BASF Lecture: Remembering Dresden; Forgetting Hamburg with Professor William Donahue

15 February 2022

Time: 6:30 - 8:00pm

National myths, ideology, and personal experience prove from this perspective to be the far more influential determinants of what is remembered, repressed or overwritten. Prompted by Sven Hanuschek’s Wir leben noch, I ask what literature and the arts more generally can contribute to this process. Whereas Sebald drew our attention to the “what” (the alleged absence of Allied bombings and German suffering more generally in contemporary German literature), I focus on how literature and film can both succeed and fail in offering the “better” history promised by that special commission. Finally, the talk raises questions about the place occupied by the bombing of Hamburg within British and US public culture.