Barnouw, Dagmar 1936–2008

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born March 22, 1936, in Berlin, Germany; died May 14, 2008, in San Diego, CA, from complications from a stroke. Educator, historian, critic, and author. Barnouw taught German studies and comparative literature at several American universities, from Yale University in 1968 to the University of Southern California, where she was a professor from 1988 through 2008. She wrote several books and many articles on the German intellectual community, especially as it flourished in the period after World War II. Barnouw wrote about a wide range of topics, from the politics of author and critic Thomas Mann to the place of political philosopher Hannah Arendt in the German-Jewish experience and the critical realism of film theorist Siegfried Kracauer. Never one to avoid controversy (she successfully sued the University of California at San Diego for gender bias as early as 1977), Barnouw spent her later years moving ever farther from the conventional core of German literary and intellectual criticism. In the books Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (1996) and War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans (2005), Barnouw began to question in print what she considered to be an overemphasis on the suffering of Holocaust victims, one that excluded the suffering experienced among Germans who were marked by collective guilt after the fall of the Nazi regime. Her views provoked much controversy, perhaps to the point of overshadowing a thirty-five-year career as educator and author. Barnouw was nevertheless convinced that the suffering imposed on ordinary German citizens through widespread Allied bombings, not to mention decades of self-imposed recriminations regarding the Holocaust, was a substantial but long-absent element of the historical accounts. These topics were rarely mentioned, even in personal memoirs and autobiographies. She saw what she termed a tradition of "never-forgetting" as an impediment to addressing the issues of the present day and moving forward into the future. Barnouw's other writings include Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity (1988), Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (1990), and There and Then: History, Photography, and the Critical Realism of Siegfried Kracauer (1993). Earlier studies were published only in German.

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Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2008, p. B11.