Introduction
Paul Betts, Alon Confino, Dirk Schumann

PART I: BODIES

Chapter 1. How the Germans Learned to Wage War. On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World Wars
Michael Geyer

Chapter 2. The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of the Second World War
Richard Bessel

Chapter 3. Rebuilding and Reburying: Emergency Cemeteries in Berlin after 'Zero Hour'
Monica Black

PART II: DISPOSAL

Chapter 4. Fanning the Flames - Cremation in Late Imperial and Weimar Germany
Simone Ameskamp

Chapter 5. Disposing of the Dead in East Germany, 1945 - 1990
Felix Robin Schulz

Chapter 6. Death in Munich. The 1972 Olympics
Kay Schiller

Chapter 7. When Cold Warriors Die: The State Funerals of Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht
Paul Betts

PART III: SUBJECTIVITY

Chapter 8. A Common Experience of Death: Commemorating the German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War, 1914-1923
Tim Grady

Chapter 9. Laughing about death? `German Humor¿ in the Two World Wars
Martina Kessel

Chapter 10. Death, Spiritual Solace, and Afterlife. Between Nazism and Religion
Alon Confino

Chapter 11. Yizkor! Commemoration of the Dead by Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany
Gabriel Finder

PART IV: RUINS

Chapter 12. The Imagination of Disaster. Death and Survival in Postwar West Germany
Svenja Goltermann

Chapter 13. European Melancholy and the Inability to Listen: Sebald, Politics, and Death
Daniel Steuer

Chapter 14. A Cemetery in Berlin
Peter Fritzsche

Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index

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.

Dirk Schumann is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Georg-August University, Göttingen. His most recent books include Raising Citizens in the "Century of the Child": The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective (Berghahn, 2010, edited), Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (Berghahn, 2009).