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No description available.

published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

This research has two objectives. The first objective is to analyze how former combatants of World War II now present the 'facts' of that struggle to their current student population. To accomplish this, eight secondary school history textbooks were selected with the assistance of the International Textbook Institute in Braunschweig, Federal Republic of Germany. The chosen texts are from The United States, England, Italy, West Germany, The Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. The six non-English textbooks were literally translated into English. The second objective is to create comparative education research methodologies that are compatable with the incipient power of microcomputers. The 92,707 words in the bodies of the textbooks are submitted to six analytic techniques to assess the nature of the information within them. The first three techniques are 'time-centered', and the last three are 'event-oriented'. All of the six techniques are structured as ad interim algorithms that are imposed onto a generic 'electronic calculating sheet' software program for microcomputers. All appendices included in this study are data outputs from the computer program. This research suggests certain conclusions. First, that the specific affiliation of selected countries during World War II is not significant in the presentation of the 'facts' in their textbooks; whereas, the present affiliation (Nato/Warsaw Pact) is significant. Second, the communist texts are, relative to the Western texts, quite political; however, the Western texts are generally academically less rigorous. Third, all of the selected texts tend to be ethnocentric by selecting and avoiding 'facts', and ignoring some of their negative behaviors in the struggle.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, public discourse in German society has been repeatedly riven by debates prompted by three leading figures of the literary scene: Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Christa Wolf. The tremendously emotional controversies regarding Wolf's purported cowardice as a GDR-writer, Walser's alleged anti-Semitism, and Grass's membership in the Waffen-SS served to confirm the significance of these writers, which, I argue, stems not only from their literary merits, but also from their status as former members of the Hitler Youth. Building upon Sigrid Weigel's claim that generations in post-war Germany act as symbols of the country's relationship to the Nazi past, my dissertation elucidates the process by which Grass, Walser, and Wolf were adopted--and adopted themselves--as proxies for a "better Germany." The biographies of these three writers, I argue, came to represent the overarching political goal of both post-war German states: the successful transition from an intimate association with the Nazi regime - in the authors' case, their associations with the Hitler Youth - to a full embrace of democratic values. The conflation of the writers' biographies with national identity explains their authority and popularity in both German societies. It also explains why the process of detachment from these writers as political figures began after 1990 as national identity changed after reunification. With the waning of the Hitler Youth generation's dominance in the public sphere, a re-evaluation of the writers' political and literary work, set against the backdrop of their generational identity, is long overdue. In four chapters, this dissertation examines key moments in the careers of Grass, Walser, and Wolf. I emphasize the striking similarities between the generational discourse of the two West-German writers and the East-German writer, while pointing out where their shared generational background led to distinct political agendas. I show that the literary output, self-understanding, and public reception of arguably the three most significant writers in the post-war Germanies cannot be understood without a consideration of this mutual historical-biographical legacy. My dissertation thus rewrites an important part of post-1945 and post-1989 cultural history.

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University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Fachbereich Philosophie- und Sozialwissenschaften--Universität Hamburg, 1996. / Bibliogr. p. 423-462. Index.

Diss.--Freie Universität--Berlin, 2000. / Notes bibliogr. p. 307-317 (vol. 2). Index.

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Universität Konstanz, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 548-556. Index.