Bill Niven

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 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.

United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich

Facing the Nazi Past

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

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 Christoph Hein follows the pattern set by earlier volumes in the series, opening with a previously unpublished piece by Hein, a biography of the author, and a interview conducted during Hein's stay in Swansea in March 1998.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

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.

William John Niven

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