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• eBook available May 2017

  The Absent Jews

  Kurt Forstreuter and the Historiography of Medieval Prussia

  Hess, C.

  For nearly a century, it has been a commonplace of Central European history that there were no Jews in medieval Prussia—the result, supposedly, of the ruling Teutonic Order’s attempts to create a purely Christian crusader’s state. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, however, medievalist Cordelia Hess demonstrates the very weak foundations upon which that assumption rests. In exacting detail, she traces this narrative to the work of a single, minor Nazi-era historian, revealing it to be ideologically compromised work that badly mishandles its evidence. By combining new medieval scholarship with a biographical and historiographical exploration grounded in the 20th century, The Absent Jews spans remote eras while offering a fascinating account of the construction of historical knowledge.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: Medieval/Early Modern

• January 2005

  Adolf Cluss, Architect

  From Germany to America

  Lessoff, A. & Mauch, C. (eds)

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  Adolf Cluss was born in 1825 into a middle-class family of master stonemasons, engineers and entrepreneurs in Heilbronn, Germany. A colleague and correspondent of Karl Marx, and a participant in the unsuccessful German revolution of 1848, he emigrated to the United States. Until 1858 he remained a member in the German Communist Party although by then he had established himself in both German-American life and in the professional and intellectual milieu of Washington where he was soon considered the most important architect. Thanks to Cluss’s imagination, technical skills, and vision of a new cityscape, Washington became a showcase for the nation through the handsome public buildings and private structures that expressed national confidence and international interest in improving the health, safety, and beautification of cities. Cluss’s work as an architect, civil engineer and urban planner in Washington represents a long neglected chapter in the development of the capital city during the social and physical rebuilding that followed the Civil War.

  Major scholars in the field place Cluss’s life and career in a historical context. Their essays are enhanced by many previously unpublished illustrations drawn from years of research. A photo essay at the center of the book vividly illustrates Washington in Cluss’s time, Cluss’s contribution to Washington, and the fate of Cluss’s buildings and city.

  Subjects: Urban Studies History (General)

• eBook available July 2012

  After The History of Sexuality

  German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault

  Spector, S., Puff, H. & Herzog, D. (eds)

  Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

  Subjects: History (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2021

  After Auschwitz

  The Difficult Legacies of the GDR

  Heitzer, E., Jander, M., Kahane, A., & Poutrus, P. G. (eds)

  From the moment of its inception, the East German state sought to cast itself as a clean break from the horrors of National Socialism. Nonetheless, the precipitous rise of xenophobic, far-right parties across the present-day German East is only the latest evidence that the GDR’s legacy cannot be understood in isolation from the Nazi era nor the political upheavals of today. This provocative collection reflects on the heretofore ignored or repressed aspects of German mainstream society—including right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and racism—to call for an ambitious renewal of historical research and political education to place East Germany in its proper historical context.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2011

  After the Event

  The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan

  Feuchtwang, S.

  Two of the most destructive moments of state violence in the twentieth century occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine). This is the first book to bring the two histories together in order to examine their differences and to understand if there are any similar processes of transmission at work. The author expertly ties in the Taiwanese civil war between Nationalists and Communists, which included the White Terror from 1947 to 1987, a less well-known but equally revealing part of twentieth-century history. Personal and family stories are told, often in the individual’s own words, and then compared with the public accounts of the same events as found in official histories, commemorations, school textbooks and other forms of public memory. The author presents innovative and constructive criticisms of social memory theories in order to make sense both of what happened and how what happened is transmitted.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)

• March 2009

  After the 'Socialist Spring'

  Collectivisation and Economic Transformation in the GDR

  Last, G.

  Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• September 1997

  After Unity

  Reconfiguring German Identities

  Jarausch, K. H. (ed)

  The unification of Germany is the most important change in Central Europe in the last four decades. Understanding this rapid and unforeseen development has raised old fears as well as inspired new hopes. In order to make sense out of the bewildering process and to help both expert and lay readers understand the changes and consequences, an American historian and a German social scientist put together this collection of central texts on German unification, the first of its kind. An invaluable reference tool.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2013

  Against the Grain

  Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times

  Mendelsohn, E., Hoffman, S., & Cohen, R. (eds)

  Highlighting the seminal role of German Jewish intellectuals and ideologues in forming and transforming the modern Jewish world, this volume analyzes the political roads taken by German Jewish thinkers; the impact of the Holocaust on the Central and East European Jewish intelligentsia; and the conundrum of modern Jewish identity. Several of German Jewry’s most outstanding figures such as Scholem, Strauss, and Kohn are discussed. Inspired by Steven E. Aschheim’s work, several contributors focus on the fraught relationship between German and East European Jews (the so-called Ostjuden) and between German Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. More generally, this book examines how Central European Jewish thinkers reacted to the terrible crises of the twentieth century—to war, genocide, and the existential threat to the very existence of the Jewish people. It is essential reading for those interested in the triumphs and tragedies of modern European Jewry.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available June 2021

  The Age of Capitalism and Bureaucracy

  Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber

  Mommsen, W. J.

  The historian Wolfgang Mommsen was one of the foremost experts on Max Weber as well as an insightful and accessible interpreter of his work. Mommsen’s classic book, first published in 1974 under the title The Age of Bureaucracy, not only concisely explains the basic concepts underlying Weber’s worldview, but also explores the historical, social, and intellectual contexts in which he operated, including Weber’s development as an academic, his relationship to German nationalism, and his engagement with Marxism. Supplemented with a new foreword, a bibliography that includes recent studies, and a postscript by Volker Berghahn that surveys the most important debates on Weber's work since his death, this short volume serves as an excellent resource for scholars and students alike.

  Subjects: Sociology History: 20th Century to Present

• February 2001

  Alien Policy in Belgium, 1840-1940

  The Creation of Guest Workers, Refugees and Illegal Aliens

  Caestecker, F.

  Belgium has a unique place in the history of migration in that it was the first among industrialized nations in Continental Europe to develop into an immigrant society. In the nineteenth century Italians, Jews, Poles, Czechs, and North Africans settled in Belgium to work in industry and commerce. They were followed by Russians in the 1920s and Germans in the 1930s who were seeking a safe haven from persecution by totalitarian regimes. In the nineteenth century immigrants were to a larger extent integrated into Belgian society: they were denied political rights but participated on equal terms with Belgians in social life. This changed radically in the twentieth century; by 1940 the rights of aliens were severely curtailed, while those of Belgian citizens, in particular in the social domain, were extended. While the state evolved into a "welfare state" for its citizens it became more of a police state for immigrants. The state only tolerated immigrants who were prepared to carry out those jobs that were shunned by the Belgians. Under the pressure of public opinion, an exception was made in the cases of thousands of Jewish refugees that had fled from Nazi Germany. However, other immigrants were subjected to harsh regulations and in fact became the outcasts of twentieth-century Belgian liberal society.

  This remarkable study examines in depth and over a long time span how (anti-) alien policies were transformed, resulting in an illiberal exclusion of foreigners at the same time as democratization and the welfare state expanded. In this respect Belgium is certainly not unique but offers an interesting case study of developments that are characteristic for Europe as a whole.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available March 2010

  Alsace to the Alsatians?

  Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939

  Fischer, C. J.

  The region of Alsace, located between the hereditary enemies of France and Germany, served as a trophy of war four times between 1870–1945. With each shift, French and German officials sought to win the allegiance of the local populace. In response to these pressures, Alsatians invoked regionalism—articulated as a political language, a cultural vision, and a community of identity—not only to define and defend their own interests against the nationalist claims of France and Germany, but also to push for social change, defend religious rights, and promote the status of the region within the larger national community. Alsatian regionalism however, was neither unitary nor unifying, as Alsatians themselves were divided politically, socially, and culturally. The author shows that the Janus-faced character of Alsatian regionalism points to the ambiguous role of regional identity in both fostering and inhibiting loyalty to the nation. Finally, the author uses the case of Alsace to explore the traditional designations of French civic nationalism versus German ethnic nationalism and argues for the strong similarities between the two countries’ conceptions of nationhood.

  Subject: History (General)

• January 2003

  The Ambivalent Alliance

  Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949-1966

  Granieri, R.

  Whenever asked to name his most significant accomplishment as West Germany's first Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer would invariably reply: "The alliance with the free West." Scholars have echoed his assessment, citing the Federal Republic of Germany's successful integration into the American-led West (Westbindung) as the key to its postwar economic and political recovery. Behind this simple success story, however,lies a much more complicated history: Adenauer and the CDU/CSU remained ambivalent about the ultimate relationship between Europe, Germany, and the United States within the West, torn between visions of Continental European integration based on Franco-German reconciliation and of an Atlantic community linking Europe and the "Anglo-Saxons." These differences eventually erupted into a damaging public conflict between "Atlanticists" and "Gaullists," which colored Adenauer's last years and, after his retirement in 1963, led directly to the failure of his successor, Ludwig Erhard.

  The opening of various personal and party archives over the past few years has now made the entire Adenauer Era accessible for historians. As one of the first efforts to use that material to re-examine existing conventional wisdom about the period, this book traces the roles of Adenauer and the CDU/CSU in shaping Westbindung. Adenauer emerges as a skilled and resourceful (if also mistrustful and devious) politician, and as a distinctly German statesman, maneuvering between allies and adversaries to shape both the Western community and the German role in it, leaving a legacy that still influences contemporary German-American and European-American relations.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 1995

  The American Impact on Postwar Germany

  Pommerin, R. (ed)

  It is only with the benefit of hindsight that the Germans have become acutely aware of how profound and comprehensive was the impact of the United States on their society after 1945.This volume reflect the ubiquitousness of this impact and examines the German responses to it.

  Contributions by well-known scholars cover politics, industry, social life and mass culture.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• November 2004

  Americanization and Anti-americanism

  The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945

  Stephan, A. (ed)

  The ongoing discussions about globalization, American hegemony and September 11 and its aftermath have moved the debate about the export of American culture and cultural anti-Americanism to center stage of world politics. At such a time, it is crucial to understand the process of culture transfer and its effects on local societies and their attitudes toward the United States.

  This volume presents Germany as a case study of the impact of American culture throughout a period characterized by a totalitarian system, two unusually destructive wars, massive ethnic cleansing, and economic disaster. Drawing on examples from history, culture studies, film, radio, and the arts, the authors explore the political and cultural parameters of Americanization and anti-Americanism, as reflected in the reception and rejection of American popular culture and, more generally, in European-American relations in the "American Century."

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2016

  The Anatomy of Murder

  Ethical Transgressions and Anatomical Science during the Third Reich

  Hildebrandt, S.

  Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the “future dead.”


  Subjects: Genocide History

• eBook available May 2017

  Archeologies of Confession

  Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017

  Johnson, C. L., Luebke, D. M., Plummer, M. E. & Spohnholz, J. (eds)

  Modern religious identities are rooted in collective memories that are constantly made and remade across generations. How do these mutations of memory distort our picture of historical change and the ways that historical actors perceive it? Can one give voice to those whom history has forgotten? The essays collected here examine the formation of religious identities during the Reformation in Germany through case studies of remembering and forgetting—instances in which patterns and practices of religious plurality were excised from historical memory. By tracing their ramifications through the centuries, Archeologies of Confession carefully reconstructs the often surprising histories of plurality that have otherwise been lost or obscured.

  Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Memory Studies

• eBook available November 2006

  The Arts in Nazi Germany

  Continuity, Conformity, Change

  Huener, J. & Nicosia, F. (eds)

  Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945. Hitler and his followers believed that art and culture were expressions of race, and that “Aryans” alone were capable of creating true art and preserving true German culture. This volume’s essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism, and are authored by some of the most respected authorities in the field: Alan Steinweis, Michael Kater, Eric Rentschler, Pamela Potter, Frank Trommler, and Jonathan Petropoulos. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to this important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.

  Subjects: History: World War II Cultural Studies (General)

• January 2002

  'Aryanisation' in Hamburg

  The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of their Property in Nazi Germany

  Bajohr, F.

  Much has been written about Nazi anti-Jewish policies, about atrocities of the Wehrmacht, and about the life of the Jews during the Third Reich. However, relatively little is known about the behavior of non-Jewish Germans. This book, published to wide acclaim in its original edition, shows how many "ordinary Germans" became involved in what they saw as a legally sanctioned process of ridding Germany and Europe of their Jews. Bajohr's study offers a major contribution to our understanding of this process in that it focusses on one of its most important aspects, namely the gradual exclusion of Jews from economic life in Hamburg, one of the largest centers of Jewish life in Europe and one in which many of them had been part of the Hanseatic patriciate before 1933. The sad conclusion of this study is that it was not necessarily antisemitism that motivated "ordinary burghers" but unrestrained greed that led them to betray their former co-citizens.

  Subjects: History: World War II Jewish Studies

• eBook available March 2021

  At the Edge of the Wall

  Public and Private Spheres in Divided Berlin

  Hochmuth, H.

  Located in the geographical center of Berlin, the neighboring boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg shared a history and identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing political systems. This revealing account of the two municipal districts before, during and after the Cold War takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the broader historical trajectories of East and West Berlin, with particular attention to housing, religion, and leisure. Merged in 2001, they now comprise a single neighborhood that bears the traces of these complex histories and serves as an illuminating case study of urban renewal, gentrification, and other social processes that continue to reshape Berlin.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Urban Studies

• March 2008

  Austria, Germany, and the Cold War

  From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938-1955

  Steininger, R.

  In the 'Moscow Declaration' of 1943 the Allies officially propagated the notion of Austria as the first victim of Hitlerite aggression and announced their intention to set up a "free and independent Austria" after the war, which finally happened in 1955. By questioning why it took so long to get to this point, the author addresses issues such as the victim thesis, Austrians as perpetrators, Austrian anti-Semitism and official attempts to mitigate its effects after the war. He discusses the various proposals for post-war Austria and connects for the first time the issues of Anschluss, German question, Cold War, and the State Treaty. He makes it clear that the question of Austria was from the very beginning inextricably linked with the more important question of Germany.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available March 2018

  Back to the Postindustrial Future

  An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City

  Ringel, F.

  How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• eBook available March 2009

  Banned in Berlin

  Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

  Stark, G. D.

  Imperial Germany’s governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors, but still not broad enough to prevent the literary community from challenging and subverting many of the social norms the state was most determined to defend. This study is the first systematic analysis in any language of state censorship of literature and theater in imperial Germany (1871–1918). To assess the role that formal state controls played in German literary and political life during this period, it examines the intent, function, contested legal basis, institutions, and everyday operations of literary censorship as well as its effectiveness and its impact on authors, publishers, and theater directors.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• eBook available September 2013

  Becoming East German

  Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler

  Fulbrook, M. & Port, A. I. (eds)

  For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.
   

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• May 2010

  Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory

  Visible Man and The Spirit of Film

  Balázs, B.

  Béla Balázs’s two works, Visible Man (1924) and The Spirit of Film (1930), are published here for the first time in full English translation. The essays offer the reader an insight into the work of a film theorist whose German-language publications have been hitherto unavailable to the film studies audience in the English-speaking world. Balázs’s detailed analyses of the close-up, the shot and montage are illuminating both as applicable models for film analysis, and as historical documents of his key contribution – alongside such contemporaries as Arnheim, Kracauer and Benjamin – to critical debate on film in the ‘golden age’ of the Weimar silents.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• eBook available September 2010

  Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989

  Broadbent, P. & Hake, S. (eds)

  A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

  Subjects: Urban Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2010

  Berlin, Alexanderplatz

  Transforming Place in a Unified Germany

  Weszkalnys, G.

  A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers’ offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a ‘future’ under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2021

  Bestsellers of the Third Reich

  Readers, Writers and the Politics of Literature

  Adam, C.

  Despite the displacement of countless authors, frequent bans of specific titles, and high-profile book burnings, the German book industry boomed during the Nazi period. Notwithstanding the millions of copies of Mein Kampf that were sold, the era’s most popular books were diverse and often surprising in retrospect, despite an oppressive ideological and cultural climate: Huxley’s Brave New World was widely read in the 1930s, while Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars was a great success during the war years. Bestsellers of the Third Reich surveys this motley collection of books, along with the circumstances of their publication, to provide an innovative new window into the history of Nazi Germany.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies

• eBook available November 2010

  Between Left and Right

  The 2009 Bundestag Elections and the Transformation of the German Party System

  Langenbacher, E. (ed)

  Germany remains a leader in Europe, as demonstrated by its influential role in the on-going policy challenges in response to the post 2008 financial and economic crises. Rarely does the composition of a national government matter as much as Germany’s did following the 2009 Bundestag election. This volume, which brings together established and up-and coming academics from both sides of the Atlantic, delves into the dynamics and consequences surrounding this fateful election: How successful was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership of the Grand Coalition and what does her new partnership with the Free Democrats auger? In the face economic crisis, why did German voters empower a center-right market-liberal coalition? Why did the SPD, one of the oldest and most distinguished parties in the world self-destruct and what are the chances that it will recover? The chapters go beyond the contemporary situation and provide deeper analyses of the long-term decline of the catchall parties, structural changes in the party system, electoral behavior, the evolution of perceptions of gender in campaigns, and the use of new social media in German politics.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2008

  Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

  The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

  Confino, A., Betts, P. & Schumann, D. (eds)

  Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 1998

  Between Reform and Revolution

  German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990

  Barclay, D. & Weitz, E. (ed)

  The powerful impact of Socialism and Communism on modern German history is the theme which is explored by the contributors to this volume. Whereas previous investigations have tended to focus on political, intellectual and biographical aspects, this book captures, for the first time, the methodological and thematic diversity and richness of current work on the history of the German working class and the political movements that emerged from it. Based on original contributions from U.S., British, and German scholars, this collection address a wide range of themes and problems.

  Subject: History (General)

• December 2007

  Between Tradition and Modernity

  Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg

  Russell, M. A.

  Aby Warburg (1866-1929), founder of the Warburg Institute, was one of the most influential cultural historians of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period 1896-1918, this is the first in-depth, book-length study of his response to German political, social and cultural modernism. It analyses Warburg's response to the effects of these phenomena through a study of his involvement with the creation of some of the most important public artworks in Germany. Using a wide array of archival sources, including many of his unpublished working papers and much of his correspondence, the author demonstrates that Warburg's thinking on contemporary art was the product of two important influences: his engagement with Hamburg's civic affairs and his affinity with influential reform movements seeking a greater role for the middle classes in the political, social and cultural leadership of the nation. Thus a lively picture of Hamburg’s cultural life emerges as it responded to artistic modernism, animated by private initiative and public discourse, and charged with debate.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• November 2005

  Between Two Worlds

  The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910-1933

  Prawer, S. S.

  Jews have been well represented in the cinema industry from the beginning of the film era: behind the screen, as producers, distributors, directors, script-writers, composers, set designers; and on the screen, as Jewish actors and as named Jewish characters in the film's plot. Some of these characters are fictional; others, ranging from Rabbi Loew of Prague to Ferdinand Lassalle and Alfred Dreyfus, have a historic original. This book examines how a variety of German and Austrian films treat aspects of Jewish life, at home and in the synagogue, and Jewish interaction with fellow Jews in different cultural environments; conflicts and accommodations between Jews and non-Jews at various times, ranging from the medieval to the contemporary. The author, one of the best known scholars in film history, theory and criticism, offers the reader a rich panorama of the many Jews involved in all spheres of the cinema and who, as the author reminds us repeatedly, together with their non-Jewish contemporaries, created a great industry and new forms of art.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Jewish Studies

• September 1997

  Beyond 1989

  Re-reading German literature since 1945

  Bullivant, K. (ed)

  With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, four decades of separation seemed to have been brought to an end. In the literary arena as in many others, this seemed to be the surprising but ultimately logical end to the situation in which, after the extreme separation of the two Germanies' literatures during most of the period up to 1980, an increasing closeness could be observed during the 1980s, as relations between the two German states normalized. With the opening up of the East in the Autumn of 1989 claims were being made, on the one hand, that German literature had never, in fact, been divided, while others were proclaiming the end of East and West German literatures as they had existed, and the beginning of a new era. This volume examines these claims and other aspects of literary life in the two Germanies since 1945, with the hindsight born of unification in 1990, as well as looking at certain aspects of developments since the fall of the Wall, when, as on East German put it in 1996, rapprochement came to an end.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies

• July 2014

  Beyond Alterity

  German Encounters with Modern East Asia

  Shen, Q. & Rosenstock, M. (eds)

  With the economic and political rise of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, many Western countries have re-evaluated their links to their Eastern counterparts. Thus, in recent years, Asian German Studies has emerged as a promising branch within interdisciplinary German Studies. This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• May 1999

  Beyond Caligari

  The Films of Robert Wiene

  Jung, U. & Schatzberg, W.

  While the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became an international film classic, its director, Robert Wiene, was disparaged and even forgotten. Wiene's oeuvre, however, exhibits a surprising versatility and quality, featuring Raskolnikov, an expressionist adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, INRI, a monumental Bible epic, Orlac's Hands, a psychological thriller, and Der Rosenkavalier, an ambitious opera film. His last film, Ultimatum(1938), is a vehement warning of approaching war, which remains relevant today. With painstaking research of the major European film archives, the author's detailed portrait reveals a career far more differentiated than hitherto acknowledged. Caligar/i - though rated the second most important film in German film history in a recent critic's and scholar's poll - was a landmark rather than a culmination in a career that successfully oscillated between artistic and commercial interests.

  As the field of film studies rediscovers film history and the value of historical context for the analysis of individual films, monographs on filmmakers are increasingly valuable to scholars and students of both film history and cultural studies. Through the provocative and prolific career of Robert Wiene, a wider, more dynamic view of fantasy production in the Weimar Republic is revealed, enabling the reader to better appreciate the complex shapes of Weimar cinema, its inimitable blend of modernism and mass culture, of avant-garde enterprie, and generic production.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• eBook available February 2020

  Beyond Posthumanism

  The German Humanist Tradition and the Future of the Humanities

  Mathäs, A.

  Kant, Goethe, Schiller and other eighteenth-century German intellectuals loom large in the history of the humanities—both in terms of their individual achievements and their collective embodiment of the values that inform modern humanistic inquiry. Taking full account of the manifold challenges that the humanities face today, this volume recasts the question of their viability by tracing their long-disputed premises in German literature and philosophy. Through insightful analyses of key texts, Alexander Mathäs mounts a broad defense of the humanistic tradition, emphasizing its pursuit of a universal ethics and ability to render human experiences comprehensible through literary imagination.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies

• eBook available March 2019

  Beyond the Border

  Young Minorities in the Danish-German Borderlands, 1955-1971

  Wung-Sung, T. H.

  In the nineteenth century, the hotly disputed border region between Denmark and Germany was the focus of an intricate conflict that complicates questions of ethnic and national identity even today. Beyond the Border reconstructs the experiences of both Danish and German minority youths living in the area from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period in which relations remained tense amid the broader developments of Cold War geopolitics. Drawing on a remarkable variety of archival and oral sources, the author provides a rich and fine-grained analysis that encompasses political issues from the NATO alliance and European integration to everyday life and popular culture.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• November 2014

  Bloom and Bust

  Urban Landscapes in the East since German Reunification

  Cliver, G. & Smith-Prei, C. (eds)

  More than two decades of deconstruction, renovation, and reconstruction have left the urban environments in the former German Democratic Republic completely transformed. This volume considers the changing urban landscapes in the former East — and how the filling of previous absences and the absence of previous presence — creates the cultural landscape of modern unified Germany. This broadens our understanding of this transformation by examining often-neglected cities, spaces, or structures, and historical narration and preservation.
   

  Subjects: Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• October 2022

  Brewing Socialism

  Coffee, East Germans, and Twentieth-Century Globalization

  Kloiber, A.

  Placing coffee at the center of its analysis, Brewing Socialism links East Germany’s consumption and food culture to its relationship to the wider world. Andrew Kloiber reveals the ways that everyday cultural practices surrounding coffee drinking not only connected East Germans to a global system of exchange, but also perpetuated a set of traditions and values which fit uneasily into the Socialist Unity Party’s conceptualization of a modern Socialist Utopia. Sifting through the relationship between material culture and ideology, this unique work examines the complex tapestry of traditions, history and cultural values that underpinned the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR).

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2009

  Bringing Culture to the Masses

  Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR

  Richthofen, E. von

  Cultural life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was strictly controlled by the ruling party, the SED, who attempted to dictate how people spent their free time by prohibiting privately organized leisure time pursuits and offering instead cultural activities in state institutions and organizations. By exploring the nature of dictatorial rule in the GDR and analysing the population’s engagement with state-organized cultural activity, this book challenges the current assumptions about the GDR’s social and institutional history that ignore the interaction and inter-dependence between ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’. The author argues that the people’s cultural life in the GDR developed a dynamic of its own; it was determined by their own interests and by the input of cultural functionaries, who often aimed to satisfy popular demands, even if they were at odds with the SED’s cultural policy. Gradually, these developments affected SED cultural policy, which in the 1960s became less focused on educationalist goals and increasingly oriented towards popular interests.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2023

  The Burden of German History

  A Transatlantic Life

  Jarausch, K. H.

  As one of the leading historians of the post-1956 generation and an internationally acclaimed scholar for the past five decades, Konrad H. Jarausch’s autobiography presents a sustained academic reflection on the post-war German effort to cope with the guilt of the Holocaust amongst a generation of historians too young to have been perpetrators. Ranging from his war-time childhood in a chaotic country, to Americanization as a foreign student, and concluding with his mentorship of PhDs as a respected international scholar, he weaves together a self-critical historiography of a twentieth-century Germany that was wrestling with the responsibility for war and genocide. This self-reflexive work explores a wide range of topics including the development of German historiography and methodological debates, the interdisciplinary teaching efforts in German studies, and the development of scholarly organizations and institutions.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History History: World War II

• eBook available May 2020

  Bureaucracy, Work and Violence

  The Reich Ministry of Labour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945

  Nützenadel, A. (ed)

  Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime’s labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials’ actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History

• March 2004

  Business and Industry in Nazi Germany

  Nicosia, F.R. & Huener, J. (eds)

  During the past decade, the role of Germany's economic elites under Hitler has once again moved into the limelight of historical research and public debate. This volume brings together a group of internationally renowned scholars who have been at the forefront of recent research. Their articles provide an up-to-date synthesis, which is as comprehensive as it is insightful, of current knowledge in this field. The result is a volume that offers students and interested readers a brief but focused introduction to the role of German businesses and industries in the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. Not only does this book treat the subject in an accessible manner; it also emerges as particularly relevant in light of current controversies over the nature of business-state relations, corporate social responsibility, and globalization.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History

• eBook available March 2019

  Categories in Context

  Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

  Berrebi-Hoffmann, I., Giraud, O., Renard, L., & Wobbe, T. (eds)

  Despite the wealth of empirical research currently available on the interrelationships of gender and labor, we still know comparatively little about the forms of classification and categorization that have helped shape these social phenomena over time. Categories in Context seeks to enrich our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, law, and rights have been produced, comprehended, appropriated, and eventually transformed by relevant actors. By focusing on specific developments in France and Germany through a transnational lens, this volume produces insights that can be applied to a wide variety of political, social, and historical contexts.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General) Sociology

• December 1998

  The Challenge of Globalization for Germany's Social Democracy

  A Policy Agenda for the 21st Century

  Dettke, D. (ed)

  "Modell Deutschland," once admired worldwide, has lost much of its shine, due to a number ofinternal and external factors. This important and timely volume deals with the economic andpolitical pressures and challenges of globalization and is particularly concerned with their effecton social policy, labor markets, environmental policies and technological change. Distinguishedacademic experts and leading politicians discuss these problems both from an internationalperspective and against the background of debates currently going on in Germany.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2014

  The Challenges of Globalization

  Economy and Politics in Germany, 1860-1914

  Torp, C.

  In the mid nineteenth century a process began that appears, from a present-day perspective, to have been the first wave of economic globalization. Within a few decades global economic integration reached a level that equaled, and in some respects surpassed, that of the present day. This book describes the interpenetration of the German economy with an emerging global economy before the First World War, while also demonstrating the huge challenge posed by globalization to the society and politics of the German Empire. The stakes for both the winners and losers of the intensifying world market played a major role in dividing German society into camps with conflicting socio-economic priorities. As foreign trade policy moved into the center stage of political debates, the German government found it increasingly difficult to pursue a successful policy that avoided harming German exports and consumer interests while also seeking to placate a growing protectionist movement.
   

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• May 2002

  Challenging Ethnic Citizenship

  German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration

  Levy, D. & Weiss, Y.(eds)

  In contrast to most other countries, both Germany and Israel have descent-based concepts of nationhood and have granted members of their nation (ethnic Germans and Jews) who wish to immigrate automatic access to their respective citizenship privileges. Therefore these two countries lend themselves well to comparative analysis of the integration process of immigrant groups, who are formally part of the collective "self" but increasingly transformed into "others." The book examines the integration of these 'privileged' immigrants in relation to the experiences of other minority groups (e.g. labor migrants, Palestinians).

  This volume offers rich empirical and theoretical material involving historical developments, demographic changes, sociological problems, anthropological insights, and political implications. Focusing on the three dimensions of citizenship: sovereignty and control, the allocation of social and political rights, and questions of national self-understanding, the essays bring to light the elements that are distinctive for either society but also point to similarities that owe as much to nation-specific characteristics as to evolving patterns of global migration.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies

• April 2000

  Challenging Modernity

  Dada between Modern and Postmodern

  Pegrum, M. A.

  When Dada burst onto the European stage in 1916, it shocked and scandalized the public of its day with art forms, ideas, and attitudes which were so revolutionary that it is only in recent decades that they have begun to find recognition within the broad cultural movement known as postmodernism. In fact, many postmodern artistic and intellectual tendencies can be seen to have descended via an underground tradition from the experiments of the Dadaists earlier this century. Yet, the existence of this close link has been largely neglected by scholars.

  This book, for the first time, examines in depth the link between modernism and postmodernism and demonstrates the extensive similarities, as well as the few crucial differences between the ideas and art of the Dadaists on the one hand, and those of contemporary postmodern thinkers and artists on the other. Although they did not have access to postmodern terminology, it is clear that many Dadaists were essentially attempting to escape constrictive Enlightenment and modern(ist)structures in order to create a proto-postmodern space of différence, otherness, and flux. Their successes, failures, and compromises in this respect are very illustrative for anyone interested in the progress of our own intellectual and artistic culture in its wavering between modern and postmodern. This book offers a much-needed historical perspective and solid basis for the on-going debate on postmodernism.

