From Perpetrators to Victims? Constructions and Representations of 'German Wartime Suffering'

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From Perpetrators to Victims? Constructions and Representations of 'German Wartime Suffering'

Veranstalter
AHRC Research Project 'Discourses of "German Wartime Suffering"' Dept of German University of Leeds
Veranstaltungsort
Hinsley Hall, Leeds / Headingley
Ort
Leeds
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
29.06.2007 - 01.07.2007
Website
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/german/AHRC.htm
Von
Annette Seidel Arpaci

It has been maintained in recent years that there had been a general silence about ‘German suffering’ during World War II, a silence that is considered to have resulted from a taboo. This argument has been put forward in very different forms in diverse texts ranging from W.G. Sebald’s Zürich Lectures to Jörg Friedrich’s notorious Der Brand, and it is the basis for numerous representations of Germans as victims in literature and, increasingly, in film, and in debates such as the one about the planned ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in Berlin. However, one can argue that the revived debate, for instance, about the Allied air raids on German cities is essentially not an unearthing of something allegedly forgotten but rather expresses the forgetting of a remembering.
Setting out from the premise that recent representations and constructions of Germans as victims are not part of a new discourse but were rather implicitly present in a variety of West and East German debates in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, a 3-year research project is currently underway at the University of Leeds with the aim of analysing discourses of ‘German wartime suffering.’ However, just as important as interrogating specific debates in this context is the discussion within the project about the foundations and thus the wider implications of such research.
The project wants to open up these questions for discussion at the conference in June/July where we will be interrogating the construction and representations of ‘German wartime suffering’ and of ‘Germans as victims’ in all areas concerned: from visual arts and literature to political and social debates in Germany from 1945 to the present.

Programm

From Perpetrators to Victims? Constructions and Representations of 'German Wartime Suffering', Leeds 29 June - 1 July 2007

Conference PROGRAMME:

DAY ONE: Friday, 29 June 2007

REGISTRATION / Check-In, Location: Foyer, Hinsley Hall, Leeds/Headingley 11.30-13.30

13.30-14.00
WELCOME / Brief introduction to the project ‘From Perpetrators to Victims?’

PLENARY SESSION 1: 14.00-15.00

Gilad Margalit, U of Haifa: The Roots of the Current Narratives of Suffering During WWII

COFFEE / TEA 15.00-15.30

PARALLEL SESSION 1: 15.30-17.30

PANEL A

CHAIR: Pascale Bos, U of Texas Austin

Helmut Schmitz, U of Warwick, Catastrophe and Mourning in W.G. Sebald and J. Friedrich/TBA

Michael Heinlein, LMU München, Memories of War Children: On the Construction of a New Generation of Eye Witnesses between National and Global Memories

Rick Crownshaw, Goldsmiths College U of London, Rereading The Reader: Remembering the Perpetrator

Kathrin Schoedel, U of Leeds, ‘Secondary Suffering’ and Victimhood: The Construction of a Burdened German Identity and its Other in Maxim Biller, Harlem Holocaust and Bernhard Schlink, Die Beschneidung

PANEL B

CHAIR: Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent U

Colette Lawson, Nottingham Trent U, The Phenomenology of Destruction: W.G. Sebald and the Literary Memory of the Allied Bombings of Germany

Christian Groh, Stadtarchiv Pforzheim, Public and Private Memory in Pforzheim,
a City hit by Air War

Jessica Anderson Hughes, Rutgers U, Forced Prostitution: The Stigmatization of German Women in the Concentration Camp Brothels

Till Geiger, U of Manchester, Caught between Permissable and Unpermissable Discourses of Victimhood: West German Society, the Cold War and the Legacy of the Second World War in the 1950s

SHERRY RECEPTION 17.30-18.00

DINNER 18.00-19.00

PLENARY SESSION 2: 19.00-20.00

Pascale Bos, U of Texas Austin, Germany is a Woman, and She is a Victim: Transformations in Gender and Memory Politics in Four Decades of German Feminist Opferdiskurs

Film screening, tba 20.00

DAY TWO: Saturday, 30 June 2007

BREAKFAST 8.00-9.00

PLENARY SESSION 3: 9.00-10.00

Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM, Washington DC: ‘Killing Us in a Slow Way Instead of Doing it with Gas’: The German Catholic Discourse of ‘Suffering’, 1946-1959

PARALLEL SESSION 2: 10.00-12.00

PANEL A

CHAIR: Helmut Schmitz, U of Warwick

Andrew Beattie, U of Technology Sydney/European U Institute, Firenze, From
Perpetrators to Victims: Reactions to Soviet Internment in Postwar Germany, 1945-50

Karina Berger, U of Leeds, Expulsion novels of the 1950s: More than meets the eye?

Alexander Peter d’Erizans, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),
‘Sufferers of Catastrophe’: Voicing Victimization in Immediate post-WWII
Hanover, 1945-48

PANEL B

CHAIR: Kathrin Schoedel, U of Leeds

Peter Arnds, Kansas State U, ‘Für alle, die in diesem Lande sind und leiden, so wie ich gelitten’: W.G. Sebald’s Representations of German Wartime Suffering

Frank Finlay, U of Leeds, ‘In the Prison of the Uniform’: Heinrich Böll’s Wartime
Letters and other Nachlaß Publications

Elizabeth Boa, U of Nottingham, Heimat – Inherited or Inflicted Trauma in Jirgl’s
Die Unvollendeten, Hein’s Landnahme And Overath’s Nahe Tage

Sonja Wandelt, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Narrative Challenges and
Strategies in Uwe Timm’s Die Entdeckung Der Currywurst

