Search

In the historiography, older women in post-war West Germany have predominantly been depicted as passive, as embodiments of a contaminated past and hindrances to cultural change. This paper challenges these stereotypical narratives by investigating quantitative and qualitative social data from the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Aging (BOLSA) in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social inequality. The results of our correspondence analysis show that women aged over sixty led more active lifestyles than commonly assumed. They also compensated for their lower economic and cultural capital by investing in higher social and symbolic capital. This was particularly pronounced in the case of unmarried elderly women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into youth violence and racism around 1989 / 90 has drawn primarily on sources of the MfS, police files, oral history interviews, and press coverage. This paper presents the Saxonian Longitudinal Study (SLS), a panel survey that began in the GDR in 1987 and is ongoing. It discusses the potential of secondary analysis to explore the relationship between transformation, racism, and nationalism in the longue durée of 1989 / 90. Social science data can be used to write a history of everyday racism during the upheaval and transformation in East Germany. The limits and possibilities of this history will be discussed in order to show that studies that did not focus on racism can assist when inquiring into the opinions and attitudes of the supposed political center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Polish state's centuries-long contacts with the East are to be understood as an important instrument for the legitimization of a Polish imperialcolonial self-image in the epoch of European high imperialism. In the period between 1880 and 1914, the Polish-language commercial weekly press analyzed in this paper produced a sizeable body of historical knowledge on the East. Two focal points can be identified: the origins of Lithuanian, Ukrainian and, to a lesser extent, Ottoman history, as well as the manifold Polish-Lithuanian, -Ukrainian and -Ottoman historical relations. These two bodies of knowledge have contributed to the construction of the East as an inferior other vis-á-vis Poland, as well as a feature of Polish claims to be an imperial-colonial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Established in 1886, the Royal Settlement Commission sought to settle German colonists, who came from inside of the empire and abroad, in Prussia's eastern provinces in order to decrease the relative Polish share of the population. This paper focuses on the importance of subdividing the settlers regarding their different regional origins. Based on official records, the paper demonstrates that the project of "inner colonization" was not determined to evoke a specific German identity. It also shows that negative stereotypes usually thought to be exclusively anti-Slavic can also be found in debates about German remigrants fromRussia. In conclusion, Prussian settler villages were more like regional "salad bowls" than national "melting pots." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historiography, older women in post-war West Germany have predominantly been depicted as passive, as embodiments of a contaminated past and hindrances to cultural change. This paper challenges these stereotypical narratives by investigating quantitative and qualitative social data from the Bonn Longitudinal Study of Aging (BOLSA) in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social inequality. The results of our correspondence analysis show that women aged over sixty led more active lifestyles than commonly assumed. They also compensated for their lower economic and cultural capital by investing in higher social and symbolic capital. This was particularly pronounced in the case of unmarried elderly women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into youth violence and racism around 1989 / 90 has drawn primarily on sources of the MfS, police files, oral history interviews, and press coverage. This paper presents the Saxonian Longitudinal Study (SLS), a panel survey that began in the GDR in 1987 and is ongoing. It discusses the potential of secondary analysis to explore the relationship between transformation, racism, and nationalism in the longue durée of 1989 / 90. Social science data can be used to write a history of everyday racism during the upheaval and transformation in East Germany. The limits and possibilities of this history will be discussed in order to show that studies that did not focus on racism can assist when inquiring into the opinions and attitudes of the supposed political center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the National Socialists came to power, the Gestapo gained access to the card files of the Prussian Secret Police. The Nazis' Secret State Police quickly recognized the potential of such repositories of knowledge for the regime's mission to realize the "Volksgemeinschaft." In the following years, it massively expanded its card indexes and developed them into a central resource for its