Reverberations of War: Communities of experience and identification in Germany and Europe since 1945

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The project analyses reverberations of the Second World War across Europe through the Cold War and beyond. It sheds new light on the complex legacies of war for generations of Europeans, and, through coordinated in-depth studies, develops a new theoretical approach. Challenging approaches based on the notion of 'collective memory', the project explores instead the relationships between 'communities of experience' and later 'communities of identification', which may not be closely related to communities of origin. Four particular themes intrinsically connect a later present to a difficult past: reckoning, reconciliation, reconstruction and representation. These are interrelated: a concern for reconciliation may be seen as a means of evading reckoning; the demands of reconstruction may entail a degree of selective repression rather than representation of difficult aspects of the past; ethical responses to the war may themselves exert a normative effect, overriding the possibility of some forms of representation. Each implies - despite the linguistic connotations of 'return' - an attempt to build anew under changed circumstances. Such attempts are coloured by later social, political, and also emotional and cultural contexts, in which imaginative engagements in film and literature play a powerful role in shaping aspirations and perceptions; hence the collaborative approach involving literary scholars as well as historians. Each strand of the project highlights one aspect, while the project as a whole aims to explore interrelations. The project consists of the following elements, with the case of divided and reunited Germany central to all strands: Legacies of Nazi racial and political persecution in Austria, divided Germany, France and Poland; Transnational activities for reconciliation and peace across Europe and Israel and the values and assumptions underpinning them; The ambiguous legacies of occupation for former occupiers as well as the occupied, in Greece, Italy, West and East Germany; Experiences of migration as a result of war, comparing two communities; The 'emotional legacies' of war transmitted through literature and film of the German-speaking countries, focusing particularly on the possibilities of humour for representing trauma and suffering; Shifting representations of war and its emotional effects in the literature and film of selected communities, with special attention to the normative effects of 'acceptable' emotions on gender; and concluding reflections on the 'Reverberations of War'. The project explores legacies of war through a transnational and comparative lens, looking at war-related violence as a phenomenon transcending the (changing) borders of European states. It thus develops a deeper understanding of national discourses and specificities as well as discerning the European dimensions and relatedness of the various experiences and discourses. The systematic exploration of communities of experience and identification allows observation and analysis of the evolution of subjectively perceived and narrated experiences of those directly affected through to later frameworks of reference that can be selectively adopted by groups not sharing the original experiences. By focusing both on the transmission processes and the active patterns of 'making sense' of the legacies of the past in different later circumstances, the project highlights both culturally shaped agency as well as changing political and structural contexts. It brings a genuinely multi-disciplinary approach to this complex, highly sensitive area, ranging from insights and provocations in the cultural arena, through familial and social reverberations, to political instrumentalisation and intellectual controversy in public spheres. The collaborative approach promises to develop fruitful new insights into areas which, although already extensively treated seperately, have not as yet been conceived and reconsidered in this integrated way.