Memory and Forgetting: Reinventing the Past in Twentieth-Century Germany Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century Rudy Koshar From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990 Rudy Koshar Visual Culture and the Holocaust Barbie Zelizer

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 117-126
Author(s):  
Matthew Levinger
2018 ◽  
pp. 96-121
Author(s):  
A. Kudryachenko

The article analyzes the processes of postwar development of Germany from the point of view of implementing measures to denazify and disqualify persons who have tarnished themselves under theHitler regime, the specifics of the formation and stages of the formation of the policy of “overcoming the past” in the national memory of postwar Germany. The author, singling out four different stagesand depths of understanding, clarifies the problems of the formation and development of this policy from posing the “problem of guilt”, the differentiation of its types with respect to the common andexcellent policies of the two German states, the role of the international political context and the reconstruction of the historical truth regarding the Third Reich and conditions for the formation ofculture of memory in modern Germany. The strengths and weaknesses of West Germany’s ambivalent policy with regard to its identity are analyzed through clear disassociation from the Nazi past and, on the other hand, the broad integration of former Nazis into new public institutions as an option to win democracy in Germany despite the post-war moods of most of its citizens. The immediate significance of the succession of generations in the political arena, the public study of the Nazi past and the establishment of a new political culture in public discourse are underlined. Its main elements were the memory and responsibility of generations for the Holocaust and the strengthening of the national identity of the Germans through “constitutional patriotism”. In the united Germany, the comprehension of the totalitarian past, which took place quite intensively and resulted not only in public discussions, but also contributed to the memorialization and commemoration of historical memory, the reparation to victims of Nazism and forced workers of the Third Reich from different countries and the restoration of justice to all those affected by the so-called policy “Arization” and measures to return property and cultural values to their heirs, is fairly effective. The policy of “overcoming the past” contributed to the achievement of a public consensus of the national memory of the modern FRG regarding the recognition of the crimes of the Nazi period and the making of lessons from the past. As in any other Western society, in Germany the attitude towards the Holocaust is the cornerstone of the memory of the Second World War and the symbol of the crimes of Nazism, as well as the central historical event of the XX century.


Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
Kathleen James-Chakraborty

James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.


1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-134
Author(s):  
David Bathrick

AbstractThe period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productionsThe Diary of Anne Frank(1960), Stanley Kramer’sJudgment at Nuremberg(1961) and Sidney Lumet’sThe Pawnbroker(1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.


Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni

Chapter 9 examines social-psychological approaches to understanding the Holocaust. Since Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were published in the early 1960s, social-psychological formulations based on obedience and social influence have dominated the psychology of the Holocaust. There is also a significant critical literature that challenges some of the findings and interpretation of Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo as they apply to the Holocaust. Social cognition is the study of thinking as situated in a social milieu and offers a fruitful framework for considering the ways Germans thought about one another during the Third Reich. Modern approaches to prejudice and racism, especially the study of unconscious or implicit biases, may provide insight into anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent in Germany (and elsewhere) during the Nazi years.


1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Few tools of Nazi propaganda were as potent or as permanent asarchitecture. At the instigation of Hitler, who had once aspired to bean architect, the Nazi regime placed unusual importance on thedesign of environments—whether cities, buildings, parade grounds, orhighways—that would glorify the Third Reich and express its dynamicrelationship to both the past and the future. Architecture and urbandesign were integral to the way the regime presented itself at homeand abroad. Newsreels supplemented direct personal experience ofmonumental buildings. Designed to last a thousand years, these edificesappeared to offer concrete testimony of the regime’s enduringcharacter. A more subtle integration of modern functions and vernacularforms, especially in suburban housing, suggested that technologicalprogress could coexist with an “organic” national communityrooted in a quasi-sacred understanding of the landscape.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document