Cameras on the Nation’s Darkest Hour

Recent BBC Culture article, Christian Petzold: How Germans today confront the Nazis, takes a look at how the attitude of German filmmakers has changed in the past 15 years and how the cinema is turning the cameras on the nation’s darkest hour in films and TV. Read more on what Nina Hoss, an actress in the latest German film to address the war and its aftermath Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, has to say bbc.com/culture

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Browse some of Berghahn’s relevant titles on the topic of Nazi portrayal and postwar cinema in Germany & Europe.

POLISH FILM AND THE HOLOCAUST
Politics and Memory
Marek Haltof

Continue reading “Cameras on the Nation’s Darkest Hour” →

Hearing History of the 19th and 20th Centuries

In a newly published collection, editor Daniel Morat and his contributors approach historical analysis in an uncommon way — by using their sense of hearing. The authors examine the way modern history sounds in Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. Following, the editor gives a brief introduction and shares an excerpt from his chapter. The excerpt is accompanied by a recording from 1914 Germany.

_______________________________

When Europe went to war in the summer of 1914, scenes of vociferous war enthusiasm have been reported from many European cities. Historiographic research of the last twenty years has shown that these scenes were not representative of the general mood in the warring nations. Still, they have long dominated our perception of the outbreak of World War I.

Continue reading “Hearing History of the 19th and 20th Centuries” →

War, Occupation, and Empire: Interview with Guest Editor Jean Elisabeth Pedersen

This is the fourth in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.

A recent issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between Berghahn blog editor Lorna Field and the Guest Editor of this special issue, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen.

Continue reading “War, Occupation, and Empire: Interview with Guest Editor Jean Elisabeth Pedersen” →

Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for June

Anthropology in Action
Volume 21, Issue 1
This is a special issue on Applied and Social Anthropology, Arts and Health.

Asia Pacific World
Volume 5, Issue 1
In this first issue of Volume 5, we have chosen to begin with two keynote presentations from the fourth IAAPS Annual Conference.

Contributions to the History of Concepts
Volume 9, Issue 1
This issue focuses on conceptual changes and political struggles around citizenship related to the challenges of Europeanization, as well as both migration and immigration after WWII.

German Politics & Society
Volume 32, Issue 2
This special issue is titled The 2013 Bundestag Election (Part 1).

Journeys
Volume 15, Issue 1
This journal explores travel as a practice and travel writing as a genre, reflecting the rich diversity of travel and journeys as social and cultural practices as well as their significance as metaphorical processes.

Learning and Teaching
Volume 7, Issue 1
This special issue is titled Collusion, Complicity and Resistance: Theorising Academics, the University and the Neoliberal Marketplace.

Social Analysis
Volume 58, Issue 2
This journal encourages contributions that break away from the disciplinary bounds of anthropology and suggest innovative ways of challenging hegemonic paradigms through analysis based in original empirical research.

Connecting Germany and Asia: A History

The relationship between the people of Germany and Asia strengthened in the second half of the twentieth century, resulting in the burgeoning of the academic field of Asian German studies in recent years. Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia is a collection of this scholarship. Following, editors Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock discuss their love of subject, the collection and how the field will grow in the future.

_________________________________

What drew you to study the relationship between Germany and Asia? What inspired your love of your subject? When?

Qinna Shen: I’m a Chinese Germanist. I started to learn German in Beijing, then attended Heidelberg University before coming to the States for my doctoral degree.

Continue reading “Connecting Germany and Asia: A History” →

‘Exporting’ Women: Writing on French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements

This is the third in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.

The latest issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between the issue’s Guest Editor, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, and one of the six contributors, Krista Molly O’Donnell.

Continue reading “‘Exporting’ Women: Writing on French and German Women’s Colonial Settlement Movements” →

Propaganda and Prostitution Reform During Germany’s Weimar Republic

This is the second in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques.

Pedersen: What first drew you to the study of the “black horror” campaign?

Roos: My first book focuses on conflicts over prostitution reform during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933). It was in this context that I first came across the issue of the brothels for colonial French troops established in the occupied Rhineland during the 1920s. Middle-class German feminists and their conservative allies appealed to racialist fears and nationalist resentment over these brothels to discredit Germany’s own system of police-controlled prostitution. I realized that the protest against the brothels was an important facet of the broader propaganda campaign against France’s colonial occupation troops, which used the racist epithet, “black horror on the Rhine.” What fascinates me about the “black horror” campaign is the fresh light it sheds on the different ways in which World War I unsettled established racial stereotypes and hierarchies between whites/Europeans, on the one hand, and Africans and other colonized peoples, on the other hand. It also offers rich possibilities for exploring the legacies and postwar permutations of wartime propaganda discourses centered on women’s and children’s sexual victimization by racial “Others.”

Continue reading “Propaganda and Prostitution Reform During Germany’s Weimar Republic” →

Researching Relevance, or How Sociology Preserved the Church

In Benjamin Ziemann’s historical account Encounters with Modernity: The Catholic Church in West Germany 1945-1975, to be published next month, the author explains how the church attempted to systematically — using the tools of social science — maintain its relevance in post-war German society. Following, the author explains how he, almost completely by accident, happened upon this research that would lead to his future book.

_____________________________

Rather than being the result of meticulous planning, I stumbled over this topic by chance. Originally, I had an interest in writing about the Catholic milieu in 1950s West Germany, and thought that starting with the miners at the Ruhr would be a good idea, not least because I taught at Bochum at the time. One of the challenges that I faced was to gather data on the practiced piety of Catholic workers such as church attendance or Easter Communions, which I thought were difficult to obtain. While I spent time pursuing other hints in the Essen municipal library, I found reports by the “Pastoral Sociological Institute of the Diocese in Essen” (PSI) for the late 1950s. This institute had broken down a count of churchgoers in Essen according to social strata, gender and other social characteristics. Here, I had all the data that I seemed to need.

Continue reading “Researching Relevance, or How Sociology Preserved the Church” →

Urban Update: Alexanderplatz Seen as a Site to Improve

In 1990s Germany, Alexanderplatz, a centuries-old public square and transportation hub in Berlin, was seen a site in need of updating. Plans to improve the space, which were a part of post-unification revitalization, are central to Gisa Weszkalnys’ Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany, which was published as a paperback late last year. Following is an excerpt from the volume, which gives insight into the collaborative process of the planned update.

____________________

In the early 1990s, Alexanderplatz was identified as a problem of urban design. A solution was to be found through an urban design competition, launched by the Senat’s Administration for Urban Development (SenStadt) in 1993. The winning design was to provide the basis for future constructions in the square. Following the competition, the Berlin Senat proceeded to establish a public-private partnership and to sign so-called urban development contracts with prospective investors.

Continue reading “Urban Update: Alexanderplatz Seen as a Site to Improve” →

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.

_________________________________________

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.

Continue reading “Blackface in Berlin Play: Racism or Tradition?” →

berghahn New York · Oxford

Tag: Germany