Air Wars, Memory Wars

Bibliographic Data

ID9645877
AuthorsMary Nolan (0009-0003-8955-1481, New York University, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume38
Issue1
Pages7-40
Publication date2005-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1163/1569161053623651
OpenAlexW2113622211
LanguageEN
Citations received15
References cited24

The German preoccupation with the Nazi past, with issues of guilt, responsibility, and victimization “... doesn't end. Never will it end,” to quote the resigned note on which Günter Grass concluded his latest novel, Crabwalk . It manifests itself in ever new forms, as different parts of the past, which may or may not have been repressed, come to the fore and are painfully reconstructed, tentatively probed, and reluctantly and often only partially accepted. Each new perspective on the past reorders, sometimes even shatters, the previous mosaic. Recall the impact of the film Holocaust or of the Wehrmacht exhibition. A similar phenomenon is now occurring—or so some hope and others fear. Since 2002 German suffering, rather than German guilt, has become the principal theme in discourses about the past. The firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff , “moral bombing,” mass rape, and ethnic cleansing dominate historical and literary production and public debate as the Eastern Front, war crimes, and the pervasive knowledge of the Holocaust did in the mid- and late-1990s, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its central place within the Third Reich did a decade before that

Art history · Criminology · Epistemology · Ethnic Cleansing · Ethnic group · Exhibition · Front (military · Geography · German · Media studies · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Phenomenon · Political science · Principal (computer security · Sociology · The Holocaust · Theme (computing · World War II · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy

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