relentless work, meticulously recording its brutal efforts to implement the National Socialist's vision of a social order. This paper reconstructs the Gestapo's doing of the 'Volksgemeinschaft' and emphasizes the complex dynamics of this process by digitally analyzing the card index of the Gestapo's Osnabrück branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic to reflect on the relationship between governance and solidarity. It considers how a social model based on self-regulating individuals has been complemented by a new form of state dirigisme reliant on evocations of solidarity. However, this configuration may be approaching the limits of its viability. Given that governance relies on the robust internalization and execution of both care and control and on an ethos of renunciation, especially among the middle and upper classes, the paper proposes the need for analyses that better incorporate concepts of social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the question concerning the possible epistemological impact and implications of digital methods on the production of historical knowledge has been raised time and again, detailed studies in this regard have been scarce. Taking the analysis of the use of the Bible in the accounts on the Conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 as an example, this paper examines the differences between the analogue and the digital approach. Drawing on the method of text re-use analysis and the tool "Tracer," it demonstrates the application of digital methods in practice and shows the consequences this has for historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the new repositories of specimens and knowledge that emerged from Sweden's first "phytotron," a modern climate laboratory for plant research established in Stockholm in the 1960s. Different aspects and scales of technoscientific plant and crop growth came together under one roof: inhouse trials on the timing and spacing of trees and crops, postwar domestic policies to modernize a largely rural country, and Swedish forest geneticists' expertise in international efforts to improve forest stand and productivity globally. I argue that a scalar analysis of scientific forestry can help identify and assess the historical contingencies and contexts that formed the interventions in planetary order invoked by the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Nahum Slouschz's concept of "Hebraic Mediterraneità" and its role in Jewish nationalism. Topics include Slouschz's integration of philology, archaeology, and history in developing this vision, the influence of his ideas from Odesa to Paris, and how Itamar Ben-Avi expanded and popularized Mediterraneanism to support his cantonization plan for mandatory Palestine.

The article focuses on the various missions to and from the Mediterranean during the 19th and 20th centuries. Topics include the rise of interconnected scientific, military, humanitarian, and religious missions, the influence of the European civilizing mission ideology, and the bidirectional nature of these missions between the different shores of the Mediterranean.

Volkswagen's success has generated both admiration and criticism. As such, the enterprise shines a light on the Federal Republic of Germany's global position as an export nation. By examining the company's presence in the USA and Mexico and its sustained efforts to become a leading global automaker since the early 1990s, the paper asks to what extent Volkswagen's international conduct has been shaped by the norms of self-restraint and moderation that define Germany's diplomatic style. That an economic actor like Volkswagen repeatedly diverged from these official diplomatic codes by pursuing its interests and provoking conflict underlines the importance of economic power in shaping Germany's image abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how dominant institutions construct univocal emotional scripts to reinforce their power, but alternative emotional expressions found in unofficial sources can challenge narratives, revealing more nuanced emotional experiences. It explores this dynamic by analyzing visual and acoustic materials, such as unofficial murals in Tehran, Iran depicting "martyrs" and official recordings from the Berlin Lautarchiv during World War I, to uncover historical significance of emotions.

The article focuses on the analysis of the intersection between work and emotions, drawing from ethnographic case studies in Germany and the Caribbean. It introduces the concept of "working out" emotions, examining how individuals interpret and manage emotions in their work, highlighting both the challenges and empowering aspects of this process through the experiences of fitness instructors Claire and Julia.

The article focuses on merging the history of emotions with the history of experience, exploring the nuanced relationship between the two in historical research. It mentions analyzing war writing from different eras, the authors argue for a closer examination of genres where emotions and experiences intersect, highlighting the significance of understanding how norms for feeling and expressing intersect with one another.

