"Fliegeropfer": German Memorials to the Victims of Allied Bombing
The paper will be presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Culture Association and prepared for eventual publication as an article or book.
There is extensive literature on the air war over Europe and the bombing of German cities and extensive literature on German collective memory, including titles that address German narratives of victimhood and suffering. There is also an extensive literature on war memorials. There is very little about the memorials to the bombing victims in Germany, however, and their place in larger scheme of German collective memory. This study will visit selected memorial sites and put them into the context of these other studies.
The sites chosen will be primarily from cities which were destroyed in large-scale raids with several thousand deaths in a short period of time (Dresden, Hamburg, Darmstadt, Pforzheim). But other locations will also be included (Karlsruhe, Schweinfurt, Dortmund) as well. Each memorial location is a spatial, artistic representation of the catastrophe that befell the city and hence, a spatial, local context. They reflect local memorial purposes and needs. But these places also relate to larger, national narratives and political and historical discussions of German war memory and suffering. I will test each site chosen for its place in local and national contexts. Thus, the paper does not, at least at this stage, have a central thesis. Instead, it will illustrate how memorial sites - the places where the bodies are buried and commemorations take place - and their use fit into larger trends in German postwar culture on the local and national levels.
Most of these sites have already been visited and photographed. Some of the sites have already been published in the sites-of-memory.de section on air raid memorials.
The image shows the memorial to the almost 80 children killed in the deadliest air raid of World War One, an Anglo-French raid on Karlsruhe in 1916. Click on the image to visit the site.
