Title: The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-68 by Hannah Schissler (review)
Abstract: MLR, 99.2, 2004 545 (pp. 139-40). The internment chapter also includes a poignant account of cultural and intellectual life in the camps (pp. 141-44). What Hitler lost and Britain gained in the sense of the cultural impact of refugees from Nazism on Britain has been examined in two recent works, Tom Ambrose's Hitler'sLoss (London: Peter Owen, 2001) and Daniel Snowman's The Hitler Emigres (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). The latter is partly based on a number of in-depth interviews. But Changing Countries, an invaluable and deeply moving book about less well-known people, adds a great deal to our perception of those who have 'not yet received the full recognition they deserve' (p. vii). Technische Universitat Darmstadt Deborah Vietor-Englander The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, ig4g-68. Ed. by Hannah Schissler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2001. 498 pp. ?15.95. ISBN 0-691-05820-2 (pbk). A review of the firstproduction of Peter Handke's Publikumsbeschimpfungin 1966 noted that the author sported a hair-do like the Beatles. Handke himself, in his instructions to performers, encouraged them to study Gary Cooper, the Rolling Stones, church liturgy, and football chants. The cultural provocations of the 1960s were no longer played out solely in aesthetic terms, but drew on and reworked a wide range of practices in their attempt to find responses appropriate to the present. For the cultural historian, the task of reconstructing the context with which texts interacted is a daunting one, since the mass of relevant information is potentially endless as soon as one pushes beyond a narrowly literary reading. Hannah Schissler's compendium on post-war West Germany is an invaluable aid to this task. It draws together a wide range of essays in social, economic, gender, film,literary,and political history to offer an overview not only of the 1960s, the cultural life of which everyone knows to have been vibrant, but also of the 1950s, otherwise considered to be 'dull and dormant'. The twenty essays successfully combine archival research with theoretically informed approaches, offering interesting individual insights, but also a sense of their poten? tially wider significance. In particular, three points emerge from the broad range of material to qualify prevailing views of 1950s West Germany, and, at the same time, to deepen an under? standing of the process of cultural mourning of which the society of the fledgling Federal Republic is a major example. The common theme behind the three points is that of unexpected continuities between the 1950s and the 1960s. The firstpoint is that what appeared to some commentators to be conservatism and a lack of interest in politics or history was arguably part of the process of psychological repair which prepared the way forthe more direct recollection undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. In his study of attitudes to rearmament in the 1950s, Michael Geyer suggests that the lack of enthusiasm for the new Republic shown by opinion polls, and the associated pursuit of private well-being, allowed individuals to repair and reassert their identity in relation to the power of the state. 'Civic egotism' then appears as a necessary form of psychological recovery, rather than being simply the strategy for escaping the past that Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich diagnosed in Die Unfdhigkeitzu trauern (1967). The tendency in the 1950s, discussed by Elizabeth Heinemann, Frank Biess, and Robert G. Moeller, to remember selectively those aspects ofthe war which show Germans as victims (of bombing, ofatrocities committed by the advancing Red Army) can similarly be read as part of this process of recovery. The second point to emerge is that the generation born in the 1940s that rebelled against their parents in the 1960s were not as unencumbered by the legacy of the past as they understood themselves 546 Reviews to be. As Dorothee Wierling argues, the children born in the 1940s, particularly in West Germany after the currency reform of 1948, were shaped by their parents' desires for innocence and a break with the past. They represented the nation that had created its success out of nothing. At the same time, this generation was formed by what its parents would not...
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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