13. Jahrgang, Februar/März 2004, Nr. 1

Ulrike Jureit
"Zeigen heißt verschweigen"
Die Ausstellungen über die Verbrechen der Wehrmacht

By the end of march 2004 the second exhibition "Verbrechen der Wehrmacht" comes to its final closure. After nine years a project will be finished that left a sustainable impact on the social, political and scientific debate of the nationalsocialist past. The article puts the conceptual background of both exhibitions into focus and seeks to clarify the different justifications of the exhibitions and their different usages of the visual sources.

Gerd Hankel
"Ich habe doch nichts gemacht"
Ruandas Abschied von der Kultur der Straflosigkeit

Ten years after the end of the genocide in Ruanda, the juridical system continues to face immense difficulties in punishing those responsible for the atrocities. The perpetrators remain silent or seek to justify their criminal actions, while the testimony supplied by surviving victims is often imprecise or inadequate. The search for truth has proven to be more difficult than anticipated. It seems that the question of responsibility threatens to disappear in a purported "unfortunate course of history".

Michael Makropoulos
Aspekte massenkultureller Vergesellschaftung

The article outlines a general theory of mass-culture, which aims at illuminating the decisive function of mass-culture for the constitution of modern societies. The theoretical approach is guided by three general assumptions: First, mass-culture is the functional medium for the social appropriation of artificial realities as they are emerging out of the technological evolution in modern times. Second, mass-culture is the functional medium for the development of a deliberate constructivist culture of contingency. Last, mass-culture is the functional medium for the social integration of a generalized "sense of possibility" (Möglichkeitssinn, Robert Musil) via its communicative normalization as a universalist matrix of specific modern experiences.

Michael Wildt
"Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"
Ein kurzer Nachtrag zur Hohmann-Rede

The essay recontextualizes Martin Hohmann's widely discussed speech in the specific german tradition of the "Volksgemeinschafts"- ideology. Thus it points out that Hohmann not only holds antisemitic positions but also favours a concept of nationstate redefined along the lines of a basic ideological feature in the political programme of the NSDAP.

in der Literaturbeilage:
Harald Welzer
Schön unscharf
Über die Konjunktur der Familien- und Generationsromane

und wie in jeder Ausgabe
Wolfgang Kraushaars "Aus der Protestchronik"

Nachrichten aus dem Institut