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This article argues that the Hindenburg myth was an exceptionally potent--and historiographically under-appreciated--political narrative between 1914 and 1934. Crucially, it was as much a cultural as it was a political phenomenon and did not just occupy those engaged in German politics, but penetrated much broader sections of society in its myriad forms: there was a massive readership of Hindenburg books and special Hindenbury issues of the illustrated press, and also a receptive audience for Hindenburg films and the President's frequent speeches on the radio. Equally, consumers' purchase decisions were animated by the use of his iconic image in commercial advertising. Hindenburg's omnipresence in the modern mass media of film, radio and the illustrated press, and in a new advertising market, broadened his appeal considerably and led his myth to escape the strict political dividing lines characteristic of Weimar Germany. This points to common symbolic ground beyond traditional political fault-lines in the interwar period. The article also highlights Hindenburg's considerable involvement in promoting, managing and censoring his own myth from the top down. The portrayal of Hindenburg as an image-oblivious public figure thus has to be revised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War was marked by a series of violent reprisals against prisoners of war which have long been overlooked by historians. This article explores one such sequence of collective reprisals, instigated by the German army in spring 1917, when it opted deliberately to use British and French prisoners of war to carry out forced labour on starvation rations under shellfire in the German trenches. As this article shows, this German reprisal occurred in retaliation for the British and French armies' use of German prisoner labourers, in particular, the French army's appalling treatment of German prisoners forced to work on the Verdun battlefield. The German army's use of harsh prisoner reprisals on the Eastern Front in 1916 is also revealed here as the model for these 1917 reprisals. Ultimately, this article contends that the 1917 reprisal action was successful: reprisal prisoners were encouraged to write home about their predicament, leading to public pressure upon the British and French governments that forced them to agree to limit their use of German prisoner labour to a distance of thirty kilometres from the front in exchange for Germany ending the reprisals. This study contends that prisoner reprisals illustrate new forms of violence--and thus a process of escalation or totalization operating during the war, It also emphasizes, through a comparison of the British, French and German armies' use of prisoner labour, that such totalization was not inevitable or unlimited. Finally, it suggests that prisoner reprisals reveal wartime violence in a new light--as highly rational and discriminating, deliberately directed towards obtaining a particular goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers views concerning the recent writings on the German reformation between deconstruction and reconstruction. It relates that the coding of religious ardour in a post-Christian age has led to no visible lessening of interest in the reformation. Historian Andrew Pettegree contends that the potency of the reformation lay first in its power of destruction which could any positive identification with the new order.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses a fiercely contested transnational lieu de mémoire in twentieth-century Polish-German history: the Annaberg. Historiography has thus far largely neglected the role played by this 'holy mountain' of Upper Silesia, a symbol that has stood at the heart of a number of competing identity-forging narratives. The competition over the Annaberg as a site for multiple collective memories occurred on three distinct but often overlapping levels: first between nation-states, secondly between ideological camps, and thirdly between national- and local-level actors. Drawing on a substantial body of primary sources, this article contributes both to the scholarly investigation of a political myth that cast a long shadow over German-Polish relations and to the growing academic interest in transnational 'realms of memory'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, German naval and colonial agitation has been discussed as a late nineteenth-century development that signaled the cooption of many German liberals to a conservative policy of imperialism. This has been posited by many historians as antithetical to the true nature and objectives of political liberalism. Those few commentators that have noted the naval and colonial agitation of liberals during the early and mid-nineteenth century have argued that there was a period in which these imperialist pressures were subdued, when their end was heralded by the failure of the nationalist movements of 1848/49 to consolidate their nation-building project. Through an investigation of the Frankfurt National Assembly and the National Association of the 1860s it becomes apparent, however, that German liberal imperialism did not represent the distasteful invention of a somehow corrupted liberalism of the 1880s, nor did it cease to be a leitmotiv within liberal circles after 1849. Rather, German liberals, enamoured with the model of Britain as a global trading power and concerned with the economic repercussions of undirected emigration, had continuously argued for a German imperialist capacity throughout the nineteenth century as an integral part of any attempt to build a trading nation that could compete internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the proper place of women in German society was one of the most pressing issues of the time immediately after the Second World War. The sheer numerical disproportion of women to men in Germany, combined with the expanded public roles many women had adopted during wartime, meant that there was hardly a debate about postwar German society that was not in some way touched by this question. The expanded role and visibility of women in the immediate postwar era coincided with the unprecedented dominance of the radio, which had emerged from the war as the best preserved means of mass communication, information and cheap entertainment. This article shows the important role played by the radio, and in particular women's programmes, in helping to shape the role and visions of women in the developing West German society. Based on an analysis of the way women's programmes addressed the activity of women in society, it is argued that in the years of scarcity before the 1948 currency reform, women's time gained unprecedented value as a consumer ‘commodity’. In particular, the efforts of women's programmes to structure and discipline women's use of time contributed significantly to the discourse of women as consumer citizens that developed dominance in the social market economy of the Federal Republic. The image of the female time consumer was combined in women's programmes with essential notions of femininity to create new narratives of German national identity. Within the broader context of the debate on the role of women in society, radio programming of the immediate postwar years helped to embed certain discourses on femininity, consumption and Germanness that later developed in 1950s society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racism by studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold. First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statistical incidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide. Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates and circumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics, this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questions of social context and individual motives. It introduces hitherto neglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sources allow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individual suicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policies on German Jews. This article also takes up the question as to how far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considered a form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent they were an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed to be the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportations started in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany after November 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expected to go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less, as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new life elsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majority of German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair and the desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racial policies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturning of normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihood of suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibility of a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the concept of anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon. This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich both in their wider political and private implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Katholikentag in Essen in September 1968, conflicts about various issues of religious practice and church activities became visible in the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic. These conflicts, and the growing demand for participation in the preparation of the Würzburg synod of the West German dioceses (1971–1975), provided the context for the first large-scale application of opinion polling in the Catholic Church. In the spring of 1970, twenty-one million questionnaires were distributed to all German Catholics, accompanied by a survey based on a quota sample of interviewees. The discourse about the implementation of polling techniques in the church was structured along the lines of binary dichotomies. Whereas some theologians and grass-roots activists demanded the inclusion of taboo topics such as the abolition of celibacy, many bishops and a conservative current feared that the questionnaire would allow for new vistas and hence deliberately liberalize and dilute essential elements of Catholic doctrine. Another controversial topic was the possibility of responsiveness, that is the extent to which decisions of church bodies should react to public opinion as it was reflected in the polls. Not only grass-roots activists, but also the renowned theologian Karl Lehmann were sceptical that the poll could be used to manipulate public opinion about pastoral issues and to gloss over substantial problems. But there was also substantial concern about the possible use of the polls in a plebiscitarian manner, which would charge facts about the state of public opinion with normative power. In the context of the preparations of the Würzburg Synod, the polls worked as a technology of the public sphere. In the aftermath of Essen 1968, the politicization of conflicts brought the question of responsiveness to the forefront. It would be misleading, however, as this example makes clear, to equate the reflection of public opinion in the polls with a 'critical' public capable of exercising democratic oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Der gelbe Stern by Gerhard Schoenberner, a book of Holocaust photodocumentation appearing in West Germany in 1960, and analyses its reception in the contemporary West German press. Both the work and its public discussion are placed in context of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit ('coming to terms with the past') and of what historian Habbo Knoch has termed 'the return of the pictures', in other words, atrocity pictures of the kind that the Allies forced Germans to see right after the war, that Germans tended to shun thereafter, but that came back into public view in the late 1950s. The reception of Schoenberner's book included reviews from a wide range of West German newspapers and magazines. These reviews were overwhelmingly favourable and in considerable agreement on the book's importance. There was consensus that its pictures would stir viewers emotionally and lead them to 'the truth' about the Third Reich and its crime against the Jews. In addition, there were moral, historical and political reflections, including a discussion of German 'guilt' concerned not only with speci?c crimes but with the general acquiescence of German society in persecution of Jews in the 1930s. There was also appreciation of the role of pictures in conveying historical understanding and, it was hoped, in educating West German youth. In addition, some reviewers considered Der gelbe Stern to be a prod to greater public discussion and thus to an enlargement of democratic culture. There was a marked reticence in the reviews to indicate that awareness generated by this book would contribute to public outcry against the employment of men with a Nazi past as high officials of the Federal Republic, or to defend Schoenberner against the charge that was sure to come from the Right: since some of his photos were from Communist Eastern Europe they were of dubious origin and no doubt part of a plot to distract the West from the fight against Communism. It is suggested that silence on either issue would have had the effect of keeping readers focused on the pictures and their moral, historical and democratic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents questions and answers related to Old Reich and its significance for the evolution of modern Germany. Five historians were invited to comment on the state of the debate and its contemporary resonances. One asks if the unification of Germany strengthen or weaken the post-national perspective.

