GER 257 ZERO HOUR POST WAR & GENOCIDE

At midnight on May 8, 1945 (known as "zero hour"), the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally.  Soon thereafter, West Germany set about creating a democratic society and culture, while confronting one urgent and unavoidable problem:  How does one create this new society out of citizens and a society which had just produced a war of world-wide aggression and the Holocaust?  This course examines the stages by which West German society created a cultural memory of this confrontation with its past.  Each stage is marked by the aspects it explores and emphasizes at the cost of neglecting or ignoring others. Students will examine these stages through such concepts as collective and individual guilt, responsibility and denial, institutional and generational factors in films, theoretical texts, novels, and memoirs.