The Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession, that occurred on an unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims’ histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events. Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe, Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War demonstrates the trend towards a victim-centred collective memory as well as the interplay of memory politics and public commemorative culture.

"The shadow of the Second World War was filled with many terrible crimes, such as genocide, forced migration and labour, human-made famine, forced sterilizations, and dispossession. None of these atrocities were new, but they all occurred on an unprecedented scale. Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War examines victim groups constructed in the twentieth century in the aftermath of these experiences. The collection explores the concept of authenticity through an examination of victims' histories and the construction of victimhood in Europe and East Asia. Chapters consider how notions of historical authenticity influence the self-identification and public recognition of a given social group, the tensions arising from individual and group experiences of victimhood, and the resulting, sometimes divergent, interpretation of historical events. Drawing from case studies on topics including the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, American air raids on Japan, and forced migrations from Eastern Europe, Authenticity and Victimhood after the Second World War shows the trends towards a victim-centred collective memory and the role trends play in memory politics and public commemorative culture."--

Classifying people as 'victims' is a historical phenomenon with remarkable growth since the second half of the 20th century. The term victim is widely used to refer both to those who have died in wars and to people who have experienced some form of physical or psychological violence. Moreover, victimhood has become a shorthand for any injustice suffered. This can be seen in many contexts: in debates on social justice, when claims for compensation are made, human rights are defended, past crimes are publicly commemorated, or humanitarian intervention is called for. By adopting a history of knowledge approach, Victims takes a fresh look at the phenomenon of classifying people as victims. It goes beyond existing narratives to provide a new and comprehensive explanation of the complex genealogy of modern concepts of victimhood. In order to reveal the fundamental shifts in perceptions and interpretations of harm, this book reconstructs the emergence of the figure of the victim from the late 18th century to the present. Focusing on Western Europe, it shows that neither the World Wars nor the Holocaust were the only reasons for this shift. Instead, changing power relations and new knowledge, especially in medicine and law, fundamentally altered perceptions and interpretations of death and suffering, of legitimate and illegitimate violence. Today, the debate takes another turn with the widespread criticism of victim attribution and the increasing delegitimisation of the term. Svenja Goltermann tells this story with brilliant clarity - without subscribing to the new denigration of the victim.

This handbook explores trauma in East Asia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, assessing how victims, perpetrators and societies have responded to such experiences and to what extent the legacies still resonate today. Mapping the trauma-scape of East Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, including anthropologists, historians, film and literary critics, scholars of law, media and education, political scientists and sociologists, this book significantly enhances understandings of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have since been suppressed, exhumed, represented and disputed. In Asia’s contested memory-scape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and heirs to their respective traumas. The scholarly research in this volume examines the silencing and distortion of traumatic pasts and sustained efforts to interrogate denial and impunity in the search for accountability. Addressing collective traumas from across East Asia (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam), this book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Trauma and Memory Studies, Asian Studies and Contemporary Asian History more broadly.

This Palgrave Handbook examines the ways in which researchers and practitioners theorise, analyse, produce and make use of testimony. It explores the full range of testimony in the public sphere, including perpetrator testimony, testimony presented through social media and virtual reality. A growing body of research shows how complex and multi-layered testimony can be, how much this complexity adds to our understanding of our past, and how creators and users of testimony have their own complex purposes. These advances indicate that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited. The purpose of this Palgrave Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.

In 1900, German legislators passed the Civil Code, a controversial law that designated women as second-class citizens with regard to marriage, parental rights, and marital property. Despite the upheavals in early twentieth-century Germany – the fall of the German Empire after the First World War, the tumultuous Weimar Republic, and the destructive Third Reich – the Civil Code remained the law of the land. After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945 and the founding of East and West Germany, legislators in both states finally replaced the old law with new versions that expanded women’s rights in marriage and the family. Entangled Emancipation reveals how the complex relationship between the divided Germanys in the early Cold War catalysed but sometimes blocked efforts to reshape legal understandings of gender and the family after decades of inequality. Using methods drawn from gender history and discourse analysis, the book restores the history of the women’s movements in East and West Germany. Entangled Emancipation ultimately explores the parallel processes through which East and West Germany reimagined, negotiated, and created new civil laws governing women’s rights after the Second World War.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject History of Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 1,0, Diplomatic Academy of Vienna - School of International Studies, language: English, abstract: The Second World War and its historical categorization remains a disputed topic within the German society. Still, the way of how Germans are rethinking their history is in a state of flux. While the question of collective and individual German guilt has attracted increased scientific and popular attention since the late 1960s, more precisely after the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, German intellectuals and the German media have in recent years turned their attention, again, towards German suffering during the war. This can be seen as a recourse within a new framework. Already in the immediate postwar period, Germans depicted themselves as victims of the war and its settlement. The preferred self-image was that of being first a victim of Hitler’s and then of enemies hands. Once again, though very late, Germans today consider their own countrymen as victims. In movies and books, they depict themselves and their ancestors not only as villains, but also as people who endured air bombing, starvation, and expulsion. This revived way of storytelling began around the new millennium and focused espe-cially on Germany’s civilian population. An important stimulus for Germany’s coming to terms with its past, or Vergangenheitsbewältigung, was once again triggered by Günter Grass, born in 1927 in Danzig, one of the country’s most popular and successful authors. Already as a member of the famous Group 47, he had – inter alia – initiated a new concept to rejuvenate German literature, particularly with his book The Tin Drum. He also contested a denial of civic responsibility and guilt in past and present, which he saw occurring in the consumerist-driven Bonn Republic. His first two books written in the new millennium, the novel Crab-walk, published in 2002, and his autobiographic work Peeling the Onion, released in 2006, were widely analyzed and sparked off a heated debate on both German guilt and German suffering. By using both books as a case study, this essay examines the main issues that were addressed by Grass and points out today’s situation of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung.