus either on Freudian psychoanalysis in general or on psychoanalytic literary or cultural criticism; the latter tend to be abstract and theoretical in nature. None of them are suitable for readers who are interested in psychoanalysis as a tool for literary and cultural criticism but have no firm knowledge of Freud's ideas. Freud's Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies fills this gap. Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield, UK.

A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka

No other 20th-century writer of German-language literature has been as fully accepted into the canon of world literature as Franz Kafka. The unsettlingly, enigmatically surreal world of Kafka's novels and stories continues to fascinate readers and critics of each new generation, who in turn continue to find new readings. One thing has become clear: although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. The challenge to critics has been to present a strong point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research, a challenge that has been met by the contributors to this volume. Contributors include: James Rolleston, Clayton Koelb, Walter H. Sokel, Judith Ryan, Russell A. Berman, Ritchie Robertson, Henry Sussman, Stanley Corngold, Bianca Theisen, Rolf J. Goebel, Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Sander L. Gilman, John Zilcosky, and Mark Harman. James Rolleston is Professor of German at Duke University.

Arthur Schnitzler and twentieth-century criticism

Schnitzler, one of the most prolific Austrian writers of the 20th century, ruthlessly dissected his society's erotic posturing and phobias about sex and death. His most penetrating analyses include 'Lieutenant Gustl,' the first stream-of-consciousness novella in German; 'Reigen,' a devastating cycle of one-acts mapping the social limits of a sexual daisy-chain; and 'Der Weg ins Freie,' a novel that combines a love story with a discussion of the roadblocks facing Austria's Jews. Today, his popularity is reflected by new editions and translations and by adaptations for theater, television, and film by artists such as Tom Stoppard and Stanley Kubrick. This book examinesSchnitzler reception up to 2000, beginning with the journalistic reception of the early plays. Before being suspended by a decade of Nazism, criticism in the 1920s and 30s emphasized Schnitzler's determinism and decadence. Not until the early 60s was humanist scholarship able to challenge this verdict by pointing out Schnitzler's ethical indictment of impressionism in the late novellas. During the same period, Schnitzler, whom Freud considered his literary Doppelganger, was often subjected to Freudian psychoanalytical criticism; but by the 80s, scholarship was citing his own thoroughgoing objections to such categories. Since the 70s, Schnitzler's remonstrance toward the Austrian establishment has been examined by social historians and feminist critics alike, and the recently completed ten-volume edition of Schnitzler's diary has met with vibrant interest. Andrew C. Wisely is associate professor of German at Baylor University.

The Critical Response to Robert Musil's "The Man without Qualities"

The Austrian writer Robert Musil ranks among the foremost novelists of the 20th century. Despite a series of lesser but well-regarded shorter works, his literary reputation rests almost entirely on his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities), a life-work in the truest sense, which became the focus of all his energies and thinking from 1924 until his death in 1942. This study analyzes the principal trends in scholarship on the novel from the 1960s to the present. It contrasts earlier criticism, which foregrounded the eponymous central character's search for identity against the background of subject theory or mysticism, with more recent criticism, which has focused on aesthetic and ethical approaches to the novel within the broader context of theories of value. A focal chapter in the study centers on the persistent difficulty critics have encountered with the idea of Eigenschaftslosigkeit, the state of being without qualities named in the novel's title.Tim Mehigan is Associate Professor of German and Head of the Department of Germanic Studies and Russian at the University of Melbourne.

An introduction to the works of Peter Weiss

The plays and prose works of the German writer, director, and political activist Peter Weiss (1916-1982) were immensely influential in the shaping of European Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century. Combining exploratory aesthetic openness with an uncompromising ethical drive, Weiss's literary works, especially the plays Marat/Sade (1964), The Investigation (1968), and Holderlin (1971), as well as the novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-81) continue to provide vital points of reference for any discussion of culture and politics in our times. Berwald's study serves as a comprehensive introduction to Weiss's work and vision. The introductory chapter outlines Weiss's life and work in exile. Three chapters provide detailed discussions of Weiss's theater work, from his early grotesque plays and the documentary dramas from the 1960s that address Auschwitz, Angola, and Vietnam, to his most complex plays in which intellectuals are staged as outsiders. The subsequent four chapters discuss Weiss's prose works, which include his autobiographical novels from the early 1960s, essays and notebooks on art and politics, and his summum opus, The Aesthetics of Resistance.Olaf Berwald is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Tennessee.