This essay, based on primary sources from the privately-run Internationale FKK-Bibliothek and a growing body of secondary literature, examines some of the myths and misconceptions regarding the fate of naturism in the Third Reich. It shows that despite Goering's decree of 3 March 1933, which described the 'naked culture movement' as 'one of the greatest dangers for German culture and morality', naturism did not come to an abrupt halt after the Machtergreifung. While official histories of German naturism talk proudly of the movement's 'persecution' and 'non-violent resistance', there was little concerted effort to close down naturist associations or to arrest individual activists. In fact, without a definitive order from the Führer, Germany's naturists existed in a semi-legal limbo for much of the 1930s. Many National Socialists regarded the clothes-free lifestyle with contempt, but there were elements within the Nazi state—and particularly the SS—which could see significant benefits from celebrating 'the instinct for bodily nobility and its beauty in our Volk'. A mutual desire to de-eroticize nudity helped cement the bond between Heydrich, Himmler and naturist leaders. As a result, German Freikörperkultur passed some of its most important landmarks in the years of Nazi rule, including its very first book with photographs in full colour, a full-length feature film, and a new, more permissive Bathing Law. Thus while George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality claims the Nazis 'forbade nudism after their accession to power', a closer examination of the fate of naturism after 1933 reveals a more complex picture, which serves to highlight not only the limits of the régime's totalitarian aspirations, but also the naturist movement's own disparate and problematic heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the Empire demand for labour in the countryside and penal reform together created the conditions for a greater deployment of prisoners, workhouse inmates and young offenders in agriculture. Farming on site, and especially leasing offenders, were the most cost-efficient ways of detaining men. Agricultural work was also regarded as key to their rehabilitation. It served to equip inmates upon release for the sector of the economy most in need of workers. 'Outside work' away from the institution was also seen as an intermediate stage in the prisoner's sentence before release. Two developments in the charitable sector complemented this correctional strategy: the emergence of a network of workers' farming colonies which acted as half-way houses for ex-prisoners after release, and ex-offender employment programmes run by prisoner welfare societies, channelling ex-offenders towards agricultural employment. Despite these efforts to reintegrate offenders, re-offending rates remained high. Penal authorities either attributed this to the incorrigibility of some inmates, or pushed for longer sentences. In some cases penal and medical authorities were inclined to re-interpret the criminal behaviour of repeat offenders as behaviour symptomatic of mental illness, and some inmates were transferred to asylums. In the discourse surrounding the failure of reform the argument that the exclusionary and punitive nature of the prison and workhouse régime actually worked against rehabilitation held little sway, nor the argument that high re-offending rates could be attributed to the vagrancy and begging laws which criminalized systemic poverty and homelessness. Absent here was any understanding that the life offered following release, working as ancillary workers or hands on the estates, bore too striking a resemblance to work in agriculture during detention. This in itself was one major reason why many ex-offenders directed into agricultural employment after release refused to stay and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of jurisdictional superiority in the territorial states of early modern Europe specifically in Germany. In replacing of a more formal and uniform judicial process setup was accomplished by establishing a supreme court for the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire, the Reichskammergericht (RKG). But the formation of this court marked both the culminating achievement of the Imperial era reform and the setting out of a new period of jurisdictional order in the Empire. The RKG as an applied Roman Law had imposed a uniform penal code throughout the Empire. And the first foundation of the court did not represent the triumph of a certain constitutional form but it was a small result of pragmatic agreement between the Empire and the territorial princes.

The article investigates the interpretation of Hans-Ulrich Wehler in the domestic history of Germany which is referred now as Sonderweg. The author stresses that the Sonderweg was an attempt to cover and decreased the book of Alan Kramer and John Horne into a stagnant issue. Since Kramer and Horne agree with the rebuttal of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley on a specific debate. The author perceived a different view of Sonderweg that it directs to the inner drives forcing the modern history of Germany to a point distinctly incompatible from the West part. By discovering and distinguishing these drives that created a large variety of the interpretation of Sonderweg, have also furnished a reminder that the German problem had searched for a solution.

This article uses the history of sharpshooting (Schützenwesen) in Göttingen to explain the integration of National Socialist ideas into daily life in interwar Germany. As both a public and private cultural practice, sharpshooting makes especially clear the political implications of everyday activities. In the 1920s sharpshooting leaders in Göttingen expanded the scope of participation and activities by encouraging more men to take part in competitions, both as members of clubs and as individuals, with the ultimate goal of making every man in town a 'shooter'. Even as they welcomed men from all political and social backgrounds, leaders and supporters solidified a definition of participation based on gender and race rather than democratic equality. This conservative expansion and the discourses surrounding it strengthened the position of middle-class men who had traditionally dominated sharpshooting. It also enabled the Third Reich to make use of sharpshooting to promote its ideology and military preparedness. At the same time, the 'coordination' (Gleichschaltung) of sharpshooting required Nazi leaders in Göttingen to negotiate, not dictate, their role in these activities. By studying these developments over the entire interwar period, this analysis demonstrates the centrality of local conditions and individuals to the gradual integration of ideas that ultimately lent support to Hitler's régime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the history of the Nazi Party's office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Heß, which after Heß's flight on 10 May 1941 was renamed the Party Chancellery and led by Martin Bormann. It evaluates the structures and functions of this important party office which had the exclusive right to control government legislation. The Deputy Führer's staff was established before 1935/36. It consisted of several offices which influenced nearly all processes of legislation and tried to introduce Nazi ideology into all sectors of German society. This was done by corresponding intensively with ministerial bureaucracy. Although the staff of the Deputy Führer and of the Party Chancellery acted in a very bureaucratic manner, the article argues that Max Weber's concept of 'bureaucratic rule' is not appropriate for analysing the radicalization of the Nazi régime throughout the Second World War because this Weberian ideal type tends to neglect social practices. The same is true for Weber's concept of 'charismatic rule' which only offers fruitful insights into the social relations between Hitler and his followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the responses of the panelists in the round table discussion on the changing perceptions, understandings and remembrances of 1945 in Germany. Assertion of Doris Bergen of the year's loss of importance since the unification of east and West Germany in 1990; Statement from Dorothee Wierling on the success of 1945 in terms of the level of diplomatic peace-making; Conduction of research on the ways in which West Germans constructed political identities after World War II, by Robert Moeller.

The article focuses on the problem of national solidarity in interwar Germany. Many historians see german nationalism as a crucial factor in the rise and establishment of National Socialism. The article focuses on German nationalism between 1918 and 1939, which was not only hugely influential, but also marked by internal tensions and conflicts. There is certainly plentiful evidence that the call for a Volksgemeinschaft or national community, generated a considerable degree of unity and cohesion--especially among the Protestant middle classes, who were motivated by it in their increasingly confident and aggressive confrontation with the labour movement from the mid-1920s onwards and who prepared the ground for National Socialism.