LUNCH 12.00-13.00

PARALLEL SESSION 3: 12.30-14.00

PANEL A

CHAIR: Gilad Margalit, U of Haifa

Nicholas J. Steneck, Ohio State U, Seeing Hitler in Concrete and Steel? Memory and
Civil Defense Bunkers in West Germany, 1950-65

Jeffrey Luppes, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor, ‘Den Toten der ostdeutschen Heimat’:
Local Monuments to the Expulsion and the Construction of Postwar Narratives

Kerstin Barndt, U of Michigan, Expulsion and Migration, or the Exhibitionary Politics of Comparison

PANEL B

CHAIR: Frank Finlay, U of Leeds

Katharina Hall, U of Wales Swansea, ‘Warum erst jetzt?’: The Representation
of German wartime suffering as a ‘memory taboo’ in Günter Grass’s novella Im Krebsgang (2002)

Stuart Taberner, U of Leeds, Memory-Work in Recent German Literary Fiction: What (if any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the ‘German Experience’ of the Second World War?

Helen Finch, Trinity College Dublin, Günter Grass’s account of wartime suffering in
Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer?

COFFEE / TEA 14.00-14.30

PARALLEL SESSION 4: 14.30-16.30

PANEL A

CHAIR: Sabine Hake, U of Texas Austin

Paul Cooke, U of Leeds, Dresden (2006), Teamworx and Titanic (1997): German
Wartime Suffering as Hollywood Disaster Movie

Anne Rothe, Wayne State U, The Competition for Victim Status in Erica Fischer’s
Aimee und Jaguar

Cathy S. Gelbin, U of Manchester, Double Visions: Lesbian Representation and
Holocaust Film

Moritz Schramm, U of Copenhagen, Back to the 1950s? Hirschbiegel’s ‘Der Untergang’ and the thesis of the ‘verführte Volk’

PANEL B

CHAIR: Katharina Hall, U of Wales Swansea

Júlia Garraio, U of Coimbra, Hans-Ulrich Treichel Der Verlorene and the Uneasiness of West German Society of the Fifties in coming to terms with the trauma of rape

Susanne Vees-Gulani, Case Western Reserve U, Wartime Suffering and Guilt in Dieter Forte’s Autobiographical Novels

Stuart Smith, Trinity College Dublin, Ghosts at the Feast: German Wartime Suffering
in Gerd Gaiser’s Schlußball (1958)

BREAK 16.30-17.00

PARALLEL SESSION 5: 17.00-19.00

PANEL A

CHAIR: Suzanne Brown-Fleming, USHMM

Julia Anspach, U of Haifa /U of Bonn, ‘…aber uns hat es am härtesten getroffen’: Der Opfermythos der deutschen Vertriebenen im Heimatfilm Hans Deppes

Anke Pinkert, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Born in ’45: the Postmemory of War
Suffering in DEFA Films of the 1960s

David Crew, U of Texas Austin, Photographic Sites of Memory: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945-2003

Matthew Frank, Sheffield Hallam U, ‘Feed the Brutes?’ British Representations of
‘German Suffering’, 1945-47

PANEL B

CHAIR: Marc Silberman, U of Wisc. Madison

René Wolf, Royal Holloway U of London, ‘The culture industry can insist all the
more convincingly that it is not the murderer but the victim who is guilty.’(Adorno): Radio and Public Opinion in Germany after 1945

Brian Hanrahan, Columbia U, ‘Nachtgedanken sind wie ein Gericht’: Ernst Schnabel’s radio feature Ein Tag wie morgen: der 29. Januar 1947 (1947)

Kerstin Mueller, Ohio State U, Perpetrators As Victims: The Representation of Nazis
In Postwar West German Drama

Elisabeth Steindl, U of Vienna, Das Bild der Verlierer-Länder in Roberto Rosselini’s
Kriegs-Trilogie

DINNER 19.00-20.30

PLENARY SESSION 4: 20.30-21.30

Sabine Hake, U of Texas Austin: The Representation of
Wartime Suffering in the DEFA Antifascist Films

DAY THREE: Sunday, 1 July 2007

BREAKFAST 8.00-9.30

PLENARY SESSION 5: 9.30-10.30

Krijn Thijs, U of Leiden, 'It's a swindle!' Dutch perspectives on German Victims

PLENARY SESSION 6: 10.30-12.30

CHAIR: Stuart Taberner, U of Leeds

Johannes-Dieter Steinert, U of Wolverhampton, British relief workers in post-war Germany and the perception of Germans as victims of the war

Bill Niven, Nottingham Trent U: German Victimhood in Comparative Perspective

Annette Seidel Arpaci, U of Leeds, ‘German Suffering’ in Israeli Cinema: ‘Perpetrator Trauma’ and the Gendered Nation in 'Walk on Water' (2005), 'Yellow Asphalt/Here is Not There' (2000)and 'Don’t Touch my Holocaust' (1994)

Hideko Mitsui, U of Leeds, Uses of ‘German Victimhood’ in Japan’s Historiography
Debate

CLOSING PLENARY: 12.30-13.00

Stuart Taberner and Annette Seidel Arpaci: further Project Plans and Outcomes

COFFEE / TEA 13.00-13.30

DEPARTURE 13.30-14.00

For more information see also: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/german/AHRC.htm

Kontakt

Dr Annette Seidel Arpaci
Department of German
University of Leeds
Leeds
LS2 9JT
t: +44(0) 113 34 33503
A.Seidel-Arpaci@leeds.ac.uk

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/german/AHRC.htm