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This essay explores how both German and international educators mobilised history curricula to reshape German collective identity between 1945 and 1950, focusing particular attention on depictions of the deutsche Vertriebene (German expellees) in curricular plans and textbooks. In the mid-1940s, 12–15 million ethnic Germans were forcibly ousted from Poland, the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states. However, while international authorities considered them 'German', expellees were typically understood as problematic outsiders by the local residents and officials of their neue Heimat (new homeland). It will be suggested that, rather than helping integrate young expellees into post-war societies, post-war curricular reforms reinforced an identity rooted in loss and collective exclusion. More than 70 years later, ageing expellees still challenge public narratives, describing themselves as perpetual outsiders, at home neither in the Federal Republic of Germany, nor in the places and cultures of their memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bonn's ascension to the rank of capital city in 1948/1949 represented the first major success of a new political culture and the original aesthetic imperatives it was designing. In 1948 five cities, Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Kassel and Stuttgart, vied to be chosen capital city of the soon to be formed Federal Republic of Germany. When the dust settled, the unexpected had occurred; the sleepy university town in the Western reaches of the country, Bonn, had triumphed over a cultural centre, financial centre, commercial centre, and the former capital city. The new political aesthetics were firstly based on the repudiation of any aesthetic program associated with either National Socialism or Monarchism, Third Reich or Wilhelmine Germany. Carlo Schmid warned that nomina sunt omina--names are omens! 'Names express what is really there, or ought to be there', that is, the essence of things. Although Schmid was warning about the name of the future constitution, his attitude reflected a broadly held belief that names and symbols are important, even crucial signifiers. This paper explores the ways the choice of Bonn was perceived by West Germans in their visual media through a look at several political cartoons and how the cartoons and official state press photographs from the Bundesarchiv collection contributed to the formation of Bonn's symbolic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on analysis of program documents and performances of the leading actors of Social Democratic Party of Germany, this article examines economic views and conceptions of social-democrats during the period of occupation between 1945 and 1949. The article analyzes the background of these economic concepts starting from the times of Nazi regime in Germany when SDP leaders were living in exile, and describes their evolution between 1945 and 1945 during the negotiations of three post-war Party Congresses. The article substantiates how two main approaches in regard of economic rehabilitation and further development of post-war Germany were formed by the leading politicians and economic experts of SDP: the first approach based on planning economy and total nationalization of enterprises, and the second one based on regulation of market economy and partial nationalization of enterprises. The article analyzes Social Democrats' participation in formation of a new representative constitutive body called Economic Council, which consisted of Germans exclusively and was created for final solving of current economic problems, as well as their work in this body. The attitude of SDP towards main economic measures of that times such as realization of Marshall Plan in Western Germany and the Monetary Reform of 1948 is described. The article indicates why the opinions of leading SDP politicians in regard of major economic measures were ambiguous, and explains that it happened because the composition of a newborn post-war SDP was heterogeneous, and because those measures were initiated and controlled by occupying states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, the British, American and French believed education could be used to promote democracy in Germany. The Western powers faced particular difficulties with the field of physical education because of the strong Nazi influence in this area during the Third Reich. The premier pre-war physical education teacher training institute was located in the Soviet sector of Berlin. To help solve that problem as well as the dearth of qualified physical education teachers in post-war Germany, the Western Allies wanted to create a new institution for physical education. This article places the creation of the Deutsche Sporthochschule in Cologne within broader Allied education plans and goals for the occupation of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critical turn in the study of toponymy has drawn attention to the politics of place-naming practices and to how place names are embedded into systems of meaning and partake in social and ideological discourses. A measure of historical revision, the commemorative renaming of streets in the context of regime change is a common strategy employed to signify the break with the past. This article juxtaposes patterns of renaming the past in two German cities from 1945 through 1950 as an aspect of the democratic reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany. The moderate pattern applied in Mannheim represented a restorative approach and signified continuity with the pre-1933 Weimar Republic. The radical pattern applied in communist-controlled Potsdam represented the future-oriented approach of socialist transformation. At one level, the investigation explores patterns of commemorative renaming of streets in two German provincial cities after the collapse of Nazi Germany. At another, the juxtaposition of two patterns of renaming the past in post-Nazi Germany offers insights into large-scale renaming of streets as a ritual of revolution that, involving different interests and priorities introduces major political shifts and the ideological reorientation of society they entail into urban namescapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As German men were conscripted into the armed forces during the Second World War, more and more wives were left to manage their families alone. At the same time more women than ever entered paid employment to fill the gaps in the market left by their soldier husbands. Scholars working in the field have made much of the dislocation to gender roles prompted by the Second World War. This article questions whether women's wartime experiences changed their views on being confined to the home. Ultimately, this article argues, women wanted to return to a sense of normality at the end of the war. In the aftermath of defeat, in which mere survival rather than speculation about potentially improved models of the family set-up were paramount, ‘normality’ was most obviously represented by prewar gender roles. Women were hoping for normalization, not only in the public sphere in the sense of a flourishing economy, but also in the private sphere with the return of the men and a resumption of the old role divisions. It was therefore not only conservative politicians who wished to preserve prewar structures within the home—so too did women themselves. The re-emergence of the traditional family model in the wake of the Second World War was thus as much the result of popular aspirations ‘from below’ as of government policies imposed ‘from above’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent military interventions by the West highlight persistent and unresolved problems regarding future foreign policy. Reconsidering the wider legacy and precedent of the British occupation of Germany from 1945 is critical in understanding these debates. Addressing a neglected topic, this article examines whether Britain reconciled its liberal democratic values as an occupying power, and in particular how its government tried to invoke the Christian ‘moral mandate’ of the British churches and voluntary organizations as an instrumental feature of policy, part of its civilizing mission in Germany. Central to this, however, were manifest contradictions between the churches’ rhetorical efforts to help the presentation of the moral case for military rule, and a policy vacuum that offered few practical measures to help German civilians, and especially expellees and refugees. Moreover, Britain's claims of moral leadership were at odds with its decision to delegate refugee matters to the German authorities. There were major differences in approach by church leaders, Whitehall ministers and civilian administrators in Germany in assessing how magnanimous to be in their treatment of Germany. With greater unanimity of purpose, humanitarian initiatives might have had greater success and become a more uniting symbol for reconciliation. The main failing was in the churches’ inability to modify government policy. Compassionate rhetoric and humanitarian relief efforts could not repair the damage caused by earlier political decisions to marginalize forced migrants that effectively punished them as Germans, a legacy of the occupation often sidestepped in order to focus on greater British achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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