Irréconciliables ? La mémoire de l’Holocauste et la mémoire de la fuite et de l’expulsion

Pour traiter la question posée dans le titre, je me concentrerai principalement sur la période entre 1979 et 1981 et l’Allemagne de l’Ouest. Beaucoup de choses de ce que je vais dire au sujet de ces années-là pourraient également s’appliquer à une période antérieure ou postérieure de l’histoire de l’Allemagne de l’Ouest, voire de l’Allemagne unifiée. Toutefois, cet article n’a pas vocation à examiner la totalité de l’histoire des relations entre la mémoire de l’Holocauste et la mémoire de la ..

Memory of the Kindertransport in Britain and Germany, and the current refugee crisis

This article sets out to categorise and analyse the ways Holocaust memory can be supportively deployed. It does so by example of memory of the Kindertransport, the rescue of over 10,000 Jewish children from Nazism prior to the outbreak of the Second World War to several different host nations. We present here our theory of invocative memory, arguing that responses to humanitarian crises in the present actively and instrumentally draw on Holocaust memory as a moral resource. Our article sets out this theory in relation to a range of cultural artefacts including memorials, novels and exhibitions

The Author, the Novel, the Reader and the Perils of "Neue Lesbarkeit": A Comparative Analysis of Bernhard Schlink's "Selbs Justiz" and "Der Vorleser"'

Ten years after the publication of Der Vorleser, this article argues that Schlink's work can only be fully understood when viewed in the commercial contexts that currently shape both German and global literatures. By undertaking a comparative analysis of Schlink's debut detective novel, Selbs Justiz (1987) and his international best-seller Der Vorleser (1995), the article explores the problematic tensions generated within these texts by the commercial demands of the literary market-place, and, in a specifically German context, the influence of ‘neue Lesbarkeit’. Special consideration is given to the dynamic between Schlink's works and the reader/consumer, with particular emphasis on the impact of the popular literary codes within the texts. These are explored in conjunction with the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco, and through the lens of over two hundred reader responses. The article breaks new ground through its comparative approach, which traces the continuities or ‘narrative patterns’ in Schlink's detective writing and Der Vorleser for the first time. It also offers the first exploration of ‘general’, non-academic reader responses to the works, allowing new insights into the texts’ operations and the tensions these create in relation to the novels’ treatment of the National Socialist past