German History - recent issues

Communal Transformations of Church Space in Lutheran Lubeck

Lee, B. B. — 2008-05-13

Though Johannes Bugenhagen instituted the structures for Lutheran reform in 1530, the impetus for reform in Lübeck came foremost from a specific stratum of ‘unofficial’ culture. Lübeck, a powerful trading city in modern-day Germany on the Baltic Sea, and head of the transnational Hanseatic League, was controlled by a wealthy and influential merchant class. The participation of this merchant class in the reconfiguration of the city's churches attests to its enthusiasm for the Lutheran cause and also belies the rigidity of the social hierarchy that organized Lübeck's society. As a result of this enthusiasm, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the addition of candleholders, pews, and tombstones to the architecture of Lübeck's churches. A further look at the key features of a Lutheran service, particularly where the Word figured prominently in the sermon and in the music, leads to the discovery of the elaboration of the pulpit and organs. Lutheran art in sacred spaces primarily testified to the faith of a pious and wealthy burgher community in Lübeck.

Threatened Protestants: Confessional Conflict in the Rhine Province and Westphalia during the Nineteenth Century

Bennette, R. A. — 2008-05-13

Hostilities between Catholics and Protestants abounded in Germany during the nineteenth century, and historical scholarship on religion has provided numerous examples. Likewise, the unequal distribution of power and status between German Catholics and Protestants that commonly factored into these conflicts has long been recognized and researched by historians. Catholics faced disadvantages in the German lands, and this situation only worsened with the foundation of the empire in 1871 under the leadership of Protestant Prussia. At the same time, several scholars have pointed out that Protestants, like Catholics, also experienced varying degrees of anxiety over confessional relations. Yet, compared to the Catholic case, historians have given far less attention to this topic. Looking at cases from the Rhine Province and Westphalia, this article attempts to flesh out the picture of Protestant anxiety by examining fears expressed in communal conflicts that were quite legitimate given the threatening confessional circumstances that existed in certain regions and locales. Examples are drawn from both rural and urban settings. The conflicts range from burial disputes to disagreements about access to adequate health care. The emphasis on the particular contexts of these cases allows for a better understanding of the multiplicity of factors that fuelled confessional conflicts.

A Day to Remember: East Germany's Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism

Monteath, P. — 2008-05-13

This article examines the initiation and development of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism (Gedenktag für die Opfer des Faschismus) in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and then the GDR. In doing so it is interested in the way in which the annual event, held on the second Sunday of September, was politicized, especially during the onset of the Cold War, which meant that it became a regular feature of official memory in the GDR but was abandoned in the Federal Republic. The theoretical framework is drawn from John Bodnar's distinction between official and vernacular expressions of public memory. The initial observance of the Day of Remembrance is notable for the presence of vernacular elements—the day was initiated by people who had suffered Nazi persecution, it was supported by a broad range of victims, and it contained elements of mourning and contrition. However, a process of political appropriation commenced as early as 1945 and reached a culminating point with the divided rallies of West and East Berlin in 1948. Communist forces—both German and Soviet—played a major role in this, but the hand of other occupying forces is also evident in efforts to restrict the impact of what was conceived as a national event. Over the course of the GDR's history the day became increasingly ritualized, so that its capacity to perform its initial functions was severely compromised. Only with German unification and a modest reinvention of the event has a vernacular form of remembrance been given some scope to re-emerge.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Revisited: Combat Cinema, American Culture and the German Past

