This two-volume set explores what postwar German representations and imaginings of violence in other places and times tell us about Germany.
Germany's 20th-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture especially challenging: it has made certain constructions of violence unspeakable, even unthinkable. As a result, new ways of thinking about violence in postwar and contemporary German culture are needed. One such approach is critical analysis of "violence elsewhere," that is, representations in literature, art, and film of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered Germans a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of "violence elsewhere" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged or deeply encoded meanings and functions of violence in German culture.
This two-volume set explores what representations of "violence elsewhere" in a variety of works and genres tell us about Germany. Volume 1, covering the immediate postwar period, 1945-2001, considers works that arose in East, West, and reunified Germany and that imagine violence in foreign lands as well as in the respective "other" German state and in the German past. Volume 2 carries the inquiry forward to the post-9/11 world of the new Federal Republic. The volumes also introduce theoretical perspectives that are transferable beyond German Studies, allowing us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities.
Contributors for Volume 1: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone.
Contributors for Volume 2: Sofía Forchieri, Susanne C. Knittel, Marie Kolkenbrock, Priscilla Layne, Joanne Leal, Francesca Lewis, Frauke Matthes, Lizzie Stewart, Nicola Thomas, and Kathrin Wunderlich.
Chapter 8 of Volume 1, "Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized "9/11" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European Research Council.
