Dora Osborne - Böcker

This book offers the first full-length study of W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. It examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives.

Explores the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1945.In recent years, the discourse of memory - and of German memory culture in particular - has become increasingly concerned with questions of the archive. An archive can refer to a physical place, the material found there, or the system that orders this material; in its broadest sense, it might refer to something public (records housed in a municipal building), or something private (photographs in a family album). The material and documentary qualities of the archive confer on it an authenticating function attributed only cautiously to memory, but theories of the archive have questioned the status of material, documentary vestiges of the past. Memory and the archive are inextricablylinked, but how does this affect the mediation of the past? This volume explores the changing relationship between memory and the archive in German-language literature and culture since 1945. Contributions approach this topic froma range of perspectives (film, visual culture, urban culture, digital technology, as well as literature) and offer illuminating studies of Harun Farocki, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas Demand, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jürgen Fuchs, StefanWolter, and Sasa Stanisic.Contributors: Priyanka Basu, Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Regine Criser, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Diana Hitzke and Charlton Payne, Caitríona Leahy, Dora Osborne, Annie Ring, Lizzie Stewart, Simon Ward.Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at Durham University.

A study of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture, drawing on recent memorials, documentaries, and prose narratives that engage with the material legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust.With the passing of those who witnessed National Socialism and the Holocaust, the archive matters as never before. However, the material that remains for the work of remembering and commemorating this period of history is determined by both the bureaucratic excesses of the Nazi regime and the attempt to eradicate its victims without trace. This book argues that memory culture in the Berlin Republic is marked by an archival turn that reflects this shift from embodied to externalized, material memory and responds to the particular status of the archive "after Auschwitz." What remains in this late phase of memory culture is the post-Holocaust archive, which at once ensures and hauntsthe future of Holocaust memory.Drawing on the thinking of Freud, Derrida, and Georges Didi-Huberman, this book traces the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of the archival turn in contemporary German memory culture across different media and genres. In its discussion of recent memorials, documentary film and theater, as well as prose narratives, all of which engage with the material legacy of the Nazi past, it argues that the performanceof "archive work" is not only crucial to contemporary memory work but also fundamentally challenges it.Dora Osborne is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of St Andrews.