Over the course of the 1990s post-unification Germany integrates the legacy of the Holocaust in the official self-image of the Berlin Republic (for example by creating a Holocaust memorial in the nation’s capital). The re-inscription of Auschwitz into a national and collective memory opens the gates for a return of German wartime memory that appeared to have been obscured by the commemoration of Nazism’s victims. The re-emergence of the issue of German wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse since the turn of the millennium represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the ‘perpetrator collective’ and its legacies. In this module, you will address the representation of German wartime experience in contemporary literature and film from several angles. Opening with a historsiation of the problem of representing Germans as victims of war, you will move on to W.G. Sebald’s essay Luftkrieg und Literatur. Sebald’s thesis that German writers had failed to inscribe the experience of the air raids into post-war German literature, triggered a debate about the moral assessment of the Allied bombings of Germany and its literary representation (or lack of it). After focusing on literary and filmic representations of the bombings of Düsseldorf and Dresden, you will address the issue of family memory, transgenerational trauma and the long-term legacy of traumatic war experience in both literature and film.

Key Texts

Week 1: Mapping the Terrain: The Return of German Suffering

Text: Introduction from Bill Niven, Germans as Victims. Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, Basingstoke 2006. Copy provided

Week 2: The Bombenkrieg – A forgotten history?

Texts: W.G.Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur* (Fischer, 1999); Volker Hage, ‘Die Sebald-Debatte’ (copy provided).

Week 3: Representing the Air War

Film: Dresden (Roland Suso Richter, 2006)

Week 4: The War as Family Memory I – The Expulsions

Text: Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang* (dtv, 2002)

Week 5: The War as Family Memory II – The Effect on the Nachgeborene

Text: Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene* (Suhrkamp, 1998)

Week 6: READING WEEK

Week 7: German Wartime Memory and 1968

Text: Uwe Timm, Am Beispiel meines Bruders* (dtv, 2003)

Week 8: The War as Family Memory III – Rewriting Post-War History

Film: Das Wunder von Bern (Sönke Wortmann, 2003)

Week 9: The War as Family Memory IV

Text: Dagmar Leupold, Nach den Kriegen* (dtv, 2004)

Week 10: The End: Inside and Outside Hitler's Bunker

Film: Der Untergang (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

Students are expected to purchase the texts marked with an asterisk.

Assessment Method: