Dagmar Barnouw (née Heyse, 22 March 1936 – 14 May 2008) was a German cultural historian. From 1988 until her death, she served as professor of German and comparative literature at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California (USC).[1][2]
Born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Barnouw's family became refugees during World War II after Dresden was bombed.[3] In an essay written just before she died, she recalled: "Packed tightly into an open truck, we clutched our small wet bundles, ourselves shaken like rags by the cold wind and the fear of being flung off the truck. It stopped abruptly; our eyes shut against the heavy rain opened; we looked at the village and knew that it would always have been cut off from the rest of the world. All hopes of leaving here would be nothing but a hazy dream; and trying to get back to where we had come from nothing but a black rock of futility."[4] The family was eventually resettled in Ulm in Baden-Württemberg.[3]
Barnouw completed her first degree in Germany[5] and in 1962 was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at Stanford University. In 1968 she obtained a PhD from Yale University for a thesis on the German poet Eduard Mörike.[2] This became her first book, Entzückte Anschauung Sprache und Realität in der Lyrik Eduard Mörikes (1971).
Barnouw's work focused on 20th-century Germany, including the suffering of ordinary Germans during and after the Second World War, and the relationship between the war, the Holocaust, and United States involvement in wars in the Middle East.[2][6] She argued against the idea that the Holocaust should be regarded as unique and in some sense ahistorical.[7][5] Germanic-studies scholar William Rasch referred to three of her books—Visible Spaces, Germany 1945, and The War in the Empty Air—as her "Arendt trilogy"; the polemics reminded him of Hannah Arendt.[8] Reviewing The War in the Empty Air, political scientist Manfred Henningsen noted Barnouw's "barely contained anger".[9] Barnouw wrote:
[T]he near total exclusion from historical memory of German wartime experiences, among them large-scale air raids, mass deportations, and warfare involving millions of conscripts has over the decades created a serious loss of historical reality. ... My concern is not that Germans suffered too—all populations caught in this particularly terrible war suffered. The issue is the usefulness now, sixty years later, of an enduring hierarchy of suffering that has removed from historical memory the larger part of a war so familiarly and viciously destructive that it should have meant the end of all wars.[10]
That the Holocaust and Auschwitz were regarded as "unique" was understandable in the early post-war years, she wrote, but in the longer term the unquestioned view of World War II as the "good, clean war" and the "absolutely just war" has continued to further Allied interests, particularly American interests. She argued for a reappraisal. The war was fought as if there were "no limits to the destruction of humans". The "empty air" of her book title represents "the spaces of annihilation peopled with millions and millions of the anonymous dead".[11][a]
Her book Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (1997) won a Golden Light Award as Photographic Book of the Year,[13] and a Best Critical Photographic Study award from the Maine Photographic Workshop.[3]
Personal life and death
Barnouw married an American academic, Jeffrey Barnouw, in Tübingen, Germany, in 1964.[1] They were both students at the time; he was later a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.[14] Their son, Benjamin Barnouw, was born in 1967 and became the deputy attorney-general of California.[3] In April 2008 Barnouw suffered a stroke; she died in hospital in San Diego the following month.[3]
Selected works
Books
Entzückte Anschauung Sprache und Realität in der Lyrik Eduard Mörikes. Munich: Fink, 1971. OCLC248255
Thomas Mann Studien zu Fragen der Rezeption (with Hans R. Vaget). Bern and Munich: Lang, 1975. OCLC476191860
Elias Canetti. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979. OCLC442366603
Die versuchte Realität oder von der Möglichkeit, glücklichere Welten zu denken: Utopischer Diskurs von Thomas Morus zur feministischen Science Fiction. Meitingen: Corian, 1985. OCLC470867094
Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. OCLC438767917
Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. OCLC954576419
Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. OCLC844195164
Elias Canetti zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1996. OCLC36398697
Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. OCLC759881392
Ansichten von Deutschland (1945): Krieg und Gewalt in der zeitgenössischen Photographie. Frankfurt am Main: Strömfeld/Nexus, 1997. OCLC863009285
Naipaul's Strangers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. OCLC907004389
"A Time for Ruins", in Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (ed.). German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. OCLC951516188
"The German War", in Marina MacKay (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 98–110. OCLC799901669
^The idea of the "empty air" comes from a poem by Howard Nemerov, "The War in the Air" (War Stories, 1987), which ends:
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness' sake,
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.[12]
^ abcBarnouw, Dagmar (2009). "The Fog of 'Evil': The Political Use of World War II in the Ongoing War on Terror". Socialism and Democracy. 23(1), 3–23. doi:10.1080/08854300802635882
^ abRasch, William (February 2007). "Reviewed Work: The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans by Dagmar Barnouw". German Studies Review. 30(1), 221–223. JSTOR27668266
^ abHenningsen, Manfred (Spring 2008). "Reviewed Work: The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans by Dagmar Barnouw". Shofar. 26(3), 171–174. JSTOR42944760
^Barnouw, Dagmar (2005). The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, xii.
^Greene, Larry A. (October 2007). "Reviewed Work: The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans by Dagmar Barnouw". German Studies Review. 30(3), 665–666. JSTOR27668401
