Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
“Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- From Nature to Modernism: The Concept and Discourse of Culture in Its Development from the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century
- The German “Geist und Macht” Dichotomy: Just a Game of Red Indians?
- “In the Exile of Internment” or “Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugend zu machen”: German-Speaking Women Interned by the British during the Second World War
- “Deutschland lebt an der Nahtstelle, an der Bruchstelle”: Literature and Politics in Germany 1933–1950
- “Das habe ich getan, sagt mein Gedächtnis. Das kann ich nicht getan haben, sagt mein Stolz! …” History and Morality in Hochhuth's Effis Nacht
- Stefan Heym and GDR Cultural Politics
- Reviving the Dead: Montage and Temporal Dislocation in Karls Enkel's Liedertheater
- Living Without Utopia: Four Women Writers' Responses to the Demise of the GDR
- A Worm's Eye View and a Bird's Eye View: Culture and Politics in Berlin since 1989
- Remembering for the Future, Engaging with the Present: National Memory Management and the Dialectic of Normality in the “Berlin Republic”
- “Wie kannst du mich lieben?”: “Normalizing” the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s Films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge
- Models of the Intellectual in Contemporary France and Germany: Silence and Communication
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
The Culture of Victimhood
SINCE UNIFICATION IN 1990 Jews have been all the rage in Germany. Victor Klemperer's Tagebücher 1933–1945 (1995) — serialized for television in 1999 — and Ruth Klüger's weiter leben (1992) are only the two most outstanding examples of the current passion for what Thomas Kraft calls “jüdische Memorienliteratur” (2000: 11). Writer and journalist Maxim Biller is bizarrely popular, despite — or more likely because of — his insistent “Jewishness,” and a renamed Lea Rosh, the raucous television chat-show host, has cemented her celebrity status with her campaign for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, armed only with a single Jewish grandfather and a prodigious talent for self-promotion. Even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen was acclaimed — above all by younger Germans — during his tour to sell the German translation of his 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (see Ullrich 1996). More generally, synagogues are being restored and monuments erected apace. The new Jewish Museum in Berlin, moreover, had been attracting in excess of two hundred thousand visitors before the exhibits had been deposited.
Germans are thus absorbed, as Jane Kramer reports, “in an elaborate exercise in ‘solidarity,’ if not identification, with Hitler's victims” (1995: 49). This extends beyond the “state-ordained philo-Semitism” that Mary Fulbrook sees as typical of the old West Germany (1999: 65), generating the paradoxical “Tabuisierung und Latenz des Antisemitismus” described by Werner Bergmann as late in the history of the FRG as 1990 (116), and it certainly contrasts with the previous indifference, if not hostility, to Jews in the former East.
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- Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany , pp. 227 - 244Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2003