Scholz, A.-M. — 2008-05-13

This article discusses the ways critical debates in West Germany—about the increased production of war films and whether such films were ‘pro-war’ or ‘anti-war’—raised central issues about the relationship between US popular culture and the politics of German cultural memory in two significant war films of the late fifties: David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (USA/GB 1957) and Bernhard Wicki's Die Brücke (The Bridge, FRG 1959). Whereas Kwai was heralded as an ‘anti-war’ epic in Columbia Pictures’ publicity campaign for the film in West Germany, many German commentators saw things differently. They made Kwai the centre of a critical discussion about the ways ostensibly anti-war US productions were ambiguously pro-war in the West German context, focusing attention upon the ways the film's music, its characters, and the symbolic function of the bridge ultimately encouraged a glorification of militarism as German commentators understood it, based upon their own past experiences. In contrast, Wicki's Die Brücke offered a filmic ‘response’ to Kwai’s ultimately ‘Cold War anti-war’ formula through an implicit visual contrast to and critique of the bridge, men and music in Kwai. Overall, an analysis of these two films in terms of the pro-war versus anti-war film debates of the time reveals cross-cultural and transnational dynamics at work in the heretofore exclusively German discussion of the politics of cultural memory in West Germany. Ultimately, this essay argues, these debates encouraged an expansion of West German memory culture rather than a denial of the past.

The German Colonial Imagination

2008-05-13

Generations, Emotion and Critical Enquiry: A British View of Changing Approaches to the Study of Nazi Germany

Stephenson, J. — 2008-05-13

The German History Society Essay Prize

2008-05-13

Globalizing German Colonialism

Ciarlo, D. — 2008-05-13

Despite exhortations to examine colonialism as a dynamic interplay between subjects and rulers, histories of German colonialism still largely tend to either study the structures of colonial rule in the colony or to map the politics and culture of colonialism in the metropole. This essay reviews recent books in the field of German colonialism that offer a diverse array of subject matter, chronologies, methodologies, and sources. Work reviewed includes Sebastian Conrad on the transnational construction of German nationalism; Sandra Maß on the gendered implications of colonial heroes and black savage warriors in Weimar-era propaganda; Andrea Schultze on the Berliner Mission's land ownership in South Africa; and Karin Schestokat on German women travel writers in Cameroon. By means of a detailed analysis of each book, the reviewer suggests that the effort to connect colony to metropole—and especially, to trace the impact of the colonies on German metropolitan society and culture—might ultimately be a futile one; for the larger metropolitan constructions of ‘race’ emerged in the first place to prevent just such an exchange.

Writing the Media into History: Recent Works on the History of Mass Communications in Germany

Ross, C. — 2008-05-13

This paper critiques several recent works on the history of the mass media in Germany by contextualizing them within the wider wave of interest in the subject since the 1990s. It highlights the limited extent to which the findings of this research on the history of mass communications have been integrated into broader structures of interpretation for the period since the middle of the nineteenth century. Although we have long had a reasonably detailed understanding of the technological, commercial and aesthetic development of the media, the works under review reflect the more recent trend towards investigating their immense social and political impact in the broadest sense. For the twentieth century in particular, the mass media played an absolutely central role in social, cultural and political life. They both reflected and helped to generate profound changes in all of these spheres, and approaching the media as an integral part of ‘mainstream’ history thus furnishes a powerful tool for analysing the multiple interconnections between them.

What's a History Handbook for? The Gebhardt German History Series and the Nineteenth Century: Discussion

Breuilly, J. — 2008-05-13

Das Ende des Siebenjahrigen Krieges 1760-1763

Wilson, P. H. — 2008-05-13

Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary

Allen, A. T. — 2008-05-13

Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion

Jefferies, M. — 2008-05-13

Zwischen Religion und Staat: Die judischen Gemeinden in der preussischen Rheinprovinz 1815-1871

Roemer, N. — 2008-05-13

Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914

Fahrmeir, A. — 2008-05-13

Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1933

Rossol, N. — 2008-05-13

The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19

Rupp, L. J. — 2008-05-13

Deutsche Olpolitik, 1928-1938

Frank, A. — 2008-05-13

From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk: Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918-1945

Pine, L. — 2008-05-13

The Antifascist Classroom. Denazification in Soviet-occupied Germany, 1945-1949

Augustine, D. L. — 2008-05-13

Vertreibung der Vertriebenen? Der historische deutsche Osten in der Erinnerungskultur der Bundesrepublik (1961-1982)

