Matthew P. Berg

Sacrifice and National Belonging in Twentieth-Century Germany

German Sacrifice Today, John Borneman The Meaning of Dying, Marcus Funck Was It All Just a Dream, Brian E. Crim Injury, Fate, Resentment, and Sacrifice in German Political Culture, 1914-1939, Greg Eghigian There Is a Land Where Everything Is Pure, Michael Geyer The Violence of Difference, Uli Linke Sacrifice and Victimization in the Commemorative Practices of Nazi Genocide After German Unification Memorials and Visual Metaphors, Silke Wenk.

Arbeitspflicht in Postwar Vienna: Punishing Nazis vs. Expediting Reconstruction, 1945-48

Even before the war in Europe ended formally on 8 May 1945, there could be no serious misconceptions—either among defeated and liberated peoples or among the victorious Allied powers—as to how complex the challenges of reconstructing physical infrastructure and social networks would be. 1 This was particularly true in urban areas within what had been Germanys 1938 borders, where the impact of air raids had reduced many areas to rubble and had damaged the rail and road connections that supplied foodstuffs and other necessities. In Berlin and other cities, images of people clearing debris from lunar landscapes dominated the popular imagination in the late 1940s and over the following decades. Indeed, when images of immediate postwar reconstruction have been invoked, it would appear as if there existed a heroic, unbroken connection between the initiative of these largely female volunteers ( Trummerfrauen ) and the economic miracle associated overwhelmingly with largely male labor in West Germany a decade later. If a remarkable preparedness to come to terms with the exigencies of the present manifested itself during the initial postwar months, historians have subsequently offered insights into how problematic a consistent and thorough confrontation with the Nazi past proved to be during the later 1940s and beyond.