From Books Cover: Gunter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now. In this new novel Grass examines a subject that has long been taboo - the suffering of Germans during World War II. It is the story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former cruise ship turned refugee carrier, by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people, most of them women and children fleeing from the advancing Red Army went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Grass's narrator is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who live in Berlin. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke tries to piece together the tragic events. While his mother Tulla sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been more normal, less touched by the past. For his teenage son Konrad, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corner of the internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect based discourses of trauma, shame and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.

The book consists of 16 case-studies on issues relating to memory, the majority of which stem from a conference in April 2005 at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Public memory is tackled from a variety of angles and various disciplines, ranging across the humanities, the social sciences and the exact sciences. First and foremost the reader will obtain a comprehensive overview of the results of scholarship published in recent years about public memory. Second, the book provides a profound insight into how public memory works within societies of different nature and at different junctures of their histories. The volume begins by offering a glimpse into individual memory, and then goes on to discuss religious societies, ethnic groups, secular groups, institutions and larger segments of society, ultimately reaching the nation state. The authors, each in his or her own discipline, have addressed the complexities involved in the creation of public memory, the media that promote and preserve it within groups and societies, and finally the nature of memory and how it «behaves» during changing circumstances and changing regimes.

When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity. Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow.

Now available in paperback, this is a uniquely authoritative study of Germany from the mid-18th century to the formation of the Bismarckian Reich.

Germany and the United States entered the post-9/11 era as allies, but they will leave it as partners of convenience—or even possibly as rivals. The first comprehensive examination of the German-American relationship written since the invasion of Iraq, Parting Ways is indispensable for those seeking to chart the future course of the transatlantic alliance. In early 2003, it became apparent that many nations, including close allies of the United States, would not participate in the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq. Despite the high-profile tension between the United States and France, some of the most bitter opposition came from Germany, marking the end not only of the German-American "special relationship," but also of the broader transatlantic relationship's preeminence in Western strategic thought. Drawing on extensive research and personal interviews with decisionmakers and informed observers in both the United States and Germany, Stephen F. Szabo frames the clash between Gerhard Schröder and George W. Bush over U.S. policy in Iraq in the context of the larger changes shaping the relationship between the two countries. Szabo considers such longer-term factors as the decreasing strategic importance of the U.S.-German relationship for each nation in the post-cold war era, the emergence of a new German identity within Germany itself, and a U.S. foreign policy led by what is arguably the most ideological administration of the post-World War II era.

Germany is the most important and powerful country in Europe. And yet it remains strangely little understood - by itself, as much as by the rest of the world. It is in a state of remarkable flux, confronting the demons of the past, whilst also seeking to make the West and the East into one country - a much greater challenge than it seemed. The coming enlargement of the European Union, which will bring much of formerly communist Eastern Europe into the EU, will make Germany more pivotal than ever. So what makes this country tick? For decades after the Second World War, the country remained strongly polluted by the Nazi legacy; there was little attempt to confront the past. For today's younger generation, by contrast, Nazism was a weird aberration that they themselves have difficulty in understanding. The book will explore those changes, and how German society itself is still in the midst of enormous change. The story takes us through three periods: Before the Poison (pre-1933), The Poison (1933-45) and - the heart of the book - the period of Coming to Terms, and the changes that this period has brought to the shape of the country. The coming to terms with the past overlaps, from 1990 onwards, with the East-West story, where mutual misunderstanding has been rife.

Highly regarded for its concise clarification of the complexities of World War II, this book illuminates the origins, course, and long-range effects of the war. It provides a balanced account that analyzes both the European and Pacific theaters of operations and the connections between them. The Fifth Edition incorporates new material based on the latest scholarship, offering updated conclusions on key topics and expanded coverage throughout.

An investigation of attitudes toward -- and unease with -- Information Technology, as reflected in recent German-language literature. Despite our embrace of the sheer utility and productivity it has made possible, the revolution in Information Technology has led to unease about its possible misuse, abuse, and even its eventual domination of humankind. That German culture is not immune to this sense of disquiet is reflected in a broad variety of German-language fiction since the 1940s. This first study of the literary reception of IT in German-speaking lands begins with an analysis of a seminal novel from the beginning of the computer age, Heinrich Hauser's Gigant Hirn (1948), then moves to its primary focus, the literature of the past two decades, ranging from Gerd Heidenreich's Die Nacht der Händler (1995) to Daniel Glattauer's novel Gut gegen Nordwind (2006). Along the way, it analyzes eleven works, including Barbara Frischmuth's novel Die Schrift des Freundes (1998), René Pollesch's drama world wide web-slums (2001), and Günter Grass's novella Im Krebsgang (2003). As wildly different in approach as these works are, each has much to offer this investigation of the imaginary border dividing the human from the technological, a lingering, centuries-old construct created to ease the anxiety that technology has given rise to throughout the ages. Paul A. Youngman is Associate Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Charlotteand Director of the Center for Humanities, Technology, and Science.

Osteoporosis and related fracture are serious problems for adults--and the best protection against bone loss later in life is to achieve optimal bone strength during childhood and adolescence. As a teacher or recreation leader, you have the opportunity to enhance children's bone health and muscle strength by using the evidence-based programs and activities provided in Building Strong Bones & Muscles.The book offers practical games and activities that are -research based so you know recreational or PE time is spent on effective, health-promoting activities; -classroom tested to ensure the activities are not only worthwhile but also fun for children; -easy to implement by the general classroom teacher or other leader because they use commonly available physical activity equipment or no equipment at all; -fully illustrated to make the games and activities easy to implement with minimal preparation with the use of reproducible task cards; and -appropriate in a variety of settings, with activities and teaching techniques for three developmental levels, multiple cross-curricular connections, and activity variations. The book presents a variety of ideas for circuits and stations, games, gymnastics, dance, and supplemental activities. You'll also find these features: -Cross-curricular worksheets and reproducibles -Assessment tools · -Achievement recognition and motivation tools that make it easy to implement the activities effectively In as little as 10 minutes a day, three times a week, the preventive measures in Building Strong Bones & Musclescan help your students achieve optimal bone health and muscle strength and decrease their risk of developing osteoporosis.