In Memoriam, Jill Anne Kowalik (1949-2003)

On October 30, 2003, Jill Anne Kowalik, Associate Professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA, died of the misdiagnosed metastatic breast cancer she lived with for her last fourteen years. She is survived by her husband, Bill Kowalik, a research geologist. A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Philosophy and German, she received her Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University in 1985. Since 1989, she has taught at UCLA, after serving as assistant professor of German at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1985-1986), and at Princeton University (1986-1989). Though barely able to walk because of a brain tumor in the late Spring of 2003, she finished the quarter's classes, graded exams for over one hundred students, and then went to the City of Hope Hospital for radiation treatment. She was on research leave when she died. Even though the illness required several lengthy hospitalizations and intensive treatments (two bone marrow transplants and one femur replacement), for which she was given sick leaves, and even though she received numerous debilitating chemotherapy regimens, Jill followed a full teaching schedule of graduate and undergraduate classes in 18th- and 19th-century German studies. In order to increase enrollments in undergraduate German literature classes, she designed and taught a number of well attended and inspiring literature in translation courses on such subjects as Love and Sex in the German Literary Violence and Insanity, or War. At Jill's memorial, a former graduate student, Lisa Parks, described her effect on undergraduates and graduates with the following words: If time was one of the resources that Jill was short of, it was also the resource she gave most generously. Regardless of her own commitments, not to mention her health, Jill always devoted her time to her students and the department-to discuss a matter, or solve a problem. ... As a teacher, her Socratic approach engaged all students from all disciplines and demanded the highest standards from herself and her students; she was a truly inspiring, and provocative teacher. ... I am indebted to her for her devoted support, her mentoring, ...and can only try to emulate her in my own future career. As a scholar, Jill was just beginning her career with brilliant essays on Thomas Mann, Kleist, and the Enlightenment, when the illness struck. Nonetheless, she produced a score of articles on the works of such writers as Goethe and Lessing as well as dictionary entries and numerous book reviews in such venues as The German Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, Monatshefte, the Lessing Yearbook, and the Yearbook of the Goethe Society of North America. When her first book, The Poetics of Historical Perspectivism: Breitinger's Critische Dichtkunst and the Neoclassic Tradition, was published in 1992 by University of North Carolina Press, she was already at work on a re-evaluation of the concept of melancholy in the 18th century. …

The life and works of Wolfgang Borchert

Wolfgang Borchert has been called 'the most important voice of post-war German literature.' He came to fame literally overnight when his play 'Draussen vor der Tur' (The Man Outside) was broadcast in the British zone of occupied Germany in February 1947 and evoked impassioned reactions both for and against. An examination of the plight of the returning soldier in the postwar world, it has become an icon of its time, capturing the futility of war and the true cost of the destruction in both physical and spiritual terms. Worldwide, 'Draussen vor der Tur' has been produced more often than any other German play. Between January 1946 and his death in November 1947, Borchert wrote over forty short stories on the model of Hemingway and Wolfe, many of them highly experimental. Indeed, he is widely regarded as having introduced the short-story form into German literature. This is the first full-length account of Borchert's life and works in English. It benefits from unprecedented access to archival material and from interviews with Borchert's contemporaries. The study links Borchert's own literary ambition with the enlightened family circumstances in which he grew up, and charts his development from a rebellious teenager with a passion for theater via his fighting as a soldier on Germany's Eastern Front and his imprisonment by the Nazis to his brief but intense career as a writer. Gordon Burgess is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Aberdeen.

Exhaustible Humanity: Using Up Language, Using Up Man

jan mieszkowski is Assistant Professor of German and Humanities at Reed College. He has recently completed a book on the models of productivity and praxis that arise at the intersection of German Romanticism and classical political economy. His new project, Murmurs of Democracy, explores the politics of poetic abnegation from Novalis to Beckett.

