Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item "Schweigen als Herausforderung": Silence as a Generational Challenge in the Post Holocaust Works of East German Jewish Authors Jurek Becker and Barbara Honigmann(2020) McDaniel, Jocelyn; Beicken, Peter; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how two postwar Jewish writers from the former German Democratic Republic, Jurek Becker, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Barbara Honigmann, a descendent of returned Jewish communist emigres and a second-generation writer, depicted and challenged a culture of silence, “Schweigen,” concerning Holocaust memory and Jewish identity in postwar Germanophone societies. This study emphasizes the unique East German context that influenced both authors. “Schweigen” is defined as a societal phenomenon of binary emotional trauma. Facing the inevitable "Schuldfrage" (Jaspers, 1946), many postwar Germans found it arduous to come to terms with the inhumanity of the Third Reich, while many Jewish victims suffered from the shame of survival. In the GDR, “Schweigen” was compounded by the state’s propagation of antifascism and a prescriptive cultural heritage, Kulturerbe, encompassing the abdication of guilt from the fascist past, the minimization of Jewish victimhood, and misappropriation of Holocaust memory. Becker and Honigmann, whose parents were victimized by the Third Reich, grew up in the GDR, a communist state. Foremost, their family backgrounds, generational attitudes, and perceptions of East German socialism shaped their contrasting writings concerning the cultural silencing of Holocaust memory and complexity of Jewish identity. Literary trauma theory, memory studies, and gender studies bring these (dis)continuities into focus. Five chapters are devoted to the authors’ development in the GDR and their literary responses to “Schweigen” within the limitations of East German cultural heritage. Both oeuvres are therapeutic undertakings impacted by experienced and inherited Holocaust-trauma. The analyses of Becker's life and his novels, Jakob der Lügner, Der Boxer, and Bronsteins Kinder, reveal his adoption of the humanist tradition of socialism that stands against the dangers of fascism, while dissenting from the GDR’s official cultural doctrine. In life and writing, Honigmann forsakes East German Kulturerbe by recreating her own German Jewish identity and cultural heritage. Her autofictive works reject communism and the generational assimilation of her family in favor of Jewish spirituality, feminist assertions, and multiculturalism. The comparison of both authors and their Holocaust-relevant writings likewise endeavors to counter the dual waning of Holocaust memory and East German national memory.Item Understanding the Class Enemy: Foreign Policy Expertise in East Germany(2009) Scala, Stephen J.; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study makes use of reports, resolutions, analyses, and other internal documents as well as oral history interviews in order to detail the construction, functioning, and output of foreign policy expertise in the GDR. Subordination to the practical needs and political-ideological requirements of the leadership of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) represented the defining feature of East German foreign policy expertise. Yet its full politicization, which was essentially complete by the late 1960s as the SED succeeded in establishing a comprehensive system of foreign policy expertise tailored to meet its particular vision, entailed the maintenance of a degree of professional and intellectual autonomy--the GDR's Aussenpolitiker, or foreign policy professionals, were expected not only to comply with the political and ideological postulates espoused by the party leadership but also to deliver sound, specialist analysis of international relations. The persistent tension between these contrasting objectives was directly reflected in the output of East German experts, who in the conditions of diplomatic isolation prevailing until the early 1970s formulated a GDR-specific conception of international relations that fused clear identification of East Germany's realpolitical interests with the Marxist-Leninist notion of foreign policy as a form of class struggle. Following foreign policy normalization in the first half of the 1970s, however, increasing specialization and professionalization matched with a dramatic increase in East German experts' exposure to the capitalist West, including integration into a transnational network of foreign policy specialists, allowed the specialist element of expertise to gain preponderance over the dogmatic-ideological element. The great challenge to the international position of the Soviet Bloc and the GDR represented by the "second Cold War" in the first half of the 1980s then prompted East German experts to abandon simplistic adherence to Marxist-Leninist foreign policy dogma in favor of prioritization of the concrete realpolitical interests of the GDR. In the process, the GDR's experts formulated a body of non-dogmatic foreign policy thought that mirrored the Soviet New Thinking without taking on its comprehensiveness or overt rejection of inherited postulates.Item Legacies of Stalingrad: The Eastern Front War and the Politics of Memory in Divided Germany, 1943-1989(2007-12-11) Morina, Christina; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The two most monstrous and closely intertwined crimes committed by Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the "war of extermination" against the Soviet Union, gave rise to two diametrically opposed official memories of the Nazi past in both Germanys: while over the years the annihilation of over six million Jews gained the most prominent position in West German memory of the war, official memory in East Germany centered around the Nazi war against the Soviet Union. The divided political memory of the latter, the Eastern Front war, is the subject of this dissertation. It analyzes and contextualizes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture as old alliances crumbled and new alliances formed in the unfolding Cold War. This study thus represents an important contribution to the history of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. As the first comprehensive analysis of the Eastern Front memory it focuses on the intersection of memory and politics. The politics of memory, i.e. the effort to place a narrative of past events into the service of a present political cause dominated both Germanys. Yet, the analysis pays close attention to the individual biographies of the protagonists arguing that the often selective and ambiguous commemoration of the Eastern Front was not only the result of an ideology-driven instrumentalization of history in the shadow of the Cold War. Rather, it also rooted in the manifold individual encounters with the horrors of genocidal war on the various fronts of this unparalleled conflict. In case of the East German communists' master narrative, the hitherto neglected centrality of the Eastern Front significantly alters the perception, that the German Democratic Republic was built upon an "antifascist founding myth." Rather the political memory of "Operation Barbarossa" was the central ingredient in the communist founding narrative of a socialist dictatorship allied in unconditional "friendship" with the Soviet Union. This calculated presence of the Eastern Front war stands in contrast to an enduring absence of the same event in West Germany. Here it served as rallying point against the continuing "Bolshevist menace", both deriving from and sustaining the antitotalitarian consensus of the young democracy.