  Subject: Cultural Studies (General)

• March 1999

  The Chameleon State

  Global Culture and Policy Shifts in Britain and Germany, 1914-1933

  Liu, T-L.

  The role of the state in capitalist societies has been a bone of considerable contention among scholars. The two founding fathers of sociology held radically opposing views on this subject which were reflected in the numerous debates over subsequent decades to this day. Yet, no answer has been found to the vexing question: on whose side is the state in capitalist societies? The author examines current theories and, comparing Britain and Germany, shows that they are unable to explain the contradictory social and industrial policies in these two countries during the twentieth century. Based on in-depth archival and secondary sources the author offers an alternative theoretical framework, one that focuses on the interactions among historical contingencies, the global cultural context, and political processes.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2007

  Changing Cultural Tastes

  Writers and the Popular in Modern Germany

  Waine, A.

  Changing Cultural Tastes offers a critical survey of the taste wars fought over the past two centuries between the intellectual establishment and the common people in Germany. It charts the uneasy relationship of high and popular culture in Germany in the modern era. The impact of National Socialism and the strong influence from Great Britain and the United States are assessed in this cultural history of a changing nation and society. The period 1920-1980 is given special prominence, and the work of significant writers and artists such as Josef von Sternberg and Bertolt Brecht, Elfriede Jelinek and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Erwin Piscator and Heinrich Böll, is closely analysed. Their work has reflected changing tastes and, crucially, helped to make taste more pluralistic and democratic.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2008

  The Changing Faces of Citizenship

  Integration and Mobilization among Ethnic Minorities in Germany

  Mushaben, J. M.

  In contrast to most migration studies that focus on specific “foreigner” groups in Germany, this study simultaneously compares and contrasts the legal, political, social, and economic opportunity structures facing diverse categories of the ethnic minorities who have settled in the country since the 1950s. It reveals the contradictory, and usually self-defeating, nature of German policies intended to keep “migrants” out—allegedly in order to preserve a German Leitkultur (with which very few of its own citizens still identify). The main barriers to effective integration—and socioeconomic revitalization in general—sooner lie in the country’s obsolete labor market regulations and bureaucratic procedures. Drawing on local case studies, personal interviews, and national surveys, the author describes “the human faces” behind official citizenship and integration practices in Germany, and in doing so demonstrates that average citizens are much more multi-cultural than they realize.

  Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available October 2019

  Cinema of Collaboration

  DEFA Coproductions and International Exchange in Cold War Europe

  Ivanova, M.

  From their very inception, European cinemas undertook collaborative ventures in an attempt to cultivate a transnational “Film-Europe.” In the postwar era, it was DEFA, the state cinema of East Germany, that emerged as a key site for cooperative practices. Despite the significant challenges that the Cold War created for collaboration, DEFA sought international prestige through various initiatives. These ranged from film exchange in occupied Germany to partnerships with Western producers, and from coproductions with Eastern European studios to strategies for film co-authorship. Uniquely positioned between East and West, DEFA proved a crucial mediator among European cinemas during a period of profound political division.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• August 2000

  Citizens and Aliens

  Foreigners and the Law in Britain and German States 1789-1870

  Fahrmeir, A.

  From the last decade of the 18th century, European states began to define nationality more rigorously. Regulations covering matters as diverse as passports, residence permits, taxes, and admission to university examinations made clear that nationality mattered more than rank. Drawing on the files of central and regional administrations and on individual case studies and travel accounts, the author offers a detailed examination of the practical consequences of alien status in liberal England and in the comparatively restrictive German states. In the latter all citizens of other German states were considered foreigners, whereas in the United Kingdom Irish immigrants were by law British subjects along with all other persons born on British soil. These differences in legal definition of citizenship should have far-reaching consequences for the development of modern nation states, consequences the effects of which can be felt to this day.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Refugee and Migration Studies

• April 2023

  Citizens into Dishonored Felons

  Felony Disenfranchisement, Honor, and Rehabilitation in Germany, 1806-1933

  de Groot, T.

  Over the course of its history, the German Empire increasingly withheld basic rights—such as joining the army, holding public office, and even voting—as a form of legal punishment. Dishonored offenders were often stigmatized in both formal and informal ways, as their convictions shaped how they were treated in prisons, their position in the labour market, and their access to rehabilitative resources.  With a focus on Imperial Germany’s criminal policies and their afterlives in the Weimar era, Citizens into Dishonored Felons demonstrates how criminal punishment was never solely a disciplinary measure, but that it reflected a national moral compass that authorities used to dictate the rights to citizenship, honour and trust.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• March 2004

  Civil Enculturation

  Nation-State, School and Ethnic Difference in The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and France

  Schiffauer, W. , Baumann, G., Kastoryano, R. & Vertovec, S, (eds)

  For several years now, the concepts of 'civil culture' and 'civil society' have been widely discussed in the social sciences. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, this volume is one of few studies that offer solid and focused ethnographic research on how the tenets and assumptions of civil culture are inculcated in schools. The authors examined school curricula, texts and pedagogical practices, observed daily interaction within the schools and outside, and conducted numerous interviews and discussion groups. The experience of students from Turkish backgrounds in the four countries was given special attention, thus offering valuable insights into the changing dynamics of nation-state civil cultures in multicultural societies.

  Subject: Educational Studies

• August 2006

  Civil Society

  Berlin Perspectives

  Keane, J. (eds)

  At the moment, no other European city attracts so much fascination as the city of Berlin. An unrivalled symbol of modern urban life, Berlin is a dynamic city whose inhabitants, in the course of the past two centuries, have lived through both the rapid growth and the violent destruction of the institutions of civil society, several times over. This volume situates itself within these developments by presenting, for the first time in English, a sample of the best, recently written essays on contemporary civil societies, their structural problems, and their uncertain future, written by scholars with a close, long-standing relationship with the city. They are pre-occupied with a broad sweep of substantive themes, but in each case they focus upon one or other of the key trends that are shaping actually existing civil societies.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Urban Studies

• December 2014

  Clausewitz in His Time

  Essays in the Cultural and Intellectual History of Thinking about War

  Paret, P.

  Anything but a detached theorist, Clausewitz was as fully engaged in the intellectual and cultural currents of his time as in its political and military conflicts. Late-eighteenth century thought helped shape the analytic methods he developed for the study of war. The essays in this volume follow his career in a complex military society, together with that of other students of war, both friends and rivals, providing a broad perspective that leads to significant documents so far unknown or ignored. They add to our understanding of Clausewitz’s early ideas and their expansion into a comprehensive theory that continues to challenge our thinking about war today.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• May 2000

  Cold Fusion

  Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia

  Barabtarlo, G. (ed)

  While historical and political aspects of the Russo-German relationship over the past three to four centuries have received due attention from scholars, the range of the far more diverse, important, and peculiar cultural relations still awaits full assessment. This volume shows how enriching these cultural influences were for both countries, affecting many spheres of intellectual and daily life such as philosophy and religion, education and ideology, sciences and their application, arts and letters, custom and language. The German-Russian relationship has always been particularly intense. Oscillating as it has between infatuation and contempt, it has always been marked by a singular paradox: a German cultural presence in Russia resulting either in a more or less complete fusion, as in the case of Russifield German, or in a pronounced mutual repulsion, accompanied by the denigration of each other's culture as inferior. It is this curious paradox that determines the perspectives of the articles that were specially written for this volume, providing it with a unifying focus.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• June 2002

  Coming Home to Germany?

  The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic since 1945

  Rock, D. & Wolff, S. (eds)

  The end of World War II led to one of the most significant forced population transfers in history: the expulsion of over 12 million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1950 and the subsequent emigration of another four million in the second half of the twentieth century. Although unprecedented in its magnitude, conventional wisdom has it that the integration of refugees, expellees, and Aussiedler was a largely successful process in postwar Germany. While the achievements of the integration process are acknowledged, the volume also examines the difficulties encountered by ethnic Germans in the Federal Republic and analyses the shortcomings of dealing with this particular phenomenon of mass migration and its consequences.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2016

  Coming of Age

  Constructing and Controlling Youth in Munich, 1942-1973

  Kalb, M.

  In the lean and anxious years following World War II, Munich society became obsessed with the moral condition of its youth. Initially born of the economic and social disruption of the war years, a preoccupation with juvenile delinquency progressed into a full-blown panic over the hypothetical threat that young men and women posed to postwar stability. As Martin Kalb shows in this fascinating study, constructs like the rowdy young boy and the sexually deviant girl served as proxies for the diffuse fears of adult society, while allowing authorities ranging from local institutions to the U.S. military government to strengthen forms of social control.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• March 2000

  Common Destiny

  A Comparative History of the Dutch, French, and German Social Democratic Parties, 1945-1969

  Orlow, D.

  Although the Socialist or Social Democractic parties played a key role in West European politics during the quarter century after the Second World War, they have been studied far less than their political rivals, the Christian Democrats. The story of West European Social Democracy after 1945 begins with a dilemma: Democratic marxism, which had been the parties' ideological and organizational principle until the Second World War, was becoming politically irrelevant. The three parties analyzed here represent the spectrum of reactions among Social Democratic parties to this realization. The debate over the parties' programs and ideologies did not, of course, take place in a vacuum: the author devotes considerable space to a comparative analysis of the parties' leaders and organizational structures as well as the evolution of Social Democratic domestic and foreign policies. Immensely readable, this book not only offers an in-depth analysis of the postwar period crucial for the history of Social Democracy but also, because of its cross-national treatment of these three major parties, adds significantly to our understanding of the processes of European integration and the evolution of the Atlantic Alliance.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available March 2010

  Comparative and Transnational History

  Central European Approaches and New Perspectives

  Haupt, H. & Kocka, J. (eds)

  Since the 1970s West German historiography has been one of the main arenas of international comparative history. It has produced important empirical studies particularly in social history as well as methodological and theoretical reflections on comparative history. During the last twenty years however, this approach has felt pressure from two sources: cultural historical approaches, which stress microhistory and the construction of cultural transfer on the one hand, global history and transnational approaches with emphasis on connected history on the other. This volume introduces the reader to some of the major methodological debates and to recent empirical research of German historians, who do comparative and transnational work.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2017

  Compensation in Practice

  The Foundation 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich

  Goschler, C. (ed)

  Founded in 2000, the German Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” is one of the largest transitional justice initiatives in history: in cooperation with its international partner organizations, it has to date paid over 4 billion euros to nearly 1.7 million survivors of forced labour during the Nazi Era. This volume provides an unparalleled look at the Foundation’s creation, operations, and prospects after nearly two decades of existence, with valuable insights not just for historians but for a range of scholars, professionals, and others involved in human rights and reconciliation efforts.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: World War II

• February 2020

  Comrades in Arms

  Military Masculinities in East German Culture

  Smith, T.

  Without question, the East German National People’s Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts’ powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers’ lives and the military institution itself.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2015

  Comrades of Color

  East Germany in the Cold War World

  Slobodian, Q. (ed)

  In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available April 2019

  Concentrationary Art

  Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts

  Pollock, G. & Silverman, M. (eds)

  Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol’s key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

  Subjects: Literary Studies Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies

• September 2009

  The Concise Cinegraph

  Encyclopaedia of German Cinema

  Bock, H.-M. & Bergfelder, T. (eds.)

  This comprehensive guide is an ideal reference work for film specialists and enthusiasts. First published in 1984 but continuously updated ever since, CineGraph is the most authoritative and comprehensive encyclopedia on German-speaking cinema in the German language. This condensed and substantially revised English-language edition makes this important resource available to students and researchers for the first time outside its German context. It offers a representative historical overview through bio-filmographical entries on the main protagonists, from the beginnings to the present day. Included are directors and actors, writers and cameramen, composers and production designers, film theorists and critics, producers and distributors, inventors and manufacturers. An appendix includes short introductory essays on specific periods and movements, such as Early Film, Weimar, Nazi Cinema, DEFA, New German Cinema, and German film since unification, as well as on cinematic developments in Austria and Switzerland. Sections that crossreference names around specific professional groups and themes will prove equally invaluable to researchers.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• July 2007

  Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity

  Essays on Modern German History

  Biess, F., Roseman, M. & Schissler, H. (eds)

  Bringing together some of the most prominent contemporary historians of modern Germany alongside innovative newcomers to the field, this volume offers new perspectives on key debates surrounding Germany’s descent into, and emergence from, the Nazi catastrophe. It explores the intersections between society, economy, and international policy, with a particular interest in the relations between elites and the wider society, and provides new insights into the complex continuities and discontinuities of modern German history. This volume offers a rich selection of essays that contribute to our understanding of the road to war, Nazism, and the Holocaust, as well as Germany’s transformation after 1945.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2004

  The 'Conservative Revolutionaries'

  The Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany after Radical Political Change in the 1990s

  Thériault, B.

  During the forty years of division, the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany were the only organizations to retain strong ties and organizational structures: they embodied continuity in a country marked by discontinuity. As such, the churches were both expected to undergo smooth and rapid institutional consolidation and undertake an active role in the public realm of the new eastern German states in the 1990s. Yet critical voices were heard over the West German system of church-state relations and the public role it confers on religious organizations, and critics often expressed the idea that despite all their difficulties, something precious was lost in the collapse of the German democratic republic. Against this backdrop, the author delineates the conflicting conceptions of the Protestant and Catholic churches' public role and pays special attention to the East German model, or what is generally termed the "positive experiences of the GDR and the Wende."

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2016

  Constitutional Courts in Comparison

  The US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court

  Rogowski, R. & Gawron T. (eds)

  Constitutional litigation in general attracts two distinct types of conflict: disputes of a highly politicized or culturally controversial nature and requests from citizens claiming a violation of a fundamental constitutional right. The side-by-side comparison between the U.S. Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court provides a novel socio-legal approach in studying constitutional litigation, focusing on conditions of mobilisation, decision-making and implementation.

  This updated and revised second edition includes a number of new contributions on the political status of the courts in their democratic political cultures.

  Subject: Sociology

• March 2007

  Continental Britons

  German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany

  Berghahn, M.

  Based on numerous in-depth and personal interviews with members of three generations, this is the first comprehensive study of German-Jewish refugees who came to England in the 1930s. The author addresses questions such as perceptions of Germany and Britain and attitudes towards Judaism. On the basis of many case studies, the author shows how the refugees adjusted, often amazingly successfully, to their situation in Britain. While exploring the process of acculturation of the German-Jews in Britain, the author challenges received ideas about the process of Jewish assimilation in general, and that of the Jews in Germany in particular, and offers a new interpretation in the light of her own empirical data and of current anthropological theory.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available May 2012

  Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany

  Luebke, D. M., Poley, J., Ryan, D. C., & Sabean, D. W. (eds)

  The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of “conversion.” One widely accepted modern notion of the phenomenon simply expresses denominational change. Yet this concept had no bearing at the outset of the Reformation. Instead, a variety of processes, such as the consolidation of territories along confessional lines, attempts to ensure civic concord, and diplomatic quarrels helped to usher in new ideas about the nature of religious boundaries and, therefore, conversion. However conceptualized, religious change— conversion—had deep social and political implications for early modern German states and societies.

  Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern

• eBook available October 2006

  Coping with the Nazi Past

  West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955-1975

  Gassert, P. & Steinweis, A. E. (eds)

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2004

  The Creation of the Modern German Army

  General Walther Reinhardt and the Weimar Republic, 1914-1930

  Mulligan, W.

  Civil-military relations have been a consistent theme of the history of the Weimar Republic. This study focuses on the career of General Walther Reinhardt, the last Prussian Minister of War and the First Head of the Army Command in the Weimar Republic. Though less well known than his great rival, Hans von Seeckt, Reinhardt's role in forming the young Reichswehr and his writings on warfare made him one of the most important and influential military figures in interwar Germany. Contrary to the conventional view that civil-military relations were fraught from the outset, the author argues, Reinhardt's contribution to the military politics of the Weimar Republic shows that opportunities for reform and co-operation with civilian leaders existed. However, although he is primarily seen as a liberal General, this study demonstrates that he was motivated by professional military considerations and by the specter of a future war. His ideas on modern warfare were amongst the most radical of the time.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• May 2014

  Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany

  Wetzell, R. F. (ed)

  The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• April 2009

  Crime Stories

  Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany

  Herzog, T.

  The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a crucial moment not only in German history but also in the history of both crime fiction and criminal science. This study approaches the period from a unique perspective - investigating the most notorious criminals of the time and the public’s reaction to their crimes. The author argues that the development of a new type of crime fiction during this period - which turned literary tradition on its head by focusing on the criminal and abandoning faith in the powers of the rational detective - is intricately related to new ways of understanding criminality among professionals in the fields of law, criminology, and police science. Considering Weimar Germany not only as a culture in crisis (the standard view in both popular and scholarly studies), but also as a culture of crisis, the author explores the ways in which crime and crisis became the foundation of the Republic’s self-definition. An interdisciplinary cultural studies project, this book insightfully combines history, sociology, literary studies, and film studies to investigate a topic that cuts across all of these disciplines.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies Film and Television Studies Sociology

• January 2007

  Crime, Jews and News

  Vienna 1890-1914

  Vyleta, D.M.

  Crimes committed by Jews, especially ritual murders, have long been favorite targets in the antisemitic press. This book investigates popular and scientific conceptualizations of criminals current in Austria and Germany at the turn of the last century and compares these to those in the contemporary antisemitic discourse. It challenges received historiographic assumptions about the centrality of criminal bodies and psyches in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century criminology and argues that contemporary antisemitic narratives constructed Jewish criminality not as a biologico-racial defect, but rather as a coolly manipulative force that aimed at the deliberate destruction of the basis of society itself. Through the lens of criminality this book provides new insight into the spread and nature of antisemitism in Austria-Hungary around 1900. The book also provides a re-evaluation of the phenomenon of modern Ritual Murder Trials by placing them into the context of wider narratives of Jewish crime.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 18th/19th Century Media Studies

• eBook available December 2008

  Crises in European Integration

  Challenges and Responses, 1945-2005

  Kuehnhardt, L. (ed)

  While the major trends in European integration have been well researched and constitute key elements of narratives about its value and purpose, the crises of integration and their effects have not yet attracted sufficient attention. This volume, with original contributions by leading German scholars, suggests that crises of integration should be seen as engines of progress throughout the history of European integration rather than as expressions of failure and regression, a widely held assumption. It therefore throws new light on the current crises in European integration and provides a fascinating panorama of how challenges and responses were guiding the process during its first five decades.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 2005

  The Crisis of the German Left

  The PDS, Stalinism and the Global Economy

  Thompson, P.

  Using Nietzsche's categories of monumentalist, antiquarian and critical history, the author examines the historical and theoretical contexts of the collapse of the GDR in 1989 and looks at the positive and negative legacies of the GDR for the PDS (the successor party to the East German Communists). He contends that the Stalinization of the GDR itself was the product not just of the Cold War but of a longer inter-systemic struggle between the competing primacies of politics and economics and that the end of the GDR has to be seen as a consequence of the global collapse of the social imperative under the pressure of the re-emergence of the market-state since the mid-1970s. The PDS is therefore stuck in dilemma in which any attempt to "arrive in the Federal Republic" (Brie) is criticized as a readiness to accept the dominance of the market over society whereas any attempt to prioritize social imperatives over the market is attacked as a form of unreconstructed Stalinism. The book offers some suggestions as to how to escape from this dilemma by returning to the critical rather than monumentalist and antiquarian traditions of the workers’ movement.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• June 2001

  Critical Theory

  Current State and Future Prospects

  Hohendahl, P.-U. & Fisher, J. (eds)

  The retirement of the distinguished philosopher Jürgen Habermas from his chair at the University of Frankfurt signalled an important caesura in the history of Critical Theory: the transition from the Habermasian project, to different forms of inquiry in the work of the next generation. This change-over happens at a time when it has become clear that Habermas's systematic exploration of communicative rationality has reached the point where both its achievements and its limitations had become evident. The essays collected in this volume address the problems connected with this transition, partly by returning to the insights of the first generation (Adorno and Benjamin), partly by focusing on questions raised by Habermas's work. Whatever the difference in the authors' positions, this collection gains its unity through their common interest in the significance and value of Critical Theory today and in its future as a philosophical project.

  Subject: Cultural Studies (General)

• October 2001

  Crossing Boundaries

  The Exclusion and Inclusion of Minorities in Germany and America

  Jones, L. (ed)

  "Crossing Boundaries" – these two words serve not only as the leitmotiv around which the following collection of essays has been organized but also as a metaphor for the life and career of the person who inspired their composition: Georg G. Iggers, whose entire life has been one of crossing boundaries: geographical, racial, and professional. Just as Iggers has done his best as a historian to break down professional and disciplinary boundaries, this volume examines, from different angles, the ways in which Germany and the United States have dealt with the inclusion and exclusion of minorities.

  Comparing the respective fates of the Jews in Germany and the African-Americans in the United States, this collection offers new insight as to how and why the struggle for equality played out so differently in the two countries and in what ways the issues of migration, multi-ethnicity, discrimination, and integration have informed the historical discourse in the postmodern era.

  Subjects: History (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• December 2007

  Cultural Diversity and the Empowerment of Minorities

  Perspectives from Israel and Germany

  Al-Haj, M. & Mielke, R. (eds)

  Conflicts between different racial, ethnic, national and other social groups are becoming more and more salient. One of the main sources of these internal conflicts is social and economic inequality, in particular the increasing disparities between majority and minority groups. Even societies that had been successful in dealing with external conflicts and making the transition from war to peace have realized that this does not automatically resolve internal conflicts. On the contrary, the resolution of external conflicts may even sharpen the internal ones. This volume, a joint publication of the University of Haifa and the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg, addresses questions of how to deal with internal issues of social inequality and cultural diversity and, at the same time, how to build a shared civility among their different national, ethnic, religious and social groups.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available November 2017

  Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin

  Bauer, K. & Hosek, J. R. (eds)

  Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2002

  Culture and Crisis

  The Case of Germany and Sweden

  Witoszek, N. & Trägårdh, L. (eds)

  It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2012

  Culture in Dark Times

  Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile

  Hermand, J.

  BETWEEN 1933 AND 1945 MEMBERS OF THREE GROUPS—THE Nazi fascists, Inner Emigration, and Exiles—fought with equal fervor over who could definitively claim to represent the authentically “great German culture,” as it was culture that imparted real value to both the state and the individual. But when authorities made pronouncements about “culture” were they really talking about high art? This book analyzes the highly complex interconnections among the cultural-political concepts of these various ideological groups and asks why the most artistically ambitious art forms were viewed as politically important by all cultured (or even semi-cultured) Germans in the period from 1933 to 1945, with their ownership the object of a bitter struggle between key figures in the Nazi fascist regime, representatives of Inner Emigration, and Germans driven out of the Third Reich.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• December 2002

  The Culture of German Environmentalism

  Anxieties, Visions, Realities

  Goodbody, A.

  Though much has been written about the Green Party in Germany, less is known about the changes in individuals' attitudes towards the environment that led to the rise of environmental movement, or of its cultural roots. This volume draws attention to the breadth of environmentalism in contemporary Germany and its significance for German political culture by focusing on the treatment of "green" issues in literature, the media and film, against the background of Green politics and the environmental movement. The volume includes an interview with Carl Amery, the Bavarian Green and science fiction writer, a short text by him and an account of his activities as writer and campaigner.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• December 2007

  Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany

  Usborne, C.

  Abortion in the Weimar Republic is a compelling subject since it provoked public debates and campaigns of an intensity rarely matched elsewhere. It proved so explosive because populationist, ecclesiastical and political concerns were heightened by cultural anxieties of a modernity in crisis. Based on an exceptionally rich source material (e.g., criminal court cases, doctors’ case books, personal diaries, feature films, plays and literary works), this study explores different attitudes and experiences of those women who sought to terminate an unwanted pregnancy and those who helped or hindered them. It analyzes the dichotomy between medical theory and practice, and questions common assumptions, i.e. that abortion was “a necessary evil,” which needed strict regulation and medical control; or that all back-street abortions were dangerous and bad. Above all, the book reveals women’s own voices, frequently contradictory and ambiguous: having internalized medical ideas they often also adhered to older notions of reproduction which opposed scientific approaches.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

• September 2013

  Death in East Germany, 1945-1990

  Schulz, F. R.

  As the first historical study of East Germany‘s sepulchral culture, this book explores the complex cultural responses to death since the Second World War. Topics include the interrelated areas of the organization and municipalization of the undertaking industry; the steps taken towards a socialist cemetery culture such as issues of design, spatial layout, and commemorative practices; the propagation of cremation as a means of disposal; the wide-spread introduction of anonymous communal areas for the internment of urns; and the emergence of socialist and secular funeral rituals. The author analyses the manifold changes to the system of the disposal of the dead in East Germany—a society that not only had to negotiate the upheaval of military defeat but also urbanization, secularization, a communist regime, and a planned economy. Stressing a comparative approach, the book reveals surprising similarities to the development of Western countries but also highlights the intricate local variations within the GDR and sheds more light on the East German state and its society.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 1999

  DEFA

  East German Cinema 1946-1992

  Allan, S. & Sandford, J. (eds)

  Western scholars have not lost any of their fascination for East German culture. Cinema in particular continues to attract interest. This volume, the first one in English, traces the development of the main institution, the state-sponsored Deutsche Film Anstalt (DEFA), which was primarily responsible for film production in the former GDR from 1946, ceasing to exist in 1992. Although largely ignored outside the former GDR, the DEFA produced anumber of excellent films and scriptwriters that are examined here for the first time. This volume analyzes the representation of fascism and anti-fascism in the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, the conflicts between the state and the film-makers of the 1960s, and the social-political criticism in the 1970s and early 1980s. Other key issues that arise from this comprehensive look at DEFA include its representation of women, the concept of "Heimat," the reception of the classical heritage, and the relation of DEFA cinema to other European film traditions.The comprehensive bibliography and a list of research sources on East German cinema make this volume an indispensable tool for students and scholars of the media.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• May 2007

  Demonstrating Reconciliation

  State and Society in West German Foreign Policy toward Israel, 1952-1965

  Hindenburg, H. von

  During the 1950s and early 1960s, the West German government refused to exchange ambassadors with Israel. It feared Arab governments might retaliate against such an acknowledgement of their political foe by recognizing Communist East Germany–West Germany’s own nemesis–as an independent state, and in doing so confirm Germany’s division. Even though the goal of national unification was far more important to German policymakers than full reconciliation with Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in 1965 the Bonn government eventually did agree to commence diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. This was due, the author argues, to grassroots intervention in high-level politics. Students, the media, trade unions, and others pushed for reconciliation with Israel rather than the pursuit of German unification. For the first time, this book provides an in-depth look at the role society played in shaping Germany’s relations with Israel. Today, German society continues to reject anti-Semitism, but is increasingly prepared to criticize Israeli policies, especially in the Palestinian territories. The author argues that this trend sets the stage for a German foreign policy that will continue to support Israel, but is likely to do so more selectively than in the past.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2008

  Destination London

  German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950

  Bergfelder, T. & Cargnelli, C. (eds)

  The legacy of emigrés in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance. Focusing on areas such as exile, genre, technological transfer, professional training and education, cross-cultural exchange and representation, it begins by mapping the reasons for this neglect before examining the contributions made to British cinema by emigré directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, set designers, and composers. It goes on to assess the cultural and economic contexts of transnational industry collaborations in the 1920s, artistic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, and anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1940s.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2011

  The Devil's Captain

  Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

  Mitchell, A.

  Author of Nazi Paris, a Choice Academic Book of the Year, Allan Mitchell has researched a companion volume concerning the acclaimed and controversial German author Ernst Jünger who, if not the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly was the most controversial. His service as a military officer during the occupation of Paris, where his principal duty was to mingle with French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau and with visiting German celebrities like Martin Heidegger, was at the center of disputes concerning his career. Spending more than three years in the French capital, he regularly recorded in a journal revealing impressions of Parisian life and also managed to establish various meaningful social contacts, with the intriguing Sophie Ravoux for one. By focusing on this episode, the most important of Jünger’s adult life, the author brings to bear a wide reading of journals and correspondence to reveal Jünger’s professional and personal experience in wartime and thereafter. This new perspective on the war years adds significantly to our understanding of France's darkest hour.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• eBook available August 2016

  The Devil's Wheels

  Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic

  Disko, S.

  During the high days of modernization fever, among the many disorienting changes Germans experienced in the Weimar Republic was an unprecedented mingling of consumption and identity: increasingly, what one bought signaled who one was. Exemplary of this volatile dynamic was the era’s burgeoning motorcycle culture. With automobiles largely a luxury of the upper classes, motorcycles complexly symbolized masculinity and freedom, embodying a widespread desire to embrace progress as well as profound anxieties over the course of social transformation. Through its richly textured account of the motorcycle as both icon and commodity, The Devil’s Wheels teases out the intricacies of gender and class in the Weimar years.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Transport Studies

• November 2022

  The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky

  Into Germany at the End of World War II

  Lerg, C. A. (ed.)

  In 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.

  Subjects: History: World War II History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies

• eBook available October 1999

  Dictatorship as Experience

  Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR

  Jarausch, K. (ed)

  A decade after the collapse of communism, this volume presents a historical reflection on the perplexing nature of the East German dictatorship. In contrast to most political rhetoric, it seeks to establish a middle ground between totalitarianism theory, stressing the repressive features of the SED-regime, and apologetics of the socialist experiment, emphasizing the normality of daily lives. The book transcends the polarization of public debate by stressing the tensions and contradictions within the East German system that combined both aspects by using dictatorial means to achieve its emancipatory aims. By analyzing a range of political, social, cultural, and chronological topics, the contributors sketch a differentiated picture of the GDR which emphasizes both its repressive and its welfare features. The sixteen original essays, especially written for this volume by historians from both east and west Germany, represent the cutting edge of current research and suggest new theoretical perspectives. They explore political, social, and cultural mechanisms of control as well as analyze their limits and discuss the mixture of dynamism and stagnation that was typical of the GDR.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2022

  Different from the Others

  German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918–1940

  Sturgess, C.

