... when he not only makes no mention of the Jewish population persecuted at the site but also relies on the highly conventional and objectifying symbol of the suitcase to represent metonymically Auschwitz's victims. © 2014 by New German Critique, Inc. 2014 Past Lessons: Holocaust Conservation...

..., Susan Buck-Morss, Anton Kaes, Edward Dimendberg, D. N. Rodowick, and Laura Mulvey. © 2014 by New German Critique, Inc. 2014 Dossier on Cinema and Experience  9 The Future of the Past Anton Kaes Cinema...

...Axel Bangert This article examines how documentary film in reunified Germany has engaged with the Nazi past of “ordinary Germans” and their descendants. It analyzes films produced since 1990 that portray personal views of the period, including those of World War II veterans, Hitler's secretary...

... the future had “been both the sacred preserve of the genius and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan.” But he was careful to historicize the prophetic imagination. In the “relatively static age” before the bourgeois revolutions, social change proceeded so slowly that past, present, and future appeared...

... of reification, which is defended against Honneth’s definition of this concept. Based on an interpretation of passages in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno’s notion of “working through the past,” the article claims that reification should be understood as a forgetting...

...Simon Ward Berlin's material past remains obstinately visible despite the predictions of urban theorists about the “overexposed” city. What is “remembering well” in contemporary Berlin: the preservation of a particular form of the city (Berlin's Planwerk Innenstadt ) or the remembering of one...

...Anna M. Parkinson This article analyzes a paradigm shift in the late 1980s within West German discourses on coming to terms with Germany's Nazi past. Exploring the role of citation and ekphrasis in Anne Duden's book The Judas Sheep , the article argues that the relationship between postwar...

...Susanne Knittel Abstract In recent years, reenactment has emerged as a compelling and controversial form of coming to terms with the past ( Vergangenheitsbewältigung ). As reconstructions of past events inflected through contemporary contexts and concerns, reenactments prompt an affective...

...Amir Engel Abstract This article reconstructs two “modes of memory” in postwar West Germany and explores an underappreciated historical trajectory. These two modes offer radically different ideas about why Germany should remember its past. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Karl Jaspers called...

...Eric Kligerman Despite critics' attempts to read a work of mourning unfolding in films about the Red Army Faction (RAF) with respect to two traumatic histories (the National Socialist [NS] past and the German Autumn), this article examines how such films as Germany in Autumn, The Patriot...

... Sommers ( With the Speed of the Summer , 2009). Cosgrove argues that both works subvert the rural idyll of Heimat to produce a critical perspective on the postunification present and on the twentieth-century German past. Place in both novels is temporalized space, in which all characters are creaturely...

... simultaneously function as symptoms of a profound contemporary crisis: in mobilizing unaccommodated, unrealized, or taboo aspects of the GDR past, but also in presenting an aesthetic opportunity in that they “recall” the various intertexts they cite (from Hamlet to Karl Marx or the medieval danse macabre...

..., and to an understanding of ideology as performance with malleable content. In the postwar setting, ideology offered the illusion of order, harmony, and morality in the very absence of these. It further served as a pragmatic mechanism to hide and exculpate the immediate past. © 2012 by New German Critique, Inc. 2012...

... reflection: bringing loss to consciousness. Holt claims that acknowledging past losses not only is the starting point and core of any attempt to change the present but also is the extent to which the activity of collecting can contribute to the goal of political transformation. © 2012 by New German...

...' ideological projections of the future but also by persistent and often subversive traces of the cultural-historical past. In this way, a “palimpsestuous” reading of the Ministry site highlights the profoundly and inherently ambivalent temporalities generated by the cultural-political projects of the twentieth...

... of the Waffen-SS and a covert anti-Semite, regards such attacks as misplaced and ultimately irrelevant. In Stern's view, the real problems lie in various oversimplifications of the debate on the Middle East, in Grass's failure to take note of Israel's internal debates, and in his long silence about his own past...

... Goldstücker's readings of Kafka and his understanding of his own life through his readings of Kafka. Goldstücker gradually came to frame his own past in terms borrowed from Kafka's Trial while interpreting Kafka's writings as a commentary on totalitarianism. A close reading of his memoir, written in exile...

... of Heinrich Himmler's recorded Posen speech to integrate sounds and images from the past into the present. © 2014 by New German Critique, Inc. 2014 The Desk Murderer and the Corporate Executive: (Re)concretizing the “Banality of Evil” in The Specialist and The Himmler Project...

... interpretation that turns lateness into a generative principle of cultural change (Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil, Mann). The article then returns to the current debate on acceleration and the question of whether our “Age of Innovation” is characterized by a fundamental devaluation of the past in favor of an ever...

... title refers. A Film Unfinished presents a paradigm of redoubled spectatorship: it is an Israeli film about the production of a German propaganda film, and it is also a film about the experience of encountering scenes from one's own past in such a film. The film's witnesses are positioned before...