ABSTRACT
What are the effects of Nazism on contemporary German culture? Can we uncover traces of past concerns with blood, race, and hygiene outside the symbolic universe of postwar national identity? How is the past, specifically the murder of Jews, configured in the imagination, language, and metaphors of a postwar generation that is firmly committed to the restoration of a democratic society? Or is the social world after 1945 in fact “the same world that produced (and keeps producing) genocide” (Bartov 1998:75), a claim perhaps supported by the overt manifestations of paranoia, anxiety, and hysteria, and the intense brutality that accompanied public representations of immigrants as racial threats before and after German unification. The reality of the Holocaust, the underlying discourse on enemies and victims, and its effects on German perceptions of history and nationhood can be viewed as among the most critical issues of this century. It is a vast topic, and I do not presume to cover it in its entirety. Rather, in the context of this chapter, I am concerned with several closely related matters: postwar German perceptions of self, and German attitudes toward Nazis and Jews. My discussion is focused on everyday forms of representation, which, as we will see, reveal an obsessive preoccupation with the fracture and violation of the body.
