Staging the German Family Photo Album

The Wehrmacht Exhibit and Thomas Bernhard’s Vor dem Ruhestand

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22345965
AutoresKerstin Mueller Dembling (autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen48
Número2
Páginas1-24
Fecha de publicación2015-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Austrian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2165-669X • E-ISSN: 2327-1809
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/oas.2015.0023
OpenAlexW849137406
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas10

In this article, I employ the notion of a Holocaust performative developed by Vivian Patraka and modifies it to accommodate German cultural production about the memory of Germans as Holocaust perpetrators. Rather than engage with the irretrievable absence of the Holocaust victims, many cultural products produced for German audiences highlight the reappearance of the perpetrators in postwar decades. With this as my framework, I analyze the performative strategies involved in cultural texts that invoke the family—and by extension the nation—as a site of memory, including the utilization of photographs. I explore the ways in which such “family albums” have been used in the context of a variety of media, such as the first and the revised Wehrmacht exhibit, the drama Vor dem Ruhestand (1979) by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who wrote this play specifically for the theater in Stuttgart, and Michael Verhoeven’s documentary film Der unbekannte Soldat (2006). My discussion underscores how each of these media perform in intermedial ways to highlight the Germans’ conflicted and difficult engagement with the Nazi past, affecting German cultural and memory politics

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Cultural memory · Cultural politics · Drama · German · Literature · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · Anthropology · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration