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In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to resist, and to contemporary observers the road toward democracy in the Western zones of occupation seemed rather uncertain. Drawing on a vast array of American, German, and other sources--diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film--Werner Sollors makes visceral the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification. These tales reveal writers, visual artists, and filmmakers as well as common people struggling to express the sheer magnitude of the human catastrophe they witnessed. Some relied on traditional images of suffering and death, on Biblical scenes of the Flood and the Apocalypse. Others shaped the mangled, nightmarish landscape through abstract or surreal forms of art. Still others turned to irony and black humor to cope with the incongruities around them. Questions about guilt and complicity in a totalitarian country were raised by awareness of the Holocaust, making "After Dachau" a new epoch in Western history. The Temptation of Despair is a book about coming to terms with the mid-1940s, the contradictory emotions of a defeated people--sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience--as well as the ambiguities and paradoxes of Allied victory and occupation.

Reconstruction (1939-1951) --- Denazification. --- Social psychology --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.). --- Social psychology. --- War and literature. --- War and motion pictures. --- Besetzung --- Entnazifizierung --- Denazifiering --- Socialpsykologi. --- Andra världskriget 1939-1945 i konsten. --- Andra världskriget 1939-1945 i litteraturen. --- Film och krig. --- Andra världskriget 1939-1945 --- Influence. --- Art and the war --- Literature and the war. --- Motion pictures and the war. --- historia. --- influenser. --- Reconstruction (1939-1951). --- World War (1939-1945). --- 1939-1951. --- Geschichte 1945-1948. --- Germany. --- Deutschland --- Reconstruction (1939-1951) -- Germany. --- Social psychology -- Germany. --- World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war. --- World War, 1939-1945 -- Influence. --- Denazification --- History & Archaeology --- History - General --- Influence --- Literature and the war --- Motion pictures and the war --- Besetzung. --- Entnazifizierung. --- Art and the war. --- Deutschland. --- World War, 1939-1945, in art --- Mass psychology --- Psychology, Social --- Human ecology --- Psychology --- Social groups --- Sociology --- Influenser. --- Historia.

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What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are we, and can we strike a balance between an emphasis on our divergent ethnic origins and what we have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines our evolving understanding of ourselves as an Anglo-American nation to a multicultural one and the key role writing has played in that process. Challenges of Diversity contains stories of American myths of arrival (pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, slave ships at Jamestown, steerage passengers at Ellis Island), the powerful rhetoric of egalitarian promise in the Declaration of Independence and the heterogeneous ends to which it has been put, and the recurring tropes of multiculturalism over time (e pluribus unum, melting pot, cultural pluralism). Sollors suggests that although the transformation of this settler country into a polyethnic and self-consciously multicultural nation may appear as a story of great progress toward the fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, deepening economic inequality actually exacerbates the divisions among Americans today.

HISTORY / United States / General. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / General. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. --- Immigrants in literature. --- Race in literature. --- Ethnicity in literature. --- Multiculturalism in literature. --- American literature --- National characteristics, American, in literature. --- History and criticism.