At the start of the seventeenth century composers such as Michael Praetorius, Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz saw much of their music into print; at the end of the century, however, musicians such as Johann Kuhnau or Nikolaus Adam Strungk entered print comparatively little, if at all. This article uses the decline in music printing as a way to understand the changing role of music and musicians in society. At the start of the century, the intensity of music printing testified to the Lutheran market for music, but also to the efforts of composers to promote and present themselves in print. After the Thirty Years' War, however, the market for printed music collapsed, as many courts and cities began to expect virtuoso performances and a constant supply of new compositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi Doctors' Trial in 1946 and 1947 sparked significant debate about medical research ethics and the origins of the Nuremberg Code, historians have so far paid little, if any, attention to Allied war crimes policy on the investigation of German medical atrocities, of which the Ravensbrück trials formed part. British war crimes policy, in particular, was concerned with medical war crimes committed by German scientists at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Much of the evidence against some key defendants at the Doctors' Trial was compiled by British experts and made available to the US prosecution. Although the British investigated this group, some of the defendants were later extradited and tried with the Nuremberg doctors. To date, little has been written about the broader political and legal context of the first Ravensbrück trial, its origin, and overall place in the context of Allied denazification policy. The article investigates the genesis of the Ravensbr¨ck trial and the extensive investigations and discussions that preceded its opening. It looks at how members of the German public perceived the Ravensbrück trial, and contextualizes the British response to criticism levelled against it at the dawn of the Cold War. It aims, in part, to reconstruct the wider historical context of postwar British policy on medical war crimes, and suggests that British war crimes investigations conducted in preparation for the Ravensbrück trials formed one of the most substantial bodies of legal testimony and scientific expertise on human rights violations in experimental human research before the establishment of the Nazi Doctors' Trial. The article also acknowledges Britain's contribution to the war crimes programme, and emphasises that the memory of the first Ravensbrück trial has largely been overshadowed by the publicity surrounding the Nuremberg trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the prosecution of former Generalleutnant Theodor Tolsdor. before the Landgericht Traunstein on three separate occasions (June 1954, September 1958 and May/June 1960) as a means of examining both press and judicial attitudes towards the Wehrmacht in the Federal Republic from 1954 to 1960. What is most surprising about the case is that, while the press reactions to the first hearing in June 1954 were uniformly critical of the guilty verdict, the first retrial in September 1958 provoked attacks on the accused in newspapers, and the abandonment of the case under the provisions of the Amnesty Law provoked intense criticism of the court. The reasons for the differing reactions in June 1954 and September 1958 are not only to be sought in the fact that the 1958 verdict came shortly after the close of the Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozeß, but rather in the upsurge in anti-militarism which occurred between September 1954 and February 1955 and the effects on public opinion of the 1957 Schörner trial in Munich. When examined against the background of the 1957 Schörner trial and the 1959 Manteuffel trial, the Tolsdor. case indicates not only that attitudes towards the Wehrmacht became much more critical during the second half of the 1950s, but also that these three ‘generals' trials’ were part of a broader pattern of proceedings for ‘crimes of the final period’ which played an important psychological part in paving the way for a more honest confrontation with the mass murder committed during the Third Reich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Joint Polish—German Commission for the Revision of School Textbooks was set up in 1972, bringing together historians from Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany in view of reopening a scholarly dialogue after decades of almost complete noncommunication. Until the late 1980s, the commission played a prominent role as a forum for cross-national discussions on Polish-German Beziehungsgeschichte, and most of the leading Polish experts in German history participated in its proceedings. For the development of Polish historiography on Germany the work of the commission seems to have been relevant in at least two respects. The commission's regular conferences on controversial or methodologically complex issues of Polish-German Beziehungsgeschichte contributed, on the one hand, to defining a new agenda for Polish historiography on Germany. The interest in explicitly comparative approaches to German and Polish history increased, and the focus shifted from specifically 'Polish interests' in German history to more general issues. On the other hand, these conferences provided Polish historians with the opportunity to make their research more visible to German historians (even outside the field of specialised East Europeanists)—a fact that encouraged Polish historiography on Germany to pursue more ambitious tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This esssay examines fifty-six violent confrontations between civilians and state authorities in the Prussian Rhineland, assessing the degree to which this violence can be understood as social or political protest. Ranging from simple fist fights to mêlées involving weapons, these fights cut across several socio-economic, political, and religious fronts and therefore cannot be identified as a fixed category of contentious behaviour. Yet a general anti-statist disposition does unite most of these actions. They manifest a changing popular culture, registering opposition to state intrusion and the attempt of popular classes to link grievances to broader political impulses. At issue is the question of how local life became bound up in the political frameworks of post-revolutionary Europe. In spite of formal political exclusion, common social groups acquired a political mindset of Parteilichkeit and exercised political agency in ways that affected politics at regional and national levels. Such processes of politicization should be part of an interpretive framework of civil society that can simultaneously examine popular and bourgeois political cultures and thus pose sharper questions for understanding how they mutually changed one another in the first half of the nineteenth century. Literature on social protest, civil society, Alltagsgeschichte, and the public sphere form the essay's historiographical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the evolution of American and Soviet arts policy in Berlin between 1945 and 1947, with special attention to the role of music. Music's political ambiguity, and its reception as at once a uniquely German and international form of artistic expression, made it an ideal medium through which Allied military officials could project their country's aesthetic ideals and programmes for German cultural reform. If Berliners and their Soviet occupiers largely agreed upon the importance of élite musical tradition as an expression of national accomplishment and the mark of a cultured society, American authorities tended to treat music more as an entertaining, but non-essential diversion. Under the city's quadripartite military administration, it was difficult for any one occupation authority to pursue cultural objectives that were aesthetically or politically more restrictive than the others. Thus, superpower rivalry initially created more opportunities than limitations for Berlin artists. American officers were compelled to consent to more lenient denazification standards for musicians than they had initially intended, while the Soviets permitted and even encouraged modernist musical experiments in their sector of occupation. In competition with each other and seeking the loyalties of their German charges, the Allies encouraged Berlin to become a lively—and heavily subsidized—city of the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade or so, long-standing arguments about the absence or failures of German liberalism during the Wilhelmine period have given way to a new emphasis on its surprising strengths and even revival after 1900. Inspired by this historiographical shift, this essay explores the hegemony and the dynamics of National Liberalism—especially its movement from a paternalist to a reform liberalism—in response to the two most important moments of labour militancy in the Saar during this period: the miners' strikes from 1889 to 1893 and the Burbach steel strike of 1906. As workers attempted to build their own organizations and sought access to the arenas of political debate, and Centre politicians and Social Democrats threatened to win working-class votes, Saar liberals increasingly embraced a programme of social reform and a more popular style of political mobilization. Yet this essay argues that the key to the pre-war success of Saar liberals lay not in the intrinsic appeal of their civic and political ideals but rather in their capacity narrowly to define the terms of proper political activity and to fix the boundaries of permissible speech in the public sphere. Drawing on recent debates over the work of Jürgen Habermas, therefore, this essay locates the strength of Saar liberalism in its ability to secure the class-based and gendered exclusions intrinsic to the institutions and discursive strategies of bourgeois Öffentlichkeit and thereby to prevent the emergence of alternative, popular-democratic forms of working-class politics in the pre-war Saar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1870s, the German colonial movement belonged wholly to the bourgeoisie, a tendency reinforced by consistent Social Democratic hostility. However, this did not necessarily exclude the lower classes from enthusiasm or fascination for empire. For most of the workingand lower-middle-class public, the transmission of colonial knowledge occurred outside of the colonial movement, through the media of a new mass culture that developed simultaneously with the so-called new imperialism. By 1914, the formation of print-capitalism and the mass circulation of texts had introduced the colonial empire to millions of new readers of serialized fiction, penny dreadfuls, and illustrated magazines. This essay examines the place of colonial literature—novels, travelogues, missionary tracts, histories, geography, and ethnography—in the reading culture of working-class Leipzig from 1890 to 1914. The first half traces the dissemination of colonial literature through colportage and both public and socialist libraries, and documents a substantial working-class readership for books about the overseas empire. The second half addresses the problem of reception, asking how workers read colonial literature. Because almost no record of their responses survives, the essay reconstructs the contextual framework for reading, with emphasis on politics and ideology, escapism and pleasure, and popular science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the extraordinary domestic pressures exerted upon the foreign policies of the Prussian and Austrian governments during the 1848 revolutions in the German Confederation and their aftermath. Examines whether the foreign policies of the Great Powers in and outside of Germany were more determined by domestic forces.

