The Module will run in the Spring Term, time tbc

Seminars are tbc

Seminars will consist of lectures and base group discussions of the text and secondary reading material. Students will be issued with detailed worksheets in advance and may be required to prepare material in advance.

 

Module schedule:

Week 1: Lecture: 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?

Lecture: Trauma and Memory

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

 

Week 3: Representing the Air War I

Lecture: The issue of empathy in the discourse of German wartime suffering

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

Lecture: Intergenerational Trauma and Postmemory

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

Week 6: Reading Week

 

Week 7: German Wartime Memory and 1968

Lecture: 1968 and German Suffering

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 of Hitler's Bunker

Film: Der Untergang (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

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