This article traces the career of the West German jurist Manfred Roeder, who went from evangelicalism and resistance to left-wing Protestantism to become a central conservative-nationalistic actor against "perversion" and the "porn wave" in 1970. In his militant activism he rapidly left the Christian frame of reference; his path led him to antisemitism, historical revisionism, and right-wing terrorism. The study ofRoeder can serve as a probe into the social processes of negotiation for the liberalization of sexuality and thus fundamentally for the moral-ethical sovereignty of interpretation of the time, while also shedding light on the radicalization of conservative and rightwing Christian groups in reaction to the developments of 1968 / 69. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the debate on the shadow economy in the 1980s. It shows how proponents of neoliberalism used this debate to publicly promote their ideas and underscore their plausibility in different countries and regions of the world. At their core, these neoliberal economists, politicians, economic journalists, and representatives of international organizations argued that the shadow economy consisted of informally operating small-scale entrepreneurs whose economic success was hampered by misguided government intervention. They therefore called for economic reforms aimed at changing not only the shadow economy but also the formal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the varied responses to domestic violence across East andWest Germany in the final two decades of German division. Specifically, it explores two case studies that were central to addressing violence against women in the home: divorce cases and women's shelters. Divorce hearings and women's shelters were both hubs for the discussion of domestic abuse in the two Germanies and provide a glimpse not only into the lives of women experiencing violence, but also into the various stakeholders involved in addressing it. In doing so, it shows how in East andWest Germany, the idealization of marriage was pressed into the service of maintaining families in ways that limited the protection for women experiencing familial violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social research, qualitative and quantitative, has long been the preferred means of selfobservation in industrial societies. The social science data generated in the process are therefore rewarding sources for many fields of contemporary history. A large-scale integration of both quantitative and qualitative social science data into the contemporary historian's practice will aid a fuller reconstruction of the agency of ordinary people and the relations between the social sciences, society, and politics of the past. This article addresses the challenges facing historians re-using social science data. It gives examples of relevant archives and research projects, discussing the historian's method and practice and the ethical, legal, archival and metadata problems awaiting resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most historians agree that it would be instructive to know more about the historical reception of media products. However, many shy away from such research, contending that the primary sources available were not “representative." This paper argues that this methodological credo of empirical social research is misleading for cultural historians interested in reconstructing the various ways in which historical audiences made sense of media products. By presenting examples from her own work,the author discusses the informative value of book and film reviews, listeners' letters to broadcasters, and audience polls for questions that historians would otherwise be unable to answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes new approaches that the history of concepts has taken to the history of science. These include the interconnection of the history of concepts, metaphorology, and object history, as well as the increasing interweaving of the history of science with social, political, and communication history. These shifts in the boundaries between different fields give new relevance to Reinhart Koselleck's approach to the history of concepts. The final part of the paper addresses a number of views, questions and perspectives of a history of concepts after Koselleck. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social research, qualitative and quantitative, has long been the preferred means of selfobservation in industrial societies. The social science data generated in the process are therefore rewarding sources for many fields of contemporary history. A large-scale integration of both quantitative and qualitative social science data into the contemporary historian's practice will aid a fuller reconstruction of the agency of ordinary people and the relations between the social sciences, society, and politics of the past. This article addresses the challenges facing historians re-using social science data. It gives examples of relevant archives and research projects, discussing the historian's method and practice and the ethical, legal, archival and metadata problems awaiting resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prussia's Germanization and colonization policies in its Polish territories relied on Polish farmworkers for German settlement. In the 1890s, the state joined the Pan- German League in an attempt to replace Polish workers with working-class German children, setting up a Protestant institutional network that depended on municipal welfare offices to bring destitute children from urban centers to the region. By 1914, municipalities had sent 1500 children to institutions in Poznania, to be placed in settler households as future domestic and farm workers. Most children, however, refused to stay in the region in the long run and returned to their hometowns. Municipalities also reconsidered their involvement following pressure from political rivals and the disclosure of abuses in the press. The article highlights the interplay of child welfare, municipal politics, and the social process of colonization, and contributes to the re-centering of the Polish territories in the history of the Prussian- German Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the texts by the contemporaryMoroccan intellectual, historian, and novelist Abdallah Laroui embody a critical form of subjectivity. It interprets this form of subjectivity as a practice of cultivating a situated universalist, self-reflexive attitude towards the making