Die Bildung der Gefühle - Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften

Thursday, December 6
Registration
8:30-9:00 Foyer
Definitions, Explanations, Contexts
9:00 – 10:30 Ute Frevert : Historical semantics and social norms Large conference room
Luc Ciompi : Do collective emotions make history? The effects of shame, the ―master‖ emotion
Coffee Break
10:30 – 11:00
Social Practices of shaming
11:00-13:15 Chair: Mary Fulbrook Large conference room
Lunch
Anne Rudermann: The ―Femmes Tondues‖ and the historicization of shame
Maren Röger: Shaming Practices in World War II-Poland and Postwar-Sanctions against
Female Fraternizers
Ismee Tames: Shame and Shaming: Nazi-Collaborators and their Families in Postwar Dutch
Society
13:15 – 14:00 Foyer
Justice, guilt and shame
14:00 – 16:15 Chair: Ute Frevert Large conference room
Coffee Break
Barak Kushner: Searching for Shame in Immediate Postwar East Asia: The Pursuit of
Justice and the Dilemma of Benevolence
Ann Goldberg: Nazism and Defamation Litigation in Postwar West Germany
Mary Fulbrook: Guilt and shame among ‗perpetrators‘ and ‗victims‘
16:15 – 16:45
Foyer
UCL project: Researching and Searching for Postwar Shame. Presences and Absences
16:45-17:45 Brief presentations by Julia Wagner, Christiane Wienand, Alex Hills, Gaelle Fisher

Keynote
18:00-19:30 Large conference room
Ruth Leys: The Disappearance of Shame?
Friday, December 7
Power and shame (1)
9:00 – 11:15 Chair: Uta Gerhardt
11:15 – 11:45 Coffee break
Power and shame (2)
Karolina Wigura: The Shaming and the Declarations of Forgiveness and Repentance in Poland
after World War II
Ulrike Weckel: Shamed by Nazi Crimes: The First Step towards Germans‘ Reeducation or a
Catalyst for their Wish to Forget?
Stefanie Bird: Perpetrator trauma and shame
11:45-13:15 Chair: Stephanie Bird Large conference room
Lunch
Alexey Tikhomirov: From Shame to Pride: a Moral Economy of Victors and Defeatists in Post-
War East Germany (1945-1956)
Phil Leask: Humiliation, shame and ―normalization‖ in the GDR
13:15 – 14:00 Foyer
Literary representations
14:00-16:00 Chair: Benno Gammerl Large conference room
Aneta Stępień: The Flesh of Shame: Representation of collective and individual shame in
Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki‘s Raz. Dwa.Trzy
Agnieszka Komorowska: Shame in the Literature of the Shoah – the Ethics of Testimony
Round Table
16:00 – 17:00 Large conference room

Abstracts & Bios
Stephanie Bird
Perpetrator Trauma and Shame
By approaching trauma and shame from the figure of the perpetrator of abusive and violent acts, this paper
explores the relationship between trauma, shame and moral transgression. With reference to Robert Musil‘s The
Confusions of the Young Törleß, I argue that the notions of agency and action are central to an understanding of
trauma, guilt and remorse. What this novel suggests, however, is that shame obstructs ethical behaviour. By
drawing on a range of writings on shame I shall consider how far shamelessness may in fact be vital for
addressing guilt.
Stephanie Bird is Senior Lecturer in German at University College London. She has published on topics ranging
from the interaction of fact and fiction in the biographical novel, the relationship of female and national
identity, and the representation and ethics of shame. She is currently the Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded
project ‗The Reverberations of War‘ and is working on a comparative study of the role of comedy in the
representation of suffering and the traumatic past in the work of post-war German-language writers and
directors. These include Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, W. G. Sebald and Volker Koepp.
Luc Ciompi
Do Collective Emotions Make History? – The Effects of Shame, the “Master Emotion”
The thesis that collective emotions can ―make history‖ has recently been developed in a book by Elke Endert and
myself*. Here, I will focus on the effects of shame, a ―master emotion‖ according to the American sociologist
Thomas Sheff. Shame provokes specific reparative emotional dynamics: feelings of guilt and depression may
gradually be replaced by envy, hate, agression and feelings of grandiosity. By integrating recent findings from
sociology, neurobiology and evolutionary sciences, emotions appear as goal-directed energetic states. When
individual emotional energies are bundled and directed in the same direction, they can have devastating
macrosocial effects. Striking historical examples include the rise of German national-socialism, the Israel-
Palestina-conflict and the recent ―Arab spring.‖
*Ciompi, L., Endert, E. Gefühle machen Geschichte. Die Wirkung kollektiver Emotionen - von Hitler bis Obama.
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011
Luc Ciompi Prof. Dr.med. em., Dr. h.c.was born in Florence/Italy in 1929. Former director of the socio-psychiatric
university clinic in Berne/Switzerland (1977-94). Founder of the therapeutic community „Soteria Berne―. Author
of the concept of affect-logic, a theory on omnipresent interactions between emotion and cognition, with
numerous implications in psychiatry, psychology and sociology. Numerous scientific publications and awards.
Ute Frevert is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Scientific Member of the Max
Planck Society. Between 2003 and 2007 she was a professor of German history at Yale University and prior to
that she taught History at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld and the Free University in Berlin. Her research
interests include social and cultural history of modern times, gender history and political history. Some of her
best known work has examined the history of women and gender relations in modern Germany, social and
medical policy in 19th century Germany, and the impact of military conscription on German society from 1814 to
the present day. Ute Frevert is an honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin and member of several
scientific boards; she was awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize in 1998.

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at UCL. Her research interests have ranged across a variety of
fields, including religion and society in early modern Europe, the German dictatorships of the twentieth century,
Europe after the Holocaust, and historiography and social theory. Mary Fulbrook's teaching ranges from
introductory courses on German history from medieval times to the present, through to more specialized sourceled
teaching on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and MA courses on 'Theoretical Issues in History and
Literature', and 'The Making of Modern Europe'. She supervises a number of PhD students and runs regular
graduate student seminars and workshops. Among other professional commitments, Mary Fulbrook is currently
Chair of the Modern History Section of the British Academy. Mary Fulbrook's contributions to UCL have included
nearly a dozen years as Head of the German Department (January 1995 to September 2006) as well as a stint
serving on UCL Council. She is currently Vice-Dean (Interdisciplinarity), Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
Benno Gammerl works at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions,
in Berlin. His current project analyses oral histories about homosexuality and emotional life in rural West-
Germany between 1960 and 1990. He received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin in 2008 with a thesis about
citizenship, nationality and the handling of ethnic heterogeneity in the British and the Habsburg empires
between 1867 and 1918. Publications include: Emotional styles: Concepts and challenges. In: Rethinking History
16 (2012), 2, p. 161-175. Frau Muskeltyp, Herr Hexe und Fräulein Butch? Geschlechtlichkeiten und
Homosexualitäten in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. In: Julia Paulus, Eva-Maria Silies und Kerstin Wolf
(Hg.), Zeitgeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte: Neue Perspektiven auf die Bundesrepublik, Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2012, p. 225-245. Subjects, Citizens and Others. The Handling of Ethnic Differences in the British and
the Habsburg Empire (late 19th and early 20th century). In: European Review of History - Revue Européenne
d'Histoire 16 (2009), 4, p. 523-549.
Uta Gerhardt has held academic positions, from 1965 until her retirement in 2003, at the Free University in
Berlin, the University of Konstanz, University of London (Bedford College), Justus Liebig University Giessen
Medical School, and Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg where she held a Full Professorship in Allgemeine
Soziologie (Lehrstuhl für Soziologie II). She has been Research Associate/Visiting Professor at the University of
Tübingen, University of California San Francisco, University of Wisconsin Madison, New York University, Case
Western Reserve University Cleveland OH as well as Harvard University (eight visits, 1986-2003) and the German
Historical Institute in Washington. Her most recent two books: A history of German sociology tracing six
scenarios from the early 20 th century to the Re-unification and how the social changes have been analyzed in
theory and research; her other recent book gives a full picture of the social thought of Parsons, detailing three
phases of his sociology that echo the history of the US between the 1920s and late 1970s, and also Germany in
the 1930s and 1940s.
