The Child's View of the Third Reich in German Literature PDF Download

Author: Debbie Pinfold
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191554197
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child's perspective to present the Third Reich. It considers how children at this time were brought up and educated to accept unquestioningly National Socialist ideology, and thus questions the possibility of a traditional naive perspective on these events. Authors as diverse as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf, together with many less well-known writers, have all used this perspective, and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the enormity of the Third Reich. This study asks whether this perspective is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the period, or a means of discovering a new language which had not been tainted by Nazism. This raises and addresses issues central to a post-war aesthetic in German writing.

Author: Christa Kamenetsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780821423646
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Kamenetsky shows how Nazis used children's literature to shape a "Nordic Germanic" worldview, intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their thus corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic's liberal education, while promoting a following for Hitler.

Author: Chloe Paver
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191532819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Six decades after the defeat of National Socialism, commemoration and mourning are ongoing, open-ended projects in Germany and Austria, and continue to generate a steady stream of literature and film about the Nazi past that, while comparatively modest in volume, is often disproportionately influential in public debates. At the same time, new museums and memorials are being established all the time in what Andreas Huyssen has called a 'memory boom', while what is remembered and how it is remembered is subject to continuous change. Scholars have to keep pace with each new development in this culture of commemoration. Rather than add to the growing body of surveys of literature and film about the Third Reich, this study instead puts scholars' critical approaches under the microscope. Chloe Paver considers how far the object of the study is not just analysed but also constructed by the scholar's approach and identifies the criteria by which academics judge the values of works that deal with the Third Reich. This book brings aspects of film, fiction, and memorial culture together in a single study that pays as much attention to images (and in the case of film to sound) as it does to text. The study of film, historical exhibitions, and sites of memory also demands consideration of social contexts and practices. A case study of memory at two of Austria's sites of terror demonstrates the methods used in the study of memorials and museums and considers the ways in which memory attaches itself to place.

Author: Hans Massaquoi
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061856606
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description
This is a story of the unexpected.In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir -- an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer's spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door -- or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic,, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi's account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Author: Katherine Stone
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 157113994X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In recent years, historians have revealed the many ways in which German women supported National Socialism-as teachers, frontline auxiliaries, and nurses, as well as in political organizations. In mainstream culture, however, the women of the period are still predominantly depicted as the victims of a violent twentieth century whose atrocities were committed by men. They are frequently imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the "rubble women" who spiritually and literally rebuilt Germany. This book investigates why the question of women's complicity in the Third Reich has struggled to capture the historical imagination in the same way. It explores how female authors from across the political and generational spectrum (Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Elisabeth Plessen, Gisela Elsner, Tanja D ckers, Jenny Erpenbeck) conceptualize the role of women in the Third Reich. As well as offering innovative re-readings of celebrated works, this book provides instructive interpretations of lesser-known texts that nonetheless enrich our understanding of German memory culture. Katherine Stone is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick.

Author: Hal Marienthal
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 059536859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
"Only rarely does an autobiographical manuscript become a breathtaking thriller However, the novel of American emigrant Hal Marienthal maintains its tension on a high level from the first to the last page and is, at the same time, a time-specific document of a terrifying reality." -Walter Gruenzweig, Vienna Standard "A soul-riveting, heart-shattering personal account of the Holocaust, from the 1920's to liberation under the Statue of Liberty. Absolutely spell-binding." -Kenneth Lincoln (UCLA), Men Down West, The Good Red Road, A Writer's China "Hal Marienthal writes with the assured rhythms of a gifted storyteller. This coming-of-age narrative carries us deep into the heart of Nazi Germany, where a wise child leads us through harrowing near-death tunnels into the expanse of a new life. Rich with cinematic vividness and the authenticity of a first-person witness, Good Germans makes a truly important contribution." -Elizabeth Rosner, The Speed of Light, Blue Nude Germany 1929: Horst, son of Jewish parents, is six years old when he runs away from an orphanage. For three years the desperate little boy survives by sheer determination and with the help of ordinary citizens. Unintentionally he witnesses the rise of Nazism on its most elemental level. Germany 1932: When Horst and his widowed father are reunited they accept proposed adoption plans by distant relatives in Chicago. The agonizing mechanism of getting Horst out of the country is the suspenseful core of the novel. Good Germans becomes an electrifying adventure story whose outcome remains uncertain until the book's final page.

Author: Christa Kamenetsky
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 082144672X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Between 1933 and 1945, National Socialists enacted a focused effort to propagandize children’s literature by distorting existing German values and traditions with the aim of creating a homogenous “folk community.” A vast censorship committee in Berlin oversaw the publication, revision, and distribution of books and textbooks for young readers, exercising its control over library and bookstore content as well as over new manuscripts, so as to redirect the cultural consumption of the nation’s children. In particular, the Nazis emphasized Nordic myths and legends with a focus on the fighting spirit of the saga heroes, their community loyalty, and a fierce spirit of revenge—elements that were then applied to the concepts of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Führer and the fatherland. They also tolerated select popular series, even though these were meant to be replaced by modern Hitler Youth camping stories. In this important book, first published in 1984 and now back in print, Christa Kamenetsky demonstrates how Nazis used children’s literature to selectively shape a “Nordic Germanic” worldview that was intended to strengthen the German folk community, the Führer, and the fatherland by imposing a racial perspective on mankind. Their efforts corroded the last remnants of the Weimar Republic’s liberal education, while promoting an enthusiastic following for Hitler.

Author: Gillian Lathey
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783906760803
Category : Autobiographical fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Contends that although autobiographical children's literature (fictionalized or straight accounts) about World War II may ostensibly be directed toward juvenile readers, they are primarily written for the authors themselves, to help them establish their identity or to serve a therapeutic purpose. Compares works written in 1970-95 by Germans, Britons, and Jews (mainly refugees from Nazism). Understandably, their perspectives are quite different. The Jews write about persecution and exile. Germans who want to write about their childhood in the Third Reich are faced with an "impossible legacy": how to depict their childhood experiences (sometimes including membership in the Hitler youth movement) and, at the same time, express rejection of Nazi values. Concludes that this type of literature has not yet established its true audience and that further research might study children's responses and the contrast in ideological perspectives between works written in West and East Germany.

Author: John David Pizer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311072510X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This study reverses the question implicit in title of Christa Wolf’s now-canonical 1990 novella Was bleibt (What remains), looking instead at what was lost during the process of German reunification. It argues that, in their work during and after the Wende, most literary authors from both East and West Germany responded ambivalently to the reunification. Many felt, on the one hand, a keen sense of loss as the GDR dissolved and an expanded Federal Republic summarily absorbed former Eastern Germany. They mourned the ideals of democratic socialism, tolerance, and internationalism that the GDR had held dear, as well as the country’s rich cultural life. On the other hand, however, they recognized that the GDR was a fundamentally corrupt surveillance state whose industry weighed heavily on the environment while failing to buoy the country’s economy. By looking at works by some of the most important authors from either side of the border, this study shows that those who unequivocally embraced the reunification were clearly in the minority.

Author: Winfried Weiss
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780884962014
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A Nazi Childhood is a disturbing and intimate portrait of Germany and the Third Reich from the recaptures perpective of a highly-perceptive child. A censored version of this memoir was first published in 1983. This is the posthumous, complete, uncensored story. As the war rages on, young Winifried's feelings of security and mormalcy within his family and country dissolve into fear and confusion. His father, an SS officer, disappears...Germany crumbles...the American occupation begins.