UCL DEPARTMENT OF GERMAN

AHRC-funded project:

Reverberations of War: Communities of Experience and Identification in Germany and Europe since 1945

Principal Investigator: Mary Fulbrook
Co-Investigator: Stephanie Bird
Research Fellows: Julia Wagner, Christiane Wienand

This project analyses reverberations of the Second World War across Europe through the Cold War and beyond, shedding new light on the complex legacies of war for generations of Europeans, and, through coordinated in-depth studies, developing a new theoretical approach. It is supported by a 44-month grant from the AHRC of £729,928.00 plus two PhD studentships over three years (providing fees and maintenance for UK students or fees only for EU students who do not fulfil the UK residence requirements).

The project challenges approaches couched in terms of ‘collective memory’ or ‘communities of remembrance’, exploring instead the relationships between ‘communities of experience’ and later ‘communities of identification’, which may not be closely related to communities of origin. It focuses on a selection of inter-related themes which intrinsically connect a later present to a difficult past: reckoning, reconciliation, reconstruction and 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 involvement of literary scholars as well as historians in a collaborative, inter-disciplinary team.

• Further information on this project

Past Research Projects have resulted in the following publications:

Un-civilising Processes: Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture, ed. Mary Fulbrook (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

Controversial notions of a ‘German national identity’, a ‘German character’, or even ‘ordinary Germans’, have long been bandied about in both public and scholarly debate. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, engagement with the question of ‘German-ness’ is linked with ambitious attempts to work out the relations between broad historical processes – changing social structures, patterns of state formation, the emergence of ‘modernity’ - and changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment, conceptions of politeness and notions of the modern self. The work of Norbert Elias has proved seminal for scholars working in early modern history, and has attracted (rather more limited) attention among those working on modern culture and society. But the strands of the debates on Elias, which range across disciplinary boundaries, have rarely been brought together with a re-examination of changing patterns of the German self and conceptions of appropriate behaviour under different socio-political contexts from the medieval period to the present.

This volume seeks to address some of the key issues involved in both sets of debates by looking at metaphorical boundaries, moments when accepted norms are transgressed: at moments of excess, of discipline or of the development and internalisation of new norms. With contributions by experts from a range of disciplinary backgrounds – from sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and literary analysis to political science, sociology and history – Un-civilising Processes challenges evolutionary notions of the ‘civilising process’ and seeks to explore in more detail, by means of in-depth analysis of transgressive moments and cultural constructions and representations of ‘excess’ and ‘ transgression’, the ways in which conceptions of personality, ‘ appropriate’ behaviour, the sense of a particular type of ‘self’, and social and political context are inter-related across the long sweep of German history.

Table of Contents
Mary FULBROOK: Introduction: The Character and Limits of the Civilizing Process
Sebastian COXON: Laughter and the Process of Civilization in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival
Geraldine HORAN: (Un-)Civilized Language: The Regulation of Cursing and Swearing in German through the Ages
Martin SWALES: Civilization, Un-Civilization, Transgression: On Goethe’s Faust
Susanne KORD: The Pre-Colonial Imagination: Race and Revolution in Literature of the Napoleonic Period
Mark HEWITSON: Violence and Civilization: Transgression in Modern Wars
Ernest SCHONFIELD: Civilization in the Dining Room: Table Manners in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks
Maiken UMBACH: The Civilizing Process and the Construction of the Bourgeois Self: Music Chambers in Wilhelmine Germany
Stephanie BIRD: Norbert Elias, the Confusions of Törleß and the Ethics of Shamelessness
Mererid Puw DAVIES: Bodily Issues: The West German Anti-Authoritarian Movement and the Semiotics of Dirt
Mary FULBROOK: Changing States, Changing Selves: Generations in the Third Reich and the GDR

Representing the German Nation, ed. Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales (Manchester: MUP, 2000) This volume, which contains contributions from members of the department and from colleagues in other universities, addresses the issue of representation and identity at several levels. The case of modern Germany - with its dramatic political ruptures from the short-lived and deeply rivenWeimar democracy, through the depths of the Nazi dictatorship, to the extraordinary experiment of two opposing German states, each with its own attempt to re-appropriate and reinterpret a common past, up to the equally unparalleled experiment of reunification in 1990 - provides a superb case study. Political, cultural and historical discourses have intermingled in a maelstrom of identity construction and reconstruction over the course of the turbulent twentieth century.

Through in-depth analysis of a select range of topics treated in the light of a common set of theoretical questions, we seek in this volume to bring together a range of perspectives on these debates. Covering modes of representation as diverse as popular guidebooks and architecture, novels, music, film, drama, and the writings of professional historians, the chapters of the book grapple with issues which have often been treated separately, or only brought together in the abstract discourse of theoretical debates.