Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
AT THE INTERNATIONAL conference on the Holocaust held in Stockholm in January 2000, Gerhard Schröder asserted: “Einen Schlußstrich unter die deutsche Geschichte kann niemand ziehen, und die überwältigende Mehrheit der Deutschen will das auch nicht.” Even if the German population wanted to forget it would not be able to. It is a fact as obvious as it is paradoxical that at the beginning of the twenty-first century the Holocaust has become less of an event in history than one in current affairs. Take the first six months of the year 2000 alone when Germany witnessed the “symbolic” start of construction of the Holocaust monument in Berlin on the annual day of commemoration to the victims of National Socialism, reports on the resurgence of far right violence and a neo-Nazi march through the Brandenburg Gate, and false claims that secret donations to the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) came from Holocaust survivors living in Switzerland. President Johannes Rau apologized for German atrocities towards the Jews during the Second World War in a speech at the Knesset in Jerusalem, while legal wranglings over compensation payments to former forced laborers continued to dominate the political agenda. The award of the Konrad-Adenauer prize to the controversial historian Ernst Nolte and the ensuing Feuilleton debate seemed to have taken Germany back full circle to the Historikerstreit of the 1980s and certainly proved, to use Nolte's terms, that this is a “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will.”
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- Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany , pp. 201 - 226Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003