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Much has been written about US efforts to solve the 'German problem' after the Second World War. Scholars have carefully studied US attempts to de-Nazify, pacify and democratise post-war Germany and have identified the creation of large-scale student exchange programmes as an integral part of that agenda. As this article shows, 1945 was not the first time in the twentieth century that US policy-makers and educators had pondered the German problem and sought to address Germany's apparently deficient democratisation and excessive militarism, as well as the alarmingly narrow horizons of its youth. Based on long-neglected or inaccessible archival materials in Europe and the United States, this article charts the development of US student exchanges with inter-war Germany and demonstrates that a fuller understanding of US re-education policies in West Germany requires paying attention to the 1920s and 1930s. The article traces the discovery of the German student as an object of US democratisation efforts in the inter-war period and shows that US re-education policy after 1945 was deeply informed by the experiences made, connections forged and convictions won (sometimes without reliable evidence) by US internationalists in the inter-war years. Facing the German problem after the First World War, the article argues, helped establish a modus operandi —and a modus cogitandi —with regard to the German student that would inform US cultural diplomacy well into the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A transformative military occupation aimed at the radical ideological change of an occupied country must exercise cultural control. The occupiers must complement repression with propaganda and censorship to create new narratives and prohibit those deemed undesirable. Do transformative military occupations carried out by dictatorships and liberal democracies differ in the way in which they handle information control? I argue that the mechanisms of cultural control used by the Third Reich in France (1940-1942) and by the United States in Germany (1945-1949), shared significant similarities in spite of the fact that their respective agendas were inspired by opposite ideological tenets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This study examines how medical discourse and culture were affected by the denazification policies of the Soviet occupation authorities in East Germany. Examining medical textbooks in particular, it reveals how the production and dissemination of medical knowledge was subject to a complex process of negotiation among authors, publishers, and censorship officials. Drawing on primary-source material produced by censorship authorities that has not been rigorously examined to date, it reveals how knowledge production processes were structured by broader ideological and political imperatives. It thus sheds new light on a unique chapter in the history of censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War – the so-called Stunde Null, or “zero hour” – has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the German language and breaking the silences of the past. This historical examination of sensory-emotional and material contexts and related cultural practices takes as its source Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s autobiographical novel Die Erfindung des Lebens (The Invention of Life), published in 2009. Ortheil’s novel is about a child’s enormous struggle to learn how to feel, see, read, write and speak. This so-called “ego document”, told by a first-person narrator, focuses on the links between things, objects, senses, emotions, and the acquisition of cultural skills and techniques while at the same time providing subtle commentary on post-war West German society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This analysis traces the evolution of the denazification programme in American-occupied Germany from 1945–1948. At the close of the Second World War, high-level American policy-makers proclaimed their determination to drive all Nazis out of power. However, the realities of denazification differed from American officials’ goals; additionally, their objectives in Germany dramatically changed over time. Monitoring German public opinion about the occupation, and keeping public opinion positive, proved of central importance to Military Government officials. They actively promoted denazification in an attempt to bolster German attitudes toward the programme. Using Office of Military Government of the United States documents, this analysis examines the decision to wind down the American denazification programme and shows that the decision came in April 1947 because of negative German public opinion. In place of denazification, American Military Government officials recommended increasing emphasis on reorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses German priest Martin Luther's historical significance after World War II. Topics discussed include whether the national conception of history in the defeated militarily and politically demoralized Germany revised after the war; whether the older tradition was pressed into use as a spiritual leitmotif for the national reconstruction after the war; and the debate surrounding Luther's role in the German national tradition.

The article discusses film making in the Soviet-occupied area of East Germany in the post-World War II era. Topics considered include motion picture companies Ufa and DEFA, movie audiences, denazification, intellectual life in Germany in the post-war period, and film aesthetics. The 1947 motion picture entitled "Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows)" by Kurt Maetzig about anti-Semitism is considered.

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]

In the years after World War II, West Germany (after 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG) experienced a severe housing shortage coupled with a demand—unambiguously conveyed by the occupying powers—to “modernize” and socially restructure. With war-torn cities needing extensive repair, politicians and planners made choices that affected not only the physical but also the social landscape, with the federal government ultimately using urban policy in an attempt to redefine identity and help shape a new middle class. This article traces this process by examining three postwar policy directions—suburbanization, urban high-rise housing, and automobile ownership—both as an economic driver and as a first toehold on the ladder to upward mobility. I argue that not only did these policy foci fundamentally change the FRG’s urban landscape, their physical manifestations became central to the nation’s often-acrimonious debate over societal modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A long-standing thesis has it that modern Germany’s educated bourgeoisie identified with cultural ideals to the detriment of its political formation. Fixated on the realm of ideas, the ‘unpolitical German’ deferred to real-world authority, paving the road to National Socialism. While émigré scholars gave an influential version of this diagnosis, parallel concerns shaped debates within occupied Germany. On its unsettled political-cultural field, educated elites grappled with how to assess the national cultural heritage in the wake of Nazism, war and Holocaust. Most sought refuge in a compensatory cultural identity, while a vocal minority demanded a purifying break with all tradition. This article focuses on an overlooked third grouping and their equivocal position, which reworked an elitist cultural patrimony into one cornerstone of a counter-elitist political vision. On the one hand, they agreed a focus on things spiritual had fed political quiescence; on the other, they saw embedded in German Kultur a specific and rich way of thinking about freedom. After 1945, they sought neither to jettison nor to revive this cultural tradition but to extract the liberating potential at its heart and bring the latter to bear on politics, as a resource for democratic renewal. Various loosely linked clusters of intellectuals pursued this project through cultural-political journals and in a new type of association, the Kulturbund. This article explores the conditions of their novel rearticulation of received frameworks of cultural and political meaning in the years after 1945 and reflects on its resonance in West and East Germany after 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the history of waste management in the German Democratic Republic (GDR/DDR) in the second half of the twentieth century. The author focuses on how scrap and salvage materials were used both in an environmentally inspired effort to develop recycling strategies and to remedy a perceived shortage of raw materials within the East German economy. Issues addressed include the importance of scrap metal in postwar reconstruction efforts, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of waste management, and environmentalism as a goal of East German Socialism.

Copyright of IBEROAMERICANA. América Latina - España - Portugal is the property of Vervuert Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Britain began to plan for the occupation and reconstruction of Germany following the end of the Second World War as early as 1944. However, such was the devastation as a result of intensive fighting that went all the way to Berlin that these plans were unsuited to the reality on the ground in May 1945. Christopher Knowles explores the first four years of ‘benevolent occupation’ in the British zone under the leadership of Field Marshal Montgomery and his successors, noting that positive effect was more likely where they created the conditions for the German people to act for themselves, rather than imposing solutions by force or decree. [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]

There is no definitive, single-volume history of the Allied occupation and reconstruction of West Germany from 1945 to 1955. This is a significant and surprising lacuna in the literature on US and European history, international relations, and the rapidly growing field in reconstruction and stabilization operations. Scholars, historians, and policymakers need a comprehensive treatment of the German occupation. There is now an opportunity to fill that need. This bibliographic essay reviews the wealth of source material that has become available in recent decades. We can now synthesize primary sources and specialized scholarship to tell the story, for the first time, of how the Allies occupied and rebuilt the western part of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the US Army's role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the specific context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a conference on urban planning in the two German states during the Cold War, held in Münster, Germany, from March 11-12, 2013. Topics of discussion included the reconstruction of German cities and towns after World War II, urban planning in the two states' respective capitals, East Berlin, East Germany, and Bonn, West Germany, and citizen participation in urban planning.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 article reports on a panel on reactions to Nazi war crimes in Germany after World War II, held during the Deutscher Historikertag (German Historians Conference) in Mainz, Germany, from September 25-28, 2012. Topics of discussion included the activities of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the runup to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, the attitudes of German philosopher Hannah Arendt to postwar reconstruction, and the link between fears of retribution and antisemitism in postwar Germany.

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]

Both the examination of key technicalities of the Nazi Party membership process and case studies of individuals who at one point in their careers sought NSDAP affiliation provide an important historical perspective on the recent controversy surrounding the hitherto unknown party membership of several postwar authors and other prominent Germans. With the youngest generation of Nazis, which included such people as Martin Walser and Hans Dietrich Genscher, the circumstances of the wartime recruitment of Hitler Jugend members deserve special scrutiny. Any discussion of their culpability must take into account the rapidly shifting priorities and superficiality of the postwar denazification project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and future Director-General of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd-Orr, had warned that “we are only at the beginning of what looks like a long grim struggle, in which food may be, as it was in the last war, the decisive factor for victory.” Even more ominously, such experts foresaw the end of the war as ushering in a world defined less by peace and more by hunger. Australian economist and humanitarian Frank Lidgett McDougall axiomatically declared that “the exigencies of war and of the relief period will in the next few years render almost all men everywhere in the world highly food-conscious.” The recognition of the global ramifications of hunger meant that, as Nick Cullather put it in his recent article on the history of the calorie, “the construction of a postwar international order began with food.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the example of the city of Kassel, this article examines the way in which the historic city centres lived on in the consciousness of the inhabitants after the destruction during World War II. It demonstrates the need to review the generally received opinion that the German people had initially greeted the extensive loss of their built heritage as a ‘welcome disaster’, and began only thirty years later, as modernism gave way to postmodernism, to mourn their former cities. The article traces a genealogy of longing for the old city as it was imagined to have existed prior to the destruction. Nostalgia over the lost city enjoyed a first boom in the decade following the war, and never completely disappeared thereafter. The politics of longing were not straightforward but subject to significant reversals. In the light of this, the article argues that historians of the Federal Republic should no longer discount the nostalgia for an idealized past as being merely a momentary delay in the onward march of history, but should instead take it seriously both as evidence of the long-term consequences of the violence of war and as expressing unease with the costliness of modernization itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Starting with the election of Germany's first postwar government in 1949, the Western Allies, most notably the United States and Great Britain, came to the conclusion that in order to strengthen the defenses of Western Europe against a possible Soviet invasion, a viable German Army, free of the militarism and influence from its World War II predecessor, would be necessary for the defense of not only Germany but of Western Europe itself. After surmounting serious French objections to the creation of standing German Army on its border, the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer set about to create a West German Army or 'Bundeswehr' based on democratic principles and practices. This article, the first of four on the post-World War II German Armed Forces, is a history of the problems, organization, and fielding of what became the 'tip' of NATO's sharp spear guarding against the Soviet Army from overrunning Western Europe - the West German Bundeswehr. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the Luth case from a historical artifact called the denazification of German law and society after World War II. The author mentions that the case was the first case that emphasized the freedom of expression as a major concern in German constitutionalism. The author cites the Basic Law which protects the freedom of expression, but it appeared to declare a general law of Parliament can remove the protection.

After WWII, Germany found itself in physical ruin as well as in a moral shambles. The rebuilding process in West Germany included both economic reconstruction and moral reconstitution. In my paper I argue that these two processes were more closely related than generally believed. While economic instability, measured by unemployment rates, certainly has not caused a greater willingness to come to terms with the National Socialist past, such times seem to have coincided with some of the great historiographical controversies about that past, namely the Fischer controversy, the Historikerstreit, the Goldhagen affair, and the highly controversial, so-called Wehrmachtsausstellung. This paper proposes a model for the relationship and explores possible explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An article discussing the political influence of the organizations of German expellees in West German political culture is presented. The author addresses the role of the German Sudeten Council on the foreign policy and public relations of West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining the role of expellee German politicians during Hans-Christoph Seebohm's tenure as leader of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society, the author explains the importance of the public relations initiatives of Germany following the revelation of Nazi war crimes during World War II. The impact of the Potsdam Agreement on U.S.-German relations and the development of political connections between the German government and Arab leaders in the Middle East are also addressed.

The legitimacy of the rule of a socialist elite was essentially based on meeting the criteria of its own ideology, thus it is appropriate to define the congruity of the criteria of the system of conviction and the practice of its realization. Concerning power elites of the GDR this can particularly be done while looking at their involvement in the system of rule of National Socialism. Here, it is about the legitimatory core of the SED's power structure, as from its beginnings to its end anti-fascism was the most important ideologem of its ideology of power. There is ample empirical evidence that, in the respective birth cohorts, there was a considerable share of former NSDAP members among the First and Second Secretaries of the SED County Committees in the districts of Erfurt, Gera, and Suhl. The fact that their past during the NS regime was overwhelmingly characterized by collaboration and fellow travelling may be supposed to have even supported a kind of submissive loyalty towards a party centre which had the power to allocate positions and direct careers. However, functionaries with a National Socialist entanglement did not have much to offer to the "governed 'masses'", except maybe the impression of being similar to a population which, after all, did also not consist of antifascist resistance fighters or victims of persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only West Germany saw the social rehabilitation of former National Socialists after 1945, former NSDAP members were also integrated into the GDR society and into the echelons of its functional elites. The share of former National Socialists among the elites varies between societal sectors. However, some of them even entered the ranks of the power elite. Due to the omnipresent myth of anti-fascism, disclosed brown shadows of the past could put careers at risk, but submissive loyalty to the young socialist state and its leadership could balance the scales. Keeping silent turned out a successful strategy in many cases: the general exculpation of the populace and the antifascist propaganda made serious checks rather inopportune for the Communist regime. For a differentiated evaluation of the ambivalent process of socialist denazification, it is vital to discuss its impact on social structure and to analyze the strategy of the Communist Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Copyright of Canadian Bulletin of Medical History is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the cash flow of West German automobile manufacturers during the period 1948 to 1960 to elucidate the broader issue of the financing of the reconstruction and expansion of the country's economy in the post-World war II era. The auto industry's as well as private dealers' investments in growth in the 1950s are statistically presented. Government steps to preserve and liberalize credit and aid in auto industry financing are reviewed, as well as industry initiatives to rationalize their operations. Financial strategies of the auto firms Volkswagen and Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) are contrasted.

Comparing the post-war reconstruction of bombed German cities and the ongoing rebuilding of New Orleans can provide a useful basis for evaluating what has happened in the Crescent City since Katrina. This article concentrates on reconstruction financing, design ideas, and the planning process. The experience of German reconstruction suggests that expectations in New Orleans for immediate, unrestricted financial help from the Federal government and for constructing a dramatically new city were misplaced. External financing requires time to arrive. Planners after the war and today have drawn upon ideas common throughout the twentieth century. Aided by the Internet and the input of planners and architects from across the United States, the planning process in New Orleans has been comparatively rapid and open. Helped by volunteer labour and charity, actual rebuilding has been as much ad hoc as planned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of noted scholar John H. Herz is presented. He was born September 23, 1908, in Dusseldorf Germany, and studied in a variety of universities in Germany, obtaining a doctorate in law in 1931. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, and while in the U.S. married his wife Anne. Herz played a role in the reconstruction of Germany's democracy after World War II, and often wrote about Germany. He died on December 26, 2005.

An essay is presented on the motion picture "Europa," directed by Lars von Trier. The film depicts the reconstruction of Germany following World War II. The author notes speculation that the film symbolizes international relations between the U.S. and Europe and suggests that a scene in the film depicting prisoners of concentration camps symbolizes the repression of information regarding the Jewish Holocaust in motion pictures.

The article discusses the development of the psychotechnics after the Great War in Germany. It aims at reconstructing the democratic social order, thus, it desire to rationalize and optimize mental elements of labor that was the foundation of the country. It cites that the psychotechnics known to be modern, rational, and humane, became a basis of rationalization in the 1920's. It focuses on the interactions between psychotechnicians and female switchboard operators and the debates on the country's postwar economic and political restructuring and the so-called new woman. It presents the failure of psychotechnicians to realize their aims within the country's system, that resulted in their subordination to the National Socialist order, accepting it as the best means in restructuring.

The article explores the growth of the sexual consumer-goods industry in reconstruction West Germany. Factors driving the growth are: the form of consumption; the role of erotica firms as sexual educators; and the appeal of the family as a location for passion. The mechanics of the erotica marketplace are also discussed.

The article analyzes the urban development of Berlin, Germany as part of the national development process that has accompanied the denazification of Germany following World War II. Berlin was often romanticized as the main base of the Cold War wherein East and West intersected and vied with each other in sports, ideology or technology. The dominant concepts and themes during the period were reflected by the buildings and monuments built and destroyed by the German leaders.

Copyright of Prohistoria is the property of Prohistoria Ediciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Explores the role of architecture in helping postwar Germany find a national and cultural identity. Link between specific places and cultural identity; Importance of historical restoration projects to German self-definition; Physical manifestation of the attempt to recapture an idea of Germanness that everyone could safely embrace.

Explores several issues concerning the Cold War historiography which Michael Cox and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe failed to discuss in their article "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan." Role of Germany in European reconstruction; Complexities of the decision making of the U.S. about the German and European reconstruction; Exercise of revisionism of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Examines whether Germany's postwar growth was due to economic liberalization or reconstruction. Time series properties of Germany's long-run income path; Outline of the growth regression model; Calculation of the overall growth trend.