Germans as Victims Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany

Since the 1960s and certainly the 1980s, Germans have been confronting the Nazi past and the legacy of German perpetration. However, over recent years, Germany has become increasingly preoccupied with German suffering during the war and the post-war period. Arguably, it is no longer the Holocaust that takes centre-stage in the contemporary German culture of memory but the trauma caused by Allied bombing of German cities, and by the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the war.

BILL NIVEN is Professor of Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University.

Introduction--B.Niven * The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics and Victimization in East and West Germany--R.Moeller * Victimizing German Culture: The Invention of Individual and Representative Identity--J.London * The 'Germans as Victims' Theme in the Federal Republic Between the 1960s and the 1990s--R.Willinger * The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the Historians' Debate to German Suffering--H.Schmitz * Victims of the Berlin Wall--P.Ahonen * From the Margins to the Centre? The Discourse on Expellees and Victimhood in Germany--S.Wolff & K.von Oppen * The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood--P.Cooke * No New Historians' Dispute? Historians' Voices and the New Victims' Discourse in Germany--S.Berger * Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad--A.Huyssen * Representations of German Wartime Suffering in Recent Fiction--S.Taberner * The Victims of Totalitarianism: Continuity and Change in German Commemorative Politics--A.Beattie Introduction--B.Niven * The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics and Victimization in East and West Germany--R.Moeller * Victimizing German Culture: The Invention of Individual and Representative Identity--J.London * The 'Germans as Victims' Theme in the Federal Republic Between the 1960s and the 1990s--R.Willinger * The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the Historians' Debate to German Suffering--H.Schmitz * Victims of the Berlin Wall--P.Ahonen * From the Margins to the Centre? The Discourse on Expellees and Victimhood in Germany--S.Wolff & K.von Oppen * The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood--P.Cooke * No New Historians' Dispute? Historians' Voices and the New Victims' Discourse in Germany--S.Berger * Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad--A.Huyssen * Representations of German Wartime Suffering in Recent Fiction--S.Taberner * The Victims of Totalitarianism: Continuity and Change in German Commemorative Politics--A.Beattie