How can Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung — working through the past — build democratic political culture and further reconciliation between victims and perpetrators after the Holocaust? How is collective, public memory politicized and to what ends?
We will think about collective memory theoretically with the help of works by Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Jeff Olick, Dirk Moses and Michael Rothberg, Sadiya Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, and others. Then we’ll look at German and Austrian postwar history and examine how those societies tried to come to grips with their complicity and guilt and also victimhood. We will read poetry by Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, the public reckonings following the trial of Adolf Eichmann (via Hannah Arendt) and the Auschwitz trials and the legal work of Fritz Bauer; fiction and dramatic works of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek in Austria and other literary treatments in Germany; films by Edgar Reitz, Margarethe von Trotta, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Claude Lanzmann, perhaps others. We’ll consider the historians debates of the 1980s centering on the originality and singularity of the Holocaust; the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition and the historical work on allied bombings of German cities; the ethics and historiography of comparing the Holocaust to the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia (colonial German Southwest Africa); and transnationally we will compare German memory culture to the memory culture about the Black experience of enslavement in the Atlantic world, reading Davidson alum Clint Smith and philosopher Susan Neiman on this complicated topic. We will think about inherited trauma; Holocaust spaces and memorials and museum culture in Germany and Austria; the current German public antisemitism and reductionist thinking in the German state’s response to the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023; as well as the attempts at working through the experience of the East German dictatorship and Germans as victims in the context of that authoritarian police state; among other examples. We will also examine the concept of Heimat (home, home place or space) as a specifically German example of a kind of hermetic collective memory.
Erinnerungskultur
GER 352 — ein Seminar (auf Deutsch) für Studierende an Davidson College
Mondays 1:30 – 4:20
Carolina Inn upstairs seminar room
link to the course syllabus will be here
Memory Culture: History, Memory, and Politics in German Culture from 1945 to the Present
a course in English for DavidsonLearns
alternating Thursdays 3:00 – 4:30pm
Jan 23, Feb 6, Feb 20, Mar 6, Mar 20, Apr 3, Apr 17, May 1
link to the course syllabus will be here
If you’re thinking of taking this course but are not sure about the content (fascinating!) and the reading and viewing load (fairly substantial!), have a look at these two recent essays by Clint Smith (Davidson alum!) and Susan Neiman. We will learn all the background that leads up to their views on German memory culture.