Years after the defeat of Nazism, some in Germany now feel that the Germans were the victims - not least of relentless attempts to remind them of past crimes. Aimed at students of German history, politics and culture, this book examines the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration and towards one on German suffering.

Nearly sixty years after the defeat of Nazism, some in Germany now feel that the Germans were the victims - not least of relentless attempts to remind them of past crimes. This is the first examination of the shift in the culture of memory away from a focus on German perpetration, and towards one on German suffering. Students of German history, politics and culture will find this contextualization of current victim discourse within a wider historical framework invaluable.

Notes on the Contributors - Maps - Introduction
B.Niven - The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany
R.G.Moeller - Victims in Uniform: West German Combat Movies from the 1950s
R.G.Moeller - Taboo or Tradition? The 'Germans as Victims' Theme in West Germany until the Early 1990s

R.Wittlinger - The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood
P.Cooke - The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the 'Historians' Dispute' to German Suffering
H.Schmitz - The GDR and Memory of the Bombing of Dresden
B.Niven - Victims of the Berlin Wall
P.Ahonen - The Victims of Totalitarianism and the Centrality of Nazi Genocide: Continuity and Change in German Commemorative Politics
A.H.Beattie - Representations of German Wartime Suffering in Recent Fiction
S.Taberner - Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad
A.Huyssen - From the Margins to
the Centre? The Discourse on Expellees and Victimhood in Germany
K.von Oppen &
S.Wolff - On Taboos, Traumas and Other Myths: Why the Debate About German Victims of the Second World War is not a Historians' Controversy
S.Berger - Chronology of Victimhood - Select Bibliography - Index