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.
İçerik tablosu
Introduction
Paul Betts, Alon Confino, Dirk Schumann
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
Yazar hakkında
Dirk Schumann is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Georg-August University, Göttingen. His most recent books include Raising Citizens in the ‘Century of the Child“: The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (Berghahn, 2010, edited), Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (Berghahn, 2009).