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

该项目分析了第二次世界大战在冷战期间及以后在整个欧洲的回响。它揭示了几代欧洲人留下的复杂的战争遗产，并通过协调深入的研究，开发了一种新的理论方法。该项目挑战基于“集体记忆”概念的方法，而是探索“经验社区”和后来的“认同社区”之间的关系，这些社区可能与原籍社区关系不大。四个特定的主题内在地将后来的现在与艰难的过去联系在一起：清算、和解、重建和代表性。这些是相互关联的：对和解的关切可能被视为逃避清算的一种手段；重建的要求可能需要一定程度的选择性镇压，而不是代表过去的困难方面；对战争的道义反应本身可能产生规范效应，凌驾于某些形式的代表的可能性之上。每一次都意味着--尽管“回归”的语言内涵--试图在变化的环境下重建。这种尝试受到后来的社会、政治以及情感和文化背景的影响，在这些背景下，对电影和文学的富有想象力的参与在塑造愿望和看法方面发挥了强大的作用；因此，文学学者和历史学家采取了合作的方法。该项目的每一条线索都突出了一个方面，而该项目作为一个整体旨在探索相互关系。该项目包括以下内容：分裂和统一的德国是所有方面的核心：奥地利纳粹种族和政治迫害的遗产，分裂的德国、法国和波兰；欧洲和以色列的跨国和解与和平活动及其背后的价值观和假设；希腊、意大利、西德和东德的前占领者和被占者的模糊遗产；战争造成的移民经历，比较两个社区；通过德语国家的文学和电影传播战争的“情感遗产”，特别侧重于表现创伤和痛苦的幽默的可能性；在选定社区的文学和电影中改变对战争及其情感影响的表现，特别注意“可接受的”情感对性别的规范影响；以及对“战争的回响”的总结思考。该项目通过跨国和比较的视角探索战争的遗产，将与战争有关的暴力视为一种超越欧洲国家(不断变化的)边界的现象。因此，它加深了对国家话语和特殊性的理解，也加深了对各种经验和话语的欧洲层面和关联性的认识。对经验和认同社区的系统探索可以观察和分析那些直接受影响的人的主观感知和叙述经验的演变，直到后来的参照框架，不分享原始经验的群体可以有选择地采用这些参照框架。通过关注过去遗产在不同的后来情况下的传播过程和积极模式，该项目既强调了文化塑造的机构，也强调了不断变化的政治和结构背景。它为这个复杂、高度敏感的领域带来了真正的多学科方法，从文化领域的洞察和挑衅，到家庭和社会的反响，再到公共领域的政治工具化和智力争议。这种合作方式有望对一些领域提出富有成效的新见解，尽管这些领域已经被广泛地分开处理，但尚未以这种综合方式加以构思和重新审议。

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.