Product Description: This book examines both the obvious and less obvious ways in which Germans struggle with their Nazi past. It embraces only a small part of a complex problem, which is impossible for an individual author to grasp in its entirety and character...read more

In 2013, Germany celebrated the bicentennial of the so-called Wars of Liberation (1813-1815). These wars were the culmination of the Prussian struggle against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815, which occupied a key position in German national historiography and memory. Although these conflicts have been analyzed in thousands of books and articles, much of the focus has been on the military campaigns and alliances. Karen Hagemann argues that we cannot achieve a comprehensive understanding of these wars and their importance in collective memory without recognizing how the interaction of politics, culture, and gender influenced these historical events and continue to shape later recollections of them. She thus explores the highly contested discourses and symbolic practices by which individuals and groups interpreted these wars and made political claims, beginning with the period itself and ending with the centenary in 1913.

Why did men and women in one of the best educated countries in the Western world set out to get rid of Jews? In this book, Judith M. Hughes focuses on how historians' efforts to grapple anew matters of actors' meanings, intentions, and purposes have prompted a return to psychoanalytically informed ways of thinking. Hughes makes her case with fine-grained analyses of books by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Ian Kershaw, Daniel Goldhagen,Saul Friedländer, Christopher Browning, Jan Gross, Hannah Arendt, and Gitta Sereny. All of the authors pose psychological questions; the more astute among them shed fresh light on the Holocaust - without making the past any less disturbing.

Product Description: How do individuals, societies, and nations deal with their difficult pasts? "Getting History Right" examines this question in a comparative context by looking at an authoritarian East Germany and a pluralistic, democratic West Germany...read more

Product Description: The concept of Heimat with its seemingly pre- or anti-modern connotations of rootedness in a place of origin is central to a critical understanding of German history and culture. Over the course of the past fifteen years, scholars across a range of disciplines have found new ways to examine the changing notions of Heimat - its multifaceted cultural, literary, and visual history, its gendered connotations, and its national and ideological appropriations...read more

Product Description: The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh...read more

Product Description: Twenty years after the dramatic events that led to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR, the subjective dimension of Germany's unification process is still far from being resolved. The nature of the East German state remains a matter of cultural as well as political controversy...read more

Product Description: Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse offers an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of fundamental shifts in German cultural memory. Focusing on the resurgence of family stories in fiction, autobiography and in film, this study challenges the institutional boundaries of Germany's memory culture that have guided and arguably limited German identity debates...read more

The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state. In this era the reading public’s obsession with the most destructive and divisive war in its history—the Thirty Years’ War—resurrected old animosities and sparked a violent, century-long debate over the origins and aftermath of the war. The core of this bitter argument was a clash between Protestant and Catholic historians over the cultural criteria determining authentic German identity and the territorial and political form of the future German nation. This groundbreaking study of modern Germany’s morbid fascination with the war explores the ideological uses of history writing, commemoration, and collective remembrance to show how the passionate argument over the “meaning” of the Thirty Years’ War shaped Germans' conception of their nation. The first book in the extensive literature on German history writing to examine how modern German historians reinterpreted a specific event to define national identity and legitimate political and ideological agendas, The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century is a bold intellectual history of the confluence of history writing, religion, culture, and politics in nineteenth-century Germany.

Product Description: "This book will provoke intellectually, ideologically, and emotionally loaded responses in the U.S., Germany, and Israel. Barnouw’s critique of the ‘enduringly narrow post-Holocaust perspective on German guilt and the ensuing fixation on German remorse’ questions taboos that the political and cultural elites in those three countries would rather leave alone...read more

Product Description: This is the first book-length study that examines Celan´s impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry´s relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country´s memory politics after the Holocaust...read more

Product Description: This book explores silence and memory in Germany's ongoing discourse about the Nazi past. It examines the ways in which exile literature and critical thought by Anna Seghers joins postwar discourse and current historical research to formulate an acceptable memory of private life during the Third Reich...read more