Mary Fulbrook

A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations, and across continents. Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past," on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, seeking to draw a line under the past, tended toward leniency and tolerance. Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the 1980s, when news broke about UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's past. Following the various periods of trials and testimonials after the war, the shifting attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, this major book weighs heavily down on the scales of justice. The Holocaust is not mere "history," and the memorial landscape covering it barely touches the surface; beneath it churns the maelstrom of reverberations of the Nazi era. Reckonings uses the stories of those who remained below the radar of public representations, outside the media spotlight, while also situating their experiences in the changing wider contexts and settings in which they sought to make sense of unprecedented suffering. Fulbrook uses the word "reckoning" in the widest possible sense, to evoke the consequences of violence on those directly involved, but also on those affected indirectly, and how its effects have expanded almost infinitely across place and time.

Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

Reckonings

This third edition of Mary Fulbrook's much-admired and popular introduction to German history provides a clear and informative guide to the twists and turns of the story of the German lands and peoples from the early middle ages to the present day. Crisply synthesising a vast array of historical material, Fulbrook explores the interrelationships between social, political and cultural factors in the light of scholarly controversies. Since the second edition in 2004, there have been important changes in Germany, Europe and the wider world. This new edition features a significantly expanded chapter on Germany since 1990, encapsulating recent and dramatic developments that have transformed Germany's character and international standing. This single-volume history of Germany offers broad and accessible coverage and provides a useful guide for students, general readers, travellers to Germany and anyone with an interest in German history.

A Concise History of Germany

Concise History of Germany

Presents a profile of the principal civilian administrator of Bñedzin, Poland and his role in enforcing Nazi policies towards Jews, along with insights into the conflicting memories of the Holocaust.

Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust

A Small Town Near Auschwitz

Geschiedenis van een kleine Poolse stad nabij Auschwitz, waarbij de vraag wordt gesteld in hoeverre 'gewone' Duitsers schuldig zijn aan de Shoah.

gewone nazi's en de Holocaust

Een kleine stad bij Auschwitz / druk 1

For over half a century, Germans have lived in the shadow of Auschwitz. Who was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people in the Holocaust: just a small gang of evil men, Hitler and his henchmen; or certain groups within a particular system; or even the whole nation? Could the roots of malignancy be traced far back in German history? Or did the Holocaust have more to do with European modernity? Should Germans live with a legacy of guilt forever? And how, if at all, could an acceptable German national identity be defined? These questions dogged public debates in both East and West Germany in the long period of division. Both states officially claimed to have "overcome the past" more effectively than the other; both sought to construct new, opposing identities as the "better Germany". But, in different ways, official claims ran at odds with the kaleidoscope of popular collective memories; dissonances, sensitivities and taboos were the order of the day on both sides of the Wall. And in the 1990s, with continued heated debates over past and present, it was clear that inner unity appeared to be no automatic consequence of formal unification. Drawing on a wide range of material - from landscapes of memory and rituals of commemoration, through private diaries, oral history interviews and public opinion poll surveys, to the speeches of politicians and the writings of professional historians - Fulbrook provides a clear analysis of key controversies, events and patterns of historical and national consciousness in East and West Germany in equal depth. Arguing against "essentialist" conceptions of the nation, Fulbrook presents a theory of the nation as a constructed community of shared legacy and common destiny, and shows how the conditions for the easy construction of any such identity have been notably lacking in Germany after the Holocaust. This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in history, politics, and German and European Studies, as well as established scholars and interested members of the public.

German National Identity after the Holocaust

Dissonant Lives is not a standard 'history of Germany' in the twentieth century, or even of the German dictatorships. It is concerned with the ways in which Germans of different ages and life stages lived through this terrible period in German history, and how they interpreted, confronted, and responded to the multiple challenges of their times. In volume two, Mary Fulbrook explores the move from the Nazi dictatorship to the communism that succeeded it, examining the experiences and perceptions of selected individuals, and how major historical events affected the course of their lives and their outlooks. In doing so, she provides a new understanding of the ways in which not only the character of the German state, economy, and social structure changed over the century, but also the very character of the German people themselves.

Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships, Vol. 2: Nazism through Communism

Dissonant Lives

David Cesarani

Professor of German History Mary Fulbrook

Citizenship, Nationality, and Migration in Europe

The collapse of the supposedly 'civilized' German nation into the 'barbarism' of Hitler's Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of 'the Germans' is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias's notion of the 'civilizing process', the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of 'civilization' are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions – on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence – highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present.

Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias

Un-civilizing Processes?

The fourth edition of A History of Germany, 1918–2014: A Divided Nation introduces students to the key themes of 20th century German history, tracing the dramatic social, cultural, and political tensions in Germany since 1918. Now thoroughly updated, the text includes new coverage of the Euro crisis and a review of Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship. New edition of a well–known, classic survey by a leading scholar in the field, thoroughly updated for a new generation of readers Provides an overview of the turbulent history of Germany from the end of the First World War through the Third Reich and beyond, examining the character and consequences of war and genocide Treats German history from 1918 to 2014 from the perspectives of instability, division and reunification, covering East and West German history in equal depth Offers important reflections on Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship as it extends into a new term Concise, substantive coverage of this period make it an ideal resource for undergraduate students

The Divided Nation

A History of Germany 1918-2014

A single word - "Auschwitz" - is sometimes used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet focusing on a single concentration camp, however horrific the scale of crimes committed there, leaves an incomplete story, truncates a complexhistory and obscures the continuing legacies of Nazi crimes. Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using "reckoning" in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely throughtime, from early brutality through programs to euthanize the sick and infirm in the 1930s to the full functioning of the death camps in the early 1940s, and across the post-war decades of selective confrontation with perpetrators and ever-expanding commemoration of victims, Fulbrook exposes thedisjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility. In the successor states to the Third Reich - East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - prosecution varied widely. Communist East Germany pursued Nazicriminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, caught between facing up to the past and seeking to draw a line under it, tended toward selective justice and reintegration of former Nazis; and Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the mid-1980s, when news broke about Austrianpresidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's past. The continuing battle with the legacies of Nazism in the private sphere was often at odds with public remembrance and memorials. Following the various phases of trials and testimonies, from those immediately after the war to those that stretched into the decades following, Reckonings illuminates shifting public attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, and recalibrates anew the scales of justice.

Legacies of Nazi Persecution

Individuelle Erfahrungen, generationelle Prägungen und das »kollektive Gedächtnis" als Herausforderungen an die Geschichtsschreibung der beiden deutschen Diktaturen im 20. Jahrhundert. Wie werden Menschen von der Zeit beeinflusst, in die sie hineingeboren wurden? Wie finden ihre individuellen Erinnerungen Niederschlag, nicht nur in der öffentlichen Repräsentation von Geschichte, sondern auch in ihren Lebensweisen und Handlungen? Was bedeutet eine solche Herangehensweise für die Geschichtswissenschaft? Gilt der traditionelle Anspruch von Objektivität in der Geschichtsschreibung überhaupt noch, in Anbetracht der Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts? Und wenn wir Subjektivität in die Geschichte einbeziehen wollen, ohne Strukturen und Ereignisse aus den Augen zu verlieren, welche neuen Formen der Geschichtsschreibung können und sollten wir entwickeln? Mary Fulbrook widmet sich diesen Fragen mit Blick auf die beiden deutschen Diktaturen. Sie setzt sich dabei kritisch mit dem Begriff des »kollektiven Gedächtnisses" auseinander und betont die Bedeutung individueller Erfahrungen und generationeller Prägungen für unser Verständnis der deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert.

Neue Perspektiven auf die deutschen Diktaturen

Erfahrung, Erinnerung, Geschichtsschreibung

What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.

The People's State

Dějiny moderního Německa

Andrew I. Port

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler

Becoming East German

Practising historians claim that their accounts of the past are something other than fiction, myth or propaganda. Yet there are significant challenges to this view, most notably from postmodernism. In Historical Theory, a prominent historian develops a highly original argument that evaluates the diversity of approaches to history and points to a constructive way forward. Mary Fulbrook argues that all historians face key theoretical questions, and that an emphasis on the facts alone is not enough. Against postmodernism, she argures that historical narratives are not simply inventions imposed on the past, and that some answers to historical questions are more plausible or adequate than others. Illustrated with numerous substantive examples and its focus is always on the most central theoretical issues and on real strategies for bridging the gap between the traces of the past and the interpretations of the present. Historical Theory is essential and enlightening reading for all historians and their students.

Mary Fulbrook

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