and unmaking of temporal relations. To do so, the essay focuses on Laroui's thinking with what he calls the antinomy of history – the never ceasing tension between discontinuity and incoherence on the one hand, and the production of continuity and coherence on the other. In conclusion, the essay positions Laroui's critical subjectivity against Eurocentric views of subjectivity, history, and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s and 1970s, political debates in East Central Europe and Western Europe were influenced by the idea of convergence between the capitalist and the socialist systems that dominated Europe. After 1989, the idea of convergence was replaced by ideas that revolved around the one-sided adaptation of “Europeanization" and “transformation". Despite the great political and economic success of the transformation process, the concept of an “ever closer European Union" has lost its attractiveness in East Central Europe. Drawing on current political and cultural debates in East Central Europe, the paper argues that it is the asymmetrical nature of the transformation and the process of Europeanization that is causing new divergences in Europe today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Jewish post-war testimonies of the Nazi persecution of German Jews in the 1930s. It argues that many of these testimonies were composed in light of the subsequent history of the Holocaust, and that expectations, disappointments, and questions arising from this subsequent history have beenwritten into the memories of the preceding period. Consequently, these testimonies often bear witness not only to the experiences of the time in question, but also to retrospective expectations of what those experiences should have been like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores the use of digital history for the systematic study of the periodical press in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean (1906 –1918) as a discursive field. It evaluates the methodological and practical challenges of digital history as rooted in the socio-technical infrastructures of the Global North when applied to the Global South. It does so using a case study of four Arabic journals from Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus. After outlining the need for building a corpus and the challenges presented by this effort, this article explores a digital corpus of a total of circa 2.65 million words through (social) network analysis and stylometric authorship attribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory essay presents a broad concept of digital history. Along with the themes covered in the individual articles, it surveys the major issues arising from the digitalization of the field of history. Digitalization has accelerated scholarly communication, publication, and networking. It has made many digital sources, tools, and technologies more easily accessible and has now generated born-digital materials. These changes present both new opportunities and challenges to historians, such as the uneven rates of digitized sources, the advancement of historical hermeneutics, and an increasing demand for digital resources in scholarship within reputation cultures where these remain undervalued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of recent discussions, this article asks how the broad process of digitization – and in particular the possibility of digital granular searching across vast corpora of primary sources and secondary literature – has transformed our research habits, the questions we are likely to ask, and the answers we are inclined to give. Specifically, it raises the question of whether digitization has been the unacknowledged driving force behind the rise of transnational and global history. It argues that technological changes and new digital tools have not disproportionately benefited global history. If anything, the relationship between digitization and global history has to be understood through the prism of their interplay with language and our discipline's growing Anglicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the experience of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) research project, "#ww1 – the centenary of the Great War on Twitter," to contemplate what it means to use born-digital and big data primary sources, both as a methodology and as a contribution to the field of memory studies and contemporary history more broadly. It discusses the notion of distant reading in order to show the interest of multiscale reading in the framework of big data. It also elaborates upon the use of reflexive thinking in terms of what we really study when using this kind of primary source materials (tweets and, more generally, feeds of borndigital sources), namely: temporalities and information circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors reflect on their experiences as the founding editors of the History of Knowledge blog. Situating the project in its specific institutional, geographical, and historiographical contexts, they highlight its role in scholarly communication and research alongside journals and books in a research domain that is still young, especially when viewed from an international perspective. At the same time, the authors discuss the blog's role as a tool for classifying and structuring a corpus of work as it grows over time and as new themes and connections emerge from the contributions of its many authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In World War II American intelligence proved to be a place where German-Jewish émigré intellectuals not only warred against Germany but also connected successfully to their American-born comrades. This paper is dealing with a post-war intellectual network contributing to the intellectual foundations of the New Left in the United States. The origins of this circle of intellectuals can be traced back to the wartime Office of Strategic Services. In the early Cold War period intellectual analysts of Nazi Germany continued their cooperation in academic settings, and with support from philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In this context their leftist political discourse and activism took shape. Their Cold War politics, however, was associated with their concept of intellectual history as well as with a "decontaminated" version of Weimar thought. A close reading of archival sources with regard to Herbert Marcuse will exemplify the main argument of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we analyze the (dis) integration of supranational orders and societies? Studying loyalty offers a research perspective that has the potential to address the societal sustainability of emotion, disposition, and agency. However, a sufficient theory of loyalty remains to be developed. The article discusses the analytical potential of the concept of loyalty in relation to other concepts like trust, fidelity, identity and solidarity. It provides a short introduction to historical research that has mainly focused on loyalty as a question of patriotism, citizenship, nationalism, and religion within nation states and empires. Drawing on questions of loyalty with in the European Union, the paper concludes by discussing the institutional aspects of loyalty in order to offer a better explanation of the conditions of societal and supranational coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses theoretical problems in historiography since the 1980s referring to the concept of nomadic epistemologies developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. By studying relations (instead of causalities), movements (instead of conditions), amalgamations, hybridizations, transitions, and transformations (instead of differences), nomadic epistemologies were able to open up new fields and capture new connections. But a new methodological problem arose: Where should the research start? What should be included and what should be excluded? Which actors are worth following? Which narrative fits with these new heuristics of relations and circulations? And most importantly: When is the research complete?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conceptualizes the history of the future in the twentieth century. The present future is always multi-faceted: produced by diverse actors, it concerns different aspects of the world, and is articulated in many ways. We suggest a divergence from the Koselleckian notion of a unified horizon of expectation. Rather than concentrating on the contents of visions of the future, we focus on the processes by which the future is generated. Distinguishing between futures of expectation, creation, risk, and conservation, we offer both a systematic account and a heuristic to analyze the pluralization of the future in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence offices emerged in European urban centers beginning in the seventeenth century. Most were privately run institutions and procured work, goods, real estate, and capital. They registered requests in protocol ledgers and sometimes published them in advertising papers. The registration procedures that intelligence offices imposed on job seekers contributed to surveillance and disciplinary power. The data stored by information offices were coveted by the authorities, and in some cases, the existence of intelligence offices inspired far-reaching fantasies of control that aimed to transform them into registration or credit information offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that surveillance is a core function of digital computers and a basic operative principle of digital societies. This is tested by exploring the history of operating systems and the development of digital policing. Both surveillance built into the computer and surveillance executed by the computer reveal the shift towards a relational operative mode and a flexible control regime. We propose to follow computers "in action" and to carefully observe society's confrontation with situations both complex and chaotic. This approach suggests that we must refrain from popular "Big Brother" narratives. Instead, we will look beyond the questions of surveillance and focus on the destabilization and reordering power of information technologies on both the translation processes involved in putting the world into computers and on the cultural forms linked to the genesis of digital surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article historicizes international discourses of family planning in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), established in 1952, was the site of negotiations about reproductive rights and control among its European, American and Indian member organizations. It also sheds light on the role of neo-Malthusian and eugenicist concepts. The article shows that the liberal cause for reproductive rights intersected with a political discourse emphasizing population control and explains why worldwide family planning was eventually conceived as a remedy for the supposed problem of “overpopulation” in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geological history of icebergs may initially seem separate from human beings; after all, for most of the existence of homo sapiens on the planet, most people had never seen an iceberg, let alone tasted one. Studying the history of iceberg consumption, however, reveals the extent to which human history has altered earth history, including the very fact that more icebergs are calved each year as anthropogenic activity warms the planet. In particular, this article investigates the history of iceberg consumption to reveal the ways in which spatiotemporal relationships have been condensed in the Anthropocene and explores the new challenges that result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a "third world" rose to prominence in international political discourse around 1960 and vanished around 1990. It designated a group of countries aligned with neither of the two other worlds. I argue in this article that the term needs to be situated in a larger history of the perception of global difference at least as old as the Enlightenment. The peculiar career of the concept of the "third world" is connected both to changes in the order of knowledge and, more specifically, to the history of economic thought, of which it is an effect. The paper thus focuses on the emergence of the term around 1960 and investigates the irrelevance of economics in late colonialism as opposed to the prominence of economic experts in the post-1945 world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the situation, dilemmas, and political activities of Arab exiles and students in Germany between 1933 and 1945. The author discusses the question of individual moral culpability, describes the pressures and exploitation experienced by Arabs in National Socialist Germany, and presents the consequences of their stay in Germany for their later lives, careers, and thinking. The Egyptian journalist and political activist, Husni al-Urabi, is mentioned, along with Arab students in Berlin.

