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January 6, 2006

A Vicious Debate On A Difficult Subject

I
f you enjoy caustic reviews of scholarly works and testy author responses, check out this book review by UNC's Gerhard Weinberg of Dagmar Barnouw's "The War in the Empty Air:  Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans" (Indiana University Press 2005), and Barnouw's reply which follows it.

The publisher says this of the book:  "Steering her path between the notions of 'victim' and 'perpetrator,' Barnouw seeks a place where acknowledgment of both the horror of Auschwitz and the suffering of the non-Jewish Germans can, together, create a more complete historical remembrance for postwar generations."  The book's argument appears to be that the Allies and the German people in some sense colluded immediately after the war in imposing responsibility for the war and Nazi atrocities wholly on the German people, and that this burden has imposed an unhealthy silence on the German people about their own pain and its legacy.  I suppose that's the sort of project that's bound to draw strong reactions.

Posted by Eric at January 6, 2006 10:34 AM

Comments

"this burden has imposed an unhealthy silence on the German people about their own pain and its legacy."

I think there's something to this argument (though I can't speak to whether this particular author successfully addresses it). I met at least one person in Germany (a decent guy) who lamented that it was impossible to tell the story of German refugees without being regarded as unacceptably insensitive to the Holocaust victims. I can make arguments for why that perhaps should be so, but I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with them. Part of me thinks that victimization is victimization and we shouldn't be engaged in the exercise of somehow disqualifying the validity of people's stories of injustice.

Posted by: Cathy at January 6, 2006 5:07 PM

Being somewhat aquainted with the study of victimization, I have to say I am becoming increasingly weary of a 20th / 21st century in which everyone wants recognition for their personal grief. Surely we can all look at instances in our lives where we have been victimized, but it would be refreshing to find some group / individuals who came clean and said they were free from such a burden.

Posted by: john a at January 6, 2006 9:32 PM