Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
8 - The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
That by the end of the 1990s “normalization” had become the uncontested buzzword of the decade is perhaps surprising, given that its inception was viewed with such suspicion, particularly by many on the left who attributed it to a perceived “desire to play down the centrality of the Nazi past in order to mitigate German guilt and instil national pride,” to quote Stuart Taberner. Nonetheless, by the turn of the millennium Gerhard Schröder's Red-Green coalition had successfully appropriated the term, promoting a view of “normalization” that sought to reincorporate the Nazi past into the sociopolitical consciousness of the Berlin Republic as a grave lesson, yet importantly a lesson that had been learned.
The enthusiasm with which “normalization” was greeted in the latter half of the 1990s had implications for the memory of another, more recent aspect of Germany's problematic past, namely the legacy of the left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader- Meinhof Group. The existence of the RAF had always been inextricably linked to the legacy of National Socialism. For the '68er student generation, out of which the RAF developed, the shooting of a student demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, at a rally in 1967, which initiated a decade of political unrest, confirmed the FRG as a thinly veiled continuation of the fascist state. Gudrun Ensslin, for example, a student at the time and a founding member of the RAF, immediately decried those in power as “the Auschwitz generation,” for whom violence was the only language that was understood.
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- German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First CenturyBeyond Normalization, pp. 121 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006