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The War Child in the Occupational Period
One-day workshop, 3 July 2015, University of Reading
Almost 70 years after the end of World War II, the interest in the topic has not abated as buoyant scholarship
and numerous national and international artistic productions demonstrate. What is particularly striking is the key position that children have occupied within the narratives about the Nazi past from 1945 until today. Scholars have become increasingly interested
in topics connected with minors and war, and some work has been undertaken to shed light on the role of children and adolescents in cultural representations of WWII.
This
workshop conceives of children as key figures
in the narration and negotiation of the massive crisis of consciousness characterizing the post-war adult world, particularly in Germany, the perpetrator nation. The aim is to identify the variety of roles and functions the child figure was allocated in texts
dealing with World War II from different perspectives (from perpetrator to victim narratives). The focus will be on the occupational period, 1945-1949, which was representative and constitutive for the construction of the war-child figure. We are open to papers
on representations of child figures in prose fiction, feature and documentary film, as well as testimonial writing.
Questions to be addressed include, but are not restricted to, the following:
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What kind of depictions has fed into the post-war imaginary of the war child in the German-speaking context?
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In which genres and fora did such representations of the war child take place?
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What traditions are appropriated for discourses about children in the various genres?
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What groups of children feature in these depictions?
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What images of children are created?
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What functions are allocated to these child figures?
We plan to publish a selection of revised papers in a special edition of
German Life & Letters in April 2016; manuscripts will have to be submitted to the editors by 13 September 2015. The workshop is part of a project on "Children in German War-Contexts 1945-1949", which is funded by the British
Academy. Participation is free of charge. There
may be travel bursaries available for postgraduate participants.
Registration deadline: 4 May 2015.
Submission deadline for a 250-word-abstract for a 20-minute paper, together with a short CV:
10 January 2015
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Dr Ute Wölfel |
Dr Debbie Pinfold |
Dr Beate Müller |
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Department of Modern Languages and European Studies
University of Reading |
School of Modern Languages
University of Bristol
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School of Modern Languages
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU |