The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany

Kramer, Jane

ISBN 10: 0679448721 / ISBN 13: 9780679448723

Published by Random House, 1996

Seller Inventory # 0679448721-4-35323706

Synopsis:

In the Politics of Memory Jane Kramer surveys the moral and political landscape of today's Germany, where the reunification of East and West has brought into conflict two vastly different memories of what it means to "be" German.
These essays cut straight to the Zeitgeist of Europe's most politically and economically influential country. Self-styled anarchists destroy a filmmaker's Berlin restaurant to protest its "bourgeois" nature, but their ruthless call for freedom is simply German fascism repackaged. A young East German who escapes to the West doesn't know what to do with himself once he gets there - an example of the deep passivity that is perhaps the Communists' most troubling legacy to the "new" Germany. And the bizarre story of a German holocaust memorial reveals a revisionist desire to portray the country as a victim of World War II by "turning the twelve dark years of Hitler into twelve years of resistance to Hitler and occupation by Hitler; an abandonment, for the sake of settling the past into 'history,' of the very plain historical truth that Germany had chosen Hitler."

From the Back Cover: minating, beautifully written collection of essays, the acclaimed New Yorker writer reports on the zeitgeist of reunified Germany. Jane Kramer surveys the fraught moral and political landscape of today's Germany, where the reunification of East and West has brought into conflict two vastly different memories of what it means to "be German."

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany ...
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 1996
Binding: hardcover
Condition: Fair