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