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Anne Fuchs is professor of modern German literature and culture and Georg Grote is lecturer in German History, both at University College Dublin. Mary Cosgrove is lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh. THE ESSAYS Introduction: Germany’s Memory Contests and the Management of the Past Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory J. J. Long POSITIONS What Exactly Is Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Narrative and Its Insufficiency in Postwar Germany Peter Fritzsche ETHNICITY/HYBRIDITY Imagined Identities: Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors in Literature Dagmar C. G. Lorenz The Tinderbox of Memory: Generation and Masculinity in Väterliteratur by Cristoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leupold Anne Fuchs Telling It How It Wasn’t: Familial Allegories of Wish-Fulfillment in Postunification Germany Elizabeth Boa MEDIATIONS Being Translated: Exile, Childhood, and Multilingualism in G.-A. Goldschmidt and W. G. Sebald Stefan Willer “Ein Stück langweiliger als die Wehrmachtsausstellung, aber dafür repräsentativer”: The Exhibition Fotofeldpost as Riposte to the “Wehrmacht Exhibition” Chloe E. M. Paver German Crossroads: Visions of the Past in German Cinema after Reunification Matthias Fiedler Of Stories and Histories: Golem Figures in Post-1989 German and Austrian Culture Cathy S. Gelbin Multi-Ethnicity and Cultural Identity: Afro-German Women Writers’ Struggle for Identity in Postunification Germany Jennifer E. Michaels MEMORY POLITICS The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W. G. Sebald’s Work Mary Cosgrove Between “Restauration” and “Nierentisch”: The 1950s in Ludwig Harig, F. C. Delius, and Thomas Hettche Andrew Plowman On Forgetting and Remembering: The New Right since German Unification Roger Woods IS B N 1-57113-324-0 Camden House 668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com German Memory Contests A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur Anne Fuchs Edited by Fuchs, Cosgrove, and Grote THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN LITERATURE, Since unification in 1990, and particularly since the late 1990s, Germany has seen a boom in the confrontation with memory, evident in the sharp increase in novels, films, autobiographies, and other forms of public discourse that engage with the longterm effects of National Socialism across generations. Taking issue with the concept of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, which after 1945 guided nearly all debate on the topic, the contributors to this volume view contemporary German culture through the more dynamic concept of “memory contests,” which provides a circumspect view of German debates on the past, departing, as have recent German debates, from the tone of censorship that has so often accompanied these discussions. Instead, the idea of memory contests posits that all forms of memory, public or private, can be understood as ongoing processes of negotiating identity in the present.The idea also captures the intergenerational dynamic of the ongoing confrontation with memory in Germany today. Touching on gender, generations, memory and postmemory, trauma theory, ethnicity, historiography, and family narrative alongside many other topics, the contributions provide a comprehensive picture of current German memory debates, in so doing shedding light on the struggle to construct a German identity mindful of but not wholly defined by the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The volume will appeal to readers with a wide variety of academic interests, including cultural history, gender studies,