How to Handle the New Occupiers? Margret Boveri’s Amerikafibel and U.S. ‘Reeducation’ Politics
Please join the German Department for a lecture with visiting researcher Sandra Schell titled “How to Handle the New Occupiers? Margret Boveri’s Amerikafibel and U.S. ‘Reeducation’ Politics,” which will be held on Tuesday, October 22, from 3:30-5:00 pm in ICC 462.
In 1946, when the Allied denazification efforts caused more dissent than consensus among postwar German society, the American-German journalist Margret Boveri published the Amerikafibel für erwachsene Deutsche (Primer on America for Grown-up Germans). Taking occupation-as-experience seriously, the primer aimed to navigate its readership through the encounters, if not confrontations, with the American liberators.
Like many authors from both sides of the Atlantic, Boveri understood the external stimulation provided by the ‘reeducation’ measures as an influential source of change. With her book, she played an ambivalent role in the emerging controversy surrounding the U.S. efforts to educate the citizens of the former enemy nation to form a democratic society. However, instead of giving clear instructions on the virulent question, “How to handle the new occupiers?”, Boveri rather provides equivocal attempts at cultural mediation and identity negotiation.
This talk will focus on Margret Boveri’s Amerikafibel as a seminal example to study how intellectuals controversially addressed the political, ideological, and cultural transformation of post-Nazi Germany under the auspices of ‘reeducation’. The U.S. ‘reeducation’ efforts opened a contact zone between the occupier nation and occupied Germany. Simultaneously however, this was also met with maladroitness, insecurities, and anti-American prejudice. Against the backdrop of this tension, the Amerikafibel raises questions: In what ways does the primer offer constructive suggestions for the formation of a pluralistic society? Or does Boveri just undermine the ‘reeducation’ efforts?
Sandra Schell is a visiting researcher for the fall 2024 semester. She is a PhD student at the University of Heidelberg, researching the U.S. ‘reeducation’s’ entanglements in the West German literary field. She studied German and English in Stuttgart and Bergen (Norway), before graduating with honors from Heidelberg in 2020. Sandra has been teaching at Stuttgart and Heidelberg and currently works as an editorial assistant for the journal Scientia Poetica. Besides her research interests in German literature of the 20th century, interculturality, and the relation between literature and politics, she publishes on the history of German Studies.