  For much of Europe, the interwar period was one of cultural expansion and diversion and increased visibility for lesbians. While historical research on Germany during the period immediately after the First World War has been extensively studied by historians through the lens of gender and sexuality—with an implicit emphasis on the “masculine” dimension of queer female sexuality—the Dutch context has been virtually ignored. Through careful and sensitive studies of medico‐social discourses, media representations, and literary depictions of queer femininity, Different from the Others recovers the submerged history of queer feminine women in both Germany and the Netherlands. Cyd Sturgess provides a theoretical analysis that makes key empirical contributions to the history of Dutch gays and lesbians while reframing our collective understanding of queer femininity more broadly.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: World War I History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available December 2016

  Different Germans, Many Germanies

  New Transatlantic Perspectives

  Jarausch, K. H., Wenzel, H., & Goihl, K. (eds)

  As much as any other nation, Germany has long been understood in terms of totalizing narratives. For Anglo-American observers in particular, the legacies of two world wars still powerfully define twentieth-century German history, whether through the lens of Nazi-era militarism and racial hatred or the nation’s emergence as a “model” postwar industrial democracy. This volume transcends such common categories, bringing together transatlantic studies that are unburdened by the ideological and methodological constraints of previous generations of scholarship. From American perceptions of the Kaiserreich to the challenges posed by a multicultural Europe, it argues for—and exemplifies—an approach to German Studies that is nuanced, self-reflective, and holistic.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 1996

  Different Restorations

  Reconstruction and Wiederaufbau in the United States and Germany: 1865-1945-1989

  Finzsch, N. & Martschukat, J. (eds)

  This book responds to the frequently heard call for more comparative history .It does so by focusing on the problem of reconstruction in the national experience of the United States and Germany during three crucial periods: 1865-1945-1989. Accordingly, a group of internationally recognized experts was recruited to present their views on such themes as general problems of Reconstruction, on social issues such as race, class, and gender; on the question of war criminals and denazification and of national identity, sectionalism and regionalism.

  Subject: History (General)

• January 2007

  Disenchantment with Market Economics

  East Germans and Western Capitalism

  Müller, B.

  The life-worlds and personal experiences of workers and employees in three enterprises in East Berlin at the moment of political and economic upheaval stand at the centre of the book. It sets out in 1989 at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall witnessing the confrontations with the market economy and examining the reinterpretations of the socialist past as the political and economic changes take place.

  Disenchantment with Market Economics captures a unique moment in history and unveils myths and promises of liberal market economy from the perspective of those who lived through the break down of the planned economy at their workplaces in East Berlin. While Western managers regarded the expansion of their businesses towards Eastern Europe as a civilising mission, the East German employees reacted with complex strategies of individual adaptation and resistance.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2009

  Dismantling the Dream Factory

  Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language

  Baer, H.

  The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in particular at how the attempt to ‘dismantle the dream factory’ of Nazi entertainment cinema resulted in a new cinematic language which developed as a result of the changing audience demographic. In an era when female viewers comprised 70 per cent of cinema audiences a ‘women’s cinema’ emerged, which sought to appeal to female spectators through its genres, star choices, stories and formal conventions. In addition to analyzing the formal language and narrative content of these films, Baer uses a wide array of other sources to reconstruct the original context of their reception, including promotional and publicity materials, film programs, censorship documents, reviews and spreads in fan magazines. This book presents a new take on an essential period, which saw the rebirth of German cinema after its thorough delegitimization under the Nazi regime.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available December 2010

  Divided, But Not Disconnected

  German Experiences of the Cold War

  Hochscherf, T., Laucht, C. & Plowman, A. (eds)

  The Allied agreement after the Second World War did not only partition Germany, it divided the nation along the fault-lines of a new bipolar world order. This inner border made Germany a unique place to experience the Cold War, and the “German question” in this post-1945 variant remained inextricably entwined with the vicissitudes of the Cold War until its end. This volume explores how social and cultural practices in both German states between 1949 and 1989 were shaped by the existence of this inner border, putting them on opposing sides of the ideological divide between the Western and Eastern blocs, as well as stabilizing relations between them. This volume’s interdisciplinary approach addresses important intersections between history, politics, and culture, offering an important new appraisal of the German experiences of the Cold War.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available June 2020

  Don't Need No Thought Control

  Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

  Horten, G.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Cultural Studies (General) Film and Television Studies

• eBook available April 2020

  A Dramatic Reinvention

  German Television and Moral Renewal after National Socialism, 1956–1970

  Anderson, S.

  Following World War II, Germany was faced not only with the practical tasks of reconstruction and denazification, but also with the longer-term mission of morally “re-civilizing” its citizens—a goal that persisted through the nation’s 1949 split. One of the most important mediums for effecting reeducation was television, whose strengths were particularly evident in the thousands of television plays that were broadcast in both Germanys in the 1950s and 1960s. This book shows how TV dramas transcended state boundaries and—notwithstanding the ideological differences between East and West—addressed shared issues and themes, helping to ease viewers into confronting uncomfortable moral topics.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Film and Television Studies Media Studies

• eBook available December 2018

  Dreams of Germany

  Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor

  Gregor, N. & Irvine, T. (eds)

  For many centuries, Germany has enjoyed a reputation as the ‘land of music’. But just how was this reputation established and transformed over time, and to what extent was it produced within or outside of Germany? Through case studies that range from Bruckner to the Beatles and from symphonies to dance-club music, this volume looks at how German musicians and their audiences responded to the most significant developments of the twentieth century, including mass media, technological advances, fascism, and war on an unprecedented scale.

  Subjects: Media Studies History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Performance Studies

• February 2007

  Driving Germany

  The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970

  Zeller, T.

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  Hitler's autobahn was more than just the pet project of an infrastructure-friendly dictator. It was supposed to revolutionize the transportation sector in Germany, connect the metropoles with the countryside, and encourage motorization. The propaganda machinery of the Third Reich turned the autobahn into a hyped-up icon of the dictatorship. One of the claims was that the roads would reconcile nature and technology. Rather than destroying the environment, they would embellish the landscape. Many historians have taken this claim at face value and concluded that the Nazi regime harbored an inbred love of nature. In this book, the author argues that such conclusions are misleading. Based on rich archival research, the book provides the first scholarly account of the landscape of the autobahn.

  Subjects: Transport Studies History: 20th Century to Present Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)

• October 2005

  The Dynamics of German Industry

  Germany's Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge

  Abelshauser, W.

  Over the past decade, the "German Model" of industrial organization has been the subject of vigorous debate among social scientists and historians, especially in comparison to the American one. Is a "Rhenish capitalism" still viable at the beginning of the 21st century and does it offer a road to the New Economy different from the one, in which the standards are set by the U.S.? The author, one of Germany's leading economic historians, analyzes the special features of the German path to the New Economy as it faces the American challenge. He paints a fascinating picture of Germany Inc. and looks at the durability of some of its structures and the mentalities that undergird it. He sees a "culture clash" and argues against an underestimation of the dynamics of the German industrial system. A provocative book for all interested in comparative economics and those who have been inclined to dismiss the German Model as outmoded and weak.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available April 2021

  East German Film and the Holocaust

  Ward, E.

  East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2010

  The East German State and the Catholic Church, 1945-1989

  Schaefer, B.

  From 1945 to 1989, relations between the communist East German state and the Catholic Church were contentious and sometimes turbulent. Drawing on extensive Stasi materials and other government and party archives, this study provides the first systematic overview of this complex relationship and offers many new insights into the continuities, changes, and entanglements of policies and strategies on both sides. Previously undiscovered records in church archives contribute to an analysis of regional and sectoral conflicts within the Church and various shades of cooperation between nominal antagonists. The volume also explores relations between the GDR and the Vatican and addresses the oft-neglected communist “church business” controversially made in exchange for hard Western currency.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2021

  Echoes of Surrealism

  Challenging Socialist Realism in East German Literature, 1945–1990

  Berendse, G.-J.

  For many artists and intellectuals in East Germany, daily life had an undeniably surreal aspect, from the numbing repetition of Communist Party jargon to the fear and paranoia engendered by the Stasi. Echoes of Surrealism surveys the ways in which a sense of the surreal infused literature and art across the lifespan of the GDR, focusing on individual authors, visual artists, directors, musicians, and other figures who have employed surrealist techniques in their work. It provides a new framework for understanding East German culture, exploring aesthetic practices that offered an alternative to rigid government policies and questioned and confronted the status quo.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2010

  The Economic Diplomacy of Ostpolitik

  Origins of NATO's Energy Dilemma

  Lippert, W. D.

  Despite the consensus that economic diplomacy played a crucial role in ending the Cold War, very little research has been done on the economic diplomacy during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 1980s. This book fills the gap by exploring the complex interweaving of East–West political and economic diplomacies in the pursuit of détente. The focus on German chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik reveals how its success was rooted in the usage of energy trade and high tech exchanges with the Soviet Union. His policies and visions are contrasted with those of U.S. President Richard Nixon and the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. The ultimate failure to coordinate these rivaling détente policies, and the resulting divide on how to deal with the Soviet Union, left NATO with an energy dilemma between American and European partners—one that has resurfaced in the 21st century with Russia’s politicization of energy trade. This book is essential for anyone interested in exploring the interface of international diplomacy, economic interest, and alliance cohesion.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2015

  The Emperor's Old Clothes

  Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire

  Stollberg-Rilinger, B.

  For many years, scholars struggled to write the history of the constitution and political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. This book argues that this was because the political and social order could not be understood without considering the rituals and symbols that held the Empire together. What determined the rules (and whether they were followed) depended on complex symbolic-ritual actions. By examining key moments in the political history of the Empire, the author shows that it was a vocabulary of symbols, not the actual written laws, that formed a political language indispensable in maintaining the common order.

  Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern

• June 2014

  Encounters with Modernity

  The Catholic Church in West Germany, 1945-1975

  Ziemann, B.

  During the three decades from 1945 to 1975, the Catholic Church in West Germany employed a broad range of methods from empirical social research. Statistics, opinion polling, and organizational sociology, as well as psychoanalysis and other approaches from the “psy sciences,” were debated and introduced in pastoral care. In adopting these methods for their own work, bishops, parish clergy, and pastoral sociologists tried to open the church up to modernity in a rapidly changing society. In the process, they contributed to the reform agenda of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Through its analysis of the intersections between organized religion and applied social sciences, this award-winning book offers fascinating insights into the trajectory of the Catholic Church in postwar Germany.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2022

  End Game

  The 1989 Revolution in East Germany

  Kowalczuk, I.-S.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the chain of events leading up to it, arguably constitute one of the most thoroughly documented episodes in recent history. Nonetheless, most accounts have focused predominantly on high-level politics and diplomacy along with the most dramatic and photogenic public displays. End Game, a rich, sweeping account of the autumn of 1989 as it was experienced “on the ground” in the German Democratic Republic, powerfully depicting the desolation and dysfunction that shaped everyday life for so many East Germans in the face of economic disruption and political impotence. Citizens’ frustration mounted until it bubbled over in the form of massive demonstrations and other forms of protest. Following the story up to the first free elections in March 1990, the volume combines abundant detail with sharp analysis and helps us to see this familiar historical moment through new eyes.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2008

  Environmental Organizations in Modern Germany

  Hardy Survivors in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

  Markham, W. T.

  German environmental organizations have doggedly pursued environmental protection through difficult times: hyperinflation and war, National Socialist rule, postwar devastation, state socialism in the GDR, and confrontation with the authorities during the 1970s and 1980s. The author recounts the fascinating and sometimes dramatic story of these organizations from their origins at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, not only describing how they reacted to powerful social movements, including the homeland protection and socialist movements in the early years of the twentieth century, the Nazi movement, and the anti-nuclear and new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but also examining strategies for survival in periods like the current one, when environmental concerns are not at the top of the national agenda. Previous analyses of environmental organizations have almost invariably viewed them as parts of larger social structures, that is, as components of social movements, as interest groups within a political system, or as contributors to civil society. This book, by contrast, starts from the premise that through the use of theories developed specifically to analyze the behavior of organizations and NGOs we can gain additional insight into why environmental organizations behave as they do.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available January 2018

  The Ethics of Seeing

  Photography and Twentieth-Century German History

  Evans, J., Betts P., & Hoffmann, S.-L. (eds)

  Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies

• eBook available November 2018

  Explorations and Entanglements

  Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I

  Berghoff, H., Biess, F., & Strasser, U. (eds)

  Traditionally, Germany has been considered a minor player in Pacific history: its presence there was more limited than that of other European nations, and whereas its European rivals established themselves as imperial forces beginning in the early modern era, Germany did not seriously pursue colonialism until the nineteenth century. Yet thanks to recent advances in the field emphasizing transoceanic networks and cultural encounters, it is now possible to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of Germans in the Pacific. The studies gathered here offer fascinating research into German missionary, commercial, scientific, and imperial activity against the backdrop of the Pacific’s overlapping cultural circuits and complex oceanic transits.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Colonial History

• October 2004

  Fairness and Division of Labor in Market Societies

  Comparison of U.S. and German Automotive Industries

  Kwon, H.-K.

  Contrary to the explanations offered by the theory of non-reflexive, path-dependent institutionalism, the U.S. and the German automotive industries undertook strikingly similar patterns of industry modification under tough international competition during the 1990s, departing from their traditional national patterns. By investigating the processes of the U.S. and German adjustments, the author critically reconsiders the prevalent paradigms of political economy and comes to the conclusion that the evidence does not confirm the neoliberal paradigm. In order to better account for the recomposition of new market relations, which the author terms "converging but non-liberal" and "diverging but not predetermined" markets, he proposes an alternative model of "politics among reflexive agents," emphasizing different kinds of problem-solving practices among those reflexive agents. He argues that different forms and regimes of market are established in the process of recomposition, in which agents reflect upon not only market rationality but also upon their own institutions, creating new norms.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available June 2015

  Faithfully Urban

  Pious Muslims in a German City

  Kuppinger, P.

  In the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology of Religion

• March 2023

  Family - Business - Public Eye, Thyssen in the 20th Century

  A Research Project's Findings

  Schulz, G. & Szöllösi-Janze, M.

  In 2006, Georg Heinrich Thyssen, together with the ThyssenKrupp Group, established the Thyssen Industrial History Foundation. During its formulation, the foundation made available archival material across the Thyssen-Bornemisza family, ThyssenKrupp AG, and other industrial historical sources to researchers. This volume offers a wide-ranging account of the Thyssens during the twentieth and late-nineteenth centuries. It explains the development of the company and the family whilst addressing issues such as patriarchal succession; gender roles in the family; wealthy lifestyles in international communities of aristocrats and diplomats; operating across national legislation, institutions, and policies; and discussions of labor and capital. In doing so it connects corporate and family history to provide an all-inclusive view of the development of a business.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century

• May 1996

  Fascism and Theatre

  Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945

  Berghaus, G. (ed)

  Since the 1920s, an endless flow of studies has analyzed the political systems of fascism, theseizure of power, the nature of the regimes, the atrocities committed, and, finally, the wars waged against other countries. However, much less attention has been paid to the strategies of persuasion employed by the regimes to win over the masses for their cause. Among these, fascist propaganda has traditionally been seen as the key means of influencing public opinion. Only recently has the "fascination with Fascism" become a topic of enquiry that has also formed the guiding interest of this volume: it offers, for the first time, a comparative analysis of the forms and functions of theater in countries governed by fascist or para-fascist regimes. By examining a wide spectrum of theatrical manifestations in a number of States with a varying degree of fascistization, these studies establish some of the similarities and differences between the theatrical cultures of several cultures in the interwar period.

  Subjects: Performance Studies History: World War II Literary Studies

• eBook available September 2013

  A Fatal Balancing Act

  The Dilemma of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, 1939-1945

  Meyer, B.

  In 1939 all German Jews had to become members of a newly founded Reich Association. The Jewish functionaries of this organization were faced with circumstances and events that forced them to walk a fine line between responsible action and collaboration. They had hoped to support mass emigration, mitigate the consequences of the anti-Jewish measures, and take care of the remaining community. When the Nazis forbade emigration and started mass deportations in 1941, the functionaries decided to cooperate to prevent the “worst.” In choosing to cooperate, they came into direct opposition with the interests of their members, who were then deported. In June 1943 all unprotected Jews were deported along with their representatives, and the so-called intermediaries supplied the rest of the community, which consisted of Jews living in mixed marriages. The study deals with the tasks of these men, the fate of the Jews in mixed marriages, and what happened to the survivors after the war.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available April 2008

  The Fateful Alliance

  German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light

  Beck, H.

  On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 2002

  Federalism Doomed?

  European Federalism between Integration and Separation

  Heinemann-Grüder, A. (ed)

  The conceptual uncertainty when dealing with processes of integration and disintegration in Europe is striking because traditional notions of the nation-state, constitutionalism, sovereignty, and federalism do not account for emerging realities in either Western or Eastern Europe.

  This volume explores the complex inter-relationship between federal arrangements and their effects on integrating multi-ethnic societies in Europe, and takes stock of current debates on the effects of federalism on integration and disintegration in Eastern and Western Europe. For the first time federalism is addressed in a pan-European context and an attempt is made to look for remedies to overcome nationalism in both East and West within a federalist institutional framework.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available January 2020

  Feelings Materialized

  Emotions, Bodies, and Things in Germany, 1500–1950

  Hillard, D., Lempa, H., & Spinney, R. (eds)

  Of the many innovative approaches to emerge during the twenty-first century, one of the most productive has been the interdisciplinary nexus of theories and methodologies broadly defined as “the study of emotions.” While this conceptual toolkit has generated significant insights, it has overwhelmingly focused on emotions as linguistic and semantic phenomena. This edited volume looks instead to the material aspects of emotion in German culture, encompassing the body, literature, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other themes.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Media Studies History: Medieval/Early Modern Literary Studies

• May 2015

  Fellow Tribesmen

  The Image of Native Americans, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany

  Usbeck, F.

  Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• eBook available August 2015

  Final Sale in Berlin

  The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945

  Kreutzmüller, C.

  Before the Nazis took power, Jewish businesspeople in Berlin thrived alongside their non-Jewish neighbors. But Nazi racism changed that, gradually destroying Jewish businesses before murdering the Jews themselves. Reconstructing the fate of more than 8,000 companies, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish economic activity and its obliteration. Rather than just examining the steps taken by the persecutors, it also tells the stories of Jewish strategies in countering the effects of persecution. In doing so, this book exposes a fascinating paradox where Berlin, serving as the administrative heart of the Third Reich, was also the site of a dense network for Jewish self-help and assertion.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2003

  Flight of Fantasy

  New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945

  Donahue N.H. & Kirchner D. (eds)

  During the Nazi era many German writers chose, or were forced into, exile. Many others stayed and, after the end of this period, claimed to have retreated into "Inner Emigration". The nature of this kind of emigration and the underlying motives of these writers have been hotly debated to this day. Though the reception of Inner Emigration has often been confounded by disputes over the term itself, the issue is ultimately not a matter of nomenclature, but of more far-reaching issues of literary evaluation, moral discernment and the writing of history. This volume presents, for the first time, to an English-speaking readership the complexity of Inner Emigration through the analysis of problematic individual cases of writers who, under constant pressure from a watchful dictatorship to conform and to collaborate, were caught between conscience and compromise.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: World War II

• eBook available October 2022

  Football Nation

  The Playing Fields of German Culture, History, and Society

  Dawson, R., Heinsohn, B., Knabe, O., & McDougall, A. (eds)

  Over the past century, the impact of football on Germany has been manifold, influencing the arts, political debates, and even contributing to the construction of cultural memories and national narratives. Football Nation analyses the game’s fluid role in shaping and reflecting German society, and spans its focus on modern German history, from the Wilhelmine era to the early 21st century. Expounding on topics of gender, class, fandom, spectatorship, antisemitism, nationalism, and internationalism, a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars offer a novel approach to understanding the many influences of football throughout its extensive history which until recently has only been available to a German-speaking readership.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available March 2010

  'For Their Own Good'

  Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945

  Torrie, J. S.

  The early twentieth-century advent of aerial bombing made successful evacuations essential to any war effort, but ordinary people resented them deeply. Based on extensive archival research in Germany and France, this is the first broad, comparative study of civilian evacuations in Germany and France during World War II. The evidence uncovered exposes the complexities of an assumed monolithic and all-powerful Nazi state by showing that citizens' objections to evacuations, which were rooted in family concerns, forced changes in policy. Drawing attention to the interaction between the Germans and French throughout World War II, this book shows how policies in each country were shaped by events in the other. A truly cross-national comparison in a field dominated by accounts of one country or the other, this book provides a unique historical context for addressing current concerns about the impact of air raids and military occupations on civilians.

  Subject: History: World War II

• eBook available April 2008

  A Foreign Affair

  Billy Wilder's American Films

  Gemünden, G.

  With six Academy Awards, four entries on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest American movies, and more titles on the National Historic Register of classic films deemed worthy of preservation than any other director, Billy Wilder counts as one of the most accomplished filmmakers ever to work in Hollywood. Yet how American is Billy Wilder, the Jewish émigré from Central Europe? This book underscores this complex issue, unpacking underlying contradictions where previous commentators routinely smoothed them out. Wilder emerges as an artist with roots in sensationalist journalism and the world of entertainment as well as with an awareness of literary culture and the avant-garde, features that lead to productive and often highly original confrontations between high and low.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• March 2023

  Former Neighbors, Future Allies?

  German Studies and Ethnography in Dialogue

  Weber, A. D. (ed)

  Although German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, German studies rarely emphasizes ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Through recent dialogue among Germanists, Former Neighbors, Future Allies shows the necessity of assessing the growing momentum in German studies for engaging in methods and theories of ethnography from a variety of perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology. By increasing the visibility of the pervasiveness of ethnography, this multi-modal volume illustrates how ethnography represents a transdisciplinary and international bridging of research.

  Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2021

  Four-Color Communism

  Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic

  Eedy, S.

  As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies

• eBook available September 2013

  Fragmented Fatherland

  Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1980

  Clarkson, A.

  1945 to 1980 marks an extensive period of mass migration of students, refugees, ex-soldiers, and workers from an extraordinarily wide range of countries to West Germany. Turkish, Kurdish, and Italian groups have been studied extensively, and while this book uses these groups as points of comparison, it focuses on ethnic communities of varying social structures—from Spain, Iran, Ukraine, Greece, Croatia, and Algeria—and examines the interaction between immigrant networks and West German state institutions as well as the ways in which patterns of cooperation and conflict differ. This study demonstrates how the social consequences of mass immigration became intertwined with the ideological battles of Cold War Germany and how the political life and popular movements within these immigrant communities played a crucial role in shaping West German society.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available July 2007

  Framing the Fifties

  Cinema in a Divided Germany

  Davidson, J. & Hake, S. (eds)

  The demise of the New German Cinema and the return of popular cinema since the 1990s have led to a renewed interest in the postwar years and the complicated relationship between East and West German cinema in particular. A survey of the 1950s, as offered here for the first time, is therefore long overdue. Moving beyond the contempt for "Papa's Kino" and the nostalgia for the fifties found in much of the existing literature, this anthology explores new uncharted territories, traces hidden connections, discovers unknown treasures, and challenges conventional interpretations. Informed by cultural studies, gender studies, and the study of popular cinema, this anthology offers a more complete account by focusing on popular genres, famous stars, and dominant practices, by taking into account the complicated relationships between East vs. West German, German vs. European, and European vs. American cinemas; and by paying close attention to the economic and political conditions of film production and reception during this little-known period of German film history.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2019

  France and the German Question, 1945–1990

  Bozo, F. & Wenkel, C. (eds)

  In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the victors were unable to agree on Germany’s fate, and the separation of the country—the result of the nascent Cold War—emerged as a de facto, if provisional, settlement. Yet East and West Germany would exist apart for half a century, making the "German question" a central foreign policy issue—and given the war-torn history between the two countries, this was felt no more keenly than in France. Drawing on the most recent historiography and previously untapped archival sources, this volume shows how France’s approach to the German question was, for the duration of the Cold War, both more constructive and consequential than has been previously acknowledged.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available January 2022

  France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence

  Quarrels and Convergences during the Cold War and Beyond

  Badalassi, N. & Gloriant, F. (eds)

  The legacy of World War II and the division of Eastern and Western Europe produced a radical asymmetry, and a variety of misgivings and misunderstandings, in French and German experiences of the nuclear age. At the same time, however, political actors in both nations continually labored to reconcile their differences and engage in productive strategic dialogue. Grounded in cutting-edge research and freshly discovered archival sources, France, Germany, and Nuclear Deterrence teases out the paradoxical nuclear interactions between France and Germany from 1954 to the present day.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 1997

  The French Defeat of 1940

  Reassessments

  Blatt, J. (ed)

  Why France, the major European continental victor in 1918, suffered total defeat in six weeks at the hands of the vanquished power of 1918 only two decades later remains moot. Why the stunning reversal of fortunes? In this volume thirteen prominent scholars reexamine the French debacle of 1940 in interwar perspectives, utilizing fresh analysis, original approaches, and new sources. Although the tenor of the volume is critical, the contributors also suggest that French preparations for war knew successes as well as failures, that French defeat was not inevitable, and that the Battle of France might have turned out differently if different choices had been made and other paths been followed.

  Subject: History: World War II

• eBook available March 2020

  Friendship without Borders

  Women's Stories of Power, Politics, and Everyday Life across East and West Germany

  Leask, P.

  Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• December 1996

  From Caligari to California

  Eric Pommer's Life in the International Film Wars

  Hardt, U.

  Known as one of the great producers and promoters of the film industry, Eric Pommer had a life-long commitment to German film - despite his emigration in 1933 - and worked in France and Britian, as well as the United States.

  As German producer, studio executive, and film politician in the pre-Hitler era Erich (later Eric) Pommer (1889-1966), a native of Germany, was an innovator and pioneer, a vital force in leading German cinema to international acclaim with successes such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Nibelungen and The Blue Angel. As Motion Picture Control Officer of the US Military Government he undertook , from 1946-49, the difficult task of rebuilding West Germany's film industry from the ashes of the Second World War. He succeeded brilliantly, but not without paying the hefty price of becoming embroiled in the turmoil of postwar German politics which made him many friends, but also many enemies. This book is the first detailed account in English of the remarkable career of Pommer who became a legend in his own lifetime.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2016

  From Craftsmen to Capitalists

  German Artisans from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, 1939-1953

  McKitrick, F. L.

  Politically adrift, alienated from Weimar society, and fearful of competition from industrial elites and the working class alike, the independent artisans of interwar Germany were a particularly receptive audience for National Socialist ideology. As Hitler consolidated power, they emerged as an important Nazi constituency, drawn by the party’s rejection of both capitalism and Bolshevism. Yet, in the years after 1945, the artisan class became one of the pillars of postwar stability, thoroughly integrated into German society. From Craftsmen to Capitalists gives the first account of this astonishing transformation, exploring how skilled tradesmen recast their historical traditions and forged alliances with former antagonists to help realize German democratization and recovery.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• January 1997

  From Peace to War

  Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939-1941

  Wegner, B.

  The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 represents one of the major caesuras in European history. Its consequences could still be felt fifty years later. Thirty-five historians from nine different countries (including the former Soviet Union) offer a comprehensive survey of the origins, course and long-term impact of this event. The volume is not merely concerned with political and military history, but also with the experiences of ordinary soldiers and civilians.

  Subjects: History: World War II

• September 1998

  From Recovery to Catastrophe

  Municipal Stabilization and Political Crisis

  Lieberman, B.

  Historians of the stabilization phase of Weimar Germany tend to identify German recovery after the First World War with the struggle to revise reparations and control hyperinflation. Focusing primarily on economic aspects is not sufficient, however, the author argues; the financial burden of recovery was only one of several major causes of reaction against the republic. Drawing on material from major German cities, he is able to trace the emergence of strong local activism and of comprehensive and functional policies of recovery on the municipal level which enjoyed broad political backing. Ironically, these same programs that created consensus also contained the potential for destabilization: they unleashed intense debate over the needs of the consumersand the purpose and extent of public spending, and with that of government intervention more generally, which accelerated the fragmentation of bourgeois politics, leading to the final destruction of the Weimar Republic.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available November 2010

  From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic

  Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification

  Anderson, J. & Langenbacher, E. (eds)

  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany in 1989/90 were events of world-historical significance. The twentieth anniversary of this juncture represents an excellent opportunity to reflect upon the evolution of the new Berlin Republic. Given the on-going significance of the country for theory and concept–building in many disciplines, an in-depth examination of the case is essential. In this volume, unique in its focus on all aspects of contemporary Germany - culture, historiography, society, politics and the economy - top scholars offer their assessments of the country’s performance in these and other areas and analyze the successes and continued challenges.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available November 2018

  From Weimar to Hitler

  Studies in the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932-1934

  Beck, H. & Jones, L. E. (eds)

  Though often depicted as a rapid political transformation, the Nazi seizure of power was in fact a process that extended from the appointment of the Papen cabinet in the early summer of 1932 through the Röhm blood purge two years later. Across fourteen rigorous and carefully researched chapters, From Weimar to Hitler offers a compelling collective investigation of this critical period in modern German history. Each case study presents new empirical research on the crisis of Weimar democracy, the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, and Hitler’s consolidation of power. Together, they provide multiple perspectives on the extent to which the triumph of Nazism was historically predetermined or the product of human miscalculation and intent.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 1996

  Futurism and Politics

  Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909-1944

  Berghaus, G.

  "Futurism was the state of the Fascist regime" - this is the view one encounters in most books written on Futurist art and literature. Whilst there can be no doubt about Futurist involvement with the founding of the fascist movement, little is known about the internal relationship between Futurists and Fascists in the years 1918-22, nor about the reasons for the Futurists' departure from the Fascist movement in 1920, or about Futurist opposition to (and even armed struggle against) the Fascist regime after 1924. Whilst the public documents testifying to Futurist support of Mussolini are well known, little has been written about Futurist anti-fascism camouflaged as official adherence to the regime. This study, based primarily on unknown or unpublished documents discovered in state archives and private collections, presents a new andfar more complex picture of the relationship of the two movements than has previously been shown by critics and historians.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• February 1998

  Gender and Germanness

  Cultural Productions of Nation

  Herminghouse, P. & Mueller, M. (eds)

  Cultural Studies have been preoccupied with questions of national identity and cultural representations. At the same time, feminist studies have insisted upon the entanglement of gender with issues of nation, class, and ethnicity. Developments in the wake of German unification demand a reassessment of the nexus of gender, Germanness and nationhood. The contributors to this volume pursue these strands of the cultural debate in German history, literature, visual arts, and language over a period of three hundred years in sections devoted to History and the Canon, Visual Culture, Germany and Her "Others," and Language and Power.

  Contributors: L. Adelson, A. Taylor Allen, K. Bauer, R. Berman, B. Byg, M. Denman, E. Frederiksen, S. Friedrichsmeyer, E. Kaufmann, L. Koepnick, B. Kosta, S. Lefko, A. M.O'Sickey, B. Mennel, H. M. Müller, B. Peterson, L. Pusch, D. Sweet, H. Watt, S. Zantop.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) History (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available August 2007

  Gendering Modern German History

  Rewriting Historiography

  Hagemann, K. & Quataert, J. H. (eds)

  Writing on the history of German women has - like women's history elsewhere - undergone remarkable expansion and change since it began in the late 1960s. Today Women's history still continues to flourish alongside gender history but the focus of research has increasingly shifted from women to gender. This shift has made it possible to make men and masculinity objects of historical research too. After more than thirty years of research, it is time for a critical stocktaking of the "gendering" of the historiography on nineteenth and twentieth century Germany. To provide a critical overview in a comparative German-American perspective is the main aim of this volume, which brings together leading experts from both sides of the Atlantic. They discuss in their essays the state of historiography and reflect on problems of theory and methodology. Through compelling case studies, focusing on the nation and nationalism, military and war, colonialism, politics and protest, class and citizenship, religion, Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, the Holocaust, the body and sexuality and the family, this volume demonstrates the extraordinary power of the gender perspective to challenge existing interpretations and rewrite mainstream arguments.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available April 2019

  Gendering Post-1945 German History

  Entanglements

  Hagemann, K., & Harsch, D., & Brühöfner, F. (eds)

  Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available June 2019

  German Division as Shared Experience

  Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday

  Carter, E., Palmowski, J., & Schreiter, K. (eds)

  Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• February 2004

  The German Economy During the Nineteenth Century

  Pierenkemper, T. & Tilly, R.

  In the 19th Century, economic growth was accompanied by large-scale structural change, known as industrialization, which fundamentally affected western societies. Even though industrialization is on the wane in some advanced economies and we are experiencing substantial structural changes again, the causes and consequences of these changes are inextricably linked with earlier industrialization.This means that understanding 19th Century industrialization helps us understand problems of contemporary economic growth. There is no recent study on economic developments in 19th Century Germany. So this concise volume, written specifically with students of German and economic history in mind, will prove to be most valuable, not least because of its wealth of statistical data.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available August 2013

  German History 1789-1871

  From the Holy Roman Empire to the Bismarckian Reich

  Brose, E.

  During recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in interest in the nineteenth century, resulting in many fine monographs. However, these studies often gravitate toward Prussia or treat Germany's southern and northern regions as separate entities or else are thematically compartmentalized. This book overcomes these divisions, offering a wide-ranging account of this revolutionary century and skillfully combining narrative with analysis. Its lively style makes it very accessible and ideal for all students of nineteenth-century Germany.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• October 2008

  German Literature in a New Century

  Trends, Traditions, Transitions, Transformations

  Gerstenberger, K. & Herminghouse, P. (eds)

  While the first decade after the fall of the Berlin wall was marked by the challenges of unification and the often difficult process of reconciling East and West German experiences, many Germans expected that the “new century” would achieve “normalization.” The essays in this volume take a closer look at Germany’s new normalcy and argue for a more nuanced picture that considers the ruptures as well as the continuities. Germany’s new generation of writers is more diverse than ever before, and their texts often not only speak of a Germany that is multicultural but also take a more playful attitude toward notions of identity. Written with an eye toward similar and dissimilar developments and traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume balances overviews of significant trends in present-day cultural life with illustrative analyses of individual writers and texts.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• June 2001

  German Minorities in Europe

  Ethnic Identity and Cultural Belonging

  Wolff, S. (ed)

  The study of ethnic minorities and their role in the domestic politics of their host states has long attracted scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. By contrast, national (or external) minorities, have been under-represented in the literature on ethnic minorities, although the interest has increased since the collapse of communism and more recently since the eruption of violent conflict in Kosovo. Ethnic Germans in particular, although still numbering millions and spread over twenty countries in western, central, and eastern Europe, have attracted only little attention.

  This volume addresses the issue of Germany's external minorities, exploring the complex interrelationship between their ethnic identity and sense of cultural belonging on the one hand, and the political, economic, legal, and social situation in their respective societies, on the other. Leading specialists, representing a wide spectrum of viewpoints on the social and political conditions under which German minorities live today, provide case studies of all the major individual minority groups. In this way, a comprehensive picture of Germans and German culture in Europe emerges that provides both historical and contemporary perspectives on a diaspora community with an uncertain future between assimilation, segregation, and emigration.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• October 2003

  German Public Policy and Federalism

  Current Debates on Political, Legal, and Social Issues

  Gunlicks, A. B. (ed)

  Since unification German society and institutions have been challenged by various transformations and the need to adjust to changing conditions. While much has been accomplished, many political, legal, and institutional problems remain. This volume deals with selected aspects of domestic and European policy, political parties, the challenge of direct democracy, and federalism in unified Germany – all issues that have been the subject of much discussion, political posturing, legislation, and, to some extent, constitutional amendments and court decision for many years, if not decades. In conclusion, a British scholar looks at German federalism and a number of public policy issues from a comparative perspective and arrives at some surprising and encouraging results.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available November 2019

  German Railroads, Jewish Souls

  The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution

  Browning, C. R., Hayes, P. & Hilberg, R.

  A rich and accessible introduction to the role of the German railway system in the Holocaust, a topic that remains understudied even today.

  Renowned Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg considered the German railway system that delivered European Jews to ghettos and death camps in Eastern Europe to be not only an essential component of the “machinery of destruction” but also emblematic of the amoral bureaucracy that helped to implement the Jewish genocide.

  German Railroads, Jewish Souls centers around Hilberg’s seminal essay of the same name, a landmark study of German railways in the Nazi era long unavailable in English. Supplemented with additional writings from Hilberg, primary source materials, and historical commentary from leading scholars Christopher Browning and Peter Hayes.

  “This important book unites three prominent scholars tackling crucial questions about German railways and the Holocaust. Two essays from the late, renowned Raul Hilberg investigate their overlooked role in the extermination of the European Jews. They provide groundbreaking investigations into the German railway as the prototype of a bureaucracy and challenge its supposed banality. While Christopher Browning eloquently situates Hilberg’s essays within the historical literature, Peter Hayes makes a detailed critique of the common but false belief that the deportation and annihilation of the Jews were more of a priority for the Nazis than the war effort. This question, arising from Hilberg’s essays, demonstrates the continued significance of his work today.”—Wolf Gruner, author, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

  Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History Transport Studies

• eBook available July 2014

  The German Right in the Weimar Republic

  Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism

  Jones, L. E. (ed)

  Significant recent research on the German Right between 1918 and 1933 calls into question received narratives of Weimar political history. The German Right in the Weimar Republic examines the role that the German Right played in the destabilization and overthrow of the Weimar Republic, with particular emphasis on the political and organizational history of Rightist groups as well as on the many permutations of right-wing ideology during the period.  In particular, antisemitism and the so-called “Jewish Question” played a prominent role in the self-definition and politics of the right-wing groups and ideologies explored by the contributors to this volume.
   

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available January 2005

  German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945

  Haar, I. & Fahlbusch, M. (eds)

  Recently, there has been a major shift in the focus of historical research on World War II towards the study of the involvements of scholars and academic institutions in the crimes of the Third Reich. The roots of this involvement go back to the 1920s. At that time right-wing scholars participated in the movement to revise the Versailles Treaty and to create a new German national identity. The contribution of geopolitics to this development is notorious. But there were also the disciplines of history, geography, ethnography, art history, archeology, sociology, and demography that devised a new nationalist ideology and propaganda. Its scholars established an extensive network of personal and institutional contacts. This volume deals with these scholars and their agendas. They provided the Nazi regime with ideas of territorial expansion, colonial exploitation and racist exclusion culminating in the Holocaust. Apart from developing ideas and concepts, scholars also actively worked in the SS and Wehrmacht when Hitler began to implement its criminal policies in World War II.

  This collection of original essays, written by the foremost European scholars in this field, describes key figures and key programs supporting the expansion and exploitation of the Third Reich. In particular, they analyze the historical, geographic, ethnographical and ethno-political ideas behind the ethnic cleansing and looting of cultural treasures.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present

• March 2004

  German Security Policy in the 21st Century

  Problems, Partners and Perspectives

  Mey, H.

  "Berlin, 12 January 2030 – The crisis worsens. The Chancellor reaches for the telephone. He instructs his anteroom to put through a call to Germany's most important ally in order to discuss the situation and determine a further course of action." With whom would the chancellor speak? With the American, the French, or maybe even the Russian president? Or will the Chancellor only exercise representative functions while the real responsibility and decision-making authority lies with the President of the United Regions of Europe? This volume invites policy makers and politicians to use their imagination, to look beyond current events and take a long-term view on possible developments. Such projections, the author argues, lead to interesting conclusions for strategic planning.

  Subject: Peace and Conflict Studies

• October 1999

  The German Skills Machine

  Sustaining Comparative Advantage in a Global Economy

  Culpepper, P. & Finegold, D. (eds)

  In recent years the German economy has grown sluggishly and created few new jobs. These developments have led observers to question the future viability of a model that in the past seemed able to combine economic growth, competitiveness in export markets, and low social inequality. This volume brings together empirical and comparative research from across the social sciences to examine whether or not Germany's system of skill provision is still capable of meeting the economic and social challenges now facing all the advanced capitalist economies. At issue is the question of whether or not the celebrated German training system, an essential element of the high-skill, high-wage equilibrium, can continue to provide the skills necessary for German companies to hold their economic niche in a world characterized by increasing trade and financial interdependence. Combining an examination of the competitiveness of the German training system with an analysis of the robustness of the political institutions that support it, this volume seeks to understand the extent to which the German system for imparting craft skills can adjust to changes in the organization of production in the advanced industrial states.

  Subject: History (General)

• February 2013

  The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination

  Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent

  Rinner, S.

  Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers’ understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available August 2016

  German Television

  Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

  Powell, L. & Shandley, Robert R. (eds)

  Long overlooked by scholars and critics, the history and aesthetics of German television have only recently begun to attract serious, sustained attention, and then largely within Germany. This ambitious volume, the first in English on the subject, provides a much-needed corrective in the form of penetrating essays on the distinctive theories, practices, and social-historical contexts that have defined television in Germany. Encompassing developments from the dawn of the medium through the Cold War and post-reunification, this is an essential introduction to a rich and varied media tradition.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies

• January 2001

  The German-American Encounter

  Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800-2000

  Trommler, F. & Shore, E. (eds)

  While Germans, the largest immigration group in the United States, contributed to the shaping of American society and left their mark on many areas from religion and education to food, farming, political and intellectual life, Americans have been instrumental in shaping German democracy after World War II. Both sides can claim to be part of each other's history, and yet the question arises whether this claim indicates more than a historical interlude in the forming of the Atlantic civilization.

  In this volume some of the leading historians, social scientists and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have come together to investigate, for the first time in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration, the nexus of these interactions in view of current and future challenges to German-American relations.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available October 2022

  German–Jewish Studies

  Next Generations

  Wallach, K. & Elyada. A. (eds)

  As a field, German-Jewish Studies emphasizes the dangers of nationalism, monoculturalism, and ethnocentrism, while making room for multilingual and transnational perspectives with questions surrounding migration, refugees, exile, and precarity. Focussing on the relevance and utility of the field for the twenty-first century, German-Jewish Studies explores why studying and applying German-Jewish history and culture must evolve and be given further attention today. The volume brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to reconsider the history of antisemitism—as well as intersections of antisemitism with racism and colonialism—and how connections to German Jews shed light on the continuities, ruptures, anxieties, and possible futures of German-speaking Jews and their legacies.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies

• August 2015

  Germans Against Nazism

  Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich: Essays in Honour of Peter Hoffmann

  Nicosia, F. R. & Stokes, L. D. (eds)

  Rather than being accepted by all of German society, the Nazi regime was resisted in both passive and active forms. This re-issued volume examines opposition to National Socialism by Germans during the Third Reich in its broadest sense. It considers individual and organized nonconformity, opposition, and resistance ranging from symbolic acts of disobedience to organized assassination attempts, and looks at how disparate groups such as the Jewish community, churches, conservatives, communists, socialists, and the military all defied the regime in their own ways.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2015

  The Germans and the Holocaust

  Popular Responses to the Persecution and Murder of the Jews

  Schrafstetter, S. & Steinweis, A. E. (eds)

  For decades, historians have debated how and to what extent the Holocaust penetrated the German national consciousness between 1933 and 1945. How much did “ordinary” Germans know about the subjugation and mass murder of the Jews, when did they know it, and how did they respond collectively and as individuals? This compact volume brings together six historical investigations into the subject from leading scholars employing newly accessible and previously underexploited evidence. Ranging from the roots of popular anti-Semitism to the complex motivations of Germans who hid Jews, these studies illuminate some of the most difficult questions in Holocaust historiography, supplemented with an array of fascinating primary source materials.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies Genocide History

• March 2006

  Germans No More

  Accounts of Jewish Everyday Life, 1933-1938

  Limberg, M. & Rübsaat, H. (eds)

  Most books on Nazi Germany focus on the war years. Much less is known about the preceding years although these give important clues with regard to the events after November 1938, which culminated in the Holocaust. This book is based on eyewitness accounts chosen from the many memoirs that Harvard University received in 1940 after it had sent out a call to German-Jewish refugees to describe their experiences before and after 1933. These invaluable documents became part of the Harvard archives where the editors of this volume discovered them fifty years later. These memoirs, written so soon after the emigration when the impressions were still vivid, movingly describe the gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews, the daily humiliations and insults they had to suffer, and their desperate attempts to leave Germany. An informative introduction puts these accounts into a wider framework.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Jewish Studies

• October 2001

  Germany and America

  Essays in Honor of Gerald R. Kleinfeld

  Friedrich, W.-U. (ed)

  Leading experts on German-American relations, German politics and German Studies from both sides of the Atlantic are contributing to this volume in honor of Gerry Kleinfeld, founder and executive director of the German Studies Association, founder and long-time editor of the German Studies Review. The essays cover a broad spectrum of German-American political, economic, and cultural relations, offering an up-to-date survey of recent developments in this highly topical field.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available July 2013

  Germany and the Black Diaspora

  Points of Contact, 1250-1914

  Honeck, M., Klimke, M., & Kuhlmann, A. (eds)

  The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

  Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History

• eBook available December 2021

  Germany and the Confessional Divide

  Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871-1989

  Ruff, M. E. & Großbölting, T. (eds)

  From German unification in 1871 through the early 1960s, confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a source of deep division in German society. Engaging this period of historic strife, Germany and the Confessional Divide focuses on three traumatic episodes: the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and state-supported Protestantism after World War I, and the Nazi persecution of the churches. It argues that memories of these traumatic experiences regularly reignited confessional tensions. Only as German society became increasingly secular did these memories fade and tensions ease.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available December 2018

  Germany and the Middle East

  From Kaiser Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel

  Steininger, R.

  For over a century, the Middle East has weathered seemingly endless conflicts, ensnaring political players from around the world. And perhaps no nation has displayed a greater range of policies toward, and experiences in, the region than Germany, as this short and accessible volume demonstrates. Beginning with Kaiser Wilhelm’s intermittent support for Zionism, it follows the course of German-Mideast relations through two world wars and the rise of Adolf Hitler. As Steininger shows, the crimes of the Third Reich have inevitably shaped postwar German Mideast policy, with Germany emerging as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters while continuing to navigate the region’s complex international, religious, and energy politics.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2015

  Germany and 'The West'

  The History of a Modern Concept

  Bavaj, R. & Steber, M. (eds)

  “The West” is a central idea in German public discourse, yet historians know surprisingly little about the evolution of the concept. Contrary to common assumptions, this volume argues that the German concept of the West was not born in the twentieth century, but can be traced from a much earlier time. In the nineteenth century, “the West” became associated with notions of progress, liberty, civilization, and modernity. It signified the future through the opposition to antonyms such as “Russia” and “the East,” and was deployed as a tool for forging German identities. Examining the shifting meanings, political uses, and transnational circulations of the idea of “the West” sheds new light on German intellectual history from the post-Napoleonic era to the Cold War.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available October 2019

  Germany On Their Minds

  German Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988

  Schenderlein, A. C.

  Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• October 1999

  Germany's Difficult Passage to Modernity

  Breakdown, Breakup, Breakthrough

  Lankowski, C. (ed)

  Germany's institutional anatomy, its norms, and the spirits that animate it can only be properly understood if one takes into account such factors as its economic power and central position within Europe. This volume traces the difficult passage of German society to modernity, offering new perspectives on the "German question," largely characterized by the absence of key ideological underpinnings of democracy in the early modern period and a constitutional exceptionalism on the eve of the 20th century. The essays describe the organizational infrastructure and behavioral norms that account for the success of Germany's postwar economy and polity, but also register the tensions between the increasingly individualist outlook of post-1968 Germans and the country's highly organized and ritualistic decision-making structures, which often severely test the democratic foundations of the republic.

  However, Germany is not unique in its efforts to find a balance between traditional and modern forces that have shaped its history. This volume demonstrates that Germany's experience, past and present, teaches broader lessons that speak to the central concerns of our time: what are the historical precursors of and vital attitudes towards democracy? How much structural variation will be feasible in political economies embedded in Europe after the introduction of the Euro and in the context of economic and other globalization? The considerable insights into these questions provided by this volume celebrate the inspiration given to colleagues and students who have worked with Andrei S. Markovits, to whom it is dedicated.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 1995

  Germany's New Politics

  Parties and Issues in the 1990s

  Conradt, D., Kleinfeld, G. R., Romoser, G. K. & Søe, C. (eds)

  Four years after unification, Germany completed what has been called the "super election year": no less than nineteen elections, culminating in the Bundestag vote on October 16, 1994. Four years after unification, the elections of 1994 reveal the state of German Unity and the interplay of new forces in post-Cold War Europe. This book analyzes the elections for specialists as well as for students, placing them in the wider context of political and economic developments in Germany in the 1990s. An appendix with full data on previous Bundestag elections and relevant charts on party developments enhances the value of this volume which students, scholars and the general reader interested in German affairs will find indispensable.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• July 2005

  Gray Zones

  Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath

  Petropolous, J. & Roth, J. (eds)

  Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi’s reflections on what he called “the gray zone,” a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain--lest resolution deceive us--will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• September 2000

  The Great Train Race

  Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914

  Mitchell, A.

  From their origins, railways produced an intense competition between the two major continental systems in France and Germany. Fitting a new technology into existing political institutions and social habits, these two nations became inexorably involved in industrial and commercial rivalry that eventually escalated into the armed conflict of 1914. Based on many years of research in French and German archives, this study examines the adaptation of railroads and steam engines from Britain to the continent of Europe after the Napoleonic age. A fascinating example of how the same technology, borrowed at the same time from the same source, was assimilated differently by the two continental powers, this book offers a groundbreaking analysis of the crossroads of technology and politics during the first Industrial Revolution.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Transport Studies

• January 2023

  The Guardians of Concepts

  Political Languages of Conservatism in Britain and West Germany, 1945-1980

  Steber, M.

  National and transnational debates in Britain and Germany surrounding the meaning of the word “conservative” continue to have far-reaching political consequences. After 1945, even while the term was an accepted part of the political vocabulary of Great Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany their young democracy was conflicted due to anti-democratic instability. The Guardians of Concepts analyzes the historical changes in the political languages of conservatism in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1945 and the early 1980s which plagued intellectuals, politicians, and entire parties. As one of the most difficult concepts in both the political and historiographical vocabulary of the German language, conservatism’s analysis takes a linguistically focused path through comprehensive and transnational connection of intellectual history with the history of politics, which are subjects that are otherwise commonly addressed separately from each other.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2019

  Gustav Stresemann

  The Crossover Artist

  Pohl, K. H.

  As a foreign minister and chancellor of Weimar Germany, Gustav Stresemann is a familiar figure for students of German history – one who, for many, embodied the best qualities of German interwar liberalism. However, a more nuanced and ambivalent picture emerges in this award-winning biography, which draws on extensive research and new archival material to enrich our understanding of Stresmann’s public image and political career. It memorably explores the personality of a brilliant but flawed politician who endured class anxiety and social marginalization, and who died on the eve of Germany’s descent into economic and political upheaval.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present History (General)

• February 2015

  Helmut Kohl's Quest for Normality

  His Representation of the German Nation and Himself

  Wicke, C.

  During his political career, Helmut Kohl used his own life story to promote a normalization of German nationalism and to overcome the stigma of the Nazi period. In the context of the cold war and the memory of the fascist past, he was able to exploit the combination of his religious, generational, regional, and educational (he has a PhD in History) experiences by connecting nationalist ideas to particular biographical narratives. Kohl presented himself as the embodiment of “normality”: a de-radicalized German nationalism which was intended to eclipse any anti-Western and post-national peculiarities. This book takes a biographical approach to the study of nationalism by examining its manifestation in Helmut Kohl and the way he historicized Germany’s past.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• June 2007

  Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe

  Hildermeier, M. (ed)

  More than a decade after the breakdown of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Europe historiographies and historical concepts still are very much apart. Though contacts became closer and Russian historians joined their Polish colleagues in the effort to take up western discussions and methodologies, there have been no common efforts yet for joint interpretations and no attempts to reach a common understanding of central notions and concepts. Exploring key concepts and different meanings in Western and East-European/Russian history, this volume offers an important contribution to such a comparative venture.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available January 2012

  History in the Plural

  An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck

  Olsen, N.

  Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of “grand theory,” Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a “great thinker” and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available January 2014

  The History of the Stasi

  East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990

  Gieseke, J.

  A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the Stasi.

  “This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the MfS.”—German History

  The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The “shield and sword of the party,” it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita.

  Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany.

  A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2018

  A History Shared and Divided

  East and West Germany since the 1970s

  Bösch, F. (ed)

  By and large, the histories of East and West Germany have been studied in relative isolation. And yet, for all their differences, the historical trajectories of both nations were interrelated in complex ways, shaped by economic crises, social and cultural changes, protest movements, and other phenomena so diffuse that they could hardly be contained by the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, A History Shared and Divided offers a collective portrait of the two Germanies that is both broad and deep. It brings together comprehensive thematic surveys by specialists in social history, media, education, the environment, and similar topics to assemble a monumental account of both nations from the crises of the 1970s to—and beyond—the reunification era.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• July 2012

  Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion

  Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939

  Wildt, M.

  In the spring of 1933, German society was deeply divided – in the Reichstag elections on 5 March, only a small percentage voted for Hitler. Yet, once he seized power, his creation of a socially inclusive Volksgemeinschaft, promising equality, economic prosperity and the restoration of honor and pride after the humiliating ending of World War I persuaded many Germans to support him and to shut their eyes to dictatorial coercion, concentration camps, secret state police, and the exclusion of large sections of the population. The author argues however, that the everyday practice of exclusion changed German society itself: bureaucratic discrimination and violent anti-Jewish actions destroyed the civil and constitutional order and transformed the German nation into an aggressive and racist society. Based on rich source material, this book offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of this transformation as it traces continuities and discontinuities and the replacement of a legal order with a violent one, the extent of which may not have been intended by those involved.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History

• June 2003

  Hitler's Dancers

  German Modern Dance and the Third Reich

  Karina, L & Kant, M.

  The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three perspectives: the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.

  Subject: Performance Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available August 2012

  Hitler's Plans for Global Domination

  Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims

  Thies, J.

  What did Hitler really want to achieve: world domination. In the early twenties, Hitler was working on this plan and from 1933 on, was working to make it a reality. During 1940 and 1941, he believed he was close to winning the war. This book not only examines Nazi imperial architecture, armament, and plans to regain colonies but also reveals what Hitler said in moments of truth. The author presents many new sources and information, including Hitler’s little known intention to attack New York City with long-range bombers in the days of Pearl Harbor.

  Subject: History: World War II

• December 2008

  Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945. (3rd Edition)

  A Critical Assessment

  Müller, R.-D. & Ueberschär, G.R.

  This volume provides a guide to the extensive literature on the war in the East, including largely unknown Soviet writing on the subject. Indispensable for military historians, but also for all scholars who approach this crucial period in world history from a socio-economic or cultural perspective.

  Subject: History: World War II

• eBook available September 2019

  The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

  Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

  Gruner, W.

  Prior to Hitler’s occupation, nearly 120,000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• March 2005

  Holocaust Monuments and National Memory

  France and Germany since 1989

  Carrier, P.

  Since 1989, two sites of memory with respect to the deportation and persecution of Jews in France and Germany during the Second World War have received intense public attention: the Vélo d'Hiver (Winter Velodrome) in Paris and the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe or Holocaust Monument in Berlin. Why is this so? Both monuments, the author argues, are unique in the history of memorial projects. Although they are genuine "sites of memory", neither monument celebrates history, but rather serve as platforms for the deliberation, negotiation and promotion of social consensus over the memorial status of war crimes in France and Germany. The debates over these monuments indicate that it is the communication among members of the public via the mass media, rather than qualities inherent in the sites themselves, which transformed these sites into symbols beyond traditional conceptions of heritage and patriotism.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Genocide History Heritage Studies

• May 2013

  Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema

  Nationhood, Genre and Masculinity

  Fritsche, M.

  Despite the massive influx of Hollywood movies and films from other European countries after World War II, Austrian film continued to be hugely popular with Austrian and German audiences. By examining the decisive role that popular cinema played in the turbulent post-war era, this book provides unique insights into the reconstruction of a disrupted society. Through detailed analysis of the stylistic patterns, narratives and major themes of four popular genres of the time, costume film, Heimatfilm, tourist film and comedy, the book explains how popular cinema helped to shape national identity, smoothed conflicted gender relations and relieved the Austrians from the burden of the Nazi past through celebrating the harmonious, charming, musical Austrian man.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality

• December 2002

  Identities

  Time, Difference and Boundaries

  Friese, H. (ed)

  "Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

  Subjects: History (General) Literary Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• December 1997

  Immigration Admissions

  The Search for Workable Policies in Germany and the United States

  Hailbronner, K., Martin, D. A., & Motomura, H. (eds)

  There is general agreement today that traditional approaches to immigration admissions in the major receiving countries of the West have serious shortcomings either in concept or implementation, or at times in both. These essays, all written by leading immigration experts, consider the philosophical and moral constraints on immigration law and policy, the basic elements of a comprehensive migration policy, and specific policy areas, including family reunification and asylum. Taken together, these perspectives represent a fresh, comparative look at some of the most urgent issues in this pivotal area of law and policy.

  Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

• March 1998

  Immigration Controls

  The Search for Workable Policies in Germany and the United States

  Hailbronner, K., Martin, D. A. & Motomura, H. (eds)

  Some of the most pressing questions in immigration law and policy today concern the problem of immigration controls. How are immigration laws administered, and how are they enforced against those who enter and remain in a receiving country without legal permission? Comparing the United States and Germany, two of the four extended essays in this volume concern enforcement; the other two address techniques for managing high-volume asylum systems in both countries.

  Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available November 2009

  Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany

  Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation

  Klusmeyer, D. & Papademetriou, D.

  German migration policy now stands at a major crossroad, caught between a fifty-year history of missed opportunities and serious new challenges. Focusing on these new challenges that German policy makers face, the authors, both internationally recognized in this field, use historical argument, theoretical analysis, and empirical evaluation to advance a more nuanced understanding of recent initiatives and the implications of these initiatives. Their approach combines both synthesis and original research in a presentation that is not only accessible to the general educated reader but also addresses the concerns of academic scholars and policy analysts. This important volume offers a comprehensive and critical examination of the history of German migration law and policy from the Federal Republic’s inception in 1949 to the present.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies

• January 2005

  Imperial Germany 1871-1918

  Economy, Society, Culture and Politics

  Berghahn, V. R.

  A comprehensive history of German society in this period, providing a broad survey of its development. The volume is thematically organized and designed to give easy access to the major topics and issues of the Bismarkian and Wilhelmine eras. The statistical appendix contains a wide range of social, economic and political data. Written with the English-speaking student in mind, this book is likely to become a widely used text for this period, incorporating as it does twenty years of further research on the German Empire since the appearance of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's classic work.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available September 2011

  Imperial Germany Revisited

  Continuing Debates and New Perspectives

  Müller, S. O. & Torp, C. (eds)

  The German Empire, its structure, its dynamic development between 1871 and 1918, and its legacy, have been the focus of lively international debate that is showing signs of further intensification as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Based on recent work and scholarly arguments about continuities and discontinuities in modern German history from Bismarck to Hitler, well-known experts broadly explore four themes: the positioning of the Bismarckian Empire in the course of German history; the relationships between society, politics and culture in a period of momentous transformations; the escalation of military violence in Germany's colonies before 1914 and later in two world wars; and finally the situation of Germany within the international system as a major political and economic player. The perspectives presented in this volume have already stimulated further argument and will be of interest to anyone looking for orientation in this field of research.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• May 2015

  Imperial Projections

  Screening the German Colonies

  Fuhrmann, W.

  The beginning of filmmaking in the German colonies coincided with colonialism itself coming to a standstill. Scandals and economic stagnation in the colonies demanded a new and positive image of their value for Germany. By promoting business and establishing a new genre within the fast growing film industry, films of the colonies were welcomed by organizations such as the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society). The films triggered patriotic feelings but also addressed the audience as travelers, explorers, wildlife protectionists, and participants in unique cultural events. This book is the first in-depth analysis of colonial filmmaking in the Wilhelmine Era.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Colonial History

• eBook available March 2019

  The Indoctrination of the Wehrmacht

  Nazi Ideology and the War Crimes of the German Military

  Sait, B.

  Far from the image of an apolitical, “clean” Wehrmacht that persists in popular memory, German soldiers regularly cooperated with organizations like the SS in the abuse and murder of countless individuals during the Second World War. This in-depth study demonstrates that a key factor in the criminalization of the Wehrmacht was the intense political indoctrination imposed on its members. At the instigation of senior leadership, many ordinary German soldiers and officers became ideological warriors who viewed their enemies in racial and political terms—a project that was but one piece of the broader effort to socialize young men during the Nazi era.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: 20th Century to Present

• June 1999

  Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society in Modern Germany

  Kocka, J.

  Jürgen Kocka is one of the foremost historians of Germany whose work has been devoted to the integration of different genres of the social and economic history of Europe during the period of industrialization. This collection of essays gives a representative sample of his effort to develop, by reference to Marx and Weber, new and powerful analytical tools for understanding the dynamics of modern industrial societies.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 18th/19th Century Sociology

• February 2004

  International Adventures

  German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s

  Bergfelder, T.

  West German cinema of the 1960s is frequently associated with the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, collectively known by the 1970s as the "New German Cinema." Yet for domestic and international audiences at the time, German cinema primarily meant popular genres such as exotic adventure films, Gothic crime thrillers, westerns, and sex films, which were dismissed by German filmmakers and critics of the 1970s as "Daddy's Cinema."

  International Adventures provides the first comprehensive account of these genres, and charts the history of the West German film industry and its main protagonists from the immediate post-war years to its boom period in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing film genres in the context of industrial practices, literary traditions, biographical trajectories, and wider cultural and social developments, this book uncovers a forgotten period of German filmmaking that merits reassessment.

  International Adventures firmly locates its case studies within the wider dynamic of European cinema. In its study of West German cinema's links and co-operations with other countries including Britain, France, and Italy, the book addresses what is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of 1960s popular film genres: the dispersal and disappearance of markers of national identity in increasingly international narratives and modes of production.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2004

  The Inverted Mirror

  Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898-1914

  Nolan, M. E.

  It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other - distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility between the two countries in the years before the First World War. Most remarkably, as the author discovered, the qualities each country ascribed to its chief adversary appeared to be exaggerated or negative versions of precisely those qualities that it perceived to be lacking or inadequate in itself. Moreover, banishing undesirable traits and projecting them onto another people was also an essential step in the consolidation of national identity. As such, it established a pattern that has become all too familiar to students of nationalism and xenophobia in recent decades. This study shows that antagonism between states is not a fact of nature but socially constructed.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• November 2022

  Invested Narratives

  German Responses to Economic Crisis

  Twark, J. (ed)

  As crises unfold, the narratives chronicled by journalists, economists, and historians produce stories that serve not only to recount events, but also to prescribe preventative measures. Combining multiple narratives of economic crisis in Germany over the past 200 years, Invested Narratives situates interdisciplinary examinations of how German society grappled with establishing structures and strategies for state involvement in the industrial and commercial markets. This volume allows for a widened understanding of German economic debates and their influence on German society and the European Union while critically engaging both early and more recent theoretical, empirical, and analytical approaches to economic crisis and Ordnung narratives generated from sources such as the German government, the financial sector and fictional representations.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century

• November 1995

  Japan and Germany in the Modern World

  Martin, B.

  First study of the fascinating parallelism that characterizes developments in Japan and Germany by one of Germany's leading Japan specialists.

  With the founding of their respective national states, the Meiji Empire in 1869 and the German Reich in 1871, Japan and Germany entered world politics. Since then both countries have developed in strikingly similar ways, and it is not surprising that these two became close allies during the Second World War, although in the end this proved a "fatal attraction."

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2010

  Jewish Life in Nazi Germany

  Dilemmas and Responses

  Nicosia, F. & Scrase, D. (eds)

  German Jews faced harsh dilemmas in their responses to Nazi persecution, partly a result of Nazi cruelty and brutality but also a result of an understanding of their history and rightful place in Germany. This volume addresses the impact of the anti-Jewish policies of Hitler’s regime on Jewish family life, Jewish women, and the existence of Jewish organizations and institutions and considers some of the Jewish responses to Nazi anti-Semitism and persecution. This volume offers scholars, students, and interested readers a highly accessible but focused introduction to Jewish life under National Socialism, the often painful dilemmas that it produced, and the varied Jewish responses to those dilemmas.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: World War II Genocide History

• December 2012

  Karl Marx

  An Intellectual Biography

  Hosfeld, R.

  Is the Grand Old Man re-emerging? More than twenty years after the collapse of Communism, and in the midst of the crisis of Capitalism, Karl Marx’s ideas, at least in part, are back in vogue. He is often invoked, yet often misunderstood. In this award-winning biography Rolf Hosfeld offers a new, transparent, and critical view of Marx’s turbulent life. Linking the contradictory politician and revolutionary to his work—his errors and misjudgments as well as his pioneering ideas—Hosfeld presents a vivid account of Marx’s life between Trier and London. At the same time, he renders accessible Marx’s complex work, one of the world’s most important contributions to the history of ideas.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• eBook available January 2007

  Launching the Grand Coalition

  The 2005 Bundestag Election and the Future of German Politics

  Langenbacher, E. (ed.)

  This edited volume, which brings together the leading experts in German politics from around the US and Germany, combines rich descriptive data with insightful analyses regarding one of the most dramatic and important election years in postwar Germany. A variety of more specialized issues and perspectives is addressed, including the transatlantic relationship, EU policy, voting behavior and far Right parties. This book will be essential reading for students of German, European and comparative politics.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available March 2013

  The Law in Nazi Germany

  Ideology, Opportunism, and the Perversion of Justice

  Steinweis, A. E. & Rachlin, R. D. (eds)

  While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. This volume offers a concise and compelling account of how these intelligent and welleducated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination. The chapters address why German lawyers and jurists were attracted to Nazism; how their support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic selfdelusion; and whether they were held accountable for their Nazi-era actions after 1945. This book also examines the experiences of Jewish lawyers who fell victim to anti-Semitic measures. The volume will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers with an interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the history of jurisprudence.

  Subjects: History: World War II History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available December 2018

  Law, History, and Justice

  Debating German State Crimes in the Long Twentieth Century

  Weinke, A.

  Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• July 2009

  Learning Democracy

  Education Reform in West Germany, 1945-1965

  Puaca, B. M.

  Scholarship on the history of West Germany’s educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture?

  This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.

  Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2021

  Legal Entanglements

  Law, Rights and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945-1989

  Gehrig, S.

  During the division of Germany, law became the object of ideological conflicts and the means by which the two national governments conducted their battle over political legitimacy. Legal Entanglements explores how these dynamics produced competing concepts of statehood and sovereignty, all centered on citizens and their rights. Drawing on wide-ranging archival sources, including recently declassified documents, Sebastian Gehrig traces how politicians, diplomats, judges, lawyers, activists and intellectuals navigated the struggle between legal ideologies under the pressures of the Cold War and decolonization. As he shows, in their response to global debates over international law and human rights, their work kept the legal cultures of both German states entangled until 1989.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2008

  Liberal Imperialism in Germany

  Expansionism and Nationalism, 1848-1884

  Fitzpatrick, M. P.

  In a work based on new archival, press, and literary sources, the author revises the picture of German imperialism as being the brainchild of a Machiavellian Bismarck or the "conservative revolutionaries" of the twentieth century. Instead, Fitzpatrick argues for the liberal origins of German imperialism, by demonstrating the links between nationalism and expansionism in a study that surveys the half century of imperialist agitation and activity leading up to the official founding of Germany’s colonial empire in 1884.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• December 1999

  The Lion and the Eagle

  German-Spanish Relations Over the Centuries: An Interdisciplinary Approach

  Kent, C., Wolber, T. & Hewitt, C. (eds)

  The German and Spanish-speaking worlds have, over the centuries, developed an intrinsic relationship, one which predates the Habsburg dynasty and the Renaissance and baroque periods. The cross-fertilization and challenges have been both fruitful and complex with novel inventions surfacing in one culture often achieving their greatest prosperity in the other: Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation stimulated a response in Spain that was to define the European Counter Reformation; Spanish Baroque writers were seminal in the development of German Romanticism; Carl Christian Friedrich Krause and other nineteenth-century liberals provided the foundation for Spanish reformist efforts on the one hand, while German conservatives like Novalis and Adam Müller inspired conservatvies on the other; the music of Richard Wagner transformed Spanish music and the Spanish stage at the turn of the twentieth century; Pablo Picasso and other artists of the Spanish avant-garde sparkled the enthusiasm of the Germans before the Nazi era. Today, German and Spanish intellectuals and writers share a similar commitment to the creation of a European culture in the face of resistance from other members of the European Union.

  Viewed from a variety of disciplines this volume explores the relentlessly consistent, albeit often forgotten connections between the two linguistic and cultural groups revealing the myriad of ways in which they have shared and transformed literature, art, culture, politics, and history.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2001

  Literature, the 'Volk' & the Revolution in Mid-19th Century Germany

  Perraudin, M.

  Between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, poverty reached new extremes in Germany, as in other European countries, and gave rise to a class of disaffected poor, leading to the widespread expectation of a social revolution. Whether welcomed or feared, it dominated private and public debate to a larger extent than is generally assumed as is shown in this study on the reflections in literature of what was called the "Social Question."

  Examining works by Heine, Eichendorff, Nestroy, Büchner, Grillparzer, and Theodor Storm, the author reveals an acute awareness of political issues in an era in literature which is often seen as tending to quiescence and withdrawal from public preoccupations.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available January 2016

  Lobbying Hitler

  Industrial Associations between Democracy and Dictatorship

  Bera, M.

  From 1933 onward, Nazi Germany undertook massive and unprecedented industrial integration, submitting an entire economic sector to direct state oversight. This innovative study explores how German professionals navigated this complex landscape through the divergent careers of business managers in two of the era’s most important trade organizations. While Jakob Reichert of the iron and steel industry unexpectedly resisted state control and was eventually driven to suicide, Karl Lange of the machine builders’ association achieved security for himself and his industry by submitting to the Nazi regime. Both men’s stories illuminate the options available to industrialists under the Third Reich, as well as the real priorities set by the industries they served.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available October 2016

  Losing Heaven

  Religion in Germany since 1945

  Großbölting, T.

  As the birthplace of the Reformation, Germany has been the site of some of the most significant moments in the history of European Christianity. Today, however, its religious landscape is one that would scarcely be recognizable to earlier generations. This groundbreaking survey of German postwar religious life depicts a profoundly changed society: congregations shrink, private piety is on the wane, and public life has almost entirely shed its Christian character, yet there remains a booming market for syncretistic and individualistic forms of “popular religion.” Losing Heaven insightfully recounts these dramatic shifts and explains their consequences for German religious communities and the polity as a whole.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available July 2017

  Mad Mädchen

  Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film

  McCarthy, M.

  The last two decades have been transformational, often discordant ones for German feminism, as a new cohort of activists has come of age and challenged many of the movement’s strategic and philosophical orthodoxies. Mad Mädchen offers an incisive analysis of these trans-generational debates, identifying the mother-daughter themes and other tropes that have defined their representation in German literature, film, and media. Author Margaret McCarthy investigates female subjectivity as it processes political discourse to define itself through both differences and affinities among women. Ultimately, such a model suggests new ways of re-imagining feminist solidarity across generational, ethnic, and racial lines.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Media Studies Film and Television Studies Literary Studies

• December 2006

  The Many Faces of Clio

  Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography
  Essays in Honor of Georg G. Iggers

  Wang, Q. E. & Fillafer, F. (eds)

  Born in Germany, Georg Iggers escaped from Nazism to the United States in his adolescence where he became one of the most distinguished scholars of European intellectual history and the history of historiography. In his lectures, delivered all over the world, and in his numerous books, translated into many languages, Georg Iggers has reshaped historiography and indefatigably promoted cross-cultural dialogue. This volume reflects the profound impact of his oeuvre. Among the contributors are leading intellectual historians but also younger scholars who explore the various cultural contexts of modern historiography, focusing on changes of European and American scholarship as well as non-Western historical writing in relation to developments in the West. Addressing these changes from a transnational perspective, this well-rounded volume offers an excellent introduction to the field, which will be of interest to both established historians and graduate students.

  Subject: History (General)

• April 2004

  The Many Faces of Germany

  McCarthy, J. A., Grûnzweig, W. & Koebner, T. (eds)

  With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the shifting of American foreign policy away from "old" Europe, long-established patterns of interaction between Germany and the U.S. have come under review. Although seemingly disconnected from the cultural and intellectual world, political developments were not without their influence on the humanities and their curricula during the past century. In retrospect, we can speak of the many different roles Germany has played in American eyes. The Many Faces of Germany seeks to acknowledge the importance of those incarnations for the study of German culture and history on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major questions raised by the contributors is whether the transformations in the transatlantic dynamics and in the importance of Germany for the U.S. have had a major influence on the study of things German in the U.S. internally. The volume gathers together leading voices of the older and younger generations of social historians, literary scholars, film critics, and cultural historians.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2011

  The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany

  Sutton, K.

  Throughout the Weimar period the so-called “masculinization of woman” was much more than merely an outsider or subcultural phenomenon; it was central to representations of the changing female ideal, and fed into wider debates concerning the health and fertility of the German “race” following the rupture of war. Drawing on recent developments within the history of sexuality, this book sheds new light on representations and discussions of the masculine woman within the Weimar print media from 1918–1933. It traces the connotations and controversies surrounding this figure from her rise to media prominence in the early 1920s until the beginning of the Nazi period, considering questions of race, class, sexuality, and geography. By focusing on styles, bodies and identities that did not conform to societal norms of binary gender or heterosexuality, this book contributes to our understanding of gendered lives and experiences at this pivotal juncture in German history.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2015

  Mass Media and Historical Change

  Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present

  Bösch, F.

  Media influenced politics, culture, and everyday life long before the invention of the Internet. This book shows how the advent of new media has changed societies in modern history, focusing not on the specifics of technology but rather on their distribution, use, and impact. Using Germany as an example for international trends, it compares the advent of printing in Europe and East Asia, and the impact of the press on revolutions, nation building, and wars in North America and Europe. The rise of tabloids and film is discussed as an international phenomenon, as the importance of media during National Socialism is looked at in comparison with Fascist Italy and Spain. Finally, this book offers a precise analysis of media during the Cold War, with divided Germany providing the central case study.

  Subjects: Media Studies History (General)

• May 2011

  Max Liebermann and International Modernism

  An Artist's Career from Empire to Third Reich

  Deshmukh, M., Forster-Hahn, F. & Gaehtgens, B. (eds)

  Although Max Liebermann (1847–1935) began his career as a realist painter depicting scenes of rural labor, Dutch village life, and the countryside, by the turn of the century, his paintings had evolved into colorful images of bourgeois life and leisure that critics associated with French impressionism. During a time of increasing German nationalism, his paintings and cultural politics sparked numerous aesthetic and political controversies. His eminent career and his reputation intersected with the dramatic and violent events of modern German history from the Empire to the Third Reich. The Nazis’ persecution of modern and Jewish artists led to the obliteration of Liebermann from the narratives of modern art, but this volume contributes to the recent wave of scholarly literature that works to recover his role and his oeuvre from an international perspective.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2002

  Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany

  Origins, Practices, Legacies

  Nicosia, F.R. & Huener, J. (eds)

  The participation of German physicians in medical experiments on innocent people and mass murder is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Six distinguished historians working in this field are addressing the critical issues raised by these murderous experiments, such as the place of the Holocaust in the larger context of eugenic and racial research, the motivation and roles of the German medical establishment, and the impact and legacy of the eugenics movements and Nazi medical practice on physicians and medicine since World War II.

  Based on the authors' original scholarship, these essays offer an excellent and very accessible introduction to an important and controversial subject. They are also particularly relevant in light of current controversies over the nature and application of research in human genetics and biotechnology.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History

• eBook available May 2018

  Memorializing the GDR

  Monuments and Memory after 1989

  Saunders, A.

  Since unification, eastern Germany has witnessed a rapidly changing memorial landscape, as the fate of former socialist monuments has been hotly debated and new commemorative projects have met with fierce controversy. Memorializing the GDR provides the first in-depth study of this contested arena of public memory, investigating the individuals and groups devoted to the creation or destruction of memorials as well as their broader aesthetic, political, and historical contexts. Emphasizing the interrelationship of built environment, memory and identity, it brings to light the conflicting memories of recent German history, as well as the nuances of national and regional constructions of identity.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Urban Studies Heritage Studies

• eBook available September 2015

  The Merkel Republic

  An Appraisal

  Langenbacher, E. (ed)

  Chancellor Angela Merkel has dominated German and European politics for almost a decade. Her stellar reputation, sound political and economic management, and popularity inside of Germany resulted in one of the most decisive electoral victories for her conservative parties in postwar Germany—the country can rightfully be deemed the Merkel Republic. Bringing together German politics experts from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume addresses the campaign, results, and consequences of the 2013 Bundestag election. Chapters delve into a diverse array of themes, including immigrant-origin and women candidates, the fate of the small parties, and the prospects for the SPD, the new coalition partner, as well as more general structural trends like the Europeanization and cosmopolitanization of German politics.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available January 2009

  Michael Haneke's Cinema

  The Ethic of the Image

  Wheatley, C.

  Existing critical traditions fail to fully account for the impact of Austrian director, and 2009 Cannes Palm d'Or winner, Michael Haneke’s films, situated as they are between intellectual projects and popular entertainments. In this first English-language introduction to, and critical analysis of, his work, each of Haneke’s eight feature films are considered in detail. Particular attention is given to what the author terms Michael Haneke’s ‘ethical cinema’ and the unique impact of these films upon their audiences.

  Drawing on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Stanley Cavell, Catherine Wheatley, introduces a new way of marrying film and moral philosophy, which explicitly examines the ethics of the film viewing experience. Haneke’s films offer the viewer great freedom whilst simultaneously imposing a considerable burden of responsibility. How Haneke achieves this break with more conventional spectatorship models, and what its far-reaching implications are for film theory in general, constitute the principal subject of this book.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• August 1997

  Migrants, Refugees, and Foreign Policy

  U.S. and German Policies Toward Countries of Origin

  Münz, R. & Weiner, M. (eds)

  Foreign policies have always played an important role in the movements of migrants. A number of essays in this volume show how the foreign policies of the United States and Germany have directly or inadvertently contributed to the influx from the former Yugoslavia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Now being faced with growing resistance to admit foreigners into their countries, both governments have once again been using foreign-policy instruments in an effort to change the conditions in the refugees' countries of origin which forced people to leave. This volume addresses questions such as which policies can influence governments to improve their human rights, protect minorities, end internal strife, reduce the level of violence, or improve economic conditions so that large numbers of people need not leave their homes.

  Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

• August 1997

  Migration Past, Migration Future

  Germany and the United States

  Bade, K. J. & Weiner, M. (eds)

  The United States is an immigrant country. Germany is not. This volume shatters this widely held myth and reveals the remarkable similarities (as well as the differences) between the two countries. Essays by leading German and American historians and demographers describe how these two countries have become to have the largest number of immigrants among advanced industrial countries, how their conceptions of citizenship and nationality differ, and how their ethnic compositions are likely to be transformed in the next century as a consequence ofmigration, fertility trends, citizenship and naturalization laws, and public attitudes.

  Subject: Refugee and Migration Studies

• November 2016

  Migration, Memory, and Diversity

  Germany from 1945 to the Present

  Wilhelm, C. (ed)

  Within Germany, policies and cultural attitudes toward migrants have been profoundly shaped by the difficult legacies of the Second World War and its aftermath. This wide-ranging volume explores the complex history of migration and diversity in Germany from 1945 to today, showing how conceptions of “otherness” developed while memories of the Nazi era were still fresh, and identifying the continuities and transformations they exhibited through the Cold War and reunification. It provides invaluable context for understanding contemporary Germany’s unique role within regional politics at a time when an unprecedented influx of immigrants and refugees present the European community with a significant challenge.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies Memory Studies

• eBook available September 2016

  Migrations in the German Lands, 1500-2000

  Coy, J., Poley, J., & Schunka, A. (eds)

  Migration to, from, and within German-speaking lands has been a dynamic force in Central European history for centuries. Exemplifying some of the most exciting recent research on historical mobility, the essays collected here reconstruct the experiences of vagrants, laborers, religious exiles, refugees, and other migrants during the last five hundred years of German history. With diverse contributions ranging from early modern martyrdom to post–Cold War commemoration efforts, this volume identifies revealing commonalities shared by different eras while also placing the German case within the broader contexts of European and global migration.

  Subjects: History (General) Mobility Studies Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available August 2013

  The Mind of the Nation

  Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955

  Klautke, E.

  Völkerpsychologie played an important role in establishing the social sciences via the works of such scholars as Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Ernest Renan, Franz Boas, and Werner Sombart. In Germany, the intellectual history of “folk psychology” was represented by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt and Willy Hellpach. This book follows the invention of the discipline in the nineteenth century, its rise around the turn of the century and its ultimate demise after the Second World War. In addition, it shows that despite the repudiation of “folk psychology” and its failed institutionalization, the discipline remains relevant as a precursor of contemporary studies of “national identity.”

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available April 2022

  Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990

  Gezen, E., Layne, P., & Skolnik, J. (eds)

  While German unification promised a new historical beginning, it also stirred discussions about contemporary Germany’s Nazi past and ideas of citizenship and belonging in a changing Europe. Minority Discourses in Germany Since 1990 explores the intersections and divergences between Black German, Turkish German, and German Jewish experiences, with reflections on the evolving academic paradigms with which these are studied. Informed by comparative approaches, the volume investigates social and aesthetic interventions into contemporary German public and political discourse on memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Refugee and Migration Studies

• January 1998

  Mitteleuropa

  Between Europe and Germany

  Katzenstein, P. (ed)

  German unification and the political and economic transformations in central Europe signal profound political changes that pose many questions. Will post-Communism push ahead with the task of institutionalizing a democratic capitalism? How will that process be aided or disrupted by international developments in the East and West? And how will central Europe relate to united Germany? Based on original field research this book offers, through more than a dozen case studies, a cautiously optimistic set of answers to these questions. The end of the Cold War and German unification, the empirical evidence indicates, are not returning Germany and central Europe to historically troubled, imbalanced, bilateral relationships. Rather changes in the character of German and European politics as well as the transformations now affecting Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia point to the emergence of multilateral relationships linking Germany and central Europe in an internationalizing, democratic Europe.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2009

  Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification

  Bozo, F.

  Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this important book explores the role of France in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War and German unification. Most accounts concentrate on the role of the United States and look at these events through the bipolar prism of Soviet-American relations. Yet because of its central position in Europe and of its status as Germany’s foremost European partner, France and its President, François Mitterrand, played a decisive role in these pivotal international events: the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet rule starting in 1988, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s return to unity and full sovereignty in 1989/90, and the breakup of the USSR in 1991. Based on extensive research and a vast amount of archival sources, this book explores the role played by France in shaping a new European order.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 2014

  Mixed Matches

  Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment

  Luebke, D. M. & Lindemann, M. (eds)

  The significant changes in early modern German marriage practices included many unions that violated some taboo. That taboo could be theological and involve the marriage of monks and nuns, or refer to social misalliances as when commoners and princes (or princesses) wed. Equally transgressive were unions that crossed religious boundaries, such as marriages between Catholics and Protestants, those that violated ethnic or racial barriers, and those that broke kin-related rules. Taking as a point of departure Martin Luther’s redefinition of marriage, the contributors to this volume spin out the multiple ways that the Reformers’ attempts to simplify and clarify marriage affected education, philosophy, literature, high politics, diplomacy, and law. Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.

  Subject: History: Medieval/Early Modern

• eBook available October 2017

  Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective

  Meng, M. & Seipp, A. R. (eds)

  Bringing together incisive contributions from an international group of colleagues and former students, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective takes stock of the field of German history as exemplified by the extraordinary scholarly career of Konrad H. Jarausch. Through fascinating reflections on the discipline’s theoretical, professional, and methodological dimensions, it explores Jarausch’s monumental work as a teacher and a builder of scholarly institutions. In this way, it provides not merely a look back at the last fifty years of German history, but a path forward as new ideas and methods infuse the study of Germany’s past.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present History: World War II

• eBook available July 2020

  Modern Lusts

  Ernest Borneman: Jazz Critic, Filmmaker, Sexologist

  Siegfried, D.

  As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Film and Television Studies Media Studies

• March 2006

  Modernizing Bavaria

  The Politics of Franz Josef Strauss and the CSU, 1949-1969

  Milosch, M.

  In 1949 Bavaria was not only the largest and best known but also the poorest, most agricultural, and most industrially backward region of Germany. It was further its most politically conservative region. The largest political party in Bavaria was the Christian Social Union (CSU), an extremely conservative, even reactionary, regional party. In the ensuing twenty years, the leaders of the CSU's small liberal wing (in particular Franz Josef Strauss, long-time party chair and the most colorful and polarizing politician in postwar Germany) broke with the anti-industrial traditions of Bavarian Catholic politics and made themselves useful to industry. With tactical brilliance the politicians pursued their individual political ambitions, rather than a coherent modernization strategy, which, by 1969, had turned Bavaria into a prosperous Land, the center of Germany's new aerospace, defense, and energy industries, with a disproportionate share of its research institutes.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2017

  Money in the German-speaking Lands

  Lindemann, M. & Poley, J. (eds)

  Money is more than just a medium of financial exchange: across time and place, it has performed all sorts of cultural, political, and social functions. This volume traces money in German-speaking Europe from the late Renaissance until the close of the twentieth century, exploring how people have used it and endowed it with multiple meanings. The fascinating studies gathered here collectively demonstrate money’s vast symbolic and practical significance, from its place in debates about religion and the natural world to its central role in statecraft and the formation of national identity.

  Subject: History (General)

• eBook available February 2022

  Moving Frames

  Photographs in German Cinema

  Collenberg-González, C. & Sheehan, M. P. (eds)

  As the building blocks of moving pictures, photographs have played an integral role in cinema since the dawn of the medium—a relationship that has grown more complexly connected even as the underlying technologies continue to evolve. Moving Frames explores the use of photographs in German films from Expressionism to the Berlin School, addressing the formal and narrative roles that photographs play as well as the cultural and historical contexts out of which these films emerged. Looking beyond and within the canon, the editors gather stimulating new insights into the politics of surveillance, resistance, representation, and collective memory functioning through photographic rupture and affect in German cinema.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Cultural Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• December 1998

  Multiculturalism in Transit

  A German-American Exchange

  Milich, K. & Peck, J. (eds)

  Multiculturalism is one of the most controversial topics in both the United States and Germany.This interdisciplinary collection of essays by German scholars in American Studies and American scholars in German Studies analyze the "other" from this dual perspective and from their respective disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, political science, anthropology,and history. More particularly they examine multiculturalism in terms of national and ethnic identities, as well as gender and race, and look at the disciplines and institutions that produce and legitimize discourses on subjects such as minority literatures, feminism, and the notion of foreignness itself. What becomes clear is the fact that careful attention must be paid to the particular conditions and different ideological concepts that shape this term, i.e., the "national" historical, political, social, and institutional contexts in which it appears, circulates, and accrues meanings.

  Contributors: G. Welz, T. Brennan, B. Ostendorf, R. Hof, S. Lennox, A. Koenen, F. Hajek, C.Gersdorf, G. H. Lenz, F. Trommler, H. C. Seeba, A. Seyhan, A. Hornung, B. Thomas, G. O. Kvistad, H.-J. Puhle

  Subject: Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2012

  Myth and Modernity

  Barlach's Drawings on the Nibelungen

  Paret, P. & Thieme, H.

  In interpreting its own age art often turns to the past. At the beginning of the twentieth century one of these encounters between present and past was prompted by the interest a major figure in German modernism, the sculptor Ernst Barlach, came to take in the medieval epic The Song of the Nibelungen. There exists no statement by Barlach to explain what prompted his interest and the resulting sequence of large drawings on the epic’s climactic final segment, reproduced here. In conception and execution these drawings stand out in Barlach’s graphic oeuvre, as they stand apart from the multitude of interpretations the Nibelungen inspired in art, literature, and music. This book discusses the epic and its course through German history, the artist’s biography and the course of his work, as well as the place the drawings occupy in the art, culture, and politics of Germany in the 1920s and 30s and beyond to the ideological and political crises of Central Europe before and after the First World War.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• eBook available June 2019

  Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany

  Plummer, M. E. & Harrington, J. F. (eds)

  Throughout the many political and social upheavals of the early modern era, names were words to conjure by, articulating significant historical trends and helping individuals and societies make sense of often dramatic periods of change. Centered on onomastics—the study of names—in the German-speaking lands, this volume, gathering leading scholars across multiple disciplines, explores the dynamics and impact of naming (and renaming) processes in a variety of contexts—social, artistic, literary, theological, and scientific—in order to enhance our understanding of individual and collective experiences.

  Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2016

  Narratives in the Making

  Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present

  Gallinat, A.

  Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• January 2000

  National Socialist Extermination Policies

  Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies

  Herbert, U. (ed)

  Moving beyond the well-established problems and public discussions of the Holocaust, this collection of essays, written by some of the leading German historians of the younger generation, leaves behind the increasingly agitated arguments of the last years and substantially broadens, and in many areas revises, our knowledge of the Holocaust. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on whether the Holocaust could best be understood as the "fulfilment of a world view or as a process of "cumulative radicalisation," these articles provide an overview of how situational elements and gradual processes of radicalisation were variously combined with ever-changing objectives and fundamental ideological convictions.

  Focusing on the developments in Poland, the Soviet Union, Serbia, and France the authors find that heretofore we have actually had very little knowledge of many aspects of this history, particularly with regards to the specific forces that motivated German policy in the individual regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Thus the National-Socialist extermination policy is not seen as a secret undertaking but rather as part of the German conquest and occupation policy in Europe.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History Jewish Studies

• October 2004

  Nature in German History

  Mauch, C. (ed)

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  Germany is a key test case for the burgeoning field of environmental history; in no other country has the landscape been so thoroughly politicized throughout its past as in Germany,and in no other country have ideas of 'nature' figured so centrally in notions of national identity. The essays collected in this volume — the first collection on the subject in either English or German — place discussions of nature and the human relationship with nature in their political co texts. Taken together, they trace the gradual shift from a confident belief in humanity ’s ability to tame and manipulate the natural realm to the Umweltbewußtsein driving the contemporary conservation movement. Nature in German History also documents efforts to reshape the natural realm in keeping with ideological beliefs — such as the Romantic exultation of 'the wild' and the Nazis' attempts to eliminate 'foreign' flora and fauna — as well as the ways in which political issues have repeatedly been transformed into discussions of the environment in Germany.

