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The Burden of the Past - Martin Walser on Modern German Identity: Texts, Contexts, Commentary (Hardcover)
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The Burden of the Past - Martin Walser on Modern German Identity: Texts, Contexts, Commentary (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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