This volume extends the theoretical scope of the important concept of empathy by analysing not only the cultural contexts that foster the generating of empathy, but in focusing also on the limits of pro-social feelings and the mechanisms that lead to its blocking.

Interdisciplinary views of the debates over and transformation of German cultural identity since unification. The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and the wider public engaged in "memory contests" over such questions as the legitimacy of alternative biographies, West German hegemony, and the normalization of German history. This dynamic, contested, and still ongoing transformation of German cultural identity is the topic of this volume of new essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. It exploresGerman cultural identity by way of a range of disciplines including history, film studies, architectural history, literary criticism, memory studies, and anthropology, avoiding a homogenized interpretation. Charting the complex and often contradictory processes of cultural identity formation, the volume reveals the varied responses that continue to accompany the project of unification. Contributors: Pertti Ahonen, Aleida Assmann, Elizabeth Boa,Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Deniz Goekturk, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anja K. Johannsen, Jennifer A. Jordan, Jurgen Paul, Linda Shortt, Andrew J. Webber. Anne Fuchs is Professor of German Literature at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Linda Shortt is Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales.

We have left the twentieth century, but this century of violence and extremes has not left us: Its shadow has become longer and blacker. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of the Holocaust is less and less anchored in the lived experience of survivors and witnesses. Shadows of Trauma analyzes the transformation of the past from an individual experience to a collective construction, with special attention to the tensions that arise when personal experience collides with official commemoration. In addition to surveying memory's important terms and distinctions, Assmann traces the process that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of creating a new German memory of the Holocaust. Assmann revisits the pitfalls of "false memory" and lingering forms of denial and repression, as well as the new twenty-first-century discourses, such as that of German "victimhood," as well as the new memory sites for a future in which German memory will be increasingly oriented toward a European context. Combining theoretical analysis with historical case studies, the book revisits crucial debates and controversial issues out of which "memory culture" has emerged as a collective project and a work in progress.

Cultures invest great efforts into creating a long-term memory on the basis of oral transmission, media technology, and institutional frameworks. This book provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, focusing on the arts of its construction, particularly various media such as writing, images, bodily practices, places, and monuments. Examining the period from the European Renaissance to the present, Aleida Assmann reveals the close association between cultural memory and the arts, arguing that the artists who have supplemented, criticized, transformed, and opposed it are its most lucid theorists and acute observers. Her analysis also addresses the interaction of cultural memory with individual memory and the ways in which cultural memory supports or subverts social and political identity constructions. Ultimately, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the history, forms, and functions of cultural memory, which has become a central analytical tool for scholars across disciplines.

Cultures invest great efforts into creating a long-term memory on the basis of oral transmission, media technology, and institutional frameworks. This book provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, focusing on the arts of its construction, particularly various media such as writing, images, bodily practices, places, and monuments. Examining the period from the European Renaissance to the present, Aleida Assmann reveals the close association between cultural memory and the arts, arguing that the artists who have supplemented, criticized, transformed, and opposed it are its most lucid theorists and acute observers. Her analysis also addresses the interaction of cultural memory with individual memory and the ways in which cultural memory supports or subverts social and political identity constructions. Ultimately, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the history, forms, and functions of cultural memory, which has become a central analytical tool for scholars across disciplines."

We have left the twentieth century, but this century of violence and extremes has not left us: Its shadow has become longer and blacker. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of the Holocaust is less and less anchored in the lived experience of survivors and witnesses. Shadows of Trauma analyzes the transformation of the past from an individual experience to a collective construction, with special attention to the tensions that arise when personal experience collides with official commemoration. In addition to surveying memory’s important terms and distinctions, Assmann traces the process that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of creating a new German memory of the Holocaust. Assmann revisits the pitfalls of “false memory” and lingering forms of denial and repression, as well as the new twenty-first-century discourses, such as that of German “victimhood,” as well as the new memory sites for a future in which German memory will be increasingly oriented toward a European context. Combining theoretical analysis with historical case studies, the book revisits crucial debates and controversial issues out of which “memory culture” has emerged as a collective project and a work in progress.

Is, as Hamlet once complained, time out joint? Have the ways we understand the past and the future—and their relationship to the present—been reordered? The past, it seems, has returned with a vengeance: as aggressive nostalgia, as traumatic memory, or as atavistic origin narratives rooted in nation, race, or tribe. The future, meanwhile, has lost its utopian glamor, with the belief in progress and hope for a better future eroded by fears of ecological collapse. In this provocative book, Aleida Assmann argues that the apparently solid moorings of our temporal orientation have collapsed within the span of a generation. To understand this profound cultural crisis, she reconstructs the rise and fall of what she calls "time regime of modernity" that underpins notions of modernization and progress, a shared understanding that is now under threat. Is Time Out of Joint? assesses the deep change in the temporality of modern Western culture as it relates to our historical experience, historical theory, and our life-world of shared experience, explaining what we have both gained and lost during this profound transformation.

In Paris Calligrammes the filmmaker, photographer and collector of worlds Ulrike Ottinger links historical archival material with her own art and film works to create a sociogram of the era in which she came of age as an artist. In the grip of political upheavals, Paris of the 1960s attracted artists from all over the world and was a pulsating stream of energy hovering between trauma management and the utopia of Europe. From the Librairie Calligrammes, a meeting place of exiled German intellectuals, to the Cinematheque francaise, which sparked her love of film, Ulrike Ottinger charts a city and its utopias. They live on in her collaged landscape of memories in a workshop exhibition complimenting her film Paris Calligrammes (2019). Ulrike Ottinger's (*1942 Konstanz, Germany) films were shown at the most important international festivals and honored at various major museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With her photographs she was represented at the documenta and the Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition: HKW, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 23.8-13.10.2019