The Management of Damaged Identity: Guilt and Shame in Postwar German Culture

Harvard FAS

This course will explore different ways in which postwar German writers and film makers reckoned with the disastrous legacy of the Third Reich. We will probe a variety of perspectives employed to deal with a shame-ridden past as well as the numerous difficulties encountered in confronting the experiences of National Socialism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Our discussions will consider seminal examples from a half-century's profusion of retrospective readings, works that…