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The Burden of the Past
Thomas Kovach
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Description for The Burden of the Past
Hardcover.
English translation, analysis, and contextualization of Walser's notorious but little-examined Peace-Prize speech and related writings. The German novelist Martin Walser's 1998 speech upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade remains a milestone in recent German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. The day after the speech, Ignatz Bubis, leader of Germany's Jewish community, attacked Walser for inciting dangerous right-wing sentiment with controversial passages including the notorious statement "Auschwitz is not suited to be a moral bludgeon," thus igniting the protracted public battle of opinions known as the "Walser-Bubis Debate." The speech continues to loom large in Germany's struggle to acknowledge responsibility for Nazi crimes yet escape a suffocating burden of remembrance. But in spiteof its notoriety, little attention has been paid to what the speech actually says, as opposed to the public outcry and debate that followed it. This book presents the text of the speech, along with several of Walser's other essays and speeches about the Holocaust and its impact on German identity, in English translation. It examines them as texts, a process that involves a discussion of literary complexities and an attempt to distinguish valid criticism of German intellectual life from what is justifiably problematic. And it places this textual examination in the context of Walser's and other postwar German intellectuals' attempts to deal with the Nazi past, of German-Jewish relations in the postwar era, and of the once hidden and now -- due in part to Walser's speech -- increasingly open discourse about Germans as victims during and immediately after the Nazi era. Thomas A. Kovach is Professorof German Studies at the University of Arizona.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2008
Publisher
Boydell & Brewer Ltd United States
Number of pages
153
Condition
New
Number of Pages
153
Place of Publication
Columbia, MD, United States
ISBN
9781571133687
SKU
V9781571133687
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About Thomas Kovach
THOMAS KOVACH Head of Department of German Studies, University of Arizona.
Reviews for The Burden of the Past
[T]he 80-year old Walser has been identified as Germany's leading spokesman for the 'enough already' intellectual position that Germany has absorbed enough guilt over the Holocaust.. This volume offers Kovach's translations of Walser's explosive acceptance speech when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1998) and of several of Walser's earlier speeches.. Especially valuable to those who do not read German, this is an elegant companion to studies of post-WW II Germany's struggle to deal with its past.
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