Search

In this paper I investigate the resonance of the volumeThe Empire Strikes Backwithin the debates on racism in Germany since the late 1970s. I am interested in this long-term intellectual exchange in light of the current need to conceptualize racism in a European framework and thereby reflect upon the characteristics, concepts and possibilities of such a framework. I begin by situating the debate at that time within the context of the New Left. What connected both situations, in Germany and the UK, was an inscription of the then-ongoing anti-colonial and decolonial struggles of the South in the North, not least through the ‘retaliatory effect’ of migration movements and struggles of migration arriving in Europe. I argue that the understandings of racism and anti-racism are grounded in a materialist framework and that the concept of articulation helped and continues to help thinking the complexity and heterogeneity of the social. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the thesis that popular music in early twentieth-century Germany was Americanised by shifting the focus from the meaning and reception of music to the way it was produced and disseminated by professionals, from music publishers and composers to bandleaders and critics. Firstly, it stresses a key difference in the way the music business was modernised on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900. While in the US the sheet-music trade became ‘Taylorised’, the music business in Germany, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, was transformed into a rights industry. Secondly, the paper highlights the prominence of Austrian music producers and their repertoire in Germany and suggests that, at least in a business sense, popular music in Germany was Austrianised rather than Americanised. Thirdly, it proposes that ‘Jazz’ after the First World War was hardly a straightforward import of American culture, but a site where incumbents and newcomers to the music profession struggled for position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enjoying a surge of national pride, the German media celebrated the 2010 German World Cup team's success in South Africa. A dominant theme in this coverage was the 'immigration background' of 11 of the 23 players on the team and their claim to German identity despite their ethnic diversity. Amid debate over the changing nature of German citizenship, the national team's 'multicultural kickers' became the focal point for those who wished to reframe German identity. This article examines German newspaper and magazine coverage of the national soccer team emphasizing the role that media played in constructing competing definitions of the German citizen and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1924 the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a volume investigating the teaching of school history in former belligerent states in Europe. The project sought to reconcile former enemies through mutual understanding and educational exchange and reflected a widely held belief that although the military conflict had finished, its ideas still resounded and served to perpetuate antagonism. The CEIP project, conceived in the internationalist spirit, was itself derailed by nationalist enmity, a consequence of the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, demonstrating the limits of cultural reconciliation in the early 1920s, and the resultant volume showed that belligerent views of recent history were still being taught to schoolchildren in France and Germany in the early 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a small number of Uyghur communities had begun to settle in Germany already in the 1950s and 1960s, since the 1990s they have chosen Munich as their center of national and political activism in Europe and worldwide. By that time the Chinese had begun to apply pressure on the German government to restrict Uyghur activities and to monitor and intimidate them and their German supporters, also by using spies and collaborators. As a democratic country Germany rejected the Chinese demands, although refusing to admit former Uyghur Guantanamo inmates. Despite occasional tension, Sino–German relations have not been affected by the presence of Uyghurs, some of them labeled as ‘terrorists’ by Beijing. My conclusion is that the Uyghur ‘threat’ has been deliberately inflated by China as a tool in its relations with other governments and that economic relations and technology import are far too important to spoil by persecuting Uyghurs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The wide institutionalisation and politicisation of sport and physical education in Europe during the interwar period was supported by the provision of adapted places for the masses to practise physical activities. This article shows the evolution of the measures taken to provide citizens with places and facilities to ‘keep fit’ in Italy, Germany and Britain. Based on original sources, it traces the emergence of the social needs for recreation and sports grounds and the measures taken to meet these needs. It also illustrates the debate about physical activity as a means to organise society and shows how sports and recreation places were integrated into the national landscapes of these three countries. More generally, the comparison provides insight into the reciprocal influences of the governments' national policies during a particularly tumultuous period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the First World War, youth groups all over Europe went through a period of radicalisation that would later make them an important part of the international communist movement during the interwar years. This article describes the development of the socialist youth movements in Germany and Italy, comparing their organisation, practices and their relations to both the adult labour movement and the state. Though the two groups existed within very different political contexts, the article shows how they both allied themselves with the extreme left of the movement. Also, this radicalism was in both countries explicitly connected to the concept of youth as the vanguard of the revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is time to re-open the question of the early post-war division of Europe as a problem. In order to move beyond bipolarity and give a fuller representation of the tentative and open character of the immediate post-war years it is furthermore pertinent to include a broader array of actors. By highlighting the aspirations of Internationale Gruppe Demokratischer Sozialisten, a transnational network of social-democratic refugees from Germany and German-occupied countries in Sweden during the war and some of their endeavours after the war the articles explores the relative merits of realist and liberal readings of the outcomes. It is argued that historiography so far has underestimated the nationalistic, anti-German position of French and British socialists at the end of the war, and its wider implications as well as the importance of internal domestic dissensions within the UK and US administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with various concepts of space-time constellations related to the countries around the Baltic Sea, in German and Finnish historiography known as 'Northeastern Europe'. Rooted in German national and historical thinking of the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of 'Northeastern Europe' first emerged in the framework of German spatial perceptions of the southern borderlands of the Baltic Sea. This area was perceived as being dominated by the Germans in terms of culture, politics and economy. After the Second World War, such perceptions ceased to be politically correct and vanished from the agenda of policy makers and historical thinkers. In the 1970s, the German historian Klaus Zernack revitalised the subject, i.e. historical research on the Baltic Sea area, but not the earlier concept. In fact, the Baltic Sea area as a whole became a topic of historical thinking within the framework of Zernack's concept of the spatial divisions in the overall history of Eastern Europe. 'Northeastern Europe' now appeared as a synonym for the Baltic Sea area in general, including Russia and Poland as decisive historical factors. In the late 1980s, historical research on the Baltic Sea area became a topic of research also in Great Britain and the Nordic countries. Opening up politically after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Baltic Sea area became a favourite object of research even in Poland and the Baltic states. Since then, whether there is something like 'Northeastern Europe' at all is a much debated question. But despite related concepts and notions the contents of 'Northeastern Europe' seem to become more and more congruent with the Baltic Sea area either as such or as a definite part of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]