Born After

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA. She is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (revised edition, 2015; 1st edition, 1991), and the editor of The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (2015) and Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (1994).

A courageous, self-reflexive and conscientious book. It is an intimate account of her personal life story but at the same time it is a story of a generation of Germans born into the shattered and perplexed reality of ‘aftermath’ Germany who were forced to struggle with the haunting shadows of the past … Bammer is a gifted narrator and her personal story is both intimately touching and intellectually evoking … Bammer compels us to rethink the very foundations of identity: memory, personal history, attachment to place, culture and, above all – language. It brings together historical research (letters, family documents, interviews, etc.) with contemplative and reflective observations, reminding us of the blurred distinction between facts and representation, historiography and literature, memory and imagination … Its embedded psychological and historical insights which are marked by a rare clarity and sensitivity … stem from a genuine understanding of the human psyche that goes beyond the somewhat schematic and abstractive nature of theories … Nonetheless, the most significant contribution of the book lies in its ability to raise questions without aspiring to answer them, and in its achievement in sharpening the paradoxes and dilemmas embedded not only in relation to the history of Nazi and post-war Germany but in relation to history and memory as such.

• Prologue: Swastika RaincoatPart One: The Trouble with GermanIn the AftermathLost in the Past Following the CluesFamily TiesBetween the Word-GapsAmbushed by HistoryPassing through BitburgResident AlienProof of AncestryPart Two: Walking to Buchenwald Into the Past Walking to BuchenwaldThe Quiet Dignity of Being True Once Upon a Wartime A World in LettersPart Three: There Was a Butcher Here, OnceA Longing Called HomeMemories of WarMemories of BetrayalThere Was a Butcher Here, OnceMy Nazi FamilySources and AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex