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, expulsions of "ethnic" Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature and Grass's Crabwalk are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and 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. CONTRIBUTORS: Karina Berger, Elizabeth Boa, Stephen Brockmann, David Clarke, Mary Cosgrove, Rick Crownshaw, Helen Finch, Frank Finlay, Katharina Hall, Colette Lawson, Caroline Schaumann, Helmut Schmitz, Kathrin Sch�del, and Stuart Taberner STUART TABERNER is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds. KARINA BERGER holds a PhD in German from the University of Leeds.
Brockmann, Stephen: - STEPHEN BROCKMANN is Professor of German with courtesy appointments in English and History at Carnegie Mellon University.
Clarke, David: - DAVID CLARKE is Professor of Modern German Studies at Cardiff University, UK.
Cosgrove, Mary: - Mary Cosgrove is Professor in German at Trinity College Dublin. Her research and teaching foci include Holocaust memory and representation in literature and culture; German Jewish writing; the cultural history and theory of melancholia and boredom in European letters; and literary
and narrative economics. Key publications include Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Camden House,
2014); German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (Camden House, 2006; paperback 2010).
Finch, Helen: - HELEN FINCH is Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds.
Schaumann, Caroline: - CAROLINE SCHAUMANN is Professor and Chairperson of German Studies at Emory College, GA.
Taberner, Stuart: - STUART TABERNER is Professor of German at the University of Leeds, UK. He is Research Associate in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French at the University of the Free State, South Africa.
Taberner, Stuart: - STUART TABERNER is Professor of German at the University of Leeds, UK. He is Research Associate in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French at the University of the Free State, South Africa.
