Harald Welzer – författare

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sönke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of covertly recorded, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II that recently had been declassified. Neitzel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington, D.C. These discoveries, published in book form for the first time, would provide a unique and profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy, and the military in general—almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations—and the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them—to create a powerful narrative of wartime experience.[Originally published as Soldaten.] 

Autobiographical memory constitutes an essential part of our personality, giving us the ability to distinguish ourselves as an individual with a past, present and future. This book reveals how the development of a conscious self, an integrated personality and an autobiographical memory are all intertwined, highlighting the parallel development of the brain, memory and personality.

Focusing strongly on developmental aspects of memory and integrating evolutionary and anthropological perspectives, areas of discussion include:

This book offers a unique approach through combining both neuroscientfic and social scientific viewpoints, and as such will be of great interest to all those wanting to broaden their knowledge of the development and acquisition of memory and the conscious self.

Autobiographical memory constitutes an essential part of our personality, giving us the ability to distinguish ourselves as an individual with a past, present and future. This book reveals how the development of a conscious self, an integrated personality and an autobiographical memory are all intertwined, highlighting the parallel development of the brain, memory and personality.

Focusing strongly on developmental aspects of memory and integrating evolutionary and anthropological perspectives, areas of discussion include:

This book offers a unique approach through combining both neuroscientfic and social scientific viewpoints, and as such will be of great interest to all those wanting to broaden their knowledge of the development and acquisition of memory and the conscious self.

Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects – houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We’re on a treadmill to disaster.

To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as societies, we need to stop doing what we’re doing and say ‘enough’. We find it hard to do this because our culture has trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we’re reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be no change of course in favour of sustainable and climate-friendly practices and lifestyles. We need a cultural model in which the beauty of stopping is given the recognition needed for the project of civilization to continue. Optimizing processes that are heading in the wrong direction only makes matters worse.

Stopping is imperative: it is a human cultural technique that we must re-learn. Only then can we achieve a new beginning.