Title: After the Dresden bombing : pathways of memory, 1945 to the present /
Authors: Fuchs, Anne
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan,
Year: 2012
Subjects: Collective memory.; HISTORY Military World War II.; Collective memory; Literature; Mass media; Motion pictures; Dresden (Germany) History; Dresden (Germany) In art.; Dresden (Germany) In mass media.; Dresden (Germany) In literature.; Dresden (Germany) In motion pictures.
Abstract: Together with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden belongs to a handful of global icons that capture the destructiveness of warfare in the twentieth century. Immediately recognisable, these icons are endowed with a powerful symbolism that cannot be explained with reference to historical cause and effect alone. This is precisely the terrain of this book, which€addresses the long aftermath of the bombing in the collective and cultural imagination from 1945 to the present. The material under discussion ranges from archival documents, architectural journals, the built environment, travelogues, newspaper articles, documentaries, TV dramas, fiction, diaries, poetry to photography and fine art. As a case study of an event that gained local, national and global iconicity in the postwar period, it illuminates the media-specific transmission of cultural memory in dialogue with the changing socio-political landscape. Debating fundamental processes of cultural transmission, it exemplifies a new mode of doing cultural history that interweaves the local and the global.
Contents: Introduction: the destruction of Dresden and the excess of the real -- Visual mediations: Dresden and postwar photography and fine art -- Architectural interventions I: West and East German postwar debates -- Architectural interventions II: Dresden's Altmarkt and the topology of power -- Literary voices I: the built environment and memoryscapes in Brigitte Reimann and Uwe Tellkamp -- Literary voices II: war memories in Kurt Vonnegut, Heinz Czechowski and Durs Grünbein -- Filmic represenations: documenting resentment, grief and forgiveness.