Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic

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Publisher : Camden House
ISBN 13 : 1571133933
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic by : Stuart Taberner

Download or read book Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic written by Stuart Taberner and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An opening section on the 1950s - a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration - provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s and examines shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation."--BOOK JACKET.

New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571135979
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah by : Peter Davies

Download or read book New Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on the German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah written by Peter Davies and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2014 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New perspectives on the relationship - or the perceived relationship - between the German language and the causes, nature, and legacy of National Socialism and the Shoah.

German Cinema - Terror and Trauma

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134627572
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (346 download)

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Book Synopsis German Cinema - Terror and Trauma by : Thomas Elsaesser

Download or read book German Cinema - Terror and Trauma written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In German Cinema – Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to—as well as a reminder of—Nazism’s hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser—reviving the full meaning of Freud’s Fehlleistung—calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

The Temptation of Despair

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674416325
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis The Temptation of Despair by : Werner Sollors

Download or read book The Temptation of Despair written by Werner Sollors and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources—diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film—Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification. These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making “After Dachau” a new epoch in Western history. The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people—sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience—as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

Remembering Africa

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Publisher : Camden House
ISBN 13 : 1571135464
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Remembering Africa by : Dirk Göttsche

Download or read book Remembering Africa written by Dirk Göttsche and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2013 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first comprehensive study of contemporary German literature's intense engagement with German colonialism and with Germany's wider involvement in European colonialism. Building on the author's decade of research and publication in the field, the book discusses some fifty novels by German, Swiss, and Austrian writers, among them Hans Christoph Buch, Alex Capus, Christof Hamann, Lukas Hartmann, Ilona Maria Hilliges, Giselher W. Hoffmann, Dieter Kühn, Hermann Schulz, Gerhard Seyfried, Thomas von Steinaecker, Uwe Timm, Ilija Trojanow, and Stephan Wackwitz. Drawing on international postcolonial theory, the German tradition of cross-cultural literary studies, and on memory studies, the book brings the hitherto neglected German case to the international debate in postcolonial literary studies"--Publisher website, July 5, 2013.

Heimat, Space, Narrative

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571139036
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Heimat, Space, Narrative by : Friederike Ursula Eigler

Download or read book Heimat, Space, Narrative written by Friederike Ursula Eigler and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2014 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how contemporary novels dealing with flight and expulsion after the Second World War unsettle traditional notions of Heimat without abandoning place-based notions of belonging. At the end of the Second World War, millions of Germans and Poles fled or were expelled from the border regions of what had been their countries. This monograph examines how, in Cold War and post-Cold War Europe since the 1970s, writers have responded to memories or postmemories of this traumatic displacement. Friederike Eigler engages with important currents in scholarship -- on "Heimat," the much-debated German concept of "homeland"; on the spatial turnin literary studies; and on German-Polish relations -- arguing for a transnational approach to the legacies of flight and expulsion and for a spatial approach to Heimat. She explores notions of belonging in selected postwar and contemporary German novels, with a comparative look at a Polish novel, Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night (1998). Eigler finds dynamic manifestations of place in Tokarczuk's novel, in Horst Bienek's 1972-82 Gleiwitz tetralogy about the historical border region of Upper Silesia, and in contemporary novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, Kathrin Schmidt, Tanja Dückers, Olaf Müller, and Sabrina Janesch. In a decisive departure from earlierapproaches, Eigler explores how these novels foster an awareness of the regions' multiethnic and multinational histories, unsettling traditional notions of Heimat without altogether abandoning place-based notions of belonging. Friederike Eigler is Professor of German at Georgetown University.

After the Stasi

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1472567617
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (725 download)

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Book Synopsis After the Stasi by : Annie Ring

Download or read book After the Stasi written by Annie Ring and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate – an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age. Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.

German Pop Literature

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110381303
Total Pages : 407 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis German Pop Literature by : Margaret McCarthy

Download or read book German Pop Literature written by Margaret McCarthy and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop literature of the 1990s enjoyed bestselling success, as well as an extensive and sometimes bluntly derogatory reception in the press. Since then, less censorious scholarship on pop has emerged to challenge its flash-in-the-pan status by situating the genre within a longer history of aesthetic practices. This volume draws on recent work and its attempts to define the genre, locate historical antecedents and assess pop’s ability to challenge the status quo. Significantly, it questions the ‘official story’ of pop literature by looking beyond Ralf Dieter Brinkmann’s works as origin to those of Jürgen Ploog, Jörg Fauser and Hadayatullah Hübsch. It also remedies the lack of attention to questions of gender in previous pop lit scholarship and demonstrates how the genre has evolved in the new millennium via expanded thematic concerns and new aesthetic approaches. Essays in the volume examine the writing of well-known, established pop authors – such as Christian Kracht, Andreas Neumeister, Joachim Lottman, Benjamin Lebert, Florian Illies, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Sven Regener – as well as more recent works by Jana Hensel, Charlotte Roche, Kerstin Grether, Helene Hegemann and songwriter/poet PeterLicht.

Holocaust as Fiction

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230115462
Total Pages : 442 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Holocaust as Fiction by : W. Donahue

Download or read book Holocaust as Fiction written by W. Donahue and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holocaust as Fiction seeks to explain and critically evaluate the extraordinary success of Schlink's internationally acclaimed novel, The Reader , the widely read "Selb" detective trilogy, and two popular films based closely on his work.

Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-language Literature and Culture

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1571135502
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-language Literature and Culture by : Emily Jeremiah

Download or read book Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-language Literature and Culture written by Emily Jeremiah and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on a long tradition in German-language literature and culture, this volume focuses on contemporary engagements with ethical concerns in literary texts, essays, and films. There has been an "ethical turn" in the literature, culture, and theory of recent years. Questions of morality are urgent at a time of increasing global insecurities. Yet it is becoming ever more difficult to make ethical judgments in multicultural, relativist societies. The European economic meltdown has raised further ethical difficulties, widening the gap between rich and poor. Such divisions and difficulties heighten the widespread fear of "the other"in its various manifestations. And in the German context especially, the past and its representation offer ongoing moral challenges. These ethical concerns have found their way into recent German-language literature andculture in texts that deal with history and memory (Timm, Petzold, Schoch, Strubel); materiality (Krauß, Overath); gender (Berg, Schneider); age and generation (Moster, Pehnt, Schalansky); religion, especially Islam (Senocak, Kermani, Ruete); and nomadism (Tawada). The relationship between self and other; the connection between particular and general; the personal and political consequences of individuals' actions; and the potential, and danger, of representation itself are issues that are vital to the shaping of our future ethical landscapes, as this volume demonstrates. Contributors: Monika Albrecht, Angelika Baier, David N. Coury, Anna Ertel & Tilmann Köppe, Emily Jeremiah, Alasdair King, Frauke Matthes, Aine McMurtry, Gillian Pye, Kate Roy. Emily Jeremiah is Senior Lecturer in German at Royal Holloway, University of London. Frauke Matthes is Lecturer in German at the University ofEdinburgh.

Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature

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Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1640140220
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (41 download)

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Book Synopsis Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature by : Jessica Ortner

Download or read book Transcultural Memory and European Identity in Contemporary German-Jewish Migrant Literature written by Jessica Ortner and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag.

Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 135026900X
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin by : Eloise Florence

Download or read book Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin written by Eloise Florence and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The destruction of monuments during the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 shows how many nations are being forced to grapple with their national histories. It is clear that the things which make up our streets form a core part of our historical, political and cultural identity. Here, Eloise Florence turns to Berlin and the deeply entrenched English-language narratives about World War II to explore the complicated relationship between violence, place and memory in the Anglo-American consciousness. Centered upon Teufelsberg – a hill in Berlin born from the rubble caused by Allied bombing – and other sites of violence across Germany's capital, this interdisciplinary study unpicks the use and abuse of area bombing and its cultural memory in Anglo-American audiences. Grounded in theories of new materialism and post-humanism, and drawing on extensive empirical and auto-ethnographic data, the issues addressed include: moving through urban landscapes as an embodied means of memorializing war and trauma; remembering destruction as a means to advance or challenge traditional war mythologies; and curation as an entry point for tourists to reconsider the impact of British and American aerial raids, including modern drone warfare. This innovative volume shines an important light on both the dark legacy of the aerial bombing of Berlin and the ways in which we record and read violent histories more generally. As such, Traces of Aerial Bombing in Berlin will be an invaluable resource for all scholars of World War II, memory culture and public history.

The Literature of Absolute War

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108495125
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Literature of Absolute War by : Nil Santiáñez

Download or read book The Literature of Absolute War written by Nil Santiáñez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comparative transnational approach to the language of absolute war and the literature on World War II.

The Genocidal Gaze

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Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814343864
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (143 download)

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Book Synopsis The Genocidal Gaze by : Elizabeth R. Baer

Download or read book The Genocidal Gaze written by Elizabeth R. Baer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines literature and art to reveal the German genocidal gaze in Africa and the Holocaust. The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated thousands of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the "genocidal gaze," an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich,Baer uses the trope of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists. Baer explores the threads of shared ideology in the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust—concepts such as racial hierarchies, lebensraum(living space), rassenschande (racial shame), and endlösung(final solution) that were deployed by German authorities in 1904 and again in the 1930s and 1940s to justify genocide. She also notes the use of shared methodology—concentration camps, death camps, intentional starvation, rape, indiscriminate killing of women and children—in both instances. While previous scholars have made these links between the Herero and Nama genocide and that of the Holocaust, Baer's book is the first to examine literary texts that demonstrate this connection. Texts under consideration include the archive of Nama revolutionary Hendrik Witbooi; a colonial novel by German Gustav Frenssen (1906), in which the genocidal gaze conveyed an acceptance of racial annihilation; and three post-Holocaust texts—by German Uwe Timm, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, and installation artist William Kentridge of South Africa—that critique the genocidal gaze. Baer posits that writing and reading about the gaze is an act of mediation, a power dynamic that calls those who commit genocide to account for their crimes and discloses their malignant convictions. Careful reading of texts and attention to the narrative deployment of the genocidal gaze—or the resistance to it—establishes discursive similarities in books written both during colonialism and in the post-Holocaust era. The Genocidal Gazeis an original and challenging discussion of such contemporary issues as colonial practices, the Nazi concentration camp state, European and African race relations, definitions of genocide, and postcolonial theory. Moreover, Baer demonstrates the power of literary and artistic works to condone, or even promote, genocide or to soundly condemn it. Her transnational analysis provides the groundwork for future studies of links between imperialism and genocide, links among genocides, and the devastating impact of the genocidal gaze.

German Narratives of Belonging

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351565699
Total Pages : 144 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis German Narratives of Belonging by : Linda Shortt

Download or read book German Narratives of Belonging written by Linda Shortt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since unification, German culture has experienced a boom in discourses on generation, family and place. Linda Shortt reads this as symptomatic of a wider quest for belonging that mobilises attachment to counter the effects of post-modern deterritorialisation and globalisation. Investigating twenty-first century narratives of belonging by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, Angelika Overath, Florian Illies, Juli Zeh, Stephan Wackwitz, Uwe Timm and Peter Schneider, Shortt examines how the desire to belong is repeatedly unsettled by disturbances of lineage and tradition. In this way, she combines an analysis of supermodernity with an enquiry into German memory contests on the National Socialist era, 1968 and 1989 that continue to shape identity in the Berlin Republic. Exploring a spectrum of narratives that range from agitated disavowals of place to romances of belonging, this study illuminates the topography of belonging in contemporary Germany.

The Complicit Text

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498598714
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis The Complicit Text by : Ivan Stacy

Download or read book The Complicit Text written by Ivan Stacy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction identifies the causes of complicity in the face of unfolding atrocities by examining the works of Albert Camus, Milan Kunera, Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Ivan Stacy argues that complicity often stems from narrative failures to bear witness to wrongdoing. However, literary fiction, he contends, can at once embody and examine forms of complicity on three different levels: as a theme within literary texts, as a narrative form, and also as it implicates readers themselves through empathetic engagement with the text. Furthermore, Stacy questions what forms of non-complicit action are possible and explores the potential for productive forms of compromise. Stacy discusses both individual dilemmas of complicity in the shadow of World War II and collective complicity in the context of contemporary concerns, such as the hegemony of neoliberalism and the climate emergency.

Miniature Monuments

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110304090
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Miniature Monuments by : Helmut Puff

Download or read book Miniature Monuments written by Helmut Puff and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these “miniature monuments‎” (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be “easily legible”; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.