  Subjects: History (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2008

  Nature of the Miracle Years

  Conservation in West Germany, 1945-1975

  Chaney, S.

  After 1945, those responsible for conservation in Germany resumed their work with a relatively high degree of continuity as far as laws and personnel were concerned. Yet conservationists soon found they had little choice but to modernize their views and practices in the challenging postwar context. Forced to change by necessity, those involved in state-sponsored conservation institutionalized and professionalized their efforts, while several private groups became more confrontational in their message and tactics. Through their steady and often conservative presence within the mainstream of West German society, conservationists ensured that by 1970 the map of the country was dotted with hundreds of reserves, dozens of nature parks, and one national park. In doing so, they assured themselves a strong position to participate in, rather than be excluded from, the left-leaning environmental movement of the 1970s.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available October 2008

  Nazi Paris

  The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944

  Mitchell, A.

  Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.

  Subject: History: World War II

• June 1999

  Nazism in Central Germany

  The Brownshirts in 'Red' Saxony

  Szejnmann, C.-C.

  Most studies on the spread of Nazism in German society before and after 1933 concentrate on the country's western parts. As a result, so the author claims, our overall picture of the situation has been distorted since the eastern areas contained a substantial portion of the population. Neglecting them means that all generalizations about the Nazi period require further testing. This first comprehensive study of Saxony therefore fills a large gap, also in light of the fact that Saxony was one of the most industrialized German regions. It deals with problems of continuity and change in German society during three distinct phases: constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, and dictatorship. The author shows convincingly that it was deep-rooted local traditions that determined the success or failure of Nazism among the local population.

  Subject: History: World War II

• eBook available March 2019

  Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire

  Transnational Approaches

  Habermas, R. (ed)

  With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2004

  Networks of Nazi Persecution

  Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust

  Feldman, G. & Seibel, W. (eds)

  The persecution and mass-murder of the Jews during World War II would not have been possible without the modern organization of division of labor. Moreover, the perpetrators were dependent on human and organizational resources they could not always control by hierarchy and coercion. Instead, the persecution of the Jews was based, to a large extent, on a web of inter-organizational relations encompassing a broad variety of non-hierarchical cooperation as well as rivalry and competition. Based on newly accessible government and corporate archives, this volume combines fresh evidence with an interpretation of the governance of persecution, presented by prominent historians and social scientists.

  Subjects: Genocide History

• eBook available October 2016

  The Nuclear Crisis

  The Arms Race, Cold War Anxiety, and the German Peace Movement of the 1980s

  Becker-Schaum, C., Gassert, P., Mausbach, W., Klimke, M., and Zepp, M. (eds)

  In 1983, more than one million Germans joined together to protest NATO’s deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. International media overflowed with images of marches, rallies, and human chains as protesters blockaded depots and agitated for disarmament. Though they failed to halt the deployment, the episode was a decisive one for German society, revealing deep divisions in the nation’s political culture while continuing to mobilize activists. This volume provides a comprehensive reference work on the “Euromissiles” crisis as experienced by its various protagonists, analyzing NATO’s diplomatic and military maneuvering and tracing the political, cultural, and moral discourses that surrounded the missiles’ deployment in East and West Germany.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• December 2006

  Nursing Stories

  Life and Death in a German Hospice

  Eschenbruch, N.

  At a time, when the section of the older population is increasing in all western societies, more and more attention needs to be paid to the growing number of people who live with and die of drawn-out terminal illnesses, cancer being one of the most common ones. This study focuses on terminally ill people in a German hospice and addresses the question how meaningful experience is constructed for these patients in an attempt to preserve their dignity as persons. It is based on detailed and sometimes moving material from diary texts and active participation of the author in the role of a nurse, which allowed him to watch closely the behaviour of patients and nurses in routine situations and to look at the underlying emotions, values, and assumptions within such interaction. This book goes well beyond this particular case and reaches conclusions about death narratives that are significant for the social sciences more generally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available May 2019

  One Sound, Two Worlds

  The Blues in a Divided Germany, 1945-1990

  Rauhut, M.

  For all of its apparent simplicity—a few chords, twelve bars, and a supposedly straightforward American character—blues music is a complex phenomenon with cultural significance that has varied greatly across different historical contexts. One Sound, Two Worlds examines the development of the blues in East and West Germany, demonstrating the multiple ways social and political conditions can shape the meaning of music. Based on new archival research and conversations with key figures, this comparative study provides a cultural, historical, and musicological account of the blues and the impact of the genre not only in the two Germanys, but also in debates about the history of globalization.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Performance Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2010

  Optimizing the German Workforce

  Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle

  Meskill, D.

  During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country’s human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author’s account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry’s evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany’s domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.

  Subject: History (General)

• February 2023

  The Origins of German Self-Cultivation

  Bildung and the Future of the Humanities

  Ham, J., Kinzel, U., & Pan, D. (eds)

  Recent devaluations of a liberal arts education call the formative concept of Bildung, a defining model of self-cultivation rooted in 18th and 19th century German philosophy and culture, into question and force us to reconsider what it once meant and now means to be an “educated” individual. This volume uses an arc of interdisciplinary scholarship to map both the epistemological origins and cultural expressions of the pivotal notion of Bildung at the heart of pursuit in the humanities. From its intriguing original historical manifestations to its continuing resonance in current ongoing debates surrounding the humanities, the editors urge us to ask and discover how the classical concept of Bildung, so central to humanistic inquiry, was historically imagined and applied in its original German context.

  Subjects: History (General) Educational Studies

• June 1997

  Osthandel and Ostpolitik

  German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer

  Spaulding, R. M.

  German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2022

  Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline

  Lewis, B.

  Oswald Spengler was one of the most important thinkers of the Weimar Republic. In Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline, Ben Lewis completely transforms our understanding of Spengler by showing how well-connected this philosopher was and how, at every stage of his career, he attempted to intervene politically in the very real-life events unfolding around him. The volume explains Spengler’s politics as the outcome of a dynamic interplay between his meta-historical considerations on world history on the one hand, and the practical demands and considerations of Realpolitik on the other hand.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 2000

  Paradoxes of Civil Society

  New Perspectives on Modern German and British History

  Trentmann, F. (ed)

  "Civil Society" has been experiencing a global renaissance among social movements and political thinkers during the last two decades. This collection of original papers by junior and senior scholars offers an important comparative-historical dimension to the debate by examining the historical roots of civil society in Germany and Britain from the seventeenth-century revolutions to the beginning of the welfare state.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) History (General)

• eBook available October 2017

  The Participants

  The Men of the Wannsee Conference

  Jasch, H.-C., & Kreutzmüller, C. (eds)

  Combining accessible prose with scholarly rigor, The Participants presents fascinating profiles of the all-too-human men who implemented some of the most inhuman acts in history.

  On 20 January 1942, fifteen senior German government officials attended a short meeting in Berlin to discuss the deportation and murder of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Despite lasting less than two hours, the Wannsee Conference is today understood as a signal episode in the history of the Holocaust, exemplifying the labor division and bureaucratization that made the “Final Solution” possible. Yet while the conference itself has been exhaustively researched, many of its attendees remain relatively obscure.

  From the introduction:
  Ten of the fifteen participants had been to university. Eight of them had even been awarded doctorates, although it should be pointed out that it was considerably easier to gain a doctorate in law or philosophy in the 1920s than it is today. Eight of them had studied law, which, then as now, was not uncommon in the top positions of public administration. Many first turned to radical politics as members of Freikorps or student fraternities. Three of the participants (Freisler, Klopfer and Lange) had studied in Jena. In the 1920s, the University of Jena was a fertile breeding ground for nationalist thinking. With dedicated Nazi, race researcher and later SS-Hauptsturmbannführer Karl Astel as rector, it developed into a model Nazi university. Race researcher Hans Günther also taught there. Others, such as Reinhard Heydrich, joined the SS because they had failed to launch careers elsewhere, and only became radical once they were members of the self-acclaimed Nazi elite order.

  Subjects: Genocide History History: World War II

• April 2014

  The Path to the Berlin Wall

  Critical Stages in the History of Divided Germany

  WIlke, M.

  The long path to the Berlin Wall began in 1945, when Josef Stalin instructed the Communist Party to take power in the Soviet occupation zone while the three Western allies secured their areas of influence. When Germany was split into separate states in 1949, Berlin remained divided into four sectors, with West Berlin surrounded by the GDR but lingering as a captivating showcase for Western values and goods. Following a failed Soviet attempt to expel the allies from West Berlin with a blockade in 1948–49, a second crisis ensued from 1958–61, during which the Soviet Union demanded once and for all the withdrawal of the Western powers and the transition of West Berlin to a “Free City.” Ultimately Nikita Khrushchev decided to close the border in hopes of halting the overwhelming exodus of East Germans into the West.

  Tracing this path from a German perspective, Manfred Wilke draws on recently published conversations between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, in order to reconstruct the coordination process between these two leaders and the events that led to building the Berlin Wall.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 1998

  Paths to Inclusion

  The Integration of Migrants in the United States and Germany

  Schuck, P. & Münz, R. (eds)

  The series is rounded off by this volume which focuses on "immigrant" policy, i.e., the ensemble of institutions, laws and social practices that are designed to facilitate the integration of immigrants and refugees into the receiving countries after they arrive. The chapters bring both theoretical and empirical analysis to bear on the processes of assimilation, migrants' development of transnational linkages, patterns of social and economic mobility in the immigrant and second generations, migrants' rights to public benefits and equal status, and the laws of citizenship in the two countries. The volume is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on the research of demographers, lawyers, and sociologists. It is also explicitly comparative,underscoring the similarities and differences in how the United States and Germany conceive of the role of immigrants in their societies and how the two nations incorporate them into civil and political society. Introductory and concluding chapters highlight the principal themes, findings, and policy implications of the volume.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available July 2019

  Peace at All Costs

  Catholic Intellectuals, Journalists, and Media in Postwar Polish–German Reconciliation

  Frieberg, A. E.

  Although it was characterized by simmering international tensions, the early Cold War also witnessed dramatic instances of reconciliation between states, as former antagonists rebuilt political, economic, and cultural ties in the wake of the Second World War. And such efforts were not confined to official diplomacy, as this study of postwar rapprochement between Poland and West Germany demonstrates. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace at All Costs follows Polish and German non-state activists who attempted to establish dialogue in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how they achieved modest successes and media attention at the cost of more nuanced approaches to their national histories and identities.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies Media Studies

• November 2002

  Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses During the Nazi-Regime

  Hesse, H. (ed)

  More than 50 years after the end of the Third Reich, Jehovah's Witnesses, like Sinti and Roma, continue to be forgotten victims in the broader public’s consciousness. Only recently have historians and concentration camp memorials increasingly focused on this category of inmates who were marked and stigmatized in concentration camps with purple triangles. Through 22 articles, 19 authors employ the latest research in Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s Witnesses during the Nazi Regime to summarize the multifaceted history of those prisoners in the Wewelsburg, Sachsenhausen and Moringen concentration camps. Comprehensively, this volume includes a lens on the persecution of the female members of Jehovah's Witnesses, who made up the largest group of inmates of the female concentration camps up until the beginning of the Second World War; contributions that for the first time deal with the hitherto largely unknown history of the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses specifically in the GDR; and, to round out this volume’s extensiveness, there also are around 120 documents and photos, previously mostly unseen.

  Subjects: Genocide History Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available October 2017

  The Persistence of Race

  Continuity and Change in Germany from the Wilhelmine Empire to National Socialism

  Day, L. & Haag, O. (eds)

  Race in 20th-century German history is an inescapable topic, one that has been defined overwhelmingly by the narratives of degeneracy that prefigured the Nuremberg Laws and death camps of the Third Reich. As the contributions to this innovative volume show, however, German society produced a much more complex variety of racial representations over the first part of the century. Here, historians explore the hateful depictions of the Nazi period alongside idealized images of African, Pacific and Australian indigenous peoples, demonstrating both the remarkable fixity race had as an object of fascination for German society as well as the conceptual plasticity it exhibited through several historical eras.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available July 2021

  Peter Lilienthal

  A Cinema of Exile and Resistance

  Sandberg, C.

  Best known for his 1979 film David, Peter Lilienthal was an unusual figure within postwar filmmaking circles. A child refugee from Nazi Germany who grew up in Uruguay, he was uniquely situated at the crossroads of German, Jewish, and Latin American cultures: while his work emerged from West German auteur filmmaking, his films bore the unmistakable imprints of Jewish thought and the militant character of New Latin American cinema. Peter Lilienthal is the first comprehensive study of Lilienthal’s life and career, highlighting the distinctively cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of his oeuvre, and exploring his role as an early exemplar of a more vibrant, inclusive European film culture.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• eBook available February 2012

  Peter Lorre: Face Maker

  Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe

  Thomas, S.

  Peter Lorre described himself as merely a ‘face maker’. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang’s M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre’s screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre’s career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2007

  Pious Pursuits

  German Moravians in the Atlantic World

  Gillespie, M., & Beachy, R. (eds)

  Recent work on the history of migration and the Atlantic World has underscored the importance of the political economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the impact of these exchanges on political relations and state-building, and on economic structures, commerce, and wealth. Too little of this work explores culture and identity outside the Anglo-American context, especially as reflected through religious developments of radical Pietists and other Germans, the second largest group of migrants to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

  This volume offers a fresh vantage point from which to examine the Atlantic World. Quick to traverse the conventional political boundaries that divided European states and American colonies, Moravians departed their homeland to form new congregations in the most cosmopolitan European cities as well as on the North American frontier. Pious Pursuits explores the lives and beliefs of Atlantic World Moravians, as well as their communities and culture, and it provides a new framework for analysis of the Atlantic World that is comparative and transnational.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Colonial History Refugee and Migration Studies

• September 2010

  The Plans That Failed

  An Economic History of the GDR

  Steiner, A.

  The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR’s ‘new’ society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy’s starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR’s lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2008

  Playing Politics with History

  The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany

  Beattie, A. H.

  After Germany's reunification in 1989-90, the country faced not only the history and consequences of the nation’s division during the Cold War but also the continuing burdensome legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. This book explains why concerns that the Nazi past would be marginalized by the more recent Communist past proved to be misplaced. It examines the delicate East–West dynamics and the notion that the West sought to impose "victor's justice" (or history) on the East. More specifically, it examines, for the first time, the history and significance of two parliamentary commissions of inquiry created in the 1990s to investigate the divided past after 1945 and its effects on the reunified country. Not unlike "truth commissions" elsewhere, these inquiries provided an important forum for renegotiating contemporary Germany's relationship with multiple German pasts, including the Nazi period and the Holocaust. The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2007

  The Pleasure of a Surplus Income

  Part-Time Work, Gender Politics, and Social Change in West Germany, 1955-1969

  Oertzen, C. von

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  At a time when part-time jobs are ubiquitous, it is easy to forget that they are a relatively new phenomenon. This book explores the reasons behind the introduction of this specific form of work in West Germany and shows how it took root, in both norm and law, in factories, government authorities, and offices as well as within families and the lives of individual women. The author covers the period from the early 1950s, a time of optimism during the first postwar economic upswing, to 1969, the culmination of the legislative institutionalization of part-time work.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality

• January 2001

  Poems in Steel

  National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn

  Gispen, K.

  The role of National Socialism in the development of German society remains a central question of historical inquiry. This study presents original answers by examining the politics of inventing, a crucial but long ignored problem at the intersection of the history of technology, legal, political, and business history. The analysis of conflicts over the rights of inventors and the meaning of inventing from the 1920s to the 1950s reveals a deep chasm, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, between the forces of capital and big business on one hand and the exponents of intellectual capital - inventors, engineers, industrial scientists - on the other.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• October 1996

  A Poet Or Nothing At All

  The Tübingen and Basel Years of Herman Hesse

  Helt, R. C.

  The most original, new work on Hesse in many years and the definitive study of the young Herman Hesse, offering much previously unknown material such as his "neo-Romantic" poetry of which two dozen are published here for the first time in the original.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• April 1998

  The Political Economy of German Unification

  Lange, T. & Shackleton, J. (eds)

  Although German unification has had a profound impact on European integration and economic development, very few studies of the East German economy exist. The editors of this volume have therefore brought together specialists in economics and politics who analyze such important issues as privatization, monetary reform and unemployment. The aim is to provide scholars and generally interested readers with a critical understanding of the complex processes of German unification and to identify the general lessons that can be learnt from their analysis for economies and societies that undergo such profound transformations as has been the case in East Germany since the early 1990s.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2009

  The Political Economy of Germany under Chancellors Kohl and Schröder

  Decline of the German Model?

  Leaman, J.

  While unification has undoubtedly had major effects on Germany's political economy, the pattern of current policy-making preferences was established at an earlier stage, in particular, at the beginning of the 'Kohl-era' in 1982. This essentially neo-liberal pattern can be seen to have dominated the modalities chosen to guide Germany through the process of unifi cation and was mirrored in developments in other OECD countries and in particular within the EU. This book demonstrates that the three policy imperatives (neo-liberal structural reform, European monetary integration, and unification) produced a policy-mix which, together with other structural economic and demographic factors, has had disappointing results in all three areas and hampered Germany's overall economic development.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies

• March 2009

  Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

  Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War

  Schumann, D.

  A comprehensive analysis of political violence in Weimar Germany with particular emphasis on the political culture from which it emerged.

  “Today’s readers, living in what Charles Maier calls ‘a new epoch of vanished reassurance’, will find this book absorbing and troubling.”—The Historian

  The Prussian province of Saxony—where the Communist uprising of March 1921 took place and two Combat Leagues (Wehrverbände) were founded (the right-wing Stahlhelm and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner)—is widely recognized as a politically important region in this period of German history. Using a case study of this socially diverse province, this book refutes both the claim that the Bolshevik revolution was the prime cause of violence and the argument that the First World War’s all-encompassing “brutalization” doomed post-1918 German political life from the very beginning. The study thus contributes to a view of the Weimar Republic as a state in severe crisis but with alternatives to the Nazi takeover.

  From the introduction:
  After the phase of civil war, political violence assumed a distinctly limited form. It was no longer aimed at killing or wounding as many opponents as possible; instead, it served political parties and organizations as an instrument for exerting pressure in the struggle over control of the street. This development was driven by the Combat Leagues (Wehrverbände) of all political camps, who, with their uniforms and marches, injected militaristic elements into the political culture. However, since the violence they perpetrated followed a political and not a military logic, it was, as I will show, in principle controllable and did not pose a fundamental threat to the political order, not even in 1932, that particularly turbulent year before Hitler’s assumption of power.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• July 1995

  Politics and Government in Germany, 1944-1994

  Basic Documents

  Schweitzer, C-C., Karsten, D., Spencer, R., Taylor Cole, R., Kommers, D. P., & Nicholls, A. J. (eds)

  This revised and enlarged edition brings the successful original volume of 1984 right up to date, taking into account the most recent developments. Each section begins with an introduction that provides the context for the following documents. There is no comparable volume of its kind available in English, and most documents have not previously been translated.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• July 2002

  The Politics of Education

  Teachers and School Reform in Weimar Germany

  Lamberti, M.

  Although the early history of progressive education is often associated with John Dewey in America, the author argues convincingly that the pedagogues in the elementary schools in the big cities of Imperial Germany were in the avant garde of this movement on the European Continent. Far more than a history of ideas, this study provides the first comprehensive analysis of the culture wars over the schools in Germany in the 1920s. Going up to the Nazi seizure of power, the author's narrative sheds new light on the courageous defense of the republican state by the progressive educators in the 1930s and the relationship between the traditionalists' opposition to school reform and the attraction of certain sections of the teaching profession to the Nazi movement.

  Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• March 2008

  The Politics of German Defence and Security

  Policy Leadership and Military Reform in the post-Cold War Era

  Dyson, T.

  The post-Cold War era has witnessed a dramatic transformation in the German political consensus about the legitimacy of the use of force. However, in comparison with its EU and NATO partners, Germany has been reticent to transform its military to meet the challenges of the contemporary security environment. Until 2003 territorial defence rather than crisis-management remained the armed forces' core role and the Bundeswehr continues to retain conscription. The book argues that 'strategic culture' provides only a partial explanation of German military reform. It demonstrates how domestic material factors were of crucial importance in shaping the pace and outcome of reform, despite the impact of 'international structure' and adaptational pressures from the EU and NATO. The domestic politics of base closures, ramifications for social policy, financial restrictions consequent upon German unification and commitment to EMU's Stability and Growth Pact were critical in determining the outcome of reform. The study also draws out the important role of policy leaders in the political management of reform as entrepreneurs, brokers or veto players, shifting the focus in German leadership studies away from a preoccupation with the Chancellor to the role of ministerial and administrative leadership within the core executive. Finally, the book contributes to our understanding of the Europeanization of the German political system, arguing that policy leaders played a key role in 'uploading' and 'downloading' processes to and from the EU and that Defence Ministers used 'Atlanticization' and 'Europeanization' in the interests of their domestic political agendas.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available December 2020

  The Politics of Personal Information

  Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany

  Frohman, L.

  In the 1970s and 1980s West Germany was a pioneer in both the use of the new information technologies for population surveillance and the adoption of privacy protection legislation. During this era of cultural change and political polarization, the expansion, bureaucratization, and computerization of population surveillance disrupted the norms that had governed the exchange and use of personal information in earlier decades and gave rise to a set of distinctly postindustrial social conflicts centered on the use of personal information as a means of social governance in the welfare state. Combining vast archival research with a groundbreaking theoretical analysis, this book gives a definitive account of the politics of personal information in West Germany at the dawn of the information society.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• March 1997

  Post-war Women's Writing in German

  Feminist Critical Approaches

  Weedon, C. (ed)

  Women in the Federal Republic, the former GDR, Switzerland and Austria have initiated a remarkable literary movement, especially after 1968, which is also attracting growing attention elsewhere. Informed by critical feminist and literary theory, this broad-ranging collection, the first of its kind, examines the history of these writings in the context of the social and political developments in the respective countries. It combines survey chapters with detailed studies of prominent authors whose work is often unavailable in English.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• eBook available May 2013

  Postwall German Cinema

  History, Film History and Cinephilia

  Frey, M.

  Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a proliferation of German historical films. These productions have earned prestigious awards and succeeded at box offices both at home and abroad, where they count among the most popular German films of all time. Recently, however, the country’s cinematic take on history has seen a significant new development: the radical style, content, and politics of the New German Cinema. With in-depth analyses of the major trends and films, this book represents a comprehensive assessment of the historical film in today’s Germany. Challenging previous paradigms, it takes account of a postwall cinema that complexly engages with various historiographical forms and, above all, with film history itself.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available March 2020

  Postwar Soldiers

  Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955

  Echternkamp, J.

  Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available December 2016

  Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History

  Raphael, L. (ed)

  For many, the history of German social policy is defined primarily by that nation’s postwar emergence as a model of the European welfare state. As this comprehensive volume demonstrates, however, the question of how to care for the poor has had significant implications for German history throughout the modern era. Here, eight leading historians provide essential case studies and syntheses of current research into German welfare, from the Holy Roman Empire to the present day. Along the way, they trace the parallel historical dynamics that have continued to shape German society, including religious diversity, political exclusion and inclusion, and concepts of race and gender.

  Subjects: History (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2009

  Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979

  The 'Normalisation of Rule'?

  Fulbrook, M. (ed)

  The communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany is, for many people, epitomized by the Berlin Wall; Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi, appear to be central. But is this really all there is to the GDR¹s history? How did people come to terms with their situation and make new lives behind the Wall? When the social history of the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s is explored, new patterns become evident. A fragile stability emerged in a period characterized by 'consumer socialism', international recognition and détente. Growing participation in the micro-structures of power, and conformity to the unwritten rules of an increasingly predictable system, suggest increasing accommodation to dominant norms and conceptions of socialist 'normality'. By exploring the ways in which lower-level functionaries and people at the grass roots contributed to the formation and transformation of the GDR ­ from industry and agriculture, through popular sport and cultural life, to the passage of generations and varieties of social experience ­ the contributors collectively develop a more complex approach to the history of East Germany.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2000

  Power Shift in Germany

  The 1998 Election and the End of the Kohl Era

  Conradt, D. P., Kleinfeld G. R. & Søe, C. (eds)

  Germany's landmark 1998 election saw for the first time in the Republic's fifty-year historyan incumbent Chancellor and his entire government replaced. In this collection fourteen distinguished scholars, from both sides of the Atlantic, have come together to give the first detailed scholarly account of this historic event. From a variety of perspectives the essays, based on in-depth interviews, explore the election candidates, parties, and issues, and places them within the context of the Federal Republic's history, the end of the Bonn Republic and the beginning of the Berlin Republic. Special chapters focus on the growing importance of women inelectoral politics, voting behavior and the influence of the media, and the significance of the election for the European Union.

  Based on in-depth interviews with political leaders and extensive field research this book is ideally suited for specialists in German and European politics and the interested reader who wants far more depth of coverage than the main stream media can provide.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• February 2008

  Practicing Public Diplomacy

  A Cold War Odyssey

  Richmond, Y.

  There is much discussion these days about public diplomacy—communicating directly with the people of other countries rather than through their diplomats—but little information about what it actually entails. This book does exactly that by detailing the doings of a US Foreign Service cultural officer in five hot spots of the Cold War - Germany, Laos, Poland, Austria, and the Soviet Union - as well as service in Washington DC with the State Department, the Helsinki Commission of the US Congress, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Part history, part memoir, it takes readers into the trenches of the Cold War and demonstrates what public diplomacy can do. It also provides examples of what could be done today in countries where anti-Americanism runs high.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2004

  A Precarious Victory

  Schroeder and the German Elections of 2002

  Conradt, D., Kleinfeld, G. R. & Søe, C. (eds)

  The 2002 campaign and election was one of the most dramatic in the history of the Federal Republic. An unprecedented last minute swing narrowly re-elected the Social Democratic-Green government of Chancellor Schroeder. The campaign featured the first-ever American style television debate between the two candidates for the chancellorship. Foreign policy, particularly the refusal of Schroeder to support the Iraq policies of US President George W. Bush, played an unusually important role. In the aftermath of the election the government was faced with a deteriorating economy and the charge of the opposition that it had deliberately mislead voters during the campaign. In this volume, distinguished experts from both sides of the Atlantic analyse these and other critical issues. Their work is based on extensive research in Germany and Washington, which included interviews with major political figures and the collection of new campaign and election data.

  Contributors: William Patterson, E. Gene Frankland, Clay Clemens, Christian Søe, Gerald R. Kleinfeld, David Patton, Dieter Roth, Mary N. Hampton, Ferdinand Breitbach, Irwin Collier, Helga Welsh, Stephen Szabo.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 2006

  The Price of Exclusion

  Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933

  Kurlander, E.

  "The failure of Liberalism" in Germany and its responsibility for the rise of Nazism has been widely discussed among scholars inside and outside Germany. This author argues that German liberalism failed because of the irreconcilable conflict between two competing visions of German identity. In following the German liberal parties from the Empire through the Third Reich Kurlander illustrates convincingly how an exclusionary racist Weltanschauung, conditioned by profound transformations in German political culture at large, gradually displaced the liberal-universalist conception of a democratic Rechtsstaat. Although there were some notable exceptions, this widespread obsession with "racial community [Volksgemeinschaft]" caused the liberal parties to succumb to ideological lassitude and self-contradiction, paving the way for National Socialism.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 2000

  Productive Men and Reproductive Women

  The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment

  Gray, M.

  The debate on the origins of modern gender norms continues unabated across the academic disciplines. This book adds an important and hitherto neglected dimension. Focusing on rural life and its values, the author argues that the modern ideal of separate spheres originated in the era of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, cultural norms prescribed active,interdependent economic roles for both women and men. Enlightenment economists transformed these gender paradigms as they postulated a market exchange system directed exclusively by men. By the early nineteenth century, the emerging bourgeois value system affirmed the new civil society and the market place as exclusively male realms. These standards defined women's options largely as marriage and motherhood.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Cultural Studies (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available December 2015

  Protest in Hitler's “National Community”

  Popular Unrest and the Nazi Response

  Stoltzfus, N. & Maier-Katkin, B. (eds)

  That Hitler’s Gestapo harshly suppressed any signs of opposition inside the Third Reich is a common misconception. This book presents studies of public dissent that prove this was not always the case. It examines circumstances under which “racial” Germans were motivated to protest, as well as the conditions determining the regime’s response. Workers, women, and religious groups all convinced the Nazis to appease rather than repress “racial” Germans. Expressions of discontent actually increased during the war, and Hitler remained willing to compromise in governing the German Volk as long as he thought the Reich could salvage victory.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2001

  Public Law in Germany, 1800-1914

  Stolleis, M.

  This study, by one of Germany's most prominent scholars of legal history, examines a period crucial for the history of constitutionalism in this century after the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806. This was the era of the Congress of Vienna, of the Restoration and the constitutionalist movement, of the Revolution of 1848 and the foundation of the German Empire by Bismarck. All these developments had profound repercussions on the social and constitutional structures of central European society; they invalidated the basic principles of the previous legal system and paved the way for the changes and controversies involved in the formation of a notion of the state and public law in the nineteenth century.

  But the history of public law is also marked by continuities, by long-term shits in feudal and criminal law related to the social and political conditions of the period. Integrating intellectual with political history, this book explores the constitutional movements in the literature and scholarship of public law leading to the foundation of the German Confederation, the rise of administrative law with the "German Revolution" of 1848, and the parallels between, and increased separation of, private and public spheres in the epoch of positivism that depoliticized the scholarly investigation of public law and led to the call for the purely legal construction of constitutional law that we have today.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available August 2020

  Punks and Skins United

  Identity, Class and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture

  Venstel, A.

  Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• March 1996

  The Quest for Economic Empire

  Berghahn, V. R. (ed)

  German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• November 1996

  A Question of Priorities

  Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany

  Boehling, R.

