Continue reading “Berghahn Journals: New Issues Published in September”
Tag: german politics and society
The Fall of the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was both the physical division between West Berlin and East Germany from 1961 to 1989 and the symbolic boundary between democracy and Communism during the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall was erected in the dead of night and for 28 years kept East Germans from fleeing to the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall happened nearly as suddenly as its rise. On the evening of November 9, 1989, an announcement made by East German government official Günter Schabowski stated, “Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR (East Germany) into the FRG (West Germany) or West Berlin.” Crowds of euphoric East Germans crossed and climbed on to the wall in celebration. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today,” one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, “is the war really over.”
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Browse Berghahn relevant titles:
THE PATH TO THE BERLIN WALL
Critical Stages in the History of Divided Germany
Manfred Wilke
Translated from the German by Sophie Perl
“…constitutes a superlative model of combining biography with the study of nationalism. The latter constitutes the most novel contribution of this well-researched, straightforward historical depiction of Kohl’s ideology and its impact upon the continuing development of German national identity… Recommended” · Choice
Berghahn Books at the GSA 2015 Conference!
We are delighted to inform you that we will be attending the annual German Studies Association conference in Washington D.C., on October 1-4, 2015. Please stop by our stand to browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices & pick up some free journal samples. If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all German Studies titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code GSA15.
We hope to see you in Washington D.C.!
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Here is a preview of some of our newest releases on display:
GERMANS AGAINST NAZISM
Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich: Essays in Honour of Peter Hoffmann
Edited by Francis R. Nicosia and Lawrence D. Stokes†
New and Revised Paperback Edition
Continue reading “Berghahn Books at the GSA 2015 Conference!”
Author of ‘Jesus Reclaimed’ Earns German Decoration
The President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Joachim Gauck, honoured Rabbi Walter Homolka with the Officers Cross of the Federal Merit Order.
On February 27, 2015, the Prime Minister of the State of Brandenburg, Dr. Dietmar Woidke, handed over the insignia in the state chancellery in Potsdam.
Woidke thanked Rabbi Homolka for the establishment of the Abraham Geiger College in 1999 as the first rabbinical school in Continental Europe after the Holocaust.
Homolka’s initiative in 2013 also formed the School of Jewish Theology of the University of Potsdam, Germany’s Jewish Divinity School. Rabbi Homolka is a professor of Modern Jewish Thought there.
On the day of the honour Germany’s nationwide tabloid BILD voted Homolka “winner of the day.”
Rabbi Walter Homolka is author of Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism (1995) and Jesus Reclaimed: Jewish Perspectives on the Nazarene (2015), and co-editor, with Albert Friedlander, of The Gate to Perfection: The Idea of Peace in Jewish Thought (1994). He is the rector of the Abraham Geiger College, Germany’s first rabbinical seminary after the Holocaust, and a professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the School of Jewish Theology of the University of Potsdam in Germany.
A Lived Journey: Tracing ‘The Path to the Berlin Wall’
The Berlin Wall may have been erected in 1961, but the figurative foundation was laid in 1945, as the Soviet Union’s Communist Party and its allies made selections of their areas of influence. In The Path to the Berlin Wall: Critical Stages in the History of Divided Germany, author Manfred Wilke traces the events that led to the eventual construction of the Berliner Mauer. Wilke’s original volume was translated from German into English by Sophie Perl. Following is Perl’s interview with the author about his book.
Continue reading “A Lived Journey: Tracing ‘The Path to the Berlin Wall’”Understanding Europe before, after 1945
In Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950, published last month, author Christian Bailey seeks to understand how Germans became such “good Europeans” after 1945. Whereas many histories of European integration tend to largely focus on the diplomatic goings-on between elites, this book focuses on how support for a united Europe was cultivated in civil society. Below, the author and his colleague Benno Gammerl share a dialogue about Bailey’s recent volume.
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Benno Gammerl: Your book convincingly challenges what one could call the negative founding myth of post-1945 European integration. According to this well-established narrative the European Union ultimately resulted from the wish to once and for all prevent falling back into the perils of fascism and total war. You highlight earlier visions of Europe instead that date back to the interwar period and that have at times commanded much wider popular support than the let-us-avoid-our-earlier-mistakes-rhetoric. Which positive aims and motivations sustained these European projects?
Key to Transformation is Understanding the ‘Fatherland’
The parallels between the political environment of the “Arab Spring” countries and Cold War Germany can be striking, according to Alexander Clarkson, author of Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1980. In these cases, when diaspora communities returned to their countries of origin, there was an energy for activism and a flurry of political activity. Following, Clarkson notes that taking a page from West German history could prove useful in modern Libyan, Syrian and Tunisian politics.
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In the chaotic days after the Ghadaffi regime lost control of the city of Benghazi in February 2011, hundreds of exiled Libyans returned to the liberated parts of their country to help play a role in the transformation of a state that had been under authoritarian rule for more than forty years.
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Opening Cassirer and Arendt’s ‘Hidden Conversation’
Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist; Ernst Cassirer was a German-Jewish philosopher. The ‘liberal Jewish ethics’ of the two come together in Ned Curthoys’ The Legacy of Liberal Judaism: Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Conversation. The author explains below his fascination of and engagement with the scholars.
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Berghahn Books: What exactly do you mean by the term ‘liberal Judaism’?
Ned Curthoys: Well it’s a diasporic phenomenon, a very interesting response to the twin challenges of secular modernization and inveterate Christian inspired anti-Judaism.
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Is All Repression Created Equal?
The recent revelations by Edward Snowden about the extensive online information-gathering activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) have led to a flurry of comparisons in the German media between the American agency and the infamous East German Ministry for State Security, or Stasi. According to a popular statistic, the Stasi could have filled 42,000 filing cabinets with the information it had gathered over 40 years—the NSA 48,000,000,000! Chancellor Angela Merkel, a former East German herself, has rejected such comparisons as crude and misleading. Below, in an excerpt from the introduction to Becoming East German: Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, to be published this month, co-editor Andrew I. Port discusses the extent to which such comparisons are appropriate and potentially valuable.
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Let us pose a rhetorical question that is sure to raise some hackles: was the GDR truly more repressive than the Federal Republic—or other Western states, for that matter?
Blackface in Berlin Play: Racism or Tradition?
In January 2012, a white man was cast for the part of an African American man in “I’m Not Rappaport” for the German adaptation of the U.S. play. The plan to use blackface makeup—common in American theater up until the Civil Rights movement—to change the man’s appearance stirred controversy, and was called out as racist. Co-editor of Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, Martin Klimke addresses the sensitive subject of race in Germany in light of this event.
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Germany’s place in the Black Atlantic might have been peripheral in a geographical sense. Intellectually and discursively, however, it played an often underestimated but significant role in the formation of modern social, racial, and national identities.
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