Ann Goldberg
Nazism and Defamation Litigation in Postwar West Germany
This talk examines the ritual shaming of former Nazis via postwar denunciations and the resulting defamation
lawsuits brought by the accused. The documents of those lawsuits suggest two parallel discourses of guilt/shame
among former Nazis: one purely formal, legal, and instrumental; the other private, suppressed and involving
questions of guilt and responsibility within a far-right rhetoric carried over from the Third Reich.
Ann Goldberg is professor of European history at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sex,
Religion and the Making of Modern Madness (1999) and Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany (2010).

Agnieszka Komorowska
Shame in the Literature of the Shoah – the Ethics of Testimony
The paper addresses the meaning of shame in literary testimony of the Shoah in post-war France. It proposes a
reading of Robert Antelme‘s L’espèce humaine (1947), one of the first published testimonies of survival in the
concentration camps, as well as Marguerite Duras‘ La douleur (1945/1985), a diary in which the author describes
the waiting for the return of her deported husband, Robert Antelme. The example of Antelme and Duras‘
confronts us with questions on the legitimacy of representation and allows insight on the interplay of emotion,
gender and the right to speak: as a survivor of the concentration camps Gandersheim and Dachau, male political
prisoner and known communist Robert Antelme occupies a different place in intellectual France than his former
wife, Marguerite Duras, whose book appeals to the reader through the prospect of the intimacy and emotional
intensity of a diary, while at the same time linking emotion and politics.
Agnieszka Komorowska is a researcher in French Literature at the University of Mannheim. She has studied
comparative literature and Lettres Modernes at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Jean Moulin Lyon III. From
2008 until 2012, she had worked as a researcher at the French Department of the Ruhr-University of Bochum.
She is currently writing the last chapters of her PhD thesis on the representation of shame in the French novel
since the 1980s. Her research focuses on the interplay of literature and emotions, phenomenology and the
contemporary novel in France. She has presented papers and published articles on Marguerite Duras, Georges-
Arthur Goldschmidt and Cécile Wajsbrot, organised an international conference on ―Espace et affectivité‖ and
co-edited a dossier on Michel Houellebecq in the journal Lendemains (Vol. 36/2011).
Barak Kushner
Searching for Shame in Immediate Postwar East Asia: The Pursuit of Justice and the Dilemma of
Benevolence
The difficulty of dealing with the idea of shame and emotion in postwar East Asia is not only linked to linguistic
and cultural barriers but the religious realm as well. How the Chinese conceive of the issue is mirrored in their
definition of the last 100 years of domestic history as ―humiliating.‖ In contrast, Japan‘s history of tenkō, or
switching allegiance, allowed many to easily benefit from avoiding the more cumbersome weight of
responsibility. My aim in this talk is to look beyond Ruth Benedict‘s outdated framework for understanding
Japanese soldiers and to coax forward our understanding of the deeper psyche involved as the result of
interaction between China and Japan. In Japan the idea of pushing against futility, knowing one is going to lose
yet chasing a doomed goal from the outset, is frequently denoted as heroic. As such, it is often difficult for
Japanese to conceive of war criminals as perpetrators because in war ―all action is by definition against
humanity.‖ Soldiers are thrown into conflict not of their own will. There are, in fact, four categories of Japanese
war criminal: victims of the Chinese Nationalists (KMT), those who exuded contrition with the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), those who continued to wage war in former areas of the empire, and those who
repatriated without punishment and kept silent. The mix of these soldiers‘ testimony and diaries postwar has led
to a set of ambiguous beliefs about the imperial war and been stirred up into a legally dangerous cocktail in
Japan.The Chinese case is no less sentimental but in the immediate aftermath of surrender there was tension
between the idea of pursuing criminals through the new voice of international law, which is punitive, and
satisfying the public calls for blood and retribution which was seen as payback but stood as an anathema to the
courts. As a result the KMT focused on mitigating trials of Japanese war crimes as a way of appearing
benevolent, while the CCP emphasized the cathartic element of Japanese public confessions to satiate the
population‘s interest in witnessing Japanese admit their guilt.This paper will examine and compare the manner in
which both postwar Chinese political parties tried Japanese war criminals and used the courts to show their
―honesty,‖ and at the same time consider the Japanese responses which based their understanding of war and
responsibility on an entirely different axis.
