The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans

Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the impact of the war and the Holocaust on the non-Jewish German population remains a subject that is difficult to broach in public. While the literature on the Second World War in Europe is enormous, the experiences of these Germans have been little studied, as if the memories of the defeated were not deserving of preservation.
In Germany 1945, an examination of Allied photography of postwar Germany, Dagmar Barnouw demonstrated one of the means by which the victors sought to impose the burden of responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust on the German people as a whole. Now, in The War in the Empty Air, she demonstrates how deeply that narrative took hold and the silence it imposed, in the context of recent controversies surrounding history and memory.

Dagmar Barnouw is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California.