Born After: Reckoning with the German Past

by Angelika Bammer, Esther Rashkin, Mari Ruti, Peter L. Rudnytsky

Overview

A 2020 Prose Award Finalist

What do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt usare shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501367717
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/20/2020
Series:	Psychoanalytic Horizons
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA. She is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (revised edition, 2015; 1st edition, 1991), and the editor of The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (2015) and Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (1994).

Table of Contents

Prologue: Swastika Raincoat

Part One: The Trouble with German
In the Aftermath
Lost in the Past
Following the Clues
Family Ties
Between the Word-Gaps
Ambushed by History
Passing through Bitburg
Resident Alien
Proof of Ancestry

Part Two: Walking to Buchenwald
Into the Past
Walking to Buchenwald
The Quiet Dignity of Being True
Once Upon a Wartime
A World in Letters

Part Three:There Was a Butcher Here, Once
A Longing Called Home
Memories of War
Memories of Betrayal
There Was a Butcher Here, Once
My Nazi Family

Sources and Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

[Born After] is a powerful meditation on love and death, guilt and atonement, and memory and imagination, as well as a recognition of reason and its limitations when confronting history's brutal realities. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty.
CHOICE

Engaged in what was clearly a difficult - sometimes agonising - task, Bammer has produced a beautiful and important book ... 5 stars.
Jewish Renaissance

Important and in many ways original contribution to this vast body of work concerned with Holocaust memory from the perspective of a perpetrator culture...What makes Bammer's accounting remarkable among other things is the huge time span of her engagement with her family history. Her personal narrative begins well before she was born in 1945 and stretches beyond the death of her father in 2009. Instead of narrating one single revelation concerning her family's implication with Nazi violence, as has been done in so many popular novels and films, Bammer tells about her recurrent, labored, and often frustrating efforts of trying to understand not only the actions of her parents and grandparents but maybe even more important their changing emotions and silences vis-à-vis their country's horrific past.
H-Judaic

From the Publisher