Suchergebnisse

TheGerman preoccupation with the Nazi past, with issues of guilt, responsibility, and victimization "… doesn't end. Never will it end," to quote the resigned note on which Günter Grass concluded his latest novel,Crabwalk. It manifests itself in ever new forms, as different parts of the past, which may or may not have been repressed, come to the fore and are painfully reconstructed, tentatively probed, and reluctantly and often only partially accepted. Each new perspective on the past reorders, sometimes even shatters, the previous mosaic. Recall the impact of the filmHolocaustor of the Wehrmacht exhibition. A similar phenomenon is now occurring—or so some hope and others fear. Since 2002 German suffering, rather than German guilt, has become the principal theme in discourses about the past. The firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the sinking of theWilhelm Gustloff, "moral bombing," mass rape, and ethnic cleansing dominate historical and literary production and public debate as the Eastern Front, war crimes, and the pervasive knowledge of the Holocaust did in the mid- and late-1990s, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its central place within the Third Reich did a decade before that.

I read the first pages of Ira Katznelson's provocative essay with enthusiasm and sympathy. While acknowledging that much interesting and valuable work is being done in the field of working-class history, he accurately pointed to a crisis that is at once political, theoretical, and methodological. He rightly urged us to refuse the currently fashionable alternatives: structure/agency, materialism/discourse, reality/signification, economy/culture.He wisely warned against any easy elision or conflation of these alternatives, favoring instead an exploration of their contradictions and disjunctures. But as I read on to his diagnosis of the ills besetting the field I became uneasy, fearing that while he had recognized some symptoms, he had ignored other, very prominent ones. And when I read his prescription —a labor history that centered on state-focused politics, institutions, and the law—I feared the patient might never recover.