Life after death : approaches to a cultural and social history during the 1940s and 1950s / edited by Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Violence, normality, and the construction of postwar Europe / Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann -- Post-traumatic stress disorder and World War II: can a psychiatric concept help us understand postwar society? / Alice Förster, Birgit Beck -- Between pain and silence: remembering the victims of violence in Germany after 1949 / Sabine Behrenbeck -- Paths of normalization after the persecution of the Jews: the Netherlands, France and West Germany in the 1950s / Ido de Haan -- Trauma, memory, and motherhood: Germans and Jewish displaced persons in post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1949 / Atina Grossmann -- Memory and the narrative of rape in Budapest and Vienna in 1945 / Andrea Petö -- "Going home": the personal adjustment of British and American servicemen after the war / Joanna Bourke -- Desperately seeking normality: sex and marriage in the wake of the war / Dagmar Herzog -- Family life and "normality" in postwar British culture / Pat Thane -- Continuities and discontinuities of consumer mentality in West Germany in the 1950s / Michael Wildt -- "Strengthened and purified through ordeal by fire": ecclesiastical triumphalism in the ruins of Europe / Damion Van Melis -- The nationalization of victimhood: selective violence and national grief in western Europe, 1940-1960 / Pieter Lagrou -- Italy after fascism: the predicament of dominant narratives / Donald Sassoon -- The politics of post-fascist aesthetics: 1950s West and East German industrial design / Paul Betts -- Dissonance, normality, and the historical method: why did some Germans think of tourism after May 8, 1945? / Alon Confino.

Print version record.

This collection of essays offers a novel approach to the cultural and social history of Europe after the Second World War. In a shift of perspective, it does not conceive of the impressive economic and political stability of the postwar era as a quasi-natural return to previous patterns of societal development but approaches it as an attempt to establish 'normality' upon the lingering memories of experiencing violence on a hitherto unprecedented scale. It views the relationship of the violence of the 1940s to the apparent 'normality' and stability of the 1950s as a key to understanding the history of post-war Europe. While the history of post-war Germany naturally looms large in this collection, the essays deal with countries across Western and Central Europe, offer comparative perspectives on their subjects, and draw upon a wide range of primary and secondary source material.

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