Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-century Germany

Front Cover
Alon Confino, Paul Betts, Dirk Schumann
Berghahn Books, 2008 - Family & Relationships - 329 pages

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

 

Contents

of Killing in the First and Second World Wars
25
The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of
65
Cremation in Late Imperial
93
Disposing of the Dead in East Germany 19451990
113
Death at the Munich Olympics
129
The State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer
151
Commemorating
179
Laughing about Death? German Humor in the
197
Between Nazism
219
Yizkor Commemoration of the Dead by Jewish Displaced Persons
232
Death and Survival
261
Sebald
275
A Cemetery in Berlin
298
Notes on Contributors
314
Index
322
Copyright

vii
214

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About the author (2008)

Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011). Paul Betts is Professor of European History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley, 2004) and Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford, 2010). He was Joint Editor of the journal German History, 2004-2009. Dirk Schumann is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Georg-August University, Göttingen. His most recent books include Raising Citizens in the "Century of the Child": The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (Berghahn, 2010, edited), Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (Berghahn, 2009).