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The Changing Face of Germany in Film and Text

Explore the concept of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" in German cinema and literature, examining how Germans come to terms with their past, specifically the Holocaust. Discover the paradoxes, challenges, and survivor perspectives surrounding this process.

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The Changing Face of Germany in Film and Text

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  1. The Changing Face of Germany in Film and Text Vergangenheitsbewältigung I

  2. ‘unbewältigteVergangenheit’ • Bewältigung • Who bewältigt what? • What kind of past is being ‘bewältigt’ • What do ‘Germans’ come to terms with? • What do survivors come to terms with? • Vergangenheitsbewältigung and time/temporality. • Interestedness of project/prcess of Vergangenheitsbewältigung?

  3. The Holocaust in Thought • Unrepresentability, unimaginability, unspeakability, ineffability (Cohen’s critique of the ‘priestly discourse’) - Tropes • ‘black box of reason’ • ‘The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survivance of language as creator and bearer of humane, rational truth. Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.’ (George Steiner, Language and Silence, 1967, p. 123)

  4. The Holocaust in Thought • The Holocaust as creating two categorically different (memory) collectives: • ‘what was traumatic for one group was obviously not traumatic for the other’. • ‘victims cope with a fundamentally traumatic situation [...] many Germans have to cope with a widening stain, with political shame or guilt’. Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Memory and Transference’, in: Geoffrey H.Hartman (ed), Holocaust Remembrance. TheShapes of Memory, Cambridge/Mass., CUP, 1994, 252-63

  5. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) • Auschwitz as end of (Western) civilisation • (‘Auschwitz’ as pars pro totofor Holocaust) • Paradox • ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1952) • ‘whether any art now has a right to exist’ (1962)

  6. Adorno • Holocaust as paradox • Simultaneously inside and outside of history • If purely inside history: the extra-ordinary nature of the Holocaust cannot be conceived • If purely outside of history: Holocaust becomes an ‘accident’ of human history • Incommensurability of Holocaust: no explanatory category is capable of ‘getting to grip’ with (i.e. ‘contain’) the Holocaust.

  7. ‘because the world has survived its own destruction, it has a need for art as its unconscious historiography’ (Adorno, 19 • ‘All art after Auschwitz is garbage. By restoring itself after that which was possible in its own landscape without resistance, it has wholly become that ideology that it always potentially was’ (1966) • Art after the Holocaust • Art about the Holocaust • Holocaust as ‘total integration’

  8. Paul Celan • Born Paul Antschel, German-speaking Jewish Family • 1920, Czernowitz– 1970, Paris (suicide) • ‘Todesfuge’ (1947, published 1952)

  9. ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ (1963) • ‘The banality of Evil’ • Auschwitz as outside of categories of civil justice

  10. FürdieseVerbrechengibteskeineangemessene Strafe mehr. […] Das heißt, dieseSchuld, imGegensatzzuallerkriminellenSchuld, übersteigt und zerbrichtalleRechtsordnungen. […] MiteinerSchuld, die jenseits des Verbrechensliegt und einerUnschuld, die jenseits der Güteoder der Tugendliegt, kann man menschlich-politischüberhauptnichtsanfangen.’ • Hanna Arendt in a letter to Karl Jaspers, 17.Aug 1946, See Arendt/Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1926-69 (Munich, Piper, 1985), pp. 88-93, here pp. 90-1.

  11. ‘There are no fitting punishments for such crimes. […] Such a guilt, in contrast to all criminal guilt, goes well beyond, in fact shatters any legal order. […] One can do nothing either personally or politically about a guilt that lies beyond crime and an innocence that lies beyond good or virtue.’

  12. Bernhard Schlink, Der Vorleser, p. 100 • ‘Was sollte und sollmeine Generation der Nachlebendeneigentlichmit den Informationenüber die Furchtbarkeiten der Vernichtung der Judenanfangen? [...] Sollenwirnur in Entsetzen, Scham und Schuldverstummen? AberzuwelchemEnde? [...] Aberdaßeinigewenigeverurteilt und bestraft und daßwir, die nachfolgende Generation [...] verstummenwürden – das sollteessein?’

  13. Victim-centred perspectives • Primo Levi, If this is a Man (1958): ‘If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. […] For this reason it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, […].’

  14. Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne. BewältigungsversucheeinesÜberwältigten (1966) • ‘Die moralische Wahrheit der mir noch heute im Schädel dröhnenden Hiebe besaß und besitze ich nur selber und bin darum in höherem Maße urteilsbefugt, nicht nur als der Täter, sondern auch als die nur an ihren Bestand denkende Gesellschaft.’ [...] p. 113. • ‘Niemand kann aus der Geschichte seines Volkes austreten. […] Man soll und darf die Vergangenheit nicht „auf sich beruhen lassen“, weil sie sonst auferstehen und zu neuer Gegenwärtigkeit werden könnte.’ (preface to the paperback ed. 1970)

  15. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966) • ‘Hitler hat den Menschen im Stande ihrer Unfreiheit einen neuen kategorischen Imperativ aufgezwungen: ihr Denken und Handeln so einzurichten, daß Auschwitz nicht sich wiederhole, nichts ähnliches geschehe.’ • Immanuel Kant: Categorical Imperative: • "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction.“ • Groundwork of a Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

  16. Dan Diner, ‘Between Aporia and Apology’, Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the historians’ debate (Boston/Mass., Beacon Press, 1990), 135-45. • ‘The approach oriented toward the perspective of the victim in no way represents either a purely subjective or even a complementary way of viewing things. Rather, it is the more comprehensive perspective and the one more appropriate to the totality of the phenomenon, because it proceeds from the absolute extreme case’

  17. Holocaust as ‘memory paradigm’ • Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) • Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963) • US TV series Holocaust (1979) • Holocaust as ‘negative myth of origin’ of post-war Western world (AvishaiMargalit & Gabriel Motzkin, ‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust’, 2006)

  18. Das schreckliche Mädchen • ‘Unsist in altenmaeren, wundervielgeseit’ • The Nibelungenlied (early 13thct) • Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1948-73 • Hitler as admirer of Wagner, Wagner’s family close to Hitler in Third Reich

  19. Heinrich Lübke, Bundespräsident 1959-69 • ‘zuweitnachrechtsgegriffen’ • Richard von Weizsäcker, Bundespräsident 184-94 • ‘zuhochgegriffen’ • Carl Carstens, Bundespräsident 1979-84

  20. Das schreckliche Mädchen • Form and style – how does the film use Verfremdungseffekte (and why?) • Use of comedy and satire • Image of (Catholic) Church & Bavarian society • Representation of time (as in passing historical time) • Ending.

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