Langenbacher, E. — 2008-05-13

Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War

Pendas, D. J. — 2008-05-13

After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1955

Biess, F. — 2008-05-13

Nobles, Modernism, and the Culture of fin-de-siecle Munich

Has-Ellison, J. T. — 2008-01-01

Historians of central Europe agree that the fin de siècle was a time of artistic ferment and change that was critical in the formation of the ‘modern’, but ignore the influence and role of the nobility, assuming that nobles were insignificant actors in the cultural realm. This article contests that notion by investigating the janus-faced artistic nobility in Munich. The author argues that nobles played an important role in the artistic markers of Munich's fin de siècle (Secession, art nouveau, cabaret); more importantly, many nobles were instrumental in the reception and propagation of ideas that informed the European avant-garde, and acted as a model for a European variant of alternative modernism.

A Duty to Forget? The 'Hitler Youth Generation' and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c. 1945-49

McDougall, A. — 2008-01-01

In Soviet-occupied East Germany during the mid- to late 1940s, a remarkable but scarcely remarked-upon transition took place. Hundreds of thousands of young Germans who had previously been members of the Nazi youth organizations, the Hitler Youth (HJ) and the League of German Girls (BDM) flocked to join the Communist-led Free German Youth (FDJ), a unisex ‘united youth organization’ founded under Soviet auspices in March 1946. This paper examines the experiences of this ‘twice betrayed’ generation, whose members rapidly—though with varying degrees of enthusiasm—switched allegiance from Nazism to Communism after the Second World War and ultimately exchanged life in one authoritarian youth organization for life in another. Drawing on archival and interview material, it first seeks to outline Communist attitudes towards denazification among the young in the postwar period, before going on to examine from a grass-roots perspective the experiences, motivations, and attitudes of those who exchanged their HJ or BDM membership books for those of the FDJ. Despite, or perhaps because of, East Germany's strongly-espoused and rigidly dogmatic ‘anti-fascism’, open discussion of the Nazi past was—for a variety of reasons—taboo during the immediate postwar period, particularly among the young. This paper concludes by discussing the reasons behind this ‘pact of silence’ between the Communists and the ‘Hitler Youth generation’—and how it impacted upon subsequent generations of young people ‘born into socialism’.

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

Berg, M. P. — 2008-01-01

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrian political culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienced a particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifested in communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand, the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed through active or passive complicity—threatened to link Austria with the perpetrator status reserved for German society. On the other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a myth of victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoid confronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently, discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism became a taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic. The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significant break with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressed in 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things: first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian political spectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980s and the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive Social Democratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginning in the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that made Vergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge the Austrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazi past. This process included the novel step of acknowledging the Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.

The Long Nineteenth Century

2008-01-01

The Dominance of Nationality? Nation and Citizenship from the Late Nineteenth Century Onwards: A Comparative European Perspective

Gosewinkel, D. — 2008-01-01

DDR Museum Berlin

Brock, A. — 2008-01-01

Obituary: Trevor Johnson (1961-2007)

Wilson, P. H. — 2008-01-01

Ludwig Feuerbach and German Radicalism

Caldwell, P. C. — 2008-01-01

Die 'Neue Frommigkeit' in Europa im Spatmittelalter

Rohrkasten, J. — 2008-01-01

Geschichte auf der langen Bank: Die Komissionen des Reichshofrats unter Kaiser Maximillian II. (1564-1576)

Thomson, E. — 2008-01-01

Der gescheiterte Frieden von Munster: Spaniens Ringen mit Frankreich auf dem Westfalischen Friedenskongress (1643-1649)

Wilson, P. H. — 2008-01-01

Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800-1870

Daum, A. W. — 2008-01-01

Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur Politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900-1933

Gerwarth, R. — 2008-01-01

The German Right 1860-1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination

Sperber, J. — 2008-01-01

Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945

Jefferies, M. — 2008-01-01

The Women's Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-19

Rupp, L. J. — 2008-01-01

The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust

Roseman, M. — 2008-01-01

Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Bilanz einer Debatte

Langenbacher, E. — 2008-01-01

Philosophie der Burgerlichkeit: Die lieberalkonservative Begrundung der Bundesrepublik

Nehring, H. — 2008-01-01

Chruschtschows Berlin-Krise 1958 bis 1963: Drohpolitik und Mauerbau

Bushell, A. — 2008-01-01

Power and the People: A Social History of Central European Politics, 1945-1956

Behrends, J. C. — 2008-01-01

Revolution and Resistance in Eastern Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule

Port, A. I. — 2008-01-01

Die Geschichte des Dorfes: Von den Anfangen im Frankenreich zur bundesdeutschen Gegenwart

Bauerkamper, A. — 2008-01-01

Introduction: Domesticity, Design and the Shaping of the Social

Jenkins, J. L. — 2007-01-01

The Production and Display of Domestic Interiors in Wilhelmine Germany, 1900-1914

Maciuika, J. V. — 2007-01-01

In the opening years of the twentieth century, the German home assumed new cultural meanings and symbolic significance as a site of economic, political, artistic, and social intervention. This article investigates a range of Wilhelmine institutions—from the Wertheim department store and the Prussian Commerce Ministry, to the Applied Arts Movement and the Movement for Art Education—to illustrate the variety of German approaches to promoting new conceptions of the home. Examining the ways in which Wilhelmine private and state reformers turned the topic of how one lived and dwelled into a topic of pressing significance, the article argues that private, commercial efforts and state-driven policy initiatives interpenetrated to a degree previously underappreciated in Wilhelmine historical studies. These private and state initiatives were, in turn, closely tied to the cultivation of German consumer identities, and to larger efforts on the part of Wilhelmine institutions to adapt to the dizzying conditions of twentieth-century capitalist modernity. As a result of these developments, special exhibitions of artistic home interiors originated in premier German department stores as well as in the halls of the state bureaucracy; historical ornaments termed ‘modern’ in one decade were denigrated as barbaric in another; and generations of craftsmen battled one another for a legitimacy conferred, to a significant degree, by private commissions, generous state subsidies, and admission into prestigious exhibitions.

Oskar von Miller and the Art of the Electrical Exhibition: Staging Modernity in Weimar Germany

Duffy, E. — 2007-01-01

Within the larger framework of understanding how modernity was framed within and through the domestic sphere, this article considers the efforts of Bavarian electrical engineer Oskar von Miller to electrify and modernize Germany against the backdrop of Weimar reform movements. Unlike modernist reformers associated with such projects as the Bauhaus or the Werkbund, Miller was a practical systems-builder who sought to encourage consumption within traditional frameworks of home and Heimat. For Miller, exhibiting the benefits of technology was a key element in securing its success, and his reliance on consumers rested on a corporatist ideal that would create a new kind of community centred on technology. Whereas in the Imperial era Miller focused on Handwerker and small machines as the guarantors of both progress and social stability, in the Weimar era he turned to housewives and housework. Through his involvement in electrification schemes as well as in his work in founding the Deutsches Museum, one of the first museums of science and technology in Europe, Miller created a powerful narrative of technological progress that was both traditional and modern.

