The War in the Empty Air

The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans is a non-fiction work by Dagmar Barnouw, then Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Published in 2005 by Indiana University Press, the book explores the situation of the German people after their government's surrender to the Allies on 8 May 1945 at the end of World War II.

The War in the Empty Air

Author	Dagmar Barnouw
Language	English
Genre	Non-fiction, history
Publisher	Indiana University Press
Publication date	2005
Pages	303
ISBN	978-0253220400
OCLC	59401904
Preceded by	Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence
Website	Archive.org (to borrow)

In particular, Barnouw discusses the absence of mourning for Germans, their dead, and their lost cities and artifacts destroyed by the Allied air war. Germans themselves could not mourn, because the strong message from the victors was that a just war had been fought against an evil regime, one regarded as uniquely evil for having caused the Holocaust. The politics of memory permitted no regret for Germans, the Tätervolk, the guilty people. Divided by the Allies into the democratic Federal Republic of Germany in the west and the communist German Democratic Republic in the east—with the former capital, Berlin, split by a wall from 1961—Germans were forced to look forward only and to view the hour of their surrender, Stunde Null, as a rebirth.^[1]

Barnouw examines the air war, representations of the Holocaust, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from their homes in Eastern Europe, weaving in her own story of becoming a refugee with her mother after the bombing of Dresden in February 1945.^[2]

Publication details

• Barnouw, Dagmar (2005). The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. OCLC 59401904

See also

• Collective guilt
• Historikerstreit
• List of books about Nazi Germany
• Vergangenheitsbewältigung

References

1. Barnouw, Dagmar (2005). The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ix.
2. Rasch, 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. JSTOR 27668266

Further reading

• Biess, Frank (March 2006). "Biess on Barnouw, 'The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans'". H-Net.
• 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. JSTOR 27668401
• Henningsen, Manfred (Spring 2008). "Reviewed Work: The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans by Dagmar Barnouw". Shofar. 26(3), 171–174. JSTOR 42944760