A Companion to the works of Grimmelshausen

Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimusremains the one German novel of its time that has attained the stature of literature: its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayalof a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those interested in the development of the picaresque novel in Europe, the work and its Continuations have increasingly occupied scholars around the world, who have in recent years shown it to be a work ofsubtle structure and characterization, bearing the imprint of the most advanced political thinking of the time, and showing the influences of some of the most significant works of world literature, including Cervantes' Don Quixote and Barclay's Argenis. This volume of essays by leading Grimmelshausen scholars from Germany, the United States, and England provides analyses of significant topics in his life and works, including questions of genre, structure, satire, allegory, narratology, political thought, religion, morality, humor, realism, and mortality. Contributors: Christoph E. Schweitzer, Italo Michele Battafarano, Klaus Haberkamm, Rosmarie Zeller, Andreas Solbach, Dieter Breuer, Lynne Tatlock, Peter Hess, Shannon Keenan Greene, and Alan Menhennet. KarlF. Otto is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on German Baroque literature.

Trostgründe: Cultural Nationalism and Historical Legitimation in Nineteenth-Century German Literary Histories

Hinrich C. Seeba is professor of German at the University of California,Berkeley. His most recent work appeared in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, edited by Thomas A. Kovach (2002);Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung (2002); and German Literature,Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium, edited by Stephen D. Dowden and Meike G. Werner (2002).

Portrait of an Interdisciplinary Life. John Neubauer zum 70. Geburtstag

In 1982, while waiting at Schiphol, the Dutch national airport, John Neubauer, then Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh, read an advertisement in the Times Literary Supplement for a professorship at the University of Amsterdam. He decided to give it a try – to return to Europe which he left some decades ago. Selection committees had a rich choice of candidates in those days of major funding cuts (a period from which the University still has not recovered). Nevertheless, the committee's decision was not too difficult and, since 1983, John has occupied the chair of Comparative Literature (Algemene in het bijzonder Vergelijkende literatuurwetenschap) at the University of Amsterdam.

Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust

Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust investigates communist Germany's attempt to explain the Holocaust within a framework that was at once German and Marxist. The book probes the contradictions and self-deceptions arising from East Germany's official self-understanding as an enlightened, modern society in which Jewishness did not constitute difference or otherness. The study examines East German historiography of the Holocaust, including its reflection in schoolbooks; analyzes East German concentration camp memorials; discusses the situation of Jews who remained in East Germany; and surveys East German cinematic and literary responses to the Nazi murder of the Jews. The book shows that regardless of the sincerity of the individuals involved in constructing these various forms of memory, the state attempted to orchestrate Holocaust discourse for its own purposes. Thomas C. Fox is professor of German at the University of Alabama. He has written extensively on East German literature and the Holocaust.

Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland

The idea of Heimat (home, homeland, native region) has been as important to German self-perceptions over the last two hundred years as the shifting notion of the German nation. While the idea of Heimat has been long neglected in English studies of German culture--among other reasons because the word Heimat has no exact equivalent in English--this book offers us the first cross-disciplinary and comprehensive analysis, in English or German, of this all-pervasive German idea. Blickle shows how the idea of Heimat interpenetrates German notions of modernity, identity, gender, nature, and innocence. Blickle reminds us of such commonplace expressions of Heimat sentimentality as Biedermeier landscapes of Alpine meadows and castles on the Rhine, but also finds the Heimat preoccupation in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Always aware of the many literary representations of Heimat (for instance in Schiller, Holderlin, Heine, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), Blickle does not argue for the fundamental innocence of Heimat. Instead he shows again and again how the idealization of a home ground leads to borders of exclusion. ~~~~~ PETER BLICKLE is Professor of German at Western Michigan University.

A Companion to German realism, 1848-1900

This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Muhlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von Francois, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Muhlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von Francois's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.

