Description:
In this an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany.
Brief description: Sonja Boos is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Oregon.
Review Quotes:
"This is an ambitious and important book. Sonja Boos displays extensive familiarity with the early cultural history of West Germany, presenting a valuable series of snapshots of intellectual life there through the mid-1960s, focusing on the engagement of public intellectuals in memory of the Holocaust. Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany offers complex and insightful analyses of these interventions."
--Russell A. Berman, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University