This article uses the search for the 'missing' Wehrmacht soldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore the ways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into our understanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society. In seeking to point out the connections between the ways in which 'ordinary Germans' suffered during and after the war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war West German society to 'confront' the crimes of the past on the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of war has to be considered alongside the ideological and political necessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are to understand why West German society failed to place the Holocaust at the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-war years. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a key site of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues for the integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalities and discourses into an understanding of the evolution of the commemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto been shaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Into the 1930s, the Jewish population in Germany used the term Enlightenment (Aufklärung) emphatically to formulate its self-image. At the end of the twentieth century scarcely anything remained of the once emotional semantics. The most recent literature on relations between Jews and the Enlightenment elaborates the hostility of the German Enlightenment towards Jews with philological acuity. The essay examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and Jewry and Jewish experiences in the eighteenth century from a comparative perspective. The Berlin Enlightenment is compared with its Florentine counterpart. This comparison shows that intellectuals in the Prussian capital were far more open and unbiased towards Jews than their Tuscan counterparts. While in Berlin Jews were admitted to the academies and convivial societies, this was largely denied them in Tuscany. Despite the altered climate at the end of the Enlightenment period, the article emphasizes that, if there was ever a period in German-Jewish history that may be deemed balanced, then it was the age of Enlightenment. The comparison between Prussia and Tuscany can thus help us to understand how the Enlightenment could become such an emphatic and emotional point of orientation for German Jews in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the debate concerning the crisis of the book and German society after the First World War. Discrepancy between the perception of the state of the book; Characteristics of the culture of the book in the period after the First World War; Importance of the book as the basic element in the life of German society and culture.

Reports on the limits of the power of the Elector of Palatinate, Germany. Relations with Bavaria, Germany; Counter-Reformation, or return to the Catholic faith; Rulers in the 18th century; Reception of Enlightenment; Treatment of people belonging to other religions.

Suggests a different context for the appeal of conservativism and nationalism to women in Germany, between 1914 and 1920. Potentials of women political activism; Conservative and right-wing men's attitudes toward nationalist women; Political mobilization of women in right-wing circles.

Scrutinizes the presence of the German Central Conference Office within the context of the national socialism. Management of international contracts of all kinds; Tension between competing areas of authority; Performance of plunder in occupied territories.

Focuses on the existence and development of the German Farmer's Association (DBB). Dominance of the Agrarian League over DBB; Factors influencing the support of settlers to the Agrarian League; Impact of infrastructure projects on local politics.

Focuses on the characteristic of Friedrich II, the last Hohenstaufen Emperor in Germany. Confusion existing between Friedrich and other member of the royal line; Creation of the Kyffhauser Monument; Analysis on the myth of Antichrist and Friedrich; Impact of the disappearance of Friedrich from the stage of history on contemporary chroniclers.

Focuses on the crimes committed by Ilse Koch, wife of the first commandant Karl Otto Koch of Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Association of Ilse with the fetishization of human skins; Allegation on the instigation of acts of violence in the camp; Accounts of violence from the witnesses; Details of the trial.

Presents highlights of the conference on slave laborers in Nazi Germany held at the Institute for Social Movements. Improvement of the processing of compensation application of slaves; Clarification on political, historical, economic, archival and moral issues in academic and public debate; Significance of the conference on political party and professional divisions.

Focuses on the regime of consumer culture in Germany as part of the German history subject. Factors contributing to the transformation of mass consumption; Increase in scholarship focus on mass consumer society; Importance of the scholarship recognition of consumption in the economic and fiscal policy of the Germany Democratic Republic.

Examines the political rule of King Kaiser Wilhelm II from 1890 to 1918 in Germany. Relationship with the Hessian Grand Ducal House; Disagreements between Wilhelm and the Grand Duke of Hessen on domestic politics; Alliance between Germany and Russia through dynastic diplomacy.

Analyzes the social history of antisemitism sentiment in Germany in 1870 to 1914. Information the socioeconomic interpretation of the sentiment; Presentation of ideology by antisemites; Translation of ideological demands into practice.

Focuses on Ewald Ammende, politician of Germany. Involvement of the politician in the Organization of National Minorities; Career highlights; Impact of the death of Ammende on nationalism

Examines the Catholic discourse on democratization, the Jews and the Nazi in Munich, Germany from 1945 to 1965. Possibility of causal nexus between the espousal of liberal democratic values; Alteration in Catholic perceptions of the 'Jewish Question'; Scope of the use of language after 1945.

Focuses on the art exhibitions and collections in Germany. Factors affecting exhibitions and construction and reconstruction of public collections; Trends related to art; Information on art exhibitions Romantic Spirit, Deutschlanbilder, Aufstieg und Fall and Kingdom of the Soul.

Reexamines the military violence and atrocities in the Thirty Years War in Germany. Demographic effects of the war; Undisciplined behaviors of the soldiers; Reputation of the mercenaries during the war; Evaluation on the laws of war.

Focuses on the history of female culture in terms of salon scholarship in Berlin, Germany from 18th to 19th century. Nature of sociability in the salons; Restrictive criterion for salon scholarship; Reason for the decline of salons.

Focuses on the integration problems of refugees with the German government from 1945 to 1955. Socioeconomic conditions of the refugees in the early post-war; Role of the Trek Association in the refugee resettlement program; Accommodation of refugees in the countryside.

Focuses on the Niederwald national monument in Germany. Emphasis on the contribution of monuments and national symbols to the invention of tradition and construction of a nation in modern Europe; Need for symbols of national identity; Interpretations on the role of monuments.