Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

Published by Berghahn Books 2008

Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

Edited by: Alon Confino , Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann

Volume 7 in the series Studies in German History

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857450517

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011).

Paul Betts is Professor of European 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 Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford, 2010). He was Joint Editor of the journal German History, 2004-2009.

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).

Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011).

Reviews

“Understood as a starting point for further inquiries into practices of mourning, burial and grief, this volume deserves broad attention, not least because it succeeds in embedding its case studies within a broad cultural, social and political history.” • European History Quarterly

“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

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction DEATH AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
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 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Chapter 2 THE SHADOW OF DEATH IN GERMANY AT THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR Richard Bessel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
Chapter 3 REBURYING AND REBUILDING Reflecting on Proper Burial in Berlin after “Zero Hour” Monica A. Black Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
Part II DISPOSAL
Chapter 4 FANNING THE FLAMES Cremation in Late Imperial and Weimar Germany Simone Ameskamp Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Chapter 5 DISPOSING OF THE DEAD IN EAST GERMANY, 1945–1990 Felix Robin Schulz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
Chapter 6 DEATH AT THE MUNICH OLYMPICS Kay Schiller Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
Chapter 7 WHEN COLD WARRIORS DIE Th e State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht Paul Betts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Part III SUBJECTIVITY
Chapter 8 A COMMON EXPERIENCE OF DEATH Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914–1923 Tim Grady Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Chapter 9 LAUGHING ABOUT DEATH? “GERMAN HUMOR” IN THE TWO WORLD WARS Martina Kessel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Chapter 10 DEATH, SPIRITUAL SOLACE, AND AFTERLIFE Between Nazism and Religion Alon Confino Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Chapter 11 YIZKOR! COMMEMORATION OF THE DEAD BY JEWISH DISPLACED PERSONS IN POSTWAR GERMANY Gabriel N. Finder Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	232
Part IV RUINS
Chapter 12 THE IMAGINATION OF DISASTER Death and Survival in Postwar West Germany Svenja Goltermann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	261
Chapter 13 EUROPEAN MELANCHOLY AND THE INABILITY TO LISTEN Sebald, Politics, and Death Daniel Steuer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Chapter 14 A CEMETERY IN BERLIN Peter Fritzsche Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	298
CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	314
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	322

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 344
Keywords: History: 20th Century to Present; Cultural Studies (General); Sociology

eBook

Published: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 9780857450517