Alon Confino, Paul Betts & Dirk Schumann, eds.

Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

Studies in German History. Vol. 7. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.


Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.