| The main purpose of this thesis is to discuss the topic of collective memory.The Nanjing Massacre Museum documents the massacre from 1937/38,which was committed by the Japanese troops.Along with the ’perpetrators’ and the ’victims’,the museum also illustrates those people,who stayed in Nanjing to help the Chinese population at this time.A small group of foreigners decided to stay in Nanjing and help the Chinese population left behind.They established a committee and a safety zone,and chose German businessman John Rabe to be the leader of the committee.Despite of the acts of violence,he could save a lot of lives together with his fellow colleagues.During this time,Rabe also wrote intensely diaries and documented in this way everything that happened in Nanjing.But John Rabe was also a member of the Nazi party and an admirer of Hitler.Until the present day Chinese admire him as a "hero" and the "living Buddha" because of his humanitarian work,even though it took until 1997 for him to become well known,when Germany and a broader Western public learned about his person,his acts and his diaries.This master thesis analyses,interprets and contextualizes the forgetting and repressing of John Rabe in the collective memory in Germany,and it is based on the theory of collective memory,the method of discourse analysis and an empirical survey.After the introduction,the second and third chapter of this thesis deals with the theory of the collective memory and as well with John Rabe’s life,his diaries and the screen adaption about his life.In the fourth chapter,the discourse analysis,whose text corpus based on newspaper and magazine articles from 1998 to 2016,shows a great paradox,which surrounded Rabe in the German perception.Despite of his humanitarian work,he was also a member of the Nazi party and a public admirer of Hitler.Moreover,he had never disassociated himself from the Nazi ideology directly.Even though German media discussed a great deal about his past,but rarely they came to talk about the reasons of this paradox.Reasons for this is the long process of the German past,which is a gradual process since the end of World War Ⅱ.In the fifth chapter,the following empirical survey revealed,that today most participants think positively about the previous accounting for the German past.Nevertheless,the accounting needs to be continued consistently.Moreover,the participants answered positively as well to commemorate people like Rabe more publicly.To avoid possible abuses or the relativization of the data,it is always necessary to account the whole history of persons like Rabe for the past.To achieve wider recognition for Rabe,it is important to draw more attention.Persons like Rabe cannot be repressed or forgotten in the collective memory,because they are a part of the German history.Their material legacy is located in the storage memory and it is always possible to retrieve it.In summary,the topic of this master thesis can be conceived as a topic of intercultural German studies,because the object of investigation,John Rabe,has a different meaning and popularity in China compared to Germany.Furthermore,the discourse analysis is a frequently chosen method for the intercultural linguistics.Finally,the theory of collective memory is a central component of cultural studies.Cultural studies and intercultural German studies are closely tied.To complete the picture of John Rabe in the German-Chinese context it would be interesting to find out whether there are any papers about John Rabe’s reception in China.These could be a connecting factor for comparisons between the Chinese and German context.As a consequence,more studies in regard to similarities and differences could be conducted. |
