The Module will start on Thursday, Week 1, Autumn Term 2017

 

Seminars are 10-12 in H403.

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.

 

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’ (copies 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: Representing the Air War II

Text: Dieter Forte: Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen (Fischer, 1998)

 

Week 5: The War as Family Memory I – The Expulsions

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

 

Week 6: READING WEEK

 

Week 7: 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 8: German Wartime Memory and 1968

Lecture: 1968 and German Suffering

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

 

Week 9: The War as Family Memory III – Rewriting Post-War History

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

 

Week 10: The War as Family Memory IV

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