A Family Vacation for Workers: The Strength through Joy Resort at Prora

Baranowski, S. — 2007-01-01

Despite its promise to deliver vacation packages to German workers, the huge Nazi leisure organization Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF) fell short of its claim, failing especially to attract working-class families to its tours and sea cruises. To remedy its deficiency and to better support the racial and social policies of the Nazi regime, KdF began constucting a 20,000-bed resort on the Prora inlet of the Baltic Island of Rügen in May 1936. The resort aimed to provide inexpensive seaside vacations for male workers, their wives and children, a modest form of consumption that would open an important bourgeois leisure practice to wage-earners and provide respite for ‘racially valuable’ working-class families. The plans for the resort combined space for fascist mobilization with architectural details and vistas that reflected the Nazi regime's imperialist ambitions. Yet in its variety of leisure activities, the layout of its guestrooms, and the amenities promised to its holidaymakers, the ‘KdF-Seebad Rügen’ also promoted family intimacy in an environment far removed from urban, conflict-ridden, working-class neighbourhoods. The resort would thus advance the socially harmonious Volksgemeinschaft that the regime sought and give a foretaste of the abundance to come once Lebensraum was obtained, while simultaneously demonstrating that holidays in the present and abundance in the future would be limited to the Herrenvolk. Construction ceased when war broke out in 1939. Nevertheless, the Prora project, like KdF itself, illustrated the manner in which the Nazi regime used consumer desires and visions of family intimacy to advance its racism.

Healthy for Family Life: Television, Masculinity, and Domestic Modernity during West Germany's Miracle Years

Perry, J. — 2007-01-01

This article uses the history of West German television as a lens to analyse the politics of consumption and domestic modernity during the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and early 1960s. Politicians, academics, broadcast executives, industry promoters, clerical leaders, and cultural critics engaged in a ferocious debate about the effects of the new mass media on West German society and family. While some championed the democratizing and modernizing effects of television, others decried its supposedly totalitarian and ‘feminizing’ qualities; their arguments, pro and con, marked a foundational moment in contemporary cultural criticism that continues to resonate. Installed in the family home, television accelerated the arrival of a highly commodified society and transformed the private habits of everyday life. Men in particular began to spend more leisure time on domestic pursuits, crossing traditional boundaries between public and private gender roles. Such private practices had larger effects: buying, watching, and thinking through television helped replace traditionalist social conservatism with its neoliberal variant and linked West Germany into the social, political, and cultural structures of corporate capitalism and western consumer society.

East German Plastics: Technology, Gender and Teleological Structures of Everyday Life

Rubin, E. — 2007-01-01

Fifth Workshop on Early Modern German History: Institut fur Bayerische Geschichte, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, 25 September 2006

Ott, M., Robilliard, G. — 2007-01-01

What is History? A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society.

Smith, H. W. — 2007-01-01

Straightening the Line?

Eley, G. — 2007-01-01

A Travesty?

Smith, H. W. — 2007-01-01

"...wir wollen der Liebe Raum geben": Konkubinate geistlicher und weltlicher Fursten um 1500

Pursell, B. C. — 2007-01-01

The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy

Leppin, V. — 2007-01-01

Diskurse der Aufklarung: Luise Adelgunde Victoire und Johann Christoph Gottsched

Whaley, J. — 2007-01-01

Germany and the Middle East 1871-1945

Jenkins, J. — 2007-01-01

Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective

Jaskot, P. B. — 2007-01-01

Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany

Roemer, N. — 2007-01-01

Fur Volk und deutschen Osten: Der Historiker Hermann Aubin und die deutsche Ostforschung

Hettling, M., Williams, H. — 2007-01-01

Demokratiewunder: Transatlantische Mittler und die kulturelle Offnung Westdeutschlands

Nehring, H. — 2007-01-01

Die ostdeutsche Gesellschaft: Eine transnationale Perspektive

Blessing, B. — 2007-01-01

Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany

Crew, D. F. — 2007-01-01

Working in East Germany: Normality in a Socialist Dictatorship, 1961-79

Pritchard, G. — 2007-01-01

Der Preis der Einheit: Die Wiedervereinigung und die Krise des Sozialstaates

Denis, M. — 2007-01-01

Generationalitat und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert

Berger, S. — 2007-01-01

Die Feuchtwangers: Familie, Tradition und judisches Selbstverstandnis im deutsch-judischen Burgertum des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts

Stargardt, N. — 2007-01-01