The German Trauma

Author : Gitta Sereny
Publisher : Allan Lane
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The German Trauma written by Gitta Sereny and published by Allan Lane. This book was released on 2000 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IN 1945, Germany underwent a radical political transformation, moving certainty and irreversibility from dictatorship to freedom under a model federal constitution. But despite this remarkable public success, and the economic revival that accompanied it, the experience of war remains current in the imagination of Germans. Indeed, so total was their defeat, so complete was their culpability, that Germany's obvious dynamism has coexisted with the always open wound of their history. The fact that this wound exists and has been felt so deeply for more than half a century, has altered what has usually been thought of as the German character.

Author : Gitta Sereny
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141962623
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The German Trauma written by Gitta Sereny and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gitta Sereny is one of the world's most respected journalists and historians. This book gathers together the best of her writing on Germany from over sixty years. It amounts to an extraordinary portrait of the country and its people, how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectively and in specific instances - and how the burden of their guilt has altered the national identity. She writes about key individuals - Stangl, Speer - and the questions which their lives raise. Thepenetration and conviction of her writing throughout is startling and she constantly reminds us why it is important to consider the questions she addresses - war guilt, holocaust denial and the temptations of obedience.

Author : Gitta Sereny
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The German Trauma written by Gitta Sereny and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gitta Sereny
Publisher : ePenguin
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The German Trauma written by Gitta Sereny and published by ePenguin. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a schoolgirl, Gitta Sereny was captivated by the theatrical spectacle of a Nuremberg Rally. Later, when the Nazis marched into Vienna, the spell was quickly broken when she saw an eminent Jewish doctor forced to scrub the pavement by Nazi thugs. The war years forged Sereny's lifelong fascination with Hitler's Germany and the indelible mark it made on the twentieth century. In this book of experiences and reflections she threads fragments of her own life into her larger quest to understand what it is 'that leads human beings so often and so readily to embrace violence and amorality'.

Author : Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134627572
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book German Cinema - Terror and Trauma written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In German Cinema – Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to—as well as a reminder of—Nazism’s hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser—reviving the full meaning of Freud’s Fehlleistung—calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

Author : Lina Jakob
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253048273
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Echoes of Trauma and Shame in German Families written by Lina Jakob and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it possible for people who were born in a time of relative peace and prosperity to suddenly discover war as a determining influence on their lives? For decades to speak openly of German suffering during World War II—to claim victimhood in a country that had victimized millions—was unthinkable. But in the past few years, growing numbers of Germans in their 40s and 50s calling themselves Kriegsenkel, or Grandchildren of the War, have begun to explore the fundamental impact of the war on their present lives and mental health. Their parents and grandparents experienced bombardment, death, forced displacement, and the shame of the Nazi war crimes. The Kriegsenkel feel their own psychological struggles—from depression, anxiety disorders, and burnout to broken marriages and career problems—are the direct consequences of unresolved war experiences passed down through their families. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and a broad range of scholarship, Lina Jakob considers how the Kriegsenkel movement emerged at the nexus between public and familial silences about World War II, and critically discusses how this new collective identity is constructed and addressed within the framework of psychology and Western therapeutic culture.

Author : Judith Lewis Herman
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0465098738
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trauma and Recovery written by Judith Lewis Herman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

Author : Bernhard Giesen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317250087
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Triumph and Trauma written by Bernhard Giesen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as archetypes of the Western imagination. A major recent change in Western societies is that memories of triumphant heroism-for example, the revolutionary uprising of the people-are increasingly replaced by the public remembrance of collective trauma of genocide, slavery and expulsion. The first part of the book deals with the heroes and victims and explores the social construction of charisma and its inevitable decay. Part 2 focuses on a paradigm case of the collective trauma of perpetrators: German national identity between 1945 and 2000. After a time of latency, the legacy of nationalistic trauma was addressed in a public conflict between generations. The conflict took center stage in vivid public debates and became a core element of Germany's official political culture. Today public confessions of the guilt of the past have spread beyond the German case. They are part of a new post-utopian pattern of collective identity in a globalised setting.

Author : Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1466851171
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Culture of Defeat written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at history's losers-the myths they create to cope with defeat and the steps they take never to be vanquished again History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his brilliant and provocative book, but the losers often have the final word. Focusing on three seminal cases of modern warfare-the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I-Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural reactions of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat. Drawing on responses from every level of society, Schivelbusch shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a "better North," the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic "plantation legend" after the fall of the Confederacy; the cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France; the fiction of the stab in the back by "foreign" elements in postwar Germany. From cathartic epidemics of "dance madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a tour de force that opens new territory for historical inquiry.

Author : Jason Crouthamel
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350083720
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War written by Jason Crouthamel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact of violence on the religious beliefs of front soldiers and civilians in Germany during the First World War. The central argument is that religion was the main prism through which men and women in the Great War articulated and processed trauma. Inspired by trauma studies, the history of emotions, and the social and cultural history of religion, this book moves away from the history of clerical authorities and institutions at war and instead focuses on the history of religion and war 'from below.' Jason Crouthamel provides a fascinating exploration into the language and belief systems used by ordinary people to explain the inexplicable. From Judeo-Christian traditions to popular beliefs and 'superstitions,' German soldiers and civilians depended on a malleable psychological toolbox that included a hybrid of ideas stitched together using prewar concepts mixed with images or experiences derived from the surreal environment of modern combat. Perhaps most interestingly, studying the front experience exposes not only lived religion, but also how religious beliefs are invented. Front soldiers in particular constructed new, subjective spiritual and religious concepts based on encounters with industrialized weapons, the sacred experience of comradeship, and immersion in mass death, which profoundly altered their sense of self and the supernatural. More than just a coping mechanism, religious language and beliefs enabled victims, and perpetrators, of violence to narrate concepts of psychological renewal and rebirth. In the wake of defeat and revolution, religious concepts shaped by the war experience also became a cornerstone of visions for radical political movements, including the National Socialists, to transform a shattered and embittered German nation. Making use of letters between soldiers and civilians, diaries, memoirs and front newspapers, Trauma, Religion and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War offers a unique glimpse into the belief systems of men and women at a turning point in European history.