By Konrad H. Jarausch, Michael Geyer
Damaged glass, twisted beams, piles of debris--these are the early thoughts of the kids who grew up amidst the ruins of the 3rd Reich. greater than 5 many years later, German early life inhabit manicured suburbs and walk alongside filthy rich pedestrian shops. Shattered previous is a daring reconsideration of the puzzling trend of Germany's twentieth-century historical past. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer discover the wonderful hole among the country's position within the terrors of battle and its next good fortune as a democracy. They argue that the cave in of Communism, nationwide reunification, and the postmodern shift demand a brand new examining of the country's turbulent improvement, person who not indicates continuity yet rupture and conflict.Comprising unique essays, the e-book starts through reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal grasp narratives that experience ruled the presentation of German heritage yet are actually wasting their carry. taken care of subsequent are significant problems with contemporary debate that recommend how new sorts of German historical past could be written: annihilationist conflict, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of strength, the influence of migration, the fight over nationwide identification, redefinitions of womanhood, and the improvement of intake in addition to pop culture. The concluding chapters think about the country's slow transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating learn will spark a clean debate in regards to the which means of the German previous over the last century.There is not any unmarried grasp narrative, no Weltgeist, to be stumbled on. yet there's a attention-grabbing tale to learn in lots of alternative ways.
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Additional resources for Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories
Sample text
Historicizing war and genocide means squarely facing the history of a disastrous miscarriage of civility as well as of the faltering and desperate defense of decency. It requires an exploration both of the destruction of bonds of human solidarity that hold societies together and of the good life in search of a public culture and constitution to sustain it. It finds people and institutions straddling the divide, succumbing to hatred and prejudice, haughtily denying that it ever existed, and 53 David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and World Politics, 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 1979).
Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996). , 1992); and Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstversta¨ndnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992). 70 Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Geda¨chtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt/Main, 1993). 71 The German process of nationalization was carried forward by competing mass-movements that sought to impose a minority vision upon the entire society.
84 Private conversations with people over fifty years old are replete with recollections from World War II or the immediate postwar era, telling tales of survival through catastrophe but largely evading the question of responsibility. Occasionally these stories do touch upon agency, but they offer incidents of imprisonment and persecution, scraps with the Gestapo, or stints in a penal division—altogether not as unusual an occurrence as one might think. Survivors of the Holocaust or former slave-laborers have become omnipresent on television but are rarely encountered in everyday situations as neighbors.