Barak Kushner teaches modern Japanese history in the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the

University of Cambridge and has a PhD in History from Princeton University. Previously, Kushner worked in the
US Department of State as a political officer in East Asian affairs and taught Chinese and Japanese history at
Davidson College in the US. As a scholar he has written on wartime Japanese and Chinese propaganda, Japanese
media, Sino-Japanese relations, Asian comedy, food history, war crimes, and the Cold War. He was recently
awarded a 2012 British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to complete his third book that analyzes the postwar
adjudication of Japanese war crimes in China, tentatively titled, "Men to Devils and Devils to Men": Japanese War
Crimes and Cold War Sino-Japan Relations (1945-1965). In the summer of 2008 he was a visiting scholar at
Nanjing University (China) and during 2009 he was a visiting scholar at Waseda University (Japan). He was a
2008 Abe Fellow and conducted research concerning "Cold War Propaganda in East Asia and Historical
Memory."The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, Kushner's first book, delves into the history of wartime
Japanese propaganda. His second monograph, entitled Slurp! A culinary and social history of ramen - Japan's
favorite noodle soup (Brill 2012) focuses on food and history.
Phil Leask
Humiliation, shame and normalization in the GDR
This paper proposes that we see humiliation as a demonstrative exercise of power that is consistently made up of
a number of elements and that has predictable consequences for its victims and for the emotions they feel. What
is often described as ‗shaming‘ behaviour can therefore be better understood as humiliation. The paper discusses
these issues in relation to the behaviour of Communist leaders in the Soviet Occupation Zone after their return
from exile in Moscow in 1945. It considers the impact of their earlier humiliation on the way they used power in
the GDR and on their attitude to the widespread humiliation of Germans by the Red Army, particularly through
the rape of German women. Using Mary Fulbrook‘s view of the complex nature of the ―normalization‖ process
after a major rupture, it points to the difficulties of ―normalizing‖ a society when a cycle of humiliation has not
been broken.
Phil Leask is a writer and researcher with a PhD from University College London. His doctoral dissertation
considered the concept of humiliation and its significance in representations of the GDR. He is currently working
on a research project on narratives of identity across generations and across borders, drawing on personal
accounts of people in or from the GDR.
Ruth Leys
The Disappearance of Shame?
I plan to show that the anti-intentionalism and materialism that have characterized recent attempts to
conceptualize shame have continued to prevail among theorists and scholars of many kinds. I will argue that
recent neuropsychoanalytic and related neuroscientific approaches to the “emotional brain” have produced, as one
of their consequences, an account of survivors of trauma and of various cerebral lesions and other neurological
disorders as exemplifying new kinds of beings or persons. These are “the new wounded,” people who through the
impact of injury and accidental mutations are so absolutely cut off from their previous identities, so emptied of
interiority and subjectivity, so indifferent to others, and so withdrawn from the world, as to be altogether deprived
of affect. The result is that their capacity to experience emotion of any kind, including shame, is called into
question. My aim will be to critically assess such claims.
Ruth Leys is Professor of Humanities, with a joint appointment in the Department of History. Trained in the
physiological and psychological sciences at Oxford University, she went on to receive her doctoral dissertation in
the History of Science at Harvard University. Throughout her career she has been interested in different aspects
of the history of the life sciences, especially the neurosciences, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. Her teaching
focuses on aspects of the history and theory of psychoanalysis; the history of psychiatry; the history of the

neurosciences; trauma theory; the mind-body problem; and the history of approaches to the emotions.
