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Anthropology Texts for TeachingBETWEEN MASS DEATH AND INDIVIDUAL LOSS
The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany
Edited by Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D. C.
| 344 pages, bibliog., index ISBN 978-1-84545-397-8 Hb $100.00/£50.00 Published (Summer 2008) Buy now and get 15% off listed price |
“Taken together, this volume is a welcome departure from the usual literature on memory and trauma which ignores what came before the war and treats what happened after only in relation to the Holocaust. This excellent volume enables us to look at the history of death as a whole beyond the break of 1945 and to see influences and continuities throughout the last century. The volume delivers on the promise of the introduction to open up new avenues for research and raise new questions and should be a welcome addition to the library of every scholar of modern Germany.” · German Politics & Society
“[The volume] offers a significant contribution to theories of death and memory work in German Studies. [It] is clearly organized using theme-based sections, which lead the reader through material culture as well as psychological investigation; the essays are well-researched and cogently written.” · German Studies Review
“Taken together, the volume provides more than the sum of its individual contributions and actually succeeds in offering new perspectives on a hitherto neglected topic. Several essays demonstrate persuasively the myriad ways in which the ghosts of the dead haunted the living in twentieth-century Germany…for anybody interested in the social and cultural history of death in Germany, this volume will be an indispensable starting point.” · German History
Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.
Alon Confino is a Professor of modern German and European history at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and Germany. He is the author of The Nation as a Culture of Remembrance: Germany, Memory, and the Method of History (University of North Carolina Press 2006).
Paul Betts is Reader in German History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, 2004) and co-editor of Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering 20th Century German History (Stanford, 2003). He is also Joint Editor of the journal German History.
Dirk Schumann Professor of History at Jacobs University, Bremen. He is the author of Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik (2001, English translation forthcoming) and has co-edited Life After Death (2003) and Violence and Society after the First World War (first issue of Journal of Modern European History (2003).
Series: Volume 7, Studies in German History
Contents
PART I: BODIES
Chapter 1. How the Germans Learned to Wage War. On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World Wars Michael Geyer Chapter 2. The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of the Second World War Richard Bessel Chapter 3. Rebuilding and Reburying: Emergency Cemeteries in Berlin after ‘Zero Hour’ Monica Black
PART II: DISPOSAL
Chapter 4. Fanning the Flames – Cremation in Late Imperial and Weimar Germany Simone Ameskamp Chapter 5. Disposing of the Dead in East Germany, 1945 – 1990 Felix Robin Schulz Chapter 6. Death in Munich. The 1972 Olympics Kay Schiller Chapter 7. When Cold Warriors Die: The State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht Paul Betts
PART III: SUBJECTIVITY
Chapter 8. A Common Experience of Death: Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914-1923 Tim Grady Chapter 9. Laughing about death? `German Humor´ in the Two World Wars Martina Kessel Chapter 10. Death, Spiritual Solace, and Afterlife. Between Nazism and Religion Alon Confino Chapter 11. Yizkor! Commemoration of the Dead by Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany Gabriel Finder
PART IV: RUINS
Chapter 12. The Imagination of Disaster. Death and Survival in Postwar West Germany Svenja Goltermann Chapter 13. European Melancholy and the Inability to Listen: Sebald, Politics, and Death Daniel Steuer Chapter 14. A Cemetery in Berlin Peter Fritzsche
Notes on contributors Bibliography Index