Sexual violence created an utterly asymmetric constellation between the offender and the violated person, as well as between the accuser and the court. This paper differentiates and criticises this simple and static view. With a comparative perspective on European examples and based on court records of the communal state of Zurich, the paper discusses how to dealwith the conceptual and empirical problems arising in a historical analysis: How can we make pre-modern and modern sources relate to each other? How can we approach what “rape" and “abuse" meant for the contemporaries?What can we find out about the constellations between the accusers, the defendants and the court? How can we understand the sentences which seem extremely unjust to us today as being fair at that time? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will COVID-19 "kill populism" – by exposing its incapacity to govern, its inadequate rhetoric, its hostility towards scientific expertise, and its political short-termism? In order to address this question in the European context it is necessary to account for two broader contextual factors. Firstly, that Europe's recent crises – the European debt crisis of 2010 and the migration crisis of 2015 – overlap with the current crisis, both politically and economically. Secondly, that in Europe, populism in one country cannot be viewed as independent from populism in another. The article sets out to empirically map how (and why) populism has fared quite differently in different European countries and comes to a preliminary response to the "will it kill populism"- question: no, it will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the First World War, the dam architect Otto Intze flooded extensive valleys in western Germany's low mountain ranges in order to provide the neighboring Ruhr district with water and electricity. Intze's biography and his giant dams are wellrepresented in historical research.However, very little is known about the early phases of the dam-building boom before 1900. Taking a microhistorical approach, this article reconstructs the roots of one of the earliest dam projects: the Fuelbecke dam at Altena (1894 –1896). This construction was of comparatively small dimensions, served local purposes, and was instigated by a cooperative formed by small iron producers in the local upland region. I argue that local dam-building initiatives of this kind were decisive for the boom in Western German dam construction after 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of intellectual giftedness became a battlefield for controversies over social inequality in West Germany in the 1980s. Educational practitioners and politicians argued that strengthening special education opportunities for intellectually gifted children and teenagers might further entrench inequalities in income and education. Yet proponents and parents who suspected their child might be exceptionally talented or intelligent tended to interpret giftedness rather in terms of human difference. The issue of special education for intellectually gifted children was central to political struggles in which collective paradigms of inequalities could be challenged in the name of more individualized interpretations of difference. The ascription of specific abilities and inabilities played a formative role in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay studies the historical and conceptual meaning of nation branding as it has developed in Germany and other countries since the nineteenth century. It discusses the concept and mechanisms of nation branding and its relevance for historical research and analyzes its international dimension. It also shines light on themultitude of actors involved in nation branding, the visions that informed it, and the intentions behind it. "Brand Germany" had a history long before the Cold War that cannot and should not be analyzed in isolation. The domestic and international debates over how Germany as a brand should represent itself and what imagery it should use provide a representative example of the merger between cultural, political, and diplomatic history, as national identity became an issue of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the continuity of personal interlocks among German major companies from 1914 to 1938. Continuity in economic transactions together with concentration, cartelization and a corporative system is regarded as a main characteristic of the German production system. The paper analyses the continuity assumption concerning interlocks in a period of critical economic shifts and multiple changes of the political system. As a result, the extreme economic cuts after the First World War had lower impact on network change compared to the global economic crisis after 1929. Generally, the structure of the production system remained flexible. It was after 1933 when the National Socialists came into power that stability increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the topic of parliamentary debates in the aftermath of the dictatorship in Poland. Analysing the parliament's lustration debates as a case study, the paper demonstrates how the Polish model of coming to terms with the past had been influenced by the experiences of other European countries. This is achieved by employing the concept of “translation" and examining when that concept was put into practice by the Polish parliament. Thereby the following questions are discussed: What was drawn from the original foreign experience? What became lost in the process of translation and which factors determined this practice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary research, the history of Protestant mission societies is often studied as a constitutive element of political, social, and cultural developments within the broader frame of non-European and colonial history. Mission societies are viewed as translocal enterprises and analysed as multi levelled, interactive, and dialogical phenomena. The paper focuses on specific forms of mediation within the mission context in eighteenth century South India carried out by intermediaries (middlemen/interpreters/translators) who had developed the skills and knowledge required for these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]