Maren Röger
Shaming Practices in World War II-Poland and Postwar-Sanctions against Female Fraternizers
While the history of the French femmes tondues, the shorn women, is quite well known, many Central and
Eastern European countries are a blind spot in regard to gendered honor punishments during and after World
War II. In this paper, I deal with the shaming practices in occupied Poland and the postwar punishments of
women having consorted with German men. Based on my upcoming monograph about ―Sexual Policies and
Every-Day-Life of German Occupiers in Poland: Prostitution, Fraternization, Violence‖, I firstly want to present
the wide range of disciplinary actions taken against ‛collaborating women‘during the wartime. Women were
already during the occupation subjected to strong social control. Underground publications motivated their
readers to sent injurious leaflets to women searching companionship of Germans, and the underground
jurisdiction committed head shavings and executions on women. Secondly, I will examine the blaming of these
women in the postwar period that differs clearly from the events in France. Poland, which was for a comparable
period of time under German occupation as France, did not experience a similar outbreak of anti-female violence
in the postwar period. The new communist government blamed different groups for patriotic misbehavior out of
political reasons. Among them were the non-communist underground fighters. Polish women who searched
companionship with Germans during occupation were, however, after 1945 on trial. But judges convicted them
mainly if they collaborated politically.
Dr. Maren Röger, Research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Warsaw, Poland, recent research project:
―Sexual Policies and Every-Day-Life of German Occupiers in Poland: Prostitution, Fraternization, Violence‖. Afore
studies of history, media and cultural studies at the University of Lüneburg (M.A.) and PhD-studies of history at
the University of Gießen, Germany. The dissertation was published in 2011: Flucht, Vertreibung und Umsiedlung.
Mediale Erinnerungen und Debatten in Deutschland und Polen seit 1989. Marburg: Herder 2011 (= Studien zur
Ostmitteleuropaforschung 23). The main fields of interest are history of German occupation in Poland, gender
history of NS, history of the expulsions, Polish-German relations, media history, cultural memory.
Anne Ruderman
The “Femmes Tondues” and the Historicization of Shame
This presentation argues that the phenomenon of head-shaving during the liberation of France in the Second
World War represents a practice of stigmatization via collectivization as it shamed the women in question via
de-individualizing them bodily and collectivizing them lexically and iconographically (through film and
photographs) as the "femmes tondues". The head-shaving that occurred in Liberation France inverted the
supposed crime: The French women accused of sleeping with ―les boches‖ had singled out and individualized
particular German soldiers. The punishment instead marked individual women as part of a dishonorable group.
While French contemporaries, documentary filmmakers and historians have viewed the femmes tondues as the
reassertion of a virile France and the restoration of national honor following the German occupation, American
soldiers filming scenes of the femmes tondues told a very different story, mocking French attempts to reestablish
legitimacy and contesting French sovereignty in the postwar world.
Anne Ruderman is a graduate student at Yale University.

Aneta Stępień, University of Surrey
The Flesh of Shame: Representation of Collective and Individual Shame in Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki Raz.
Dwa. Trzy.
In my presentation, I focus on the shame treatment in Poland looking at the novel Raz. Dwa. Trzy (2007), three
narratives of coming-of-age male characters, by Polish author Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. I am particularly
interested in how these characters‘ bodies are constructed as a site of oppression and abjects, and how their
personal narratives of shame engage with the collective shame that is evoked by the place and the time in which
the novel is set: adequately, Silesia and communist era. The events that took place in Silesia and the shameless
crimes of communism, in which Poles participated not only as victims but often as active agents and
perpetrators, are mirrored in the novel through the construction of the characters, especially their movement
from victim to perpetrator.
