Search

Following the 1918 collapse of the two major empires that ruled central Europe, Austria-Hungary and Germany, successor states inherited billions of increasingly depreciating paper monies. The conversion of imperial currencies posed enormous difficulties for successor states and exposed the limits of an emerging international order that rendered the pan-European predicament of defunct imperial currencies the problem of individual states. This article compares the first, and one of the last, conversions of imperial currencies, taking monetary transitions in Alsace-Lorraine (1918) and Transylvania (1920) as case studies. Although historians usually treat western and east-central European history separately, the conversion of imperial currencies produced similar outcomes in both the former Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania. Differences emerge where one would not expect them: the phasing out of the paper mark was coupled with systematic ethnic discrimination against Germans in Alsace and Lorraine, while in Transylvania, some ethnic minorities even managed to benefit from the process.

In recent years, a growing literature on nationalism has highlighted cultural and gender topics. At the same time, religion, most prominently Catholicism, has attracted the intellectual energy of more and more scholars. To date, however, the relationship between nationalism and religion has been undervalued. Helmut Walser Smith's study German Nationalism and Religious Conflict was one of the first to relate religious conflict to the character of German nationalism. Michael B. Gross now analyzes the relationship between German liberalism and religion.

Gregory Mann. Native Son: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 334. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims. The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 202 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth. In 2004, a multimedia exhibition opened in Toulon celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the soudi of France by the "Free French." In fact, the vast majority of these troops were the men of the Tirailleurs Senegalais from French West and Equatorial Africa, together with contingents from French North Africa, French Indo-China (and General Patch's American Seventh Army). Yet despite the major role they played in the liberation of France, African soldiers had not been permitted to march in either the Bastille Day parades or the celebrations marking the liberation of Paris-thus perpetuating the de Gaulle myth that France was liberated by the "French" French (with a little help from the Americans and the British). That the forgotten colonial soldiers were to be unexpectedly commemorated in Toulon sixty years later was a result of the challenge of the National Front in Le Pen's stronghold in France's own Deep South. Uncompromisingly entitled "Nos Liberateurs," the exhibition was a poignant opportunity to remind the liberated of what they owed to those who had arrived from the colonies to free them. Having apparently slipped off the pages of French history once France shed its empire, the Tirailleurs Senegalais finally achieved the recognition they deserved for the vital part they played in overthrowing the racist German state. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, when I began my doctoral research, very little had been published on the Tirailleurs-and virtually nothing by African authors. Historians of modern Africa tended to emphasize resistance to colonialism; by implication, this registered disapproval of those who collaborated with colonial power-and, of course, the men that actually carried out the colonial conquest of Africa. If, as it is often claimed, history is tainted by being written by the victors, then what happened to the African soldier? Twenty years on, all this has changed. New books on the soldiers of Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia have appeared in the last two years alone; there is also a burgeoning comparable literature, refreshingly no longer restricted to the memoirs of retired British officers and colonial civil servants, on the soldiers of Anglophone Africa. Does all this mean the field is getting too crowded? Clearly not, for the two additions to the corpus here under review both (in different ways) make important contributions to our knowledge of the Tirailleurs Senegalais. Gregory Mann's Native Sons clearly commenced with a strong focus on Mali, but inexorably became concerned with a full sweep of the tirailleur [African colonial soldier] experience-although he does not explore in any detail the tirailleur in combat. Raffael Scheck's Hitlers African Victims, by contrast, focuses mercilessly on the matter of German inhumanity, notably toward captured African soldiers in that brief period during the collapse of the French army in June 1940; but what Scheck forfeits in scope, he makes up in intensity. Native Sons takes the reader seamlessly from recruitment to retirement and thence from the politics of pensions to the politics of the French connection. The reader will readily recognize Mann's determination to describe the situation in starkly realistic terms, without making concessions to any preference for palatability rather than accuracy. Mann reminds us early in the work that "like many of its neighbors, contemporary Mali is as much a post-slavery society as a post-colonial one"; the relationship between the Malian soldier and slavery is a prominent theme throughout the book, for many of Mali's former soldiers were drawn from the lower strata of society. …

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe . By Douglas H. Shantz . Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press , 2013. xviii + 497 pp. $70.00 cloth; $35.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesPietism, Douglas Shantz concludes, originated as a seventeenth-century urban phenomenon that owed its capacity to generate a host of activities within German Protestantism to a "new paradigm." Ranging from intensely personal "conversions" or "re-births" that followed hard (for some) on the heels of a harrowing struggle for repentance, the movement's members produced conventicles of the like-minded whose communal focus flowed from a determination to be Biblically literate, sober in behavior, and watchful for the "end times." Imminent advent helped spur hopes for internal European renewal of education, orphanages, and poor relief but spread to ambitious international missions intent on converting both Jews and non-Christians (7). Given the utopian aspirations, students will hardly wonder at the difficulty scholars have faced in defining pietism, as well as the inevitable disappointment that dogged it.In four sections, Schantz introduces readers to the movement and how it has been treated (and ignored) especially in the Anglophone world. Explaining the urban Holy Roman Empire context that produced the first renewal cells, he provides a selective social and cultural analysis of the movement's Central European impact and how it found expression in North America, South India, and Labrador. Finally, the book assesses the movement and "modernity."Schantz announces forthrightly: "German Pietism represents a key, but forgotten, strand of the religious DNA of North American Christianity" (1). By stitching together different definitions and analyses of the movement by the German and Dutch scholars Johannes Wallmann, Hartmut Lehmann, Fred van Lieburg, and Martin Gierl, Schantz skillfully integrates older historiography with newer research trends that include both theological and socio-cultural analyses of what "pietism" may have meant and how long it endured, if at all. No other comprehensive survey of German Pietism in English has emerged since the work of the transplanted Wurttemberger F. Ernest Stoeffler in the 1960s. Schantz's narrative provides the most accessible summary of the movement's many facets and his own assessment.Schantz offers an homage to the posthumously published judgment of the late Carl Hinrichs, that with church music, "Pietism" was one of "the two great creations of German Protestantism" (Preusentum und Pietismus: Der Pietismus in Brandenburg-Preusen als religios-soziale Reformbewegung [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1971], 17). The author seems to share Hinrichs's perspective, especially given the book's title about "modern" Europe. Schantz acknowledges pietism's failures and shortcomings but reaffirms the "new paradigm that was marked by the experience of renewal and new birth, conventicle gathering for mutual encouragement, successful mission to the world, and the millennial reign of Christ on earth" (279). These characteristics have remained the identifying markers of Anglophone Evangelicalism down to the present. …

Gerard Gayot (1941–2009) was a French historian who embodied the best of the tradition of the Annales School, while also giving it a new turn. Along with his colleague Jean-Pierre Hirsch, also active in the University of Lille, he put enormous energy and enthusiasm into bridging many gaps—between early modern and modern history, as his questions on industrialization and the birth of capitalism spanned the whole 1700–1900 period; between the history of fi rms, of workers, of capitalists, and that of social movements, technologies and gestures, and cultural attitudes; and between French, Belgian, German, Italian, and other literatures, especially as the editor, with Giovanni Luigi Fontana, of the monumental volume Wool: Products and Markets (13th–20th Century) (2004). His premature death hit the discipline hard. Hence, this edited volume gathers papers by his former doctoral students and other colleagues for whom he opened new avenues of research (...).

This paper looks at the reasons why a UK life insurance company would wish to consider expanding into an overseas market, the factors it ought to bear in mind when deciding upon which country or countries to enter and the entry routes open to a company wishing to expand overseas.By way of examples of overseas life insurance markets, the paper provides a detailed description of the German and Indian life insurance markets.

In the last year John B. Bellinger, III, Chief Legal Adviser to the United States Department of State, has been engaging in a dialogue with politicians and legal scholars in European countries. These speeches and public appearances, like the remarks delivered at the London School of Economics in 2006 and republished in this issue of the German Law Journal, were meant to address the misimpressions, as Mr. Bellinger sees it, that have become prevalent in Europe over the last few years with respect to the US positions on questions of the legal basis and legal limits of the “war on terror” and the treatment of detained terrorists.

Dagmar Herzog opens her introduction to Sexuality and German Fascism with a simple question: “What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics?” The essays printed here offer a thought-provoking and sometimes surprising set of approaches to that question. Like most recent research in the history of sexuality, they focus on “deviant” sexualities—homosexual, commercial, interracial, public—and its policing. They are, however, informed also by an awareness of the productive and positive, as well as the prohibitive and repressive functions of the societal regulation of sex.

This book comprises papers presented at the first Anglo-German Law Conference organised by the Oxford Law Faculty in autumn 1999. Written by specialists, including members of leading English and German Law firms, the text provides a richly textured insight into the nature and operation of joint ventures underpinned by an informed commentary as to the distinctive considerations brought to bear under two highly developed systems of law.