Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung

This study examines subjective perspectives of war and trauma in post-Yugoslavian literatures on two levels. By looking at the categories of "photo-text," i.e., discourses that emerge through depiction or description, and "speech," i.e., forms of linguistic expression that convey the emotional content of what is said, this volume investigates trauma narratives a quarter century after the Yugoslavian War.

This volume investigates how German-language postmemory narratives are helping to renew national memory discourse. It examines works produced since 1989 that are located on the threshold between document and fiction. By searching for (auto-)biographical traces, and carrying out archaeological excavation and detective investigation, these works are both a medium and reflection of the pluralization of remembering.

Emotions such as guilt, shame, and remorse are often invoked to justify coming to terms with historical crimes. Taking the Algerian War in France and the genocide of the OvaHerero and Nama in Germany as examples, this book analyzes how emotions are discursively produced in postcolonial memory politics and how these enable or prevent a recognition of the "suffering of the Other".

Buchenwald concentration camp was an international event. During the seven years that it existed, people from 30 nations were deported there, and after 1945, texts about the camp were written in the majority of the languages that they spoke. This volume conveys an impression of the camp’s reach in European literature by looking at the few canonical texts by writers like Apitz, Semprún, Kertész, Adler, and Antelme, but also going beyond them.

Who constructs memory culture? What kind of impact do conceptions of history have on their users? What kind of infrastructure activates cultural memory? In three microhistorical studies, this volume examines Through the Night as a novel, audio play, and TV series (1955–1960) to ask how memories of the mass shootings of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union during the Second World War circulated in the Federal Republic of Germany.

This monograph examines the development of television and cinema productions on the centenary of the First World War from the perspectives of cultural memory, trauma theory, and film theory. It traces genre patterns and the historical development of First World War films and explores the ways in which the violent history of the war is coded cinematically. The corpus includes not only films made around the centenary of the war, but also in the period leading up to it, between 1989 and 2013. As one major result, the monograph points out new cinematic developments that occurred during the centenary period. With its regional focus on films that deal with the war in the former Ottoman Empire and in Europe, the study seeks to determine whether the war, often regarded as a 'seminal catastrophe' in European memory, is remembered differently in the Middle East. It argues that the complex history of First World War remembrance gave rise to new aesthetical coding of violence and an accompanying moral grammar of memory, which, however, differs considerably in its historical content between Europe and the Middle East.

This volume is the first to examine the museum landscape of all post-socialist EU member states. How do museums present the Second World War, the Holocaust, and Soviet crimes? As part of their nations’ attempts to join the EU, some "invoke" Europe, aiming to prove their Europeanness by adopting international museification trends. Others demand that "Europe" recognizes their suffering under Soviet rule as the greater evil.

How will future generations commemorate the Holocaust when the last eyewitnesses have died? Comic books published in the past few years suggest that: while the children are still trying to understand – and emancipate themselves from – their parents’ past, the generation of the grandchildren is keenly aware of the fact that everything they know about the Holocaust is passed on to them or is conveyed through the media.　　

Comic book authors from the grandchildren’s generation frame the events of the Holocaust either by positioning themselves as historical narrators, or by setting their plots in the present, where the Holocaust is only manifest through traces and consequences. By doing so, they bring the past to bear on the present, implicitly criticizing representations that keep the Holocaust at a distance. Recent comics, in other words, no longer narrate the Holocaust as a supposedly distant past, but rather explore its effects and parallels in the present. This allows them to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust for generations who no longer have a personal connection to it, and in this way, to do important work against oblivion.

By comparing comic books by authors from both the children’s and the grandchildren’s generation, such as Michel Kichka, Bernice Eisenstein, Rutu Modan, Barbara Yelin and Reinhard Kleist, this book shows that panels, images, and speech bubbles can help those too young to experience or commemorate the Holocaust come to terms with what had happened.

This volume examines memory narratives in literature, television, film, photography, and museum exhibitions that, firstly, take a transmedial approach and, secondly, narrate and de/construct the past or pasts in Central Europe in different ways, nationally and/or transnationally. It also discusses the connections between various media and questions understandings of the trans-/national.

This edited volume examines the representation of victims beyond the categories of the “victim cult,” self-victimization, and the victim–perpetrator dichotomy. Adopting a transnational perspective, it mainly considers literature written after 1989, leveraging concepts of dialogical and multidirectional memory to facilitate differentiated perspectives in the politics of memory regarding the highly charged figure of the victim.

In this volume, 18 authors seek to answer the question of whether the memory of genocide, persecution, and structural violence can contribute to solidarity between different groups of victims, and what the epistemological and ethical boundaries of such commemoration might be. The contributions focus on the new Shoah remembrance in a century already marked by incipient geopolitical and biopolitical changes of considerable magnitude.

Is it possible to narrate a national history that is at the same time European? Europe’s national museums must face this challenge. Using three examples from Germany, France, and Poland, the book takes a media science perspective to examine how museums are constructing Europe. What narratives of Europe and its history are they developing? And what does "Europe" and "European" mean for these museums?