Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: a poem and an image
- 1 From experience to memory: the emergence of lieux de mémoire, 1943–1947
- Part I Commemorating death
- 2 ‘Soldiers of the Heimat’: commemorating the dead, 1940–1945
- 3 ‘In quiet memory’?: post-war memory cultures, 1945–1979
- 4 The return of the dead: the renaissance of commemoration, 1979–1995
- Part II Confronting destruction
- Part III Writing histories
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
4 - The return of the dead: the renaissance of commemoration, 1979–1995
from Part I - Commemorating death
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: a poem and an image
- 1 From experience to memory: the emergence of lieux de mémoire, 1943–1947
- Part I Commemorating death
- 2 ‘Soldiers of the Heimat’: commemorating the dead, 1940–1945
- 3 ‘In quiet memory’?: post-war memory cultures, 1945–1979
- 4 The return of the dead: the renaissance of commemoration, 1979–1995
- Part II Confronting destruction
- Part III Writing histories
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction: shifting contexts
In September 1987, the Stattzeitung, an alternative city guide for Kassel, carried a cover that showed a grisly scene of mass death: dozens of scattered corpses and body parts formed an undifferentiated landscape of death from which a single body stood out in the shape of an inverted crucifix. The image derived from a photograph that had been taken a few days after 22 October 1943. It depicted the retrieval of dead bodies from the public shelter of the Bürgersäle, which had turned into a mass grave on the night of the air raid. Significantly, the photo reporter of the Stattzeitung had not unearthed the motif from an archive but had discovered it in his immediate environment – in the form of a giant poster covering the entrance door of a World War II brick bunker (Fig. 15).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Allied Air War and Urban MemoryThe Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany, pp. 141 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011