  Over the last few years, there has been a noticeable increase in studies on the postwar period of Germany, reflecting the crucial importance of these years for an understanding of the developments in the two Germanys. With her study of U.S. occupation policy and its effects on German social and political developments in Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart, Rebecca Boehling offers a most valuable contribution to this debate. She examines the decisions made by the U.S. Military Government regarding German municipal personnel from the first year of the occupation, when all city officials were appointed directly by Military Government of with its explicit approval, through the first postwar municipal elections in 1946 and 1948, when democratic self-government was gradually restored. Boehling explores the far-reaching effects of personnel decisions on German political life within the framework of U.S. policies intended to denazify and democratize Germany. The conclusion she draws is that the early local-level German developments under U.S. occupation facilitated economic recovery in a manner that restricted the implementation of political and social goals of democratization.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2010

  Raising Citizens in the 'Century of the Child'

  The United States and German Central Europe in Comparative Perspective

  Schumann, D. (ed)

  The 20th century, declared at its start to be the “Century of the Child” by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of “race” and “ethnicity,” “normality” and “deviance,” and on the impact of wars and changes in political regimes.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Educational Studies

• eBook available September 2016

  Re-Imagining DEFA

  East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts

  Allan, S. & Heiduschke, S. (eds)

  By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2005

  Reading Germany

  Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933

  Reuveni, G.

  By closely examining the interaction between intellectual and material culture in the period before the Nazis came to power in Germany, the author comes to the conclusion that, contrary to widely held assumptions, consumer culture in the Weimar period, far from undermining reading, used reading culture to enhance its goods and values. Reading material was marked as a consumer good, while reading as an activity, raising expectations as it did, influenced consumer culture. Consequently, consumption contributed to the diffusion of reading culture, while at the same time a popular reading culture strengthened consumption and its values.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies Media Studies

• eBook available August 2012

  Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals

  Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography

  Priemel, K. C. & Stiller, A. (eds)

  For decades the history of the US Military Tribunals at Nuremberg (NMT) has been eclipsed by the first Nuremberg trial—the International Military Tribunal or IMT. The dominant interpretation—neatly summarized in the ubiquitous formula of “Subsequent Trials”—ignores the unique historical and legal character of the NMT trials, which differed significantly from that of their predecessor. The NMT trials marked a decisive shift both in terms of analysis of the Third Reich and conceptualization of international criminal law. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of the NMT and brings together diverse perspectives from the fields of law, history, and political science, exploring the genesis, impact, and legacy of the twelve Military Tribunals held at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History

• August 2008

  Rebirth of a Culture

  Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria today

  Herzog, H. H., Herzog, T. & Lapp, B. (eds)

  After 1945, Jewish writing in German was almost unimaginable—and then only in reference to the Shoah. Only in the 1980s, after a period of mourning, silence, and processing of the trauma, did a new Jewish literature evolve in Germany and Austria. This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a lively Jewish cultural scene in the German-speaking countries and the various cultural forms of expression that have developed around it. Topics include current debates such as the emergence of a post-Waldheim Jewish discourse in Austria and Jewish responses to German unification and the Gulf wars. Other significant themes addressed are the memorialization of the Holocaust in Berlin and Vienna, the uses of Kafka in contemporary German literature, and the German and American-Jewish dialogue as representative of both the history of exile and the globalization of postmodern civilization. The volume is enhanced by contributions from some of the most significant representatives of German-Jewish writing today such as Esther Dischereit, Barbara Honigmann, Jeanette Lander, and Doron Rabinovici. The result is a lively dialogue between European and North American scholars and writers that captures the complexity and dynamism of Jewish culture in Germany and Austria at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• November 2003

  Recasting West German Elites

  Higher Civil Servants, Business Leaders, and Physicians in Hesse between Nazism and Democracy, 1945-1955

  Hayse, M.

  The rapid shift of German elite groups' political loyalties away from Nazism and toward support of the fledgling democracy of the Federal Republic, in spite of the continuity of personnel and professional structures, has surprised many scholars of postwar Germany. The key, Hayse argues, lies in the peculiar and paradoxical legacy of these groups' evasive selective memory, by which they cast themselves as victims of the Third Reich rather than its erstwhile supporters. The avoidance of responsibility for the crimes and excesses of the Third Reich created a need to demonstrate democratic behavior in the post-war public sphere. Ultimately, this self-imposed pressure, while based on a falsified, selective group memory of the recent past, was more important in the long term than the Allies' stringent social change policies.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2020

  Reconciliation Road

  Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace

  Schoenborn, B.

  Among postwar political leaders, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt played one of the most significant roles in reconciling Germans with other Europeans and in creating the international framework that enabled peaceful reunification in 1990. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of Brandt’s Ostpolitik from its inception until the end of the Cold War through the lens of reconciliation. Here, Benedikt Schoenborn gives us a Brandt who passionately insisted on a gradual reduction of Cold War hostility and a lasting European peace, while remaining strategically and intellectually adaptable in a way that exemplified the ‘imaginativeness of history’.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present Peace and Conflict Studies

• December 1998

  Reconstructing Education

  East German Schools after Unification

  Pritchard, R. M. O.

  After the unification of Germany had first been greeted with euphoria on both sides of the Wall, it did not take long for disillusion to set in when it became obvious that structures, mentality, values and outlook were very different in the Old and New Bundesländer. Moreover, whereas during the initial phase the East Germans were hoping just for a reform of their existing systems, they were soon disappointed and had to accept the fact that a fusion was out of the question; instead, East German structures were expected to assimilate to those of West Germany which led to the accusation of the latter's "colonization" of East Germany.

  The restructuring of the education system played a crucial role in the transformation of East Germany; consequently, enormous sums were pumped into East German schools and the training of teachers. This is the first study in any language that closely examines the process re-education and addresses such vital questions as whether the reforms were educationally sound, to what degree they meshed with local circumstances, what measures were taken to fill the vacuum in moral and social values that was left by the discrediting of Marxism-Leninism, and what happened to the notion of "equality", the key principle of a socialist society. Contrasting the old and the new regime in the East, the author addresses these and many more critical issues. Numerous case studies and substantial interview material richly illustrate the author's arguments.

  Subjects: Educational Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• October 2015

  Recovered Territory

  A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-1989

  Polak-Springer, P.

  Upper Silesia, one of Central Europe’s most important industrial borderlands, was at the center of heated conflict between Germany and Poland and experienced annexations and border re-drawings in 1922, 1939, and 1945. This transnational history examines these episodes of territorial re-nationalization and their cumulative impacts on the region and nations involved, as well as their use by the Nazi and postwar communist regimes to legitimate violent ethnic cleansing. In their interaction with—and mutual influence on—one another, political and cultural actors from both nations developed a transnational culture of territorial rivalry. Architecture, spaces of memory, films, museums, folklore, language policy, mass rallies, and archeological digs were some of the means they used to give the borderland a “German”/“Polish” face. Representative of the wider politics of twentieth-century Europe, the situation in Upper Silesia played a critical role in the making of history’s most violent and uprooting eras, 1939–1950.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2010

  Refugees From Nazi Germany and the Liberal European States

  Caestecker, F. & Moore, B. (eds)

  The exodus of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s has received far more attention from historians, social scientists, and demographers than many other migrations and persecutions in Europe. However, as a result of the overwhelming attention that has been given to the Holocaust within the historiography of Europe and the Second World War, the issues surrounding the flight of people from Nazi Germany prior to 1939 have been seen as Vorgeschichte (pre-history), implicating the Western European democracies and the United States as bystanders only in the impending tragedy. Based on a comparative analysis of national case studies, this volume deals with the challenges that the pre-1939 movement of refugees from Germany and Austria posed to the immigration controls in the countries of interwar Europe. Although Europe takes center-stage, this volume also looks beyond, to the Middle East, Asia and America. This global perspective outlines the constraints under which European policy makers (and the refugees) had to make decisions. By also considering the social implications of policies that became increasingly protectionist and nationalistic, and bringing into focus the similarities and differences between European liberal states in admitting the refugees, it offers an important contribution to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices.

  Subjects: History: World War II Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available January 2019

  Refugees Welcome?

  Difference and Diversity in a Changing Germany

  Bock, J.-J. & Macdonald, S. (eds)

  The arrival in 2015 and 2016 of over one million asylum seekers and refugees in Germany had major social consequences and gave rise to extensive debates about the nature of cultural diversity and collective life. This volume examines the responses and implications of what was widely seen as the most significant and contested social change since German reunification in 1990. It combines in-depth studies based on anthropological fieldwork with analyses of the longer trajectories of migration and social change. Its original conclusions have significance not only for Germany but also for the understanding of diversity and difference more widely.

  Subjects: Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• April 2009

  The Reluctant Revolutionary

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Collision with Prusso-German History

  Moses, J. A.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a uniquely reluctant and distinctly German Lutheran revolutionary. In this volume, the author, an Anglican priest and historian, argues that Bonhoeffer’s powerful critique of Germany’s moral derailment needs to be understood as the expression of a devout Lutheran Protestant. Bonhoeffer gradually recognized the ways in which the intellectual and religious traditions of his own class - the Bildungsbürgertum - were enabling Nazi evil. In response, he offered a religiously inspired call to political opposition and Christian witness—which cost him his life. The author investigates Bonhoeffer’s stance in terms of his confrontation with the legacy of Hegelianism and Neo-Rankeanism, and by highlighting Bonhoeffer’s intellectual and spiritual journey, shows how his endeavor to politicially reeducate the German people must be examined in theological terms.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available February 2017

  Reluctant Skeptic

  Siegfried Kracauer and the Crises of Weimar Culture

  Craver, H. T.

  The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies

• eBook available December 2021

  Repressed, Remitted, Rejected

  German Reparations Debts to Poland and Greece

  Roth, K. H. & Rübner, H.

  Since unification, the Federal Republic of Germany has made vaunted efforts to make amends for the crimes of the Third Reich. Yet it remains the case that the demands for restitution by many countries that were occupied during the Second World War are unresolved, and recent demands from Greece and Poland have only reignited old debates. This book reconstructs the German occupation of Poland and Greece and gives a thorough accounting of these debates. Working from the perspective of international law, it deepens the scholarly discourse around the issue, clarifying the ‘never-ending story’ of German reparations policy and making a principled call for further action.

  A compilation of primary sources comprising 125 annotated key texts (512 pages) on the complexity of reparations discussions covering the period between 1941 and the end of 2017 is available for free on the Berghahn Books website, doi: 10.3167/9781800732575.dd.

  Subjects: History: World War II History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2015

  The Respectable Career of Fritz K.

  The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader

  Berghoff, H. & Rauh, C.

  Entrepreneur and Nazi functionary Fritz Kiehn lived through almost 100 years of German history, from the Bismarck era to the late Bonn Republic. A successful manufacturer, Kiehn joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and obtained a number of influential posts after 1933, making him one of the most powerful Nazi functionaries in southern Germany. These posts allowed him ample opportunity to profit from “Aryanizations” and state contracts. After 1945, he restored his reputation, was close to Adenauer's CDU during Germany's economic miracle, and was a respected and honored citizen in Trossingen. Kiehn's biography provides a key to understanding the political upheavals of the twentieth century, especially the workings of the corrupt Nazi system as well as the “coming to terms” with National Socialism in the Federal Republic.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 2007

  Restitution and Memory

  Material Restoration in Europe

  Diner, D. & Wunberg, G. (eds)

  The myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies

• eBook available November 2020

  Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema

  Hales, B. & Weinstein, V. (eds)

  The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2022

  Rethinking Social Movements after '68

  Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond

  Davis, B., Brühöfener, F., & Milder, S. (eds)

  The year 1968 has widely been viewed as the only major watershed moment during the latter half of the twentieth century. Rethinking Social Movements after ’68 takes on this conventional approach, exploring the spaces, practices, organization, ideas and agendas of numerous activists and movements across the 1970s and 1980s. From the Maoist Communist League to the women’s movement, youth center movement, and gay liberation movement, established and emerging scholars across Europe and North America shed new light on the development of modern European popular politics and social change.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2009

  The Return of Jazz

  Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change

  Wright Hurley, A.

  Jazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000), author of the world’s best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era. German musicians began, in a highly productive way, to question their all-too-eager adoption of American culture and how they sought to make valid artistic statements reflecting their identity as Europeans. This book explores the significance of some of Berendt’s most important writings and record productions. Particular attention is given to the “Jazz Meets the World” encounters that he engineered with musicians from Japan, Tunisia, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. This proto-“world music” demonstrates how some West Germans went about creating a post-nationalist identity after the Third Reich. Berendt’s powerful role as the West German “Jazz Pope” is explored, as is the groundswell of criticism directed at him in the wake of 1968.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Performance Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• May 2000

  A Reversal of Fortunes?

  Women, Work, and Change in East Germany

  Alsop, R.

  German unification brought fundamental, often traumatic changes for the people in eastern Germany. Women as a group were arguably more deeply affected by the changes than any other, and in one area in particular: that of work, which had far-reaching effects on them and their families' economic situation. Rachel Alsop critically examines the processes behind women's changing relationship to the labor market in eastern Germany following the collapse of state socialism and the transition to a market economy. By the 1980s women made up virtually half of the East German work force. The collapse of the GDR transformed the field of work, drastically diminishing the general demand for labor. Yet while economic and political restructuring reduced the volume of both male and female employment, it was women who bore the brunt of unemployment. In the immediate transitional period a re-masculinization of the workforce was evident, with women constituting the large part of the unemployed.

  Using an extensive range of both quantitative and qualitative data, the author explores the gender dynamics of the social, economic, and political restructuring of eastern Germany, thereby producing an important new context in which to examine contemporary debates on gender and work.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available July 2015

  The Rhythm of Eternity

  The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900-1933

  Adriaansen, R.-J.

  The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• May 2023

  The Rich and the Poor in Modern Europe, 1890-1920

  A Historian’s Response to Recent Debates among Economists

  Kaelble, H.

  As social inequality grows, historical analysis on wealth and income distribution across the 20th century often does not take into account inequality of education, health, housing and chances of social mobility, nor does it differentiate statistical inequality from the realities of peoples’ actualexperience. With this broad understanding in mind, in a long look back on the history of social inequality in Europe, The Rich and the Poor in Modern Europe addresses these neglected subjects. It also tackles the commonplace notion that modern capitalism inevitably produces wealth gaps and asks whether the facts and figures we possess also lead to alternate interpretations of examples of mitigated inequality. Covering the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st century in Europe through wars, and economic crises, through periods of unprecedented economic prosperity and staggering economies, both exacerbating and dampening the problem, acclaimed historian Hartmut Kaelble offers a rigorous response to understanding our present-day challenge of social inequality.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• March 1999

  The Rise and Demise of German Statism

  Loyalty and Political Membership

  Kvistad, G.

  German statism as a political ideology has been the subject of many historical studies. Whereas most of these focus on theoretical texts, cultural works, and vague "traditions", this study understands German statism as a functioning logic of political membership, a logic that has helped to determine who is "in" and who is "out" with regard to the German political community. Tracing statism from the early 19th century through German unification and beyond in the 1990s, the author argues that, with its central concern for a political loyalty that is vetted "from above," it historically served the function of stabilizing the political order and containing democratic mobilization. Beginning in the 1960s, however, a mobilized German democratic consciousness "from below" gradually rejected statism as anachronistic for informing political and policy debate, and German political institutions began to respond to kind.

  Subject: History (General)

• November 1996

  The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany

  Fischer, C. (ed)

  Before seizing power the Nazi movement assembled an exceptionally broad social coalition of activists and supporters. Many were working class, but there remains considerable disagreement over the precise size and structure of this constituency and still more over its ideology and politics. An indispensable work for scholars of interwar Germany and Nazism in general.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• May 2007

  Robbery and Restitution

  The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe

  Dean, M., Goschler, C. & Ther, P. (eds)

  The robbery and restitution of Jewish property are two inextricably linked social processes. It is not possible to understand the lawsuits and international agreements on the restoration of Jewish property of the late 1990s without examining what was robbed and by whom. In this volume distinguished historians first outline the mechanisms and scope of the European-wide program of plunder and then assess the effectiveness and historical implications of post-war restitution efforts. Everywhere the solution of legal and material problems was intertwined with changing national myths about the war and conflicting interpretations of justice. Even those countries that pursued extensive restitution programs using rigorous legal means were unable to compensate or fully comprehend the scale of Jewish loss. Especially in Eastern Europe, it was not until the collapse of communism that the concept of restoring some Jewish property rights even became a viable option. Integrating the abundance of new research on the material effects of the Holocaust and its aftermath, this comparative perspective examines the developments in Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available July 2017

  Ruptures in the Everyday

  Views of Modern Germany from the Ground

  Bergerson, A. S. & Schmieding, L.

  During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect. Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigates Alltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work “on the ground.”

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2019

  A Sad Fiasco

  Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908

  Kreienbaum, J.

  Only in recent years has the history of European colonial concentration camps in Africa—in which thousands of prisoners died in appalling conditions—become widely known beyond a handful of specialists. Although they preceded the Third Reich by many decades, the camps’ newfound notoriety has led many to ask to what extent they anticipated the horrors of the Holocaust. Were they designed for mass killing, a misbegotten attempt at modernization, or something else entirely? A Sad Fiasco confronts this difficult question head-on, reconstructing the actions of colonial officials in both British South Africa and German South-West Africa as well as the experiences of internees to explore both the similarities and the divergences between the African camps and their Nazi-era successors.

  Subjects: Genocide History Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2018

  Screened Encounters

  The Leipzig Documentary Film Festival, 1955-1990

  Moine, C.

  Established in 1955, the Leipzig International Documentary Film Festival became a central arena for staging the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic, both domestically and in relation to West Germany and the rest of the world. Screened Encounters represents the definitive history of this key event, recounting the political and artistic exchanges it enabled from its founding until German unification, and tracing the outsize influence it exerted on international cultural relations during the Cold War.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available February 2019

  Screening Art

  Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema

  Allan, S.

  With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage. Spanning newsreels, documentaries, and feature films, Screening Art is the first full-length investigation into a genre that has been largely overlooked in studies of DEFA, the state-owned Eastern German film studio. As it shows, “artist-films” played an essential role in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2011

  Screening the East

  Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989

  Hodgin, N.

  Screening the East considers German filmmakers’ responses to unification. In particular, it traces the representation of the East German community in films made since 1989 and considers whether these narratives challenge or reinforce the notion of a separate East German identity. The book identifies and analyses a large number of films, from internationally successful box-office hits, to lesser-known productions, many of which are discussed here for the first time. Providing an insight into the films’ historical and political context, it considers related issues such as stereotyping, racism, regional particularism and the Germans’ confrontation with the past.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• August 1997

  The Search for Normality

  National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800

  Berger, S.

  The Historikerstreit of the 1980s has ended inconclusively amidst heated debates on the nature and course of German national history. The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 and analyzes the most recent trends in German historiography. Reunification, he observes, has brought in its wake an urgent search for the "normality" of the nation state. For anyone interested in the development of the national master narrative in more recent German historiography, this book will provide an essential guide through the multitude of historical debates surrounding the nation state.

  Subject: History (General)

• December 2015

  The Second Generation

  Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians
  With a Biobibliographic Guide

  Daum, A. W., Lehmann, H., & Sheehan, J. J. (eds)

  Of the thousands of children and young adults who fled Nazi Germany in the years before the Second World War, a remarkable number went on to become trained historians in their adopted homelands. By placing autobiographical testimonies alongside historical analysis and professional reflections, this richly varied collection comprises the first sustained effort to illuminate the role these men and women played in modern historiography. Focusing particularly on those who settled in North America, Great Britain, and Israel, it culminates in a comprehensive, meticulously researched biobibliographic guide that provides a systematic overview of the lives and works of this “second generation.”

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 2007

  Selling the Economic Miracle

  Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949-1957

  Spicka, M. E.

  Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available November 2020

  Sensitive Subjects

  The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema

  Mukhida, L.

  Both politically and aesthetically, the contemporary German and Austrian film landscape is a far cry from the early days of the medium, when critics like Siegfried Kracauer produced foundational works of film theory amid the tumult of the early twentieth century. Yet, as Leila Mukhida demonstrates in this innovative study, the writings of figures like Kracauer and Walter Benjamin in fact remain an undervalued tool for understanding political cinema today. Through illuminating explorations of Michael Haneke, Valeska Grisebach, Andreas Dresen, and other filmmakers of the post-reunification era, Mukhida develops an analysis centered on film aesthetics and experience, showing how medium-specific devices like lighting, sound, and mise-en-scène can help to cultivate political sensitivity in spectators.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Media Studies

• December 2022

  The Servants of Empire

  Sponsored German Women’s Colonization in Southwest Africa, 1896-1945

  ODonnell, K. M.

  Capturing the history of thousands of German women recruited to colonize Southwest Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, The Servants of Empire engages a radical nationalist history of German efforts to prevent interracial unions and establish permanent white settlement. As colonists, sponsored women often supported or even helped perpetrate extreme patterns of racist violence and vigilantism in Namibia, which linked them inextricably to marked atrocities such as the Herero and Nama Genocides. Navigating the intersections of German attitudes toward race, class, ethnicity, gender, and nation, this revealing study traces the German settler community’s gossip and rumors to uncover how the many poor white female settlers in Southwest Africa disrupted bourgeois race and gender relations and contributed to the trenchant sexual and racial violence in the territory.

  Subjects: Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

• December 1993

  Settlement, Economy, and Cultural Change at the End of the European Iron Age

  Excavations at Kelheim in Bavaria, 1987-1992

  Wells, P. S.

  This volume presents preliminary results of excavation at the Late Iron Age oppidum settlement of Kelheim. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first explains the reasons for investigations at Kelheim. The second presents the results of the excavations, regarding both settlement features and artifact distribution. The third includes special studies of several categories of materials, as well as discussion of the chronology of the occupation and presentation of the results of the landscape survey. The final section addresses some major questions about late prehistoric Europe from the perspective of these excavations and the analytical results. It presents investigations into ritual behavior in the Kelheim region and uses this theme to argue for strong continuity of tradition from prehistoric times into the Middle Ages.


  Subject: Archaeology

• December 2007

  Sex, Thugs & Rock 'n' Roll

  Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany

  Fenemore, M.

  A fascinating and highly readable account of what it was like to be young and hip, growing up in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Living on the frontline of the Cold War, young people were subject to a number of competing influences. For young men from the working class, in particular, a conflict developed between the culture they inherited from their parents and the new official culture taught in schools. Merging with street gangs, new youth cultures took shape, which challenged authority and provided an alternative vision of modernity. Taking their fashion cues, music and icons from the West, they rapidly came into conflict with a didactic and highly controlling party-state. Charting the clashes which occurred between teenage rebels and the authorities, the book explores what happened when gender, sexuality, Nazism, communism and rock 'n' roll collided during a period, which also saw the building of the Berlin Wall.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)

• November 2004

  Sexuality and German Fascism

  Herzog, D. (ed)

  The interrelationship of fascism and sexuality has attracted a great deal of interest for some time now. This collection offers fresh perspectives by leading scholars on the history of sexuality under national socialism on such topics as the persecution of Jewish-gentile sex in the "race defilement" trials, homophobic propaganda and the prosecution of same-sex activity within the Wehrmacht and SS, representations of female sexuality in film, prostitution on home and battle fronts, sexual relations between Germans and foreign forced laborers, and reproductive practices among Jewish survivors. Moreover, the authors provide new insights into the relationships between Nazi sexual politics and antisemitism and challenge assumptions of Nazism as sexually repressive; instead they emphasize the interrelationships between incitement to sexual activity and persecution and mass murder.

  Subjects: History: World War II Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• September 2000

  Shedding Light on the Darkness

  A Guide to Teaching the Holocaust

  Lauckner, N. & Jokiniemi, M.

  Increasingly, German Studies programs include courses on the Holocaust, but suitable course materials are often difficult to find. Teachers in higher education will therefore very much welcome this volume that examines and reflects both the practical and theoretical aspects of teaching about the Holocaust. Though designed primarily by and for North American Germanists and German Studies specialists, this book will prove no less useful for teachers in other countries and associated disciplines. It presents and describes successful Holocaust-related courses that have been developed and taught at U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities, demonstrating the depth, breadth, and variety of such offerings, while remaining mindful of the instructor's special moral responsibilities. Reflecting as it does, the innovative Holocaust pedagogy in North American German and German Studies, this collection serves the needs of educators who wish to revise or update their existing Holocaust courses and of those who are seeking guidance, ideas, and resources to enable them to develop their first Holocaust course or unit.

  Subjects: Genocide History Jewish Studies

• October 2007

  A Single Communal Faith?

  The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism

  Rohkrämer, T.

  How could the Right transform itself from a politics of the nobility to a fatally attractive option for people from all parts of society? How could the Nazis gain a good third of the votes in free elections and remain popular far into their rule? A number of studies from the 1960s have dealt with the issue, in particular the works by George Mosse and Fritz Stern. Their central arguments are still challenging, but a large number of more specific studies allow today for a much more complex argument, which also takes account of changes in our understanding of German history in general. This book shows that between 1800 and 1945 the fundamentalist desire for a single communal faith played a crucial role in the radicalization of Germany's political Right. A nationalist faith could gain wider appeal, because people were searching for a sense of identity and belonging, a mental map for the modern world and metaphysical security.

  Subject: History (General)

• September 1998

  Sinti and Roma

  Gypsies in German-speaking Society and Literature

  Tebbutt, S. (ed)

  According to opinion polls, Germans are less favorably disposed towards the Sinti and Roma than towards any other ethnic group, despite the fact that few Germans have any personal knowledge of them or even realize that the Sinti and Roma in Germany include both Germans and non-Germans. The image of the Sinti and Roma prevalent in German society and literature is one similarly founded on misconceptions and stereotypes. This volume deals in depth with the life of the Sinti and Roma in Germany and their representation in German literature, giving the background to the maltreatment, underlining the fact that the persecution of Gypsies during the Nazi period, which until the 1980s has been totally marginalized by historians, did not cease in 1945. The continuity of anti-Gypsyism is traced to the present day, and the efforts, achievements and aspirations of the Sinti and Roma civil rights movement are highlighted.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology Literary Studies

• eBook available May 2017

  Sisters in Arms

  Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968

  Karcher, K.

  Few figures in modern German history are as central to the public memory of radical protest than Ulrike Meinhof, but she was only the most prominent of the countless German women—and militant male feminists—who supported and joined in revolutionary actions from the 1960s onward. Sisters in Arms gives a bracing account of how feminist ideas were enacted by West German leftist organizations from the infamous Red Army Faction to less well-known groups such as the Red Zora. It analyzes their confrontational and violent tactics in challenging the abortion ban, opposing violence against women, and campaigning for solidarity with Third World women workers. Though these groups often diverged ideologically and tactically, they all demonstrated the potency of militant feminism within postwar protest movements.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available April 2012

  Small Town and Village in Bavaria

  The Passing of a Way of Life

  Merkl, P. H.

  At the center of this investigation is the great modernization effort of a West German state, Bavaria, in the 1970s and 1980s, by means of a reform of the smaller units of local government. The reforms were meant to abolish all autonomous local governments serving populations of fewer than 3,000, thereby reducing the number of local governments in Bavaria from more than 7,000 to less than 2,000. Based on interviews, surveys, and statistical research, this study chronicles fifteen communities and their challenges, developments, and social changes from post-1945 up to the present. While this book explores the decline of the iconic village community, it also reveals the survival of medieval towns in a contemporary world, and despite the modern desire for comprehensive and well-integrated services, there remains a seemingly perennial appeal of small town and village life.

  Subject: History (General)

• January 2005

  Social Limits to Learning

  Essays on the Archeology of Domination, Resistance, and Experience

  Mergner, G.

  At the heart of the historical and social sciences lies the remarkable gray area of learning processes. "Learning" is usually perceived as individual childhood development at home and at school and has been written about extensively. However, little is known about learning processes outside primary and secondary socialization although insight into these learning processes appears indispensable for an understanding of social changes or the lack thereof. On the basis of historical and current case studies, philosophical reflections, and critical commentaries, Mergner (1940–1999) opened up this important area through his "theory of social limits to learning," designed to explain not only why people accept or reject structures of domination but also why people trying to emancipate themselves nonetheless form and accept new structures of domination. This anthology presents Mergner's seminal work to the non-German speaking world for the first time in order to give it the wider recognition it so clearly deserves.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• November 2004

  Sound Matters

  Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture

  Alter, N. & Koepnick, L. (eds)

  The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body."

  This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Matters investigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies

• eBook available November 2020

  Sounds German

  Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational

  Fulk, K. A. (ed)

  For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies

• eBook available June 2017

  Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

  Lässig, S. & Rürup, M. (eds)

  What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History: 20th Century to Present History: 18th/19th Century

• June 2003

  The Spirit of the Berlin Republic

  Dettke, D. (ed)

  The "Berlin Republic" has become the key concept of post-Cold War Germany and as such has been widely discussed inside as well as outside Germany. Symbolized by the move of the government from Bonn to Berlin it signals all the tangible and intangible changes in Germany's position in the world that have taken place during the 1990s. Well known German authors, decision-makers, and cultural leaders as well as internationally renowned experts on German affairs contribute to this volume, examining various aspects of the New Germany and its old/new capital, such as history, foreign policy, art, architecture, and culture. In this way, the reader gains a varied but comprehensive picture of Germany after unification as perceived by its neighbors, friends, and allies.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available August 2011

  State and Minorities in Communist East Germany

  Dennis, M. & LaPorte, N.

  Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• December 2011

  A State of Peace in Europe

  West Germany and the CSCE, 1966-1975

  Hakkarainen, P.

  From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s West German foreign policy underwent substantial transformations: from bilateral to multilateral, from reactive to proactive. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was an ideal setting for this evolution, enabling the Federal Republic to take the lead early on in Western preparations for the conference and to play a decisive role in the actual East–West negotiations leading to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Based on extensive original research of recently released documents, spanning more than fifteen archives in eight countries, this study is a substantial contribution to scholarly discussions on the history of détente, the CSCE and West German foreign policy. The author stresses the importance of looking beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War decades and emphasizes the interconnectedness of European integration and European détente. He highlights the need to place the genesis of the CSCE conference in its historical context rather than looking at it through the prism of the events of 1989, and shows that the bilateral and multilateral elements (Ostpolitik and the CSCE) were parallel rather than successive phenomena, parts of the same complex process and in constant interaction with each other.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 2006

  A Stranger in Paris

  Germany's Role in Republican France, 1870-1940

  Mitchell, A.

