The emotional heritage of postwar Germany: The transgenerational transmission of a guilt conflict

Author(s):  
Susanne Schade
Author(s):  
Diane Orentlicher

The span of an international tribunal’s local impact is not the same as its operational life, as Germany’s evolved relationship with Nuremberg highlights. Recognizing that the ICTY’s impact in Bosnia and Serbia will continue to evolve after the Tribunal ends its work, this chapter considers the Tribunal’s future impact, focusing in particular on its potential to stimulate a future reckoning with Serbia’s wartime past. While recognizing myriad differences between post-Milošević Serbia and postwar Germany, this chapter explores factors behind the latter’s eventual emergence as a “model penitent” long after German society rejected the moral message the Allies hoped Nuremberg would impart. It suggests that, after an extended period of “transitional denial,” Nuremberg may have contributed to Germany’s far-reaching reckoning with the past through a process of delayed norm diffusion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Martin Schieder

Abstract When in 1955/1956, for the first time in divided postwar Germany, a major Picasso exhibition took place in Munich, Cologne, and Hamburg, it came to be a cultural event that reached and emotionalized the German audience, media, and sciences to an unprecedented extent. The exhibition Picasso 1900 – 1955 contributed significantly to the popularization of Picasso at all levels of society and gave the German people access to modern art on a much wider scale than the first documenta held concurrently in Kassel. The undisputed eye-catcher of that spectacular exhibit was Guernica, on display in Germany for the first and only time. Its controversial reception reveals that at that time there was no intention to see the work in Germany in a memorial relationship with Germany’s own historical responsibility. Thus it virtually functioned as a symbol for a collective amnesia of the West German postwar society, whereas the socialist East of the Republic stylized the painting into an anti-fascist icon.


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