Aneta Stępień has an MA in Polish Studies (2003) from THEUniversity of Warsaw and a degree in Polish
Language Teaching (2003). She also holds an M.Litt. in European Culture and Literature (2010) from the
University of Glasgow. She worked at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Polish Language and Culture
(Polonicum), where she taught Polish as a foreign language. Between 2007-2010, she worked in the Slavonic
Department at Glasgow University teaching Polish language and translation.She began her PhD in the autumn
2010, at the University of Surrey (Department of English). Her doctorial thesis is a comparative study of male
shame in the selected novels of Hanif Kureishi, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki and Philip Roth. Other research
interests include: gender representation in media and literature, Holocaust, shame and trauma narratives, body
and embodiment. In addition to her research at the University of Surrey, she is the co-author and teaches the
undergraduate module ‗National Identity, Memory and Trauma in Eastern European Literature‘.
Ismee Tames
Shame and Shaming: Nazi-Collaborators and their Families in Postwar Dutch Society
After the Second World War Dutch Nazi-collaborators were arrested, interned and tried. Historiography has
mainly focused on the early transition period when collaborators were maltreated when arrested, women were
shaved, and other forms of humiliation occurred.
After this initial period, however, new forms of shame and shaming occur. Former collaborators were soon
released and returned into society. My current research focuses on the integration and exclusion of former
National Socialist milieus in the 1950s and 1960s. In my paper I will explore the various ways of shaming and
the varying feelings of shame with regard to former Nazi-collaborators and their families. I will draw on research
findings from my book ‗Besmette jeugd‘ (‗Tainted youth‘, on children of collaborators in the early postwar years,
published 2009) and the new results from my current book that will be published 2013.
Dr. Ismee Tames (1976) is senior researcher at the NIOD, Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies and
project coordinator of Legacies of Collaboration: The exclusion and integration of former national socialist milieus
in Dutch society; a research program of NIOD/NWO. Prior to this she published Besmette jeugd (Tainted youth) on
the children of Dutch Nazi-collaborators in the post war years (April 2009).
Tames has also published on the First World War (PhD), neutrality, small nations and Dutch-German relations.
She writes both for an academic public and a wider audience.
Alexey Tikhomirov
From Shame to Pride: a Moral Economy of Victors and Defeatists in Post-War East Germany (1945-1956)
During the final period of the Second World War, the Soviet leadership began to formulate the problem of moral
administration in the occupied territories. Using feelings of shame to re-educate the defeated Germans was a

crucial part of Soviet emotional management of the occupied territories. To restore their national honour, the
Soviet leadership formulated the following condition and mandated that it be fulfilled: the Germans must
acknowledge their collective guilt for and shame about Nazi crimes. To this end, Soviet officials developed a
culture of shame and guilt that was articulated in party discourses and propaganda images, official ritual and
social practices. With the establishment of the GDR, the discourse of shame was gradually transformed into a
discourse of pride that grew out of the new East German state‘s need for self-affirmation. Instead of being one
of the ―war losers,‖ it wanted to be proud of belonging to the ―camp of history‘s winners,‖ under the leadership
of the all-powerful victor, Stalin. For their citizens, the GDR offered a new morality of ―a better Germany, [now]
liberated from fascism‖ and a register of positive feelings in which gratitude had an especially prominent place:
the German people were grateful for being liberated from the Nazi threat, for the possibility of building a
―peace-loving, anti-fascist, democratic‖ state, and for Soviet initiatives taken to preserve Germany‘s political and
economic unity. For the GDR, being a socialist country and belonging to the Soviet bloc offered a path that
would compensate for damaged concepts of national honour by re-inventing categories that were important for
the modern state‘s existence—patriotism and motherland, love and pride—as key emotional components in
legitimizing and stabilizing the state‘s socialist dictatorship.
Dr. Alexey Tikhomirov has been Marie Curie Fellow at School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University
College London since 2011. His most recent project: Forced Trust: Emotional Bonds Between People and State in
Soviet Russia, 1917-1991. He has held Postdoctoral fellowships at Chemnitz University, Tuebingen University and
German Historical Institute in Moscow and he was research fellow at the Institute for European History in
Mainz, Jena University and Karlsruhe University.
