Conference at Le Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, Université de Montréal
Organized by Till van Rahden, Canada Research Chair for German and European Studies, Université de Montréal
In collaboration with Marcus Funck, The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, York University, the German General Consulate, Montréal, the Goethe-Institut, Montréal, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, University of Toronto, the Department of German Studies, McGill University, the Faculté des arts et des sciences and the Département de littératures et de langues modernes, Université de Montréal
In its obsessive quest for normality, the Federal Republic, which will turn 60 on May 23, 2009, is a strange country. While citizens of most countries pride themselves on being different, postwar Germans have longed for normality ever since 1949. More than anything they wished to be like everyone else, to blend into Socialist or Western modernity, to become invisible citizens of a post-national Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Not surprisingly, the search for normality turned out to be at once elusive and futile. Many turns in postwar German history reminded citizens of the elusiveness of normality and the peculiar place of their country within larger trajectories of Socialist and Western modernity. By opening up new avenues of research for the study of the largest country in postwar Europe, the conference encourages transatlantic reflections on the fate of democracy, the rule of law, and representative government since the caesura of World War II and the Holocaust and since the return of history with the end of the Cold War.
Whereas many studies explore the histories of West and East Germany within a framework of Americanization/Westernization or Sovietization, Liberalization or Democratization, this workshop seeks to explore the bizarre aspects of postwar German history. Postwar Germans’ peculiar desire to become “normal” call perhaps for methodologies and analytical approaches similar to those of scholars who explore stories of magic and miracles, of madness and mysticism, of monsters and saints to understand late medieval and early modern cultures in their ways of envisioning normality and enforcing norms. Not surprisingly, medievalists and early modernists have developed methodologies and narrative techniques that assign a key role to the “creative and disruptive presence of ‘the other’—the outsider, the stranger, the alien, the subversive, the radically different—in systems of power and thought” (Natalie Zemon Davis).
In light of such reflections, this conference brings together scholars whose work has provided transformative insights into postwar German history. It aims to spark intellectual exchanges and foster ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities, to diverse ways of belonging and being a citizen in the postwar Germanys. The very plenitude of sources that allow for an analysis of bizarre stories limits our audacity to do just that. The flipside of the seemingly inchoate and limitless abundance of documents and other remnants of German history since 1945 is the danger of capitulating before an opaque mass of facts. Participants are therefore encouraged to identify those episodes and periods of these six decades full of wonder that might impress us as “having a physiognomy of their own” (Siegfried Kracauer). Participants are invited to center their analysis on a single event or site, a concept or phrase, an illuminating anecdote or a biography that captures a peculiar aspect of these six decades full of wonder. The conference format therefore encourages presentations that are at once shrewd and witty, entertaining and to the point.
In paradoxical ways, reflections on postwar Germany’s six decades full of wonder may draw our attention to the strange and contingent, therefore inherently fragile foundations of democratic polities. The conference thus takes seriously recent interest in the “democratic miracle” that is postwar Germany. To explore postwar German history in light of larger questions on the contingent history and the inherently fragile nature of democracy as a way of life is critical to anyone interested in the future of representative government, the rule of law, and of the idea of a liberal polity. Participants are invited to explore how postwar Germans freed themselves from the experiences of mass murder and mass death, and how they came to embrace democracy as a way of life. The conference is less interested, in short, in revisiting the political effects of the “economic miracle” or of allied military and economic presence than in opening up new avenues for studying the unexpected and improbable “political miracle” of Germany’s “democratic moment.”