Reading Goethe: a critical introduction to the literary work

The year 1999 saw the 250th anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest writer. Appropriately, literary scholars within Germany and beyond paid tribute to this remarkable talent. But a number of commentators also noted that Goethe is often revered rather than read, known of rather than known. It is the aim of this study to provide a corrective to this state of affairs. The authors concentrate on the literary work and offer analyses that represent an impassioned, but by no means uncritical, advocacy - one that seeks to persuade both academic critics and general readers alike that Goethe is one of the key figures of European modernity. To an extent that is virtually unique in modern literature, Goethe was active in a whole number of literary genres. He was a superb poet, unrivaled in the variety of his expressive modes, and in his ability to combine intellectual sophistication withexperiential immediacy. He also wrote short stories and novels throughout his life, ranging from the The Sorrows of Young Werther, to The Elective Affinities. He was also a highly skilled dramatist, both in the historical mode and in the classical verse-drama. Above all else, Goethe is the author of Faust: a workthat attempts - and achieves - more than any other modern European drama.ERIKA SWALES is College Lecturer and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. MARTIN SWALES is Professor of German at University College London.

Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust Toby Axelrod Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust, by Thomas C. Fox. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999. 177 pp. $55.00. As Germany agonizes over its latest wave of neo-Nazi violence, many fingers have been pointed at former East Germany. In the ten years since reunification, a higher proportion of violent xenophobic attacks have taken place in the former communist zone than in the west. Unanswered questions have resurfaced: Did the totalitarian East German state not only fail to destroy Nazi ideology, but actually ensure its survival? Is there a connection between today’s right-wing skinheads and the East German approach to Holocaust education? [End Page 115] In his book, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust, Thomas C. Fox goes a long way toward answering these questions. The book provides a concise and thorough overview, both in a technical and interpretative sense, of how the Holocaust was seen in divided Germany from 1945 until today. The analysis, which calls upon other recent works such as Jeffrey Herf’s 1997 book, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, is both fascinating and depressing. Fox aims to “show that the East German state, with its highly controlled public sphere, attempted to reorganize, censor, and orchestrate Holocaust discourse in a massive effort to utilize the ‘Jewish question’ for its own political ends . . .” (p. 8). Ultimately, the author suggests that a “new history” will have to be written by the united Germany, overcoming the “lingering power of East Germany’s self-staging as an antifascist state” (p. 8). This complicated topic is only beginning to be researched, but facets have proved tantalizing to historians, journalists, and social scientists. Much thought has been given to the fact that East Germany’s official relationship with Nazi history differed markedly from that in the west. Fox’s book is one among several recent works by non-German scholars confronting the topic. Among the others are Herf’s book, as well as Tina Rosenberg’s 1995 book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, and Ian Buruma’s thought-provoking 1994 work, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Vintage). Of these titles, Fox’s is among the most concise and scholarly, while the others have the advantage in style and accessibility to the general reader. There is a pervasive belief among western historians that East Germany did not exorcise its Nazi ghosts as successfully as did the west. Some in the east have taken issue with such conclusions. But the fact is that East German schoolbooks have been scrapped, teachers have been reeducated, and memorial sites revamped since the reunification in 1990. In his book, Fox, Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama, examines three main vehicles for transmission of the political message: historiography, concentration camp memorials, and literature and film. The stamp of socialist ideology may be seen in all three realms. Among Fox’s conclusions are: that East Germany’s “state-organized discourse” used the Holocaust to promote an image of the Socialist struggle against fascism; that the “foundation myth” of anti-fascist struggle enabled some Jewish survivors to remain loyal to the East German state; and that the state used “the language of traditional European anti-Semitism,” whether through anti-Zionist propaganda, refusing to recognize the genocide against the Jews and to pay restitution to survivors, or the persecution of Jewish citizens in the 1950s. Mr. Fox does not excuse West Germany for its whitewashing of Nazi crimes in the first two post-war decades. But he points out that, while the East German system [End Page 116] quickly became rigid and fixed, West German society gradually became more flexible and open. “[I]t is possible to argue that, despite denial and ever-present resistance, the West Germans indeed developed an important dialogue on the subject” of the Holocaust, writes Fox (p. 7). In the west, guilt may have been minimized or denied in the 50s and 60s, but in the east guilt was shoved westward. Communist Germany officially was the land...