Preface and Acknowledgments

Summary

THIS ANTHOLOGY IS THE FRUIT of a three-year collaboration that grew out of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), “From Perpetrators to Victims? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present.” The editors first discussed the rewriting of postwar German film history over beers in Berlin in summer 2006. We invited a trans-Atlantic group of interested colleagues to join us in June 2007 at the University of Leeds for a daylong brainstorming session, where we discussed the project and agreed on preliminary topics. Using a coauthored position paper, we challenged the participants to submit detailed abstracts that were then refined and coordinated over the next half year. Drafts of the essays were presented in November 2008 at the forty-first Wisconsin Workshop in Madison, and based on discussions and feedback from the encounter, the present volume took shape with the goal of exploring ways in which film has contributed to postwar “memory work” in Germany. Along with the AHRC, the editors wish to thank the British Academy, the Worldwide Universities Network, the University of Wisconsin Department of German, the University of Leeds School of Modern Languages, the University of Wisconsin Center for German and European Studies, and the Max Kade Foundation (New York City) for their generous funding of the project. We also are grateful for the careful readings of the manuscripts by two anonymous readers as well as for the support and input from our editor at Camden House publishers, Jim Walker.