UCL project: Researching and Searching for Postwar Shame. Presences and Absences
This joint presentation investigates prerequisites for the presence and reasons for absences of "shame" in
historical and literary sources dating from the post Second World War period in Europe. Based on examples from
our collaborative interdisciplinary research project "Reverberations of War" the talk addresses a variety of aspects
including historical change, generational shifts and communicative contexts as well as the role of the audience,
of gender and of the body as a site of shame.
The speakers are part of the collaborative research project "Reverberations of War" at University College London,
funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Gaelle Fisher and Alexandra Hills are PhD students;
Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand are postdoctoral research fellows.
Ulrike Weckel
Shamed by Nazi Crimes:
The First Step towards Germans’ Reeducation or a Catalyst for their Wish to Forget?
The piled corpses and emaciated suvivors in Allied atrocity films about the liberation of Nazi concentration
camps were shameful, and much can be said in favor of the thesis that at least the Americans and British staged
their screenings of these films to Germans in 1945-46 as acts of public shaming. While there were few
unambiguous indicators of viewers‘ feeling shame, close analysis of the broad spectrum of audiences‘ responses
shows that almost nobody reacted shamelessly, e.g. praising or defending these crimes. The shaming strategy,
however, offered Germans an escape from their shameful situation by prompting them to shift the moral
spotlight from their attitudes towards Nazi crimes to the Allies presuming the right to publicly shame them.
Furthermore, though shame over Nazis‘ crimes may haved seemed a necessary first step in Germans‘ change of
heart, it predictedly intensified their unwillingness to talk publicly about such shameful things.

Ulrike Weckel, currently Vertretungsprofessorin of German history of the 20th century at the Humboldt
University Berlin, on leave from the Ruhr-University Bochum; most recent book: Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche
Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über brefreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), which
won both the Franz Steiner prize für German-American Studies and the Carl Erdmann prize of the German
Historikerverband for an outstanding Habilitation; first book on German women‘s journals in the late 18th
century and their readers (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998); fields of interest: gender history, the enlightenment,
history of sociability, Nazism and German Vergangenheitsbewältigung, audience reception studies, films as
primary sources.
Karolina Wigura
Shaming and the Declarations of Repentance in Poland after World War II
Early years after the World War II in Europe can be named the years of silence and shaming – as the
wrongdoings were almost not mentioned. Around 30 years after the war, however, a shift in European collective
memory occurred, causing a real eruption of memory (Paul Ricoeur described it even as ―compulsive reminding‖).
The process of eliminating the silent shame was strongly connected with the emergence of declarations of
repentance, a new political institution based on speaking about and judging the past. A similar – yet belated -
process has taken place also behind the Iron Curtain, especially in Poland. Important from this point of view were
the declarations of repentance for past evil from before 1989 and the numerous afterwards. In the current public
debate many of these declarations have often been criticized, as badly constructed, or even being political kitch.
However, from the point of longue duree, they may be understood as an important cultural shift. They all may be
interpreted as indispensable for building a nuanced Polish collective memory paradigm, eliminating silent shame
and strengthening liberal democracy.
Karolina Wigura, Ph.D, studied sociology, philosophy and political science at University of Warsaw and Ludwig-
Maximilian-University in Munich. She works as an assistant professor at Institute of Sociology, University of
Warsaw and a journalist. She currently is a Bronisław Geremek junior fellow at Institute for Human Sciences in
Vienna. Among her interests are problems of ethics, memory, and strong emotions (e.g. disgust, shame, fear) in
political theory. Author of numerous texts about forgiveness and reconciliation in politics. Her book ―The Guilt of
Nations: Forgiveness as a Political Strategy‖ (2011) has been awarded with Józef Tischner award. Co-organizer of
international annual conferences ―Forgiveness: Probing the Boundaries‖ under the program of Interdisciplinary.net.
Laureate of Grand Press Prize 2008 for the interview ―Europe in Death Paralys‖ with Jürgen
Habermas. Co-founder and member of the editorial board of the internet-weekly „KulturaLiberalna.pl‖.