Chloe E. M. Paver Books

This book is the first full-length study of the museum object as a memory medium in history exhibitions about the Nazi era, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Over recent decades, German and Austrian exhibition-makers have engaged in significant programmes of object collection, often in collaboration with witnesses and descendants. At the same time, exhibition-makers have come to recognise the degree to which the National Socialist era was experienced materially, through the loss, acquisition, imposition, destruction, and re-purposing of objects. In the decades after 1945, encounters with material culture from the Nazi past continued, both within the family and in the public sphere. In analysing how these material engagements are explored in the museum, the book not only illuminates a key aspect of German and Austrian cultural memory but contributes to wider debates about relationships between the human and object worlds.

This book examines the ways in which the Third Reich is represented in recent German and Austrian novels and films. It also examines other aspects of the commemoration of the Third Reich. It covers a wide range of genres, media, and issues, including documentary, gender, the linguistic politics of cinema, photography, memorials, and museums.

This book investigates the fictions and fantasies invented by five narrators, examining the purpose which the fictions serve within each text and the means by which each author deliberately draws attention to them. All five authors are shown to be concerned with the kinds of stories which ordinary people tell about themselves and their past lives. This is the first major study of this distinctive trend in post-war German fiction.