Bill Niven

Since the 1960s and certainly the 1980s, Germans have been confronting the Nazi past and the legacy of German perpetration. However, over recent years, Germany has become increasingly preoccupied with German suffering during the war and the post-war period. Arguably, it is no longer the Holocaust that takes centre-stage in the contemporary German culture of memory but the trauma caused by Allied bombing of German cities, and by the expulsion of millions of Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the war. This thought-provoking and lively collection of essays, by a team of leading scholars in the field, explores current memory trends in Germany. What has triggered this preoccupation with German suffering? How dangerous is it? Is it really new, or have the Germans always tended to empathise more with their own losses than with Nazi victims? Together these essays are an invaluable resource for students and teachers, and are essential reading for all with an interest in how Germans, in the new millennium, are facing up to their past.

Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany

Germans as Victims

Nearly sixty years after the defeat of Nazism, some in Germany now feel that the Germans were the victims--not least of relentless attempts to remind them of past crimes. This is the first examination of the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration, and towards one on German suffering. Students of German history, politics and culture will find this contextualization of current victim discourse within a wider historical framework invaluable.

Years after the defeat of Nazism, some in Germany now feel that the Germans were the victims - not least of relentless attempts to remind them of past crimes. This book examines the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration and towards one on German suffering.

William John Niven

The dramatic story of a Jewish child's rescue at Buchenwald and its use as propaganda in both East and united Germany.

Truth, Fiction, and Propaganda

The Buchenwald Child

William Niven

James Jordan

Camden House

New essays on the influence of politics on 20c. German culture, not only during the Nazi and Cold War eras but in periods when the effects are less obvious.

Politics and Culture in Twentieth-century Germany

Facing the Nazi Past examines how the communist East viewed the events of these years very differently from West Germany during the Cold War. Following the unification of Germany, these contrasting memories of the Third Reich have contributed to a new perspective on this period of German history. Facing the Nazi Past explores the developments and debates that were symptomatic of this shift towards a more open confrontation with the past, such as: * the image of resistance to Hitler in united Germany * changes at concentration camp memorial sites since 1990 * the commemoration of 8 May 1945 in 1995 * how the revelations in Goldhagen's startling book Hitler's Willing Executioners triggered new discussion * the plans for the construction of a Holocaust Memorial. Anyone; students, scholars or interested readers, who are involved in the study of European history, will find this an enthralling and informative read.

United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Facing the Nazi Past

At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic's celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig's rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country's understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them. Bill Niven is Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.

"Facing the Nazi Past reflects on the most important developments and debates affecting the way united Germany remembers its past today. This timely account is set to provoke fresh discussion of this dramatic historical period."--Jacket.

Ju ̈rgen Thomaneck

Jürgen Thomaneck

This is a concise introduction to the process which led to the division of Germany in 1949, and its unification in 1990. While Germany is now politically united, it is still economically, socially and culturally deeply divided along the east-west axis.

Dividing and Uniting Germany

Eric Langenbacher

Ruth Wittlinger

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more "self-critical" memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term "collective memory" is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe

David Clarke

Christoph Hein is widely regarded as one of the most important authors to emerge from the former GDR. He began his career as a dramatist in the 1970s, and later produced some of the most acclaimed prose fiction of the GDR in the 1980s. Hein is also a prolific essayist and lecturer whose contributions to debates on GDR culture before the Wende, and on the future of the united Germany, are widely recognized. He is president of the newly unified German PEN Centre. Christoph Hein follows the pattern set by earlier volumes in the series, opening with a previously unpublished piece by Hein, a biography of the author, and a interview conducted during Hein's stay in Swansea in March 1998. The volume includes five articles by British and German academics, as well as a contribution by Hein's Lektorin at Aufbau-Verlag, who offers an insight into the composition of Hein's most recent novel Von allem Anfang an (1997). The volume ends with the most comprehensive bibliography on Christoph Hein to be published on 1992.

Christoph Hein

Stefan Berger

How objective are our history books? This addition to the Writing History series examines the critical role that memory plays in the writing of history. This book includes: - Essays from an international team of historians, bringing together analysis of forms of public history such as museums, exhibitions, memorials and speeches - Coverage of the ancient world to the present, on topics such as oral history and generational and collective memory - Two key case studies on Holocaust memorialisation and the memory of Communism

Writing the History of Memory

It is by now almost a clich� that the flight and expulsion of Germans from east-central Europe at the end of the Second World War was a taboo topic in the German Democratic Republic. According to this claim, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) suppressed reference to flight and expulsion so as not to upset its socialist neighbors. This book shows that such a view does not hold up to serious scrutiny. While the topic may not have been addressed in the realm of politics or official commemoration, it was picked up again and again in literature, particularly fiction. Representations of flight and expulsion were by no means restricted, as some have asserted, to Christa Wolf's novel Kindheitsmuster: Niven's study documents around one hundred novels and short stories published in the GDR that address flight or expulsion. He argues that in the 1950s and early 1960s GDR fiction included many refugee figures. The predominant emphasis was on their integration under socialism rather than their experience of flight and loss of home; nevertheless, flight and to a lesser degree expulsion were depicted, as was their impact on individuals. They continued to be portrayed in the late GDR and in post-unification east Germany. Flight and expulsion were subject to a developing literary discourse in the GDR, a discourse that this book explores. Bill Niven is Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University.

Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works

An exposé of Hitler's relationship with film and his influence on the film industry A presence in Third Reich cinema, Adolf Hitler also personally financed, ordered, and censored films and newsreels and engaged in complex relationships with their stars and directors. Here, Bill Niven offers a powerful argument for reconsidering Hitler's fascination with film as a means to further the Nazi agenda. In this first English-language work to fully explore Hitler's influence on and relationship with film in Nazi Germany, the author calls on a broad array of archival sources. Arguing that Hitler was as central to the Nazi film industry as Goebbels, Niven also explores Hitler's representation in Third Reich cinema, personally and through films focusing on historical figures with whom he was associated, and how Hitler's vision for the medium went far beyond "straight propaganda." He aimed to raise documentary film to a powerful art form rivaling architecture in its ability to reach the masses.

Bill Niven

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