Stephan Jaeger

The Atmosphere in the 'Führerbunker.' How to Represent the Last Days of World War II

In the context of the recent boom of World War II representations and German remembrance culture, this essay investigates different narrative ways to represent the last days in the Führerbunker in literature, historiography, and film by analyzing Joachim Fest’s popular history book Der Untergang (2002), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s movie Der Untergang (2004), Michael Kloft’s documentary film Tod im Führerbunker (2004), Walter Kempowski’s collage Echolot: Abgesang ’45 (2005), and Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (1995). History that seems to be often incomprehensible in its moral dimensions poses the challenge whether a historical representation can reconstruct or must restage the past. This article demonstrates that representational choices are grounded less in questions of genre, media, and the dichotomy between history and fiction, than in the tension between open and closed history, in the involvement of reader and viewer, and in the relationship between a realistic scenic representation and the meta-reflection of historical representation. (SJ)

Introduction: Representations of German War Experiences and the Legacy of the Second World War

The Study of German War Experiences in Context Questions of how to represent violence and war have strongly influenced the German social, cultural, political, and historical imaginary. Particularly since the early 1990s critical discussions on German war experiences both at the front and at home and their depictions have been a dominant theme in the culture sections of German newspapers as well as in the academy. These discussions focus primarily on Germany during the Second World War with a special emphasis on the experience of German wartime suffering during the air war and during the flight and expulsion from the East (e.g. Assmann; Cohen-Pfister and WienroederSkinner; Cooke and Silberman; Schmitz; Schmitz and Seidel-Arpaci; Taberner and Berger; Vees-Gulani; Wilms and Rasch; cf. also Sus, reviewed by Peter Fritzsche in this issue). While these debates specific to the Second World War are necessary and important, this special issue hopes to expand this discourse beyond its restrictive temporal focus. Taken together, the contributions offer a clearer picture of the continuations, patterns, breaks, and places of German depictions of war and violence and their cultural memorialization from the eighteenth century to the present. It is thus not the aim of the contributions simply to recall the contents of such representations of German war experiences but instead to concentrate on the processes and concerns of war representations. In the included articles, the authors employ tools and concepts that have recently emerged in the interdisciplinary field of cultural war studies, involving numerous disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences. Seeking a wider scope than military history, it tackles the origins, nature, and consequences of war and conflict and of the violence that accompanies them in all its complex aspects, including the connection of war to its cultural representation and memorialization. Involvement in war studies reaches from literary studies to psychology, from classics to peace and conflict studies, and is omnipresent in all fields of cultural studies, including gender studies, visual culture, media studies, and aesthetics. Seeing war through such a wide variety of methodologies opens the door to new and systematic approaches to the general representations of war in culture over time.

Between the National and the Transnational: European Memories of World War II in the Twenty-First-Century Museum in Germany and Poland

Whereas in the past war museums have tended to focus on national memory, Jaeger demonstrates how representations in the twenty-first-century museum allow for an increasing complexity of national, transnational, and universal narratives and experiences of World War II. Since the 1990s, there has been a representational re-orientation from merely documenting the past to memory forms that can move towards the future by creating a transnational European memory that also incorporates regional and national perspectives. Focusing on German and Polish museum exhibits on World War II at the Eastern front, Jaeger considers by what means, and to what extent, these exhibits represent World War II as a unifying, but nevertheless multiperspectival, European memory.

Screening War. Perspectives on German Suffering. Screen Cultures. German Film and the Visual (review)

als auch kleine stilistische Ungereimtheiten im Blick behalten sollte. Störend fällt auf, dass manche Beiträger vom “Mediziner” Büchner sprechen: es muss sich doch herumgesprochen haben, dass er keiner war. Und schließlich wollen einige der AutorInnen Georg Büchner der Postmoderne oder gar der Posthistoire zuschreiben: ein gewagtes Unternehmen angesichts seiner unerschütterlichen revolutionären Position.

Erzählen im historiographischen Diskurs

Die narratologische Diskussion uber historiographisches Erzahlen orientiert sich in der Regel an dessen Gemeinsamkeiten mit und Differenzen zum fiktionalen Erzahlen. Es scheint damit zuerst einmal so, als wurde historiographisches Erzahlen durch die Leitdifferenz Fakt/Fiktion bzw. wahr/unwahr bestimmt.2 Hierbei ist zu berucksichtigen, dass sich die Unterscheidung textstrukturell darauf richten kann, wie Fakten oder Fiktionen dargestellt werden, oder pragmatisch darauf, was als Fakt und was als Fiktion angesehen wird. Historiographisches Erzahlen ist am pragmatischen Anspruch erkennbar, auf eine ausertextuelle vergangene Welt zu referieren und nicht eine eigenstandige fiktionale Welt zu erschaffen. Es besteht ein Wahrhaftigkeitspakt3 zwischen Autor und Leser: Der Leser geht davon aus, dass der Historiker nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen historische Wirklichkeit darzustellen versucht. Im Rahmen der pragmatischen Unterscheidung ist es zuerst einmal nicht grundlegend, ob erst im Akt des historiographischen Erzahlens Geschichte entsteht — die Vergangenheit benotigt Erzahlen, um zur Geschichte zu werden4 –, sondern ob eine ›Aquivalenzbeziehung‹ zwischen Text und einer auserhalb des Textes befindlichen Wirklichkeit angenommen werden kann.5 Im weitesten Sinne ist die historiographische Erzahlung also nach der in der Einleitung dieses Bandes vorgenommenen Differenzierung zwischen deskriptiver, normativer oder voraussagender Erzahlung eine deskriptive Erzahlung.6