Born After: Reckoning with the German Past - Paperback

by Angelika Bammer (Author), Esther Rashkin (Editor), Mari Ruti (Editor)

A 2020 Prose Award Finalist

What do we do with pasts we inherit that carry shame? A major and original contribution to thinking about and grappling with the legacies of German and Nazi history, this book reflects on the relationship between history and memory through the personal narrative of a postwar German intellectual. Arguing that the pasts that haunt usare shaped both by the things people did and suffered and the affective traces the past leaves in memory, Born After is a powerful meditation on questions of guilt, complicity, loss, and longing. With bracing honesty and without sentimentality, Bammer draws on her own family story to think anew about a history that we have come to accept as familiar. Inflecting questions about history with questions about ethics, her book speaks to all those concerned with historical pasts that remain unreconciled.

Author Biography

Angelika Bammer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA. She is the author of Partial Visions: Feminism and Utopianism in the 1970s (revised edition, 2015; 1st edition, 1991), and the editor of The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions (2015) and Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (1994).