  In this compact and tightly argued essay, the author maintains that the French Third Republic - and European history during this period in general - can only be understood if particular attention is paid to the special relationship that existed between France and Germany. The experience of the French people was so intimately related to that of its closest neighbor that a bilateral perspective becomes unavoidable. Without the unifying theme of Germany's crucial role in acting upon and within the French Republic, this story would become a much more random tale of events. After 1870, an autonomous national history of France is no longer possible.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• June 2008

  The Strassmanns

  Science, Politics and Migration in Turbulent Times (1793-1993)

  Strassmann, W. P.

  Across six generations and two hundred years, this book tells the story of a German- Jewish family who emigrated from Rawicz, Poland, first to Prussian Berlin, and finally to America. In Berlin they found success in politics, medical science, theatre, and aviation and considered themselves German patriots. With the catastrophe of the First World War and its aftermath, they suffered rejection, threats, and persecution as their fellow citizens became unhinged by Nazism, forcing Strassmanns into exile abroad where they again made their mark and rebuilt successful careers. This book is populated by extraordinary characters, such as Wolfgang, the convicted revolutionary of 1848 who nevertheless led urban reform; by Ernst, who directed the only liberal anti-Nazi resistance movement; and by Antonie, a celebrated actress and transatlantic sports pilot. Strassmann highlights both the large-scale and the very personal dramas of this period in world history. The book is enhanced by many photographs, offering a fascinating document of the fate of a remarkable family.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies History (General)

• May 2008

  Struggling for Recognition

  The Alevi Movement in Germany and in Transnational Space

  Sökefeld, M.

  As a religious and cultural minority in Turkey, the Alevis have suffered a long history of persecution and discrimination. In the late 1980s they started a movement for the recognition of Alevi identity in both Germany and Turkey. Today, they constitute a significant segment of Germany’s Turkish immigrant population. In a departure from the current debate on identity and diaspora, Sökefeld offers a rich account of the emergence and institutionalization of the Alevi movement in Germany, giving particular attention to its politics of recognition within Germany and in a transnational context. The book deftly combines empirical findings with innovative theoretical arguments and addresses current questions of migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and identity.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2019

  Submerged on the Surface

  The Not-So-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945

  Lutjens Jr., R. N.

  Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Genocide History

• eBook available October 2009

  The Surplus Woman

  Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

  Dollard, C. L.

  The first German women’s movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• May 1996

  Taboos in German Literature

  Jackson, D. (ed)

  Students of German Literature will have asked themselves at one stage or another why certain topics have received saturation treatment of the last two centuries while others have been either ignored entirely or at best grossly neglected. This book tackles this fascinating issue and illuminates why, at various junctures, specific topics and attitudes were regarded by influential sections of society as being either inadmissable or presentable only in particular, prescribed ways. While the presentation of sexual matters such as homosexuality and lesbianism is inevitably at the heart of the book, political, social, and ideological issues also loom large. The editor has recruited a team of prominent scholars to provide a penetrating, comprehensive focus that ranges from individual writers and their works, i.e., Goethe, Hölderlin, Kafka, and Thomas Mann, to specific issues, movements and periods.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

• January 2015

  Tailoring Truth

  Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1990

  Olsen, J. B.

  By looking at state-sponsored memory projects, such as memorials, commemorations, and historical museums, this book reveals that the East German communist regime obsessively monitored and attempted to control public representations of the past to legitimize its rule. It demonstrates that the regime’s approach to memory politics was not stagnant, but rather evolved over time to meet different demands and potential threats to its legitimacy. Ultimately the party found it increasingly difficult to control the public portrayal of the past, and some dissidents were able to turn the party’s memory politics against the state to challenge its claims of moral authority.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available May 2018

  Taking on Technocracy

  Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present

  Augustine, D. L.

  The German abandonment of nuclear power represents one of the most successful popular revolts against technocratic thinking in modern times—the triumph of a dynamic social movement, encompassing a broad swath of West Germans as well as East German dissident circles, over political, economic, and scientific elites. Taking on Technocracy gives a brisk account of this dramatic historical moment, showing how the popularization of scientific knowledge fostered new understandings of technological risk. Combining analyses of social history, popular culture, social movement theory, and histories of science and technology, it offers a compelling narrative of a key episode in the recent history of popular resistance.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Environmental Studies (General)

• July 2015

  Television's Moment

  Sitcom Audiences and the Sixties Cultural Revolution

  Hodenberg, C. von

  Television was one of the forces shaping the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a blockbuster TV series could reach up to a third of a country’s population. This book explores television’s impact on social change by comparing three sitcoms and their audiences. The shows in focus – Till Death Us Do Part in Britain, All in the Family in the United States, and One Heart and One Soul in West Germany – centered on a bigoted anti-hero and his family. Between 1966 and 1979 they saturated popular culture, and managed to accelerate as well as deradicalize value changes and collective attitudes regarding gender roles, sexuality, religion, and race.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Media Studies Film and Television Studies

• eBook available June 2010

  Terror From the Sky

  The Bombing of German Cities in World War II

  Primoratz, I. (ed)

  In this first interdisciplinary study of this contentious subject, leading experts in politics, history, and philosophy examine the complex aspects of the terror bombing of German cities during World War II. The contributors address the decision to embark on the bombing campaign, the moral issues raised by the bombing, and the main stages of the campaign and its effects on German civilians as well as on Germany’s war effort. The book places the bombing campaign within the context of the history of air warfare, presenting the bombing as the first stage of the particular type of state terrorism that led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and brought about the Cold War era “balance of terror.” In doing so, it makes an important contribution to current debates about terrorism. It also analyzes the public debate in Germany about the historical, moral, and political significance of the deliberate killing of up to 600,000 German civilians by the British and American air forces. This pioneering collaboration provides a platform for a wide range of views—some of which are controversial—on a highly topical, painful, and morally challenging subject.

  Subjects: History: World War II History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2019

  Testimonies of Resistance

  Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando

  Chare, N. & Williams, D. (eds)

  The Sonderkommando—the “special squad” of enslaved Jewish laborers who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau—comprise one of the most fascinating and troubling topics within Holocaust history. As eyewitnesses to and unwilling abettors of the murder of their fellow Jews, they are the object of fierce condemnation even today. Yet it was a group of these seemingly compromised men who carried out the revolt of October 7, 1944, one of the most celebrated acts of Holocaust resistance. This interdisciplinary collection assembles careful investigations into how the Sonderkommando have been represented—by themselves and by others—both during and after the Holocaust.

  Subjects: History: World War II Genocide History Jewish Studies

• October 2001

  Theatre and War 1933-1945

  Performance in Extremis

  Balfour, M.

  On an April evening in 1934, on the River Arno in Florence, an air squadron, an infantry, a cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field radio stations, and six photoelectric units presented a piece of theatre. The mass spectacle, 18 BL involved over two thousand amateur actors and was performed before an audience of twenty thousand.

  18 BL is one of eleven extraordinary essays collected together for the first time. The essays have been selected and edited from a wide range of publications dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. The authors are academics, cultural historians, and theatre practitioners - some with direct experience of the harsh conditions of Europe during the war. Each author critically assesses the function of theatre in times of world crisis, exploring themes of Fascist aesthetic propaganda in Italy and Germany, of theatre re-education programmes in the Gulags of Russia, of cultural "sustenance" for the troops at the front and interned German refugees in the UK, or cabaret shows as a currency for survival in Jewish concentration camps.

  Subjects: Performance Studies History: World War II Literary Studies

• January 2001

  Toward a Social History of Knowledge

  Collected Essays

  Ringer, F.

  One of the foremost historians of intellectual life and education in Germany, Fritz Ringer has brought together in this volume several of his articles, most of which are not easily available are published here in English for the first time. They focus on a whole range of contemporary and historical debates about the relationship between ideas and their context, the role of education and middle-class consciousness, the social role of academics and intellectuals, and competing ideals of learning, science, and history.

  Subjects: Educational Studies History (General)

• eBook available August 2022

  Towards a Collaborative Memory

  German Memory Work in a Transnational Context

  Jones, S.

  Focusing on the memory of the German Democratic Republic, Towards a Collaborative Memory explores the cross-border collaborations of three German institutions. Using an innovative theoretical and methodological framework, drawing on relational sociology, network analysis and narrative, the study highlights the epistemic coloniality that has underpinned global partnerships across European actors and institutions. Sara Jones reconceptualizes transnational memory towards an approach that is collaborative not only in its practices, but also in its ethics, and shows how these institutions position themselves within dominant relationship cultures reflected between East and West, and North and South.

  Subjects: Memory Studies Colonial History History: 20th Century to Present

• January 1998

  Towards Emancipation

  German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century

  Diethe, C.

  No doubt, the feminist movement has come a long way, even though many of its aims have not been realized or, in fact, are still debated by its supporters and critics. It is sobering andinstructive to look back and examine the aspirations, achievements and failures of women of earlier generations, especially in the nineteenth century, on which subsequent generations of women have built. Although Germany has produced some famous and influential women writers and thinkers, no recent study exists that analyzes their work in a systematic way. This book fills the gap by discussing some of the major writers in the nineteenth century, beginning with late-Romantic writers, such as Bettina von Arnim and Johanna Schopenhauer, and goes on to discuss writers who were active in the 1848 Revolution such as Malwida von Meysenbug and Johanna Kinkel. With regard to the idea of emancipation the attitudes of mainstream writers examined range from lukewarm, such as the enormously popular Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Gabriele Reuter, to downright hostile, such as Lou Andreas-Salomé and Franziska zu Reventlow. The heart of the book is devoted to the leading proponents of emancipation, HedwigDohm, Helene Böhlau, and the prolific Louise Otto-Peters.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General) History: 18th/19th Century

• July 2009

  The Train Journey

  Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust

  Gigliotti, S.

  Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis’ genocidal vision of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the “Final Solution,” Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe?” This book explores the question by analyzing the victims’ experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced the train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to the more studied, fixed locations of persecution, such as ghettos and camps.

  Subjects: Genocide History Memory Studies Transport Studies

• March 2013

  The Transatlantic World of Higher Education

  Americans at German Universities, 1776-1914

  Werner, A.

  Between the 1760s and 1914, thousands of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to enroll in German-speaking universities, but what was it like to be an American in, for instance, Halle, Heidelberg, Göttingen, or Leipzig? In this book, the author combines a statistical approach with a biographical approach in order to reconstruct the history of these educational pilgrimages and to illustrate the interconnectedness of student migration with educational reforms on both sides of the Atlantic. This detailed account of academic networking in European educational centers highlights the importance of travel for academic and cultural transformations in nineteenth-century America.

  Subjects: Educational Studies History: 18th/19th Century History (General)

• October 1999

  Transformation of the German Political Party System

  Institutional Crisis or Democratic Renewal

  Allen, C. S. (ed)

  Using German political parties as a prism with which to view institutional change, this collection transcends a single country focus and places the German experience in a comparative and historical framework. Evaluation the performance of the German parties and party system in dealing with problems of integration and legitimation common to all industrialized democracies, it presents a sharp analysis of the effects and incompleteness of German unification.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• September 2013

  Trieglaff

  Balancing Church and Politics in a Pomeranian World, 1807-1948

  Thadden, R. von

  Through the lens of five generations of Thaddens, this book tells the history of Trieglaff, the village and family estate located in what is now western Poland, from Napoleon’s occupation in 1807 to the Red Army’s invasion in 1945 and until the departure of the last Thaddens in 1948. At the center of this history of Trieglaff society, economy, politics, and culture is the von Thadden family, notably, Adolph Ferdinand von Thadden, the head of the pietistic revival in Pomerania, and Reinold von Thadden-Trieglaff, the founder of the German Protestant Kirchentag. It intertwines family history with the political history of Germany through its description of Otto von Bismarck’s close associations with Trieglaff in the 19th century and its deliberation of the execution of Elisabeth von Thadden, arising out of her resistance to the Nazis, in the 20th century. The source material is richly supplemented by family records kept by “Trieglaffers” in America and from correspondence between Pomerania and America. The book examines the lives of individuals as well as socio-economic and cultural structures, depicting the dynamic changes that the village experienced throughout some 150 years of German and European history; it might be called world history in microcosm. As juxtaposition of formal history and remembered history, it is a serious scholarly source as well as an engaging read.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century History: 20th Century to Present

• December 1995

  The Triumph of Propaganda

  Film and National Socialism 1933-1945

  Hoffmann, H.

  The Nazis saw film as a major vehicle for both indoctrination and escapist pacification of the "masses"; in fact, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels tried to create a German counter-Hollywood. This highly acclaimed study, by one of Germany's leading commentators and authors on cultural policy, analyses the pictorial and spoken language of the various film genres in the Third Reich, including news reels, documentaries, feature and "cultural" films. It shows how a powerful and sinister propaganda machine emerged which, by deploying a wide range of psychological techniques, exerted a strong fascination on the masses. These methods were so successful that they continue to serve as models for totalitarian régimes to this day.

  Subjects: History: World War II Film and Television Studies Media Studies

• May 1996

  Turkish Culture in German Society

  Horrocks, D. & Kolinsky, E. (eds)

  For many decades Germany has had a sizeable Turkish minority that lives in an uneasy co-existence with the Germans around them and as such has attracted considerable interest abroadwhere it tends to be seen as a measure of German tolerance. However, little is known about theactual situation of the Turks. This volume provides valuable information, presented in a mostoriginal manner in that it combines literary and cultural studies with social and political analysis.It focuses on the Turkish-born writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar, who writes in German and whosework, especially her highly acclaimed novel Das ist eine Karawanserei, is examined criticallyand situated in the context of German "migrant literature".

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2012

  Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium

  Sites, Sounds, and Screens

  Hake, S. & Mennel, B. (eds)

  In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape.  Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• eBook available July 2019

  Twilight of the Merkel Era

  Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election

  Langenbacher, E. (ed)

  Elections always have consequences, but the 2017 Bundestag election in Germany proved particularly consequential. With political upheaval across the globe—notably in Britain and the USA—it was vital to European and global order that Germany remain stable. And it did through the re-election of Angela Merkel as chancellor, now in her fourth term. Just under the surface, however, instability is mounting—exemplified by the entry of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the largest opposition party, the decline of the Social Democrats, the ever-restive Bavarians, and the growing factionalism within the Christian Democratic Union as the Merkel era comes to an end. Paying special attention to the rise of the AfD, this volume delves into the campaign, leading political figures, the structure of the electorate, the state of the parties, the media environment, coalition negotiations, and policy impacts.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 1996

  Two Armies and One Fatherland

  The End of the Nationale Volksarmee

  Schönbohm, J.

  In October 1990 West German general Jörg Schönbohm and a small team of experts moved into the headquarters of the former East German army to effect the unprecedented: the takeover, in peacetime and without the firing of a single shot, of a well-equiped army that had been the Bundeswehr's main enemy only a few months earlier. What Schönbohm discovered and recorded in a diary was almost incredible: plans to conquer West Germany's major cities; blueprints for a surprise attack on West Berlin through the city's subways and sewer systems; papers documenting the planned use of chemical weapons. But there were also the more mundane problems of what to do with those 100,000 men whom the end of the Cold War had made superfluous. It is through accounts like this one that we are reminded of how dangerous a world we all lived in between 1945 and the fall of Communism.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available October 2006

  Two Lives in Uncertain Times

  Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens

  Iggers, W., & Iggers, G.

  Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

  Wilma and Georg Iggers came from different backgrounds, Wilma from a Jewish farming family from the German-speaking border area of Czechoslovakia, Georg from a Jewish business family from Hamburg. They both escaped with their parents from Nazi persecution to North America where they met as students. As a newly married couple they went to the American South where they taught in two historic Black colleges and were involved in the civil rights movement. In 1961 they began going to West Germany regularly not only to do research but also to further reconciliation between Jews and Germans, while at the same time in their scholarly work contributing to a critical confrontation with the German past. After overcoming first apprehensions, they soon felt Göttingen to be their second home, while maintaining their close involvements in America. After 1966 they frequently visited East Germany and Czechslovakia in an attempt to build bridges in the midst of the Cold War.

  The book relates their very different experiences of childhood and adolescence and then their lives together over almost six decades during which they endeavored to combine their roles as parents and scholars with their social and political engagements. In many ways this is not merely a dual biography but a history of changing conditions in America and Central Europe during turbulent times.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• March 2004

  United and Divided

  Germany since 1990

  Dennis M. & Kolinsky, E. (eds)

  The system transformation after German unification in 1990 constituted an experiment on an unprecedented scale. At no point in history had one state attempted to redesign another without conquest, bloodshed or coercion but by treaties, public policy and bureaucratic processes. Unification was achieved by erasing the eastern political and economic model. However, in the meantime it has become clear that the same cannot be said about social transformation. On the contrary, social and cultural attitudes and differentiation have continued and resulted in deep divisions between West and East Germany. After unification, the injustices of politics seemed to have been replaced, in the eyes of most former GDR citizens, by unexpected injustices in the personal spheres of ordinary people who lost their jobs and faced unknown realities of deprivation and social exclusion.

  These are the main concerns of the contributors to this volume. Incorporating new research findings and published data, they focus on key aspects of economic, political, and social transformation in eastern Germany and compare, through case studies, each area with developments in the west.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2013

  United Germany

  Debating Processes and Prospects

  Jarausch, K. H. (ed)

  Since the attempt to unite two parts of a country divided for four decades yielded contradictory results, this volume provides a balance sheet of the successes and failures of German unification during the first quarter century after the fall of the Wall. Five themes, ranging from the transfer of political institutions to the economic crisis, from the social upheaval for women’s movements to the cultural efforts at interpretation and the changes in foreign policy have been chosen to illustrate the complexity of the process. The contributors represent a broad interdisciplinary mix of political scientists, historians, and literary scholars. Because personal experiences tend to color scholarly judgments, they are drawn from West Germany, East Germany, and the United States. This collection is the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the political, social, and intellectual consequences of the efforts to regain German unity.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• August 1994

  Uniting Germany

  Documents and Debates

  Jarausch, K. & Gransow, V.

  The unification of Germany is the most important change in Central Europe in the last four decades. Understanding this rapid and unforeseen development has raised old fears as well as inspired new hopes. In order to make sense out of the bewildering process and to help both expert and lay readers understand the changes and consequences, an American historian and a German social scientist put together this collection of central texts on German unification, the first of its kind. An invaluable reference tool.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• January 1995

  Universities in the Twenty-first Century

  Muller, S. (ed)

  On the eve of the twenty-first century, the United States and Germany face common but also separate challenges that will be met in part by significant activity at the university level. This volume offers views and expert opinions from leading American and German educators and university administrators on the future role of this vital educational and cultural institution in both societies.

  Subject: Educational Studies

• eBook available January 2019

  Views of Violence

  Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials

  Echternkamp, J. & Jaeger, S. (eds)

  Twenty-first-century views of historical violence have been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. Within Europe, one of the key sites for such representation has been the vast array of museums and memorials that reflect contemporary ideas of war, the roles of soldiers and civilians, and the self-perception of those who remember. This volume takes a historical perspective on museums covering the Second World War and explores how these institutions came to define political contexts and cultures of public memory in Germany, across Europe, and throughout the world.

  Subject: Museum Studies Memory Studies

• eBook available December 2017

  Visitors to the House of Memory

  Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin

  Bishop Kendzia, V.

  As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Jewish Studies Educational Studies Memory Studies

• September 2000

  Voices in Times of Change

  The Role of Writers, Opposition Movements, and the Churches in the Transformation of East Germany

  Rock, D. (ed)

  Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume offers an overview of the role of writers, intellectuals, citizens, and the churches both before, but particularly after, 1989 in the GDR and the new Germany. Friedrich Schorlemmer provides the focal point, giving the book its coherence. Issues related to his role in the GDR church and citizens movement are examined, as well as his support for GDR writers both before and after unification, and his own writings on east and west German literature. After general surveys on intellectuals, civil rights groups, opposition movements, and churches in the transformation of east Germany the volume focuses on Friedrich Schorlemmer himself: a chapter on the significance of the role that he played is followed by interviews with him and an original essay by him, giving his personal view of the role of intellectuals, citizens, and writers in east Germany.

  The volume is rounded off by a chapter on the reactions of lesser known writers, and, finally, on the responses of prominent GDR writers to unification and on the changing role of writers in society. Combining literary and cultural with social and political analysis, this volume provides a lively and multifaceted picture of the new Germany.

  Subjects: Literary Studies History: 20th Century to Present Sociology

• eBook available August 2009

  Voyage Through the Twentieth Century

  A Historian's Recollections and Reflections

  Klemperer, K. von

  The account of the author’s life, spent between Europe and America, is at the same time an account of his generation, one that came of age between the two World Wars. Recalling not only circumstances of his own situation but that of his friends, the author shows how this generation faced a reality that seemed fragmented, and in their shared thirst for knowledge and commitment to ideas they searched for cohesiveness among the glittering, holistic ideologies and movements of the twenties and thirties. The author’s scholarly work on the German Resistance to Hitler revealed to him those who maintained dignity and courage in times of peril and despair, which became for him a life’s pursuit. This work is unique in its thorough inclusion of the postwar decades and its perspective from a historian eager to rescue the “other” Germany—the Germany of the righteous rather than the Holocaust murderers.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• April 1996

  The War for the German Mind

  Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers

  Smith, A. L.

  There are several important studies on Allied efforts to re-educate German civilians after the fall of Nazism. The simultaneous major program of the U. S., Britain and Soviet Union to influence the future of German politics and society through the re-education of prisoners of war has not previously been studied. Based on extensive archival research, including hitherto unknown material from the Soviet archives, as well as interviews with participants, this book draws a fascinating picture of the war for the postwar German mind. It also explores the question of the impact of the returnees upon the two German states that emerged after 1945. The unique value of this study lies in its genuinely comparative approach which also examines the program that Soviets introduced in their POW camps.

  Subject: History: World War II

• October 2000

  War of Extermination

  The German Military in World War II

  Heer, H. & Naumann. K. (eds)

  Among the many myths about the relationship of Nazism to the mass of the German population, few proved more powerful in postwar West Germany than the notion that the Wehrmacht had not been involved in the crimes of the Third Reich. Former generals were particularly effective in spreading, through memoirs and speeches, the legend that millions of German soldiers had fought an honest and "clean" war and that mass murder, especially in the East, was entirely the work of Himmler's SS. This volume contains the most important contributions by distinguished historians who have thoroughly demolished this Wehrmacht myth. The picture that emerges from this collection is a depressing one and raises many questions about why "ordinary men" got involved as perpetrators and bystanders in an unprecedented program of extermination of "racially inferior" men, women, and children in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Those who have seen these terrible photos of mass executions and other atrocities, currently on show in an exhibition in Germany and soon to be in the United States, will find this volume most enlightening.

  Subjects: Genocide History

• eBook available August 2010

  Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects

  Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s

  Canning, K., Barndt, K. & McGuire, K. (eds)

  In spite of having been short-lived, “Weimar” has never lost its fascination. Until recently the Weimar Republic’s place in German history was primarily defined by its catastrophic beginning and end - Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933; its history seen mainly in terms of politics and as an arena of flawed decisions and failed compromises. However, a flourishing of interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture is uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption. This collection offers new perspectives from leading scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, film studies, and German studies on the vibrant political culture of Germany in the 1920s. From the traumatic ruptures of defeat, revolution, and collapse of the Kaiser’s state, the visionaries of Weimar went on to invent a republic, calling forth new citizens and cultural innovations that shaped the republic far beyond the realms of parliaments and political parties.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available April 2009

  Weimar Radicals

  Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance

  Brown, T. S.

  Exploring the gray zone of infiltration and subversion in which the Nazi and Communist parties sought to influence and undermine each other, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between two defining ideologies of the twentieth century. The struggle between Fascism and Communism is situated within a broader conversation among right- and left-wing publicists, across the Youth Movement and in the “National Bolshevik” scene, thus revealing the existence of a discourse on revolutionary legitimacy fought according to a set of common assumptions about the qualities of the ideal revolutionary. Highlighting the importance of a masculine-militarist politics of youth revolt operative in both Marxist and anti-Marxist guises, Weimar Radicals forces us to re-think the fateful relationship between the two great ideological competitors of the Weimar Republic, while offering a challenging new interpretation of the distinctive radicalism of the interwar era.

  Subject: History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available January 2014

  What Is History For?

  Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography

  Assis, A. A.

  A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available June 2022

  What Remains

  Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf

  Fetz, G. A. & Herminghouse, P. (eds)

  Arguably the most important—and influential—German woman writer of the last century, Christa Wolf was long heralded as "die gesamtdeutsche Autorin," an author for all of Germany; but, after 1989 in unified Germany, Wolf found herself suddenly embroiled in controversies that challenged her integrity and consigned her to an ideologically suspect identity as "DDR Schriftstellerin” (GDR writer) or “Staatsdichterin” (state poet). What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf asks the question of what truly remains of her legacy in the annals of contemporary German culture and history. Unlike most of what appeared in the wake of Wolf’s death, however, the contributions to this international volume seek neither to monumentalize her nor to dismantle her stature, but to employ a range of methodologies—comparative, intertextual, psychoanalytic, historical, transcultural—to offer sensitive assessments of Wolf’s major literary texts, as well as of her lesser known work in genres such as film and essay.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Literary Studies

• eBook available August 2019

  When Will We Talk About Hitler?

  German Students and the Nazi Past

  Oeser, A.

  For more than half a century, discourses on the Nazi past have powerfully shaped German social and cultural policy. Specifically, an institutional determination not to forget has expressed a “duty of remembrance” through commemorative activities and educational curricula. But as the horrors of the Third Reich retreat ever further from living memory, what do new generations of Germans actually think about this past? Combining observation, interviews, and archival research, this book provides a rich survey of the perspectives and experiences of German adolescents from diverse backgrounds, revealing the extent to which social, economic, and cultural factors have conditioned how they view representations of Germany’s complex history.

  Subjects: History (General) Educational Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available May 2003

  Wilhelminism and Its Legacies

  German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930

  Eley, G. & Retallack, J. (eds)

  What was distinctive—and distinctively "modern"—about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany's extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple with the ambivalent, cross-cutting nature of German "modernities" and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.

  Subject: History: 18th/19th Century

• eBook available May 2009

  Willing Seduction

  The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture

  Kosta, B.

  Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany’s first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich.

  This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film’s thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola’s various “incarnations.”

  Subject: Film and Television Studies

• June 2001

  Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany

  Reality and its Representation in Popular Fiction

  Petersen, V. R.

  This book focuses on the popular fiction of Weimar Germany and explores the relationship between women, the texts they read, and the society in which they lived. A complex picture emerges that shows women talking center stage, not only in the fiction but also in the reality that shaped its fictional representations. One of the author's significant conclusions is that it was the growing strength of female subjectivity, its strong positioning, and its insistent claim to visibility that occupied the imaginations and fears of Weimar culture and contributed in an important way to the crisis that afflicted the Weimar Republic.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Cultural Studies (General)

• September 2012

  Women of Two Countries

  German-American Women, Women's Rights and Nativism, 1848-1890

  Bank, M.

  German-American women played many roles in the US women’s rights movement from 1848 to 1890. This book focuses on three figures—Mathilde Wendt, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, and Clara Neymann—who were simultaneously included and excluded from the nativist women’s rights movement. Accordingly, their roles and arguments differed from those of their American colleagues, such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Lucy Stone. Moreover, German-American feminists were confronted with the opposition to the women’s rights movement in their ethnic community of German-Americans. As outsiders in the women’s rights movement they became critics; as “women of two countries” they became translators of feminist and ethnic concerns between German- Americans and the US women’s rights movement; and as messengers they could bridge the gap between American and German women in a transatlantic space. This book explores the relationship between ethnicity and gender and deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century transatlantic relationships.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality History: 18th/19th Century

• January 2006

  The Women's Camp in Moringen

  A Memoir of Imprisonment in Germany 1936-1937

  Herz, G.

  The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camps within weeks of coming to power, but with the exception of Dachau the history of these early, improvised camps and their inmates is not yet widely known. Gabriele Herz's memoir, published for the first time, is a unique record of a Jewish woman's detention in the first women's concentration camp in Moringen (housed in part of an old-established workhouse), at a time when most other inmates were communists or Jehovah's Witnesses. This original translation of her wry and perceptive memoir is accompanied by an extensive introduction that sets Herz's experience in the history both of political detention under the Nazi regime and of the German workhouse system.

  Subjects: Jewish Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available February 2010

  Work in a Modern Society

  The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective

  Kocka, J. (ed)

  Whereas the history of workers and labor movements has been widely researched, the history of work has been rather neglected by comparison. This volume offers original contributions that deal with cultural, social and theoretical aspects of the history of work in modern Europe, including the relations between gender and work, working and soldiering, work and trust, constructions and practices. The volume focuses on Germany but also places the case studies in a broader European context. It thus offers an insight into social and cultural history as practiced by German-speaking scholars today but also introduces the reader to ongoing research in this field.

  Subject: History (General)

• November 2004

  Working for the Enemy

  Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War

  Billstein, R., Fings, K., Kugler, A. & Levis, N.

  General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today.

  Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels.

  During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral testimonies.

  For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations.

  Subjects: History (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available October 2019

  The World of Children

  Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment

  Lässig, S. & Weiß, A. (eds)

  In an era of rapidly increasing technological advances and international exchange, how did young people come to understand the world beyond their doorsteps? Focusing on Germany through the lens of the history of knowledge, this collection explores various media for children—from textbooks, adventure stories, and other literature to board games, museums, and cultural events—to probe what they aimed to teach young people about different cultures and world regions. These multifaceted contributions from specialists in historical, literary, and cultural studies delve into the ways that children absorbed, combined, and adapted notions of the world.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Cultural Studies (General) Educational Studies

• January 1998

  A Year of Revolutions

  Fanny Lewald's Recollections of 1848

  Lewis, H. (ed)

  Lewald (1811-1889), the best-selling German woman writer in the nineteenth century, proved akeen and perceptive observer of the social, artistic, and political life of her times, of which these Recollections offer an excellent example. Written from a woman's perspective, this first-hand account of the revolutions in both Germany and France must be considered a unique document. It is further enhanced by her detailed description of the Frankfurt Parliament and her relationships with many of the prominent politicians and thinkers of that eventful period.

  Subjects: History: 18th/19th Century Literary Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology