THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME show the different ways in which cultural production in Germany and Austria engages with contemporary politics. In their discussions of literature, film, theater, and art, they consider a number of interrelated topoi that are both political and subject to politicization: identity, memory, language, nationalism, Europe, transculturalism, globalization, and migration. They highlight how the relationship between culture and politics is marked by the movements and tensions between the national and the European, the local and the global, that define Germany and Austria today. While the eurozone crisis and Brexit have polarized opinion on the European Union and soured relations between European neighbors, both the belief in and abandonment of the European project as postwar legacy are shaped as much by events triggered beyond as within EU borders. The so-called migrant crisis that began in 2015 (the focus of two of the chapters in this volume) has provoked significant political change and division in Germany and Austria. This humanitarian crisis, the debates surrounding it, and the attendant polarization of political positions in both countries have all left their mark on cultural production, whose scope, influences, and reach extend consequently beyond a national paradigm.

Politics and Culture in the Berlin Republic

The significance of transnational events and developments for German identity that is so striking today marks a shift from the 1990s, when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the focus was on the emerging, unified, “normalized” nation. The founding of the Berlin Republic also brought with it a profound challenge to the relationship between culture and politics that questioned the relevance of both East and West German legacies of political authorship across media. In 1990, a heated debate broke out in the cultural pages of leading German newspapers that came to be known as the Literaturstreit (literary feud) and criticized the political commitment that was typical of German authors on both sides of the Wall. Influenced by the Gruppe 47 and the events of 1968, literature in West Germany had been resolutely “engaged” in its antifascism. For some, however, the “political contentiousness” of writers in the Federal Republic, to quote Stephen Brockmann, had resulted in a “Gesinnungsästhetik” (aesthetics of political conviction) that rendered literature staid.

Memory Culture's Archival Turn

FOUNDED ON A COMMITMENT to remembering National Socialism and the Holocaust, the Berlin Republic is defined by Erinnerungskultur (memory culture). This book argues that Erinnerungskultur, as it has developed in unified Germany, is increasingly bound to the archive— understood in its broadest sense as the material remnants of the past and the structures and spaces that house them. As those who lived through the Nationalist Socialist period reach the end of their lives, younger generations are increasingly dependent on externalized, material forms of memory, resulting in an “archival turn” in the memory culture of the Berlin Republic. The archive features in this context as a historical resource to help bridge the growing gap between the Third Reich and contemporary Germany, but also—and this is crucial to my argument—to materialize, visualize, and narrativize the (often intangible, invisible, and elusive) work of memory. The close connection between Erinnerungskultur and the archive in the Berlin Republic is seen in three installation pieces found in and around the renovated German Parliament Building. Christian Boltanski's Archiv der Abgeordneten (Archive of the German Representatives, 1999) is an imposing structure of tin boxes, designed to look like floorto- ceiling card-index boxes, which carry the names of nearly five thousand members of parliament elected democratically between 1919 and 1999. A single black box represents the rupture in the history of German democracy marked by the Third Reich, and black strips, like small mourning bands, are found on the boxes carrying the names of politicians who became victims of National Socialism. Beyond the names and dates legible on the surface, Boltanski's installation does not contain any substantial information: here, the archive does not feature primarily as an historical resource, but rather in its formal and aesthetic elements to evoke the past (the tin boxes are even marked by rust to suggest aging). Boltanski's installation shows how the recent turn to the archive is made in aesthetic and aestheticized mode to make visible the act of commemoration.

Although Boltanski's installation was made to be seen, Archiv also thematizes invisibility, oversight, and repression.

THE ARCHIVE has always been a fundamental if contested feature of documentaries about National Socialism and the Holocaust. Films often draw on the footage made by American, British, and Soviet forces when they liberated the camps. The material was used initially in unmediated mode to show what had happened, for example in the Nuremberg Trials, but it has been used subsequently as what Bill Nichols would call a “building block” for other documentaries. Thus, as David Bathrick has argued, not only does the visual archive of the Holocaust serve as an index, testifying to the events that happened in the camps, but also through its repeated circulation, it takes on iconic status. However, the significance of these so-called atrocity films, which were made after the camps had been liberated, has been subject to much scrutiny. The political purpose of these films affected their making and staging, and they therefore require more critical use in a contemporary context. The fact that some of this early footage is among the most widely reused and circulated in Holocaust documentaries has implications for our understanding of these later films.

The visual archive is fundamental to Holocaust documentary because this genre or mode is affected, like other cultural engagements with the Holocaust, by debates about the representability of the camps. Indeed, these debates have been had most forcibly among, and were perhaps defined by, documentary filmmakers. Famously, while Night and Fog by Alain Resnais does make use of archive footage from the camps, Claude Lanzmann has claimed that there is no archive that shows what happens in Auschwitz, and in his own documentary, Shoah, he eschews the use of archive footage. Instead, Lanzmann returns to the site of the camps to interview witnesses from a contemporary perspective. In its use of interviews Shoah also signals a broader shift in Holocaust historiography and memory culture in the 1980s and 1990s away from the historical archive to testimony. Many Holocaust documentaries have used interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. However, the majority feature these alongside documentary footage. As Sven Kramer notes, in this format the witnesses serve to authenticate the archive. As the number of witnesses becomes ever smaller, however, the scope for this kind of dialogue between archive footage and interviews also diminishes.

REFLECTING THE post-Wende “memory boom” that has shaped German culture since 1990, German literature in the Berlin Republic has focused on the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust in ways that show the complexity and continued relevance of this legacy. Literary texts narrate and perform memory work, which is often triggered by an encounter with archive material, be this an official document or a family photograph. It is almost a cliché of this genre that the discovery of a longhidden artefact initiates a belated process of remembering. Beyond the use of archive material as a narrative device, however, recent literary texts show how subsequent generations depend increasingly on the archive to engage with the legacy of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch's concept of “postmemory” has become a crucial paradigm for understanding the particular preoccupation of recent German literature with material artefacts in its broader focus on this period of history. Hirsch developed her concept to describe how the second generation relates to the traumatic pasts of their parents; however, postmemory is applied increasingly to the engagement of subsequent generations and to those without family connection to the victims. Indeed, postmemory as a means of connecting with a past not experienced directly is pivotal in responding to what Jennifer Kapczynski and Erin McGlothlin describe as “the enduring post-Holocaust condition of contemporary German culture.” According to Hirsch, postmemory turns on “leftovers, debris, single items,” which are to be “collected and assembled” in order to generate narratives about a past previously unarticulated. Thus, it relies on archive material. The archival turn that I am arguing for here can be understood in part as the pivotal gesture of postmemory. As mentioned in the introduction, Hirsch has even gone on to identify postmemory's own “archival turn,” arguing that the “aesthetic and ethical practices of postmemory” are characterized by an “archival impulse.” Yet postmemory also stands in a certain opposition to the archive: Hirsch highlights the role of the family archive in connecting to the past, and the way in which the personal, intimate materials that this encompasses often act as “correctives or additions” to the insufficiencies of the formal archive.