Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

Alon Confino is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has written substantially on nationhood, memory, and historical method. His new book is Foundational Pasts: An Essay in Holocaust Interpretation (CUP, 2011).

“Understood as a starting point for further inquiries into practices of mourning, burial and grief, this volume deserves broad attention, not least because it succeeds in embedding its case studies within a broad cultural, social and political history.” • European History Quarterly“Taken together, this volume is a welcome departure from the usual literature on memory and trauma which ignores what came before the war and treats what happened after only in relation to the Holocaust. This excellent volume enables us to look at the history of death as a whole beyond the break of 1945 and to see influences and continuities throughout the last century. The volume delivers on the promise of the introduction to open up new avenues for research and raise new questions and should be a welcome addition to the library of every scholar of modern Germany.” • German Politics & Society“[The volume] offers a significant contribution to theories of death and memory work in German Studies. [It] is clearly organized using theme-based sections, which lead the reader through material culture as well as psychological investigation; the essays are well-researched and cogently written.” • German Studies Review“Taken together, the volume provides more than the sum of its individual contributions and actually succeeds in offering new perspectives on a hitherto neglected topic. Several essays demonstrate persuasively the myriad ways in which the ghosts of the dead haunted the living in twentieth-century Germany…for anybody interested in the social and cultural history of death in Germany, this volume will be an indispensable starting point.” • German History

• IntroductionPaul Betts, Alon Confino, Dirk SchumannPART I: BODIESChapter 1. How the Germans Learned to Wage War. On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World WarsMichael GeyerChapter 2. The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of the Second World WarRichard BesselChapter 3. Rebuilding and Reburying: Emergency Cemeteries in Berlin after ‘Zero Hour’Monica BlackPART II: DISPOSALChapter 4. Fanning the Flames – Cremation in Late Imperial and Weimar GermanySimone AmeskampChapter 5. Disposing of the Dead in East Germany, 1945 – 1990Felix Robin SchulzChapter 6. Death in Munich. The 1972 OlympicsKay SchillerChapter 7. When Cold Warriors Die: The State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer and Walter UlbrichtPaul BettsPART III: SUBJECTIVITYChapter 8. A Common Experience of Death: Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914-1923Tim GradyChapter 9. Laughing about death? `German Humor´ in the Two World WarsMartina KesselChapter 10. Death, Spiritual Solace, and Afterlife. Between Nazism and ReligionAlon ConfinoChapter 11. Yizkor! Commemoration of the Dead by Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar GermanyGabriel FinderPART IV: RUINSChapter 12. The Imagination of Disaster. Death and Survival in Postwar West GermanySvenja GoltermannChapter 13. European Melancholy and the Inability to Listen: Sebald, Politics, and DeathDaniel SteuerChapter 14. A Cemetery in BerlinPeter FritzscheNotes on contributorsBibliographyIndex