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The aim of this essay is to make explicit major assumptions, blind spots, and generalities on the basis of which a nationalist vision of German departments in the US is constructed. To offer an alternative, the essay explores the concept of "cosmopolitanism," including its potential pitfalls, as a paradigm for countering the contemporary anxiety over the sunsetting of German departments at colleges and universities. In order to sketch the major contours of this change‐oriented vision, the history of German cultural, literary, and philosophical studies is investigated as a history of cosmopolitan engagements, including their imperialist, nationalist, and local appropriations. In conclusion, the essay examines how a critical cosmopolitan paradigm challenges us to build stronger alliances within the university and beyond, while renewing German studies in our conflict‐ridden, ecologically devastated, and technocratic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, the electoral success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is one of the most obvious signs of the rise of the far right. In public debates this tends to be associated with Eastern Germany and rural regions. What is neglected is the fact that the party was also remarkably successful in less privileged urban districts across Germany. In this paper I focus on the urban conditions for the rise of the far right. I do so by presenting first results of ethnographic research in two neighbourhoods of Frankfurt am Main. Both – Riederwald and Nied – are marginalised and the AfD gained considerable support there in the 2017 general elections. In the accounts given in 14 expert interviews I identify three crucial urban processes: austerity urbanism, post-democracy and gentrification. Relating them to findings of long-term studies on right-wing attitudes as well as to the concept of 'downward mobility', I argue that these processes increase the competition for resources and strengthen feelings of being left behind as well as experiences of being abandoned by political representatives – which are driving forces for the rise of the far right. And yet these experiences alone do not provide sufficient reason to explain the rise of the far right. They are general processes in the neighbourhoods. However, it seems that intersections with existing group-focused enmities drive a shift from social to regressive collectivity, which raises the potential for far-right political subjectification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces changing conceptions of maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. I argue that there were two moments in which the concept of motherhood was heatedly discussed and transformed. First, from the mid-1970s onward and within the broader cultural currents of "New Inwardness" (Neue Innerlichkeit) and "New Sensuality" (Neue Sinnlichkeit)—both of which permeated the New Left—motherhood became sensualized, eroticized, and sexualized. Second, these trends were intensified and at the same time drawn into new directions after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. For while the focus on female corporeality was consolidated, a growing ecofeminist strand successfully reimagined motherhood as tightly bound to nature and life itself. Serving also as a means to deal with the Nazi past, this late 1980s conception of motherhood was marked by a more pessimistic, even apocalyptic outlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting out from the question of how history and law relate to each other, the article traces the influence of historical interpretations in the making of the Nuremberg Trials, taking these as examples for transitional trials more generally. In trying to explain Germany's apparently aberrant historical evolution, special-path explanations forged by historians gained in prominence after 1933. Several schools of historical thought proved particularly influential, among them the Namierites in Britain, the Andler-Vermeil school of Pangermanism in France, and the so-called Kehrites who emigrated from Germany to the US. These ideas then traveled to Nuremberg where they informed the prosecutors' understanding of German history, leaving a discernible impact on the trials' design and dynamics. In Nuremberg's aftermath, these trial narratives would come to inform influential strands in postwar historiography, with the special path both enjoying popularity and inviting heavy criticism to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the twentieth century, planners have transformed cities by creating an "automobile urban fabric" and increasingly produced urban streets as spaces of "automobile inclusion", ordered by a seemingly rational "traffic logic". Streets have been primarily coded as a space for cars while excluding other traffic modes such as cyclists or pedestrians as well as uses that are not connected to movement. It is this logic and street code that the contemporary ideal of sustainable urban mobility aims to transform: streets should be made for people and accommodate different modes of mobility to overcome cars' supremacy. This paper takes current planning processes and developments in Berlin and New York as a starting point to explore cyclists' interest in street space and how it has historically developed since the mid-nineteenth century. Thereby, it will show that the history of urban automobility and urban cycling are deeply intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the history of a number of German scholars who fled to Great Britain in the years after German leader Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Topics covered include how these scholars have adjusted to the intellectual and social conditions of the intellectual culture of Britain that they found themselves in, the personal situations of these scholars during the war, and the organisations established to help these academic refugees.

Postcolonial and black feminist scholars have long cautioned against the dangerous proximity between the politics of sexual violence and the advancement of nationalist and imperial projects. In this article, we uncover what it is in particular about efforts to address sexual violence that makes them so amenable to exclusionary nationalist projects, by attending to the political aftermaths of the rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, and the cases of mass sexual abuse that took place during New Year's Eve in Cologne in 2015. Tracing the nationalist discourses and policies precipitated in their wake, we demonstrate how across both contexts, the response to sexual violence was ultimately to augment the securitizing power and remit of the state—albeit through different mechanisms, and while producing different subjects of/for surveillance, control and regulation. We highlight how in both cases it is through contemporary resonances of a persistent (post)colonial echo—which enmeshes the normative female body with the idea of the nation—that sexual abuse becomes an issue of national security and the politics of sexual violence becomes tethered to exclusionary nationalisms. Revealing the more general, shared, rationalities that bind the nation to the normative female body while attending to the located political reverberations that make this entanglement so affectively potent in the distinct contexts of India and Germany helps distinguish and amplify transnational and intersectional feminist approaches to sexual violence that do not so readily accommodate nationalist ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Engels claimed that the removal of the perceived causes of crime in a society—capitalist economic and societal conditions—would automatically lead to the eradication of crime. This did not prove to be the case in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where instances of everyday criminality such as theft, robbery and assault never fell below 100,000 per annum throughout the period of the state's existence, from 1949 to 1989. This article examines the ruling Socialist Unity Party's (SED) perceptions of the causes of everyday criminality in the GDR. It shows that the SED concluded that crime persisted because citizens' 'socialist sense of legal right and wrong' (sozialistisches Rechtsbewußtsein) was underdeveloped. The regime measured this by the extent to which citizens supported and participated in socialist society. Thus, crime could be eliminated by co-opting as many citizens as possible into the Party's political project. The SED's ideological tunnel vision on the causes of everyday criminality meant that it dismissed hints about the real causes of crime, such as poor supply and living conditions, identified by its analysts. Its failure to address these issues meant that citizens continued to break the law. Thus, the Party's exercise of power contributed to the creation of limits to that power. Moreover, analysis of opinion polls on GDR citizens' attitudes to criminality shows that they accepted crime as a part of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the manifold socio-cultural and demographic challenges faced by the Jewish minority at the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class Jews developed complex strategies of distinction from marginalized groups within the Jewish community. Based on records of Jewish occupational care and welfare for migrants in the Berlin metropolitan area around 1900, this paper shows how the spatial placement of welfare institutions in the city and their architectural-topographical design inscribed and fixed constructions of gender, economic and ethnic differences. After a brief look at the contemporary Jewish urban space in Berlin, subsequent sections elaborate on the placement of certain institutions on the periphery for the purpose of enforcing social discipline and distinction through spatial proximity and distance as essential strategies of bourgeois Jewish doing difference. The functioning of these practices also points to generalizable findings, which include the need to take into account the coupling effects of architectural-spatial arrangements and bodies and to keep an eye on the interference of different territorial networks of relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research on social time and temporal change theories have not yet investigated the nature of this change in depth through hypothesis testing endeavours. In this paper we respond to this research desiderate through creating quantitative empirical proof for Germany and China. Our findings are based on theories of temporal digital change and the third level of digital divide, i.e. online use vs. non-use concerning time, the rural-urban divide, and the gender divide. We show that digital media enhance the focus on social time, namely 8 out of 9 dimensions of temporal understanding as a specific form of how people deal with and plan time in Germany and China. Moreover, there are significant differences between online users and off-liners both within and across the countries. The degree of urbanization proves to have an influence on temporal digital change, while gender differences were not found to be significant in our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the sociologist Naika Foroutan, East Germans and migrants share similar experiences of discrimination and devaluation in German society. To what extent was this true for all migrant groups in West Germany? This local and microhistorical study on the housing of ethnic German resettlers and non-European asylum seekers in the 1970s demonstrates that origin was the decisive factor in how the authorities and other actors dealt with the housing needs of these two groups. Ms indicates the relevance of race as a concept for analyzing German migration history, which has keen ignored so far-an ignorance Foroutan reproduces with her widely received thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of rising inequality in Germany during the last 20 years, we document a corresponding increase in perceptions of injustice among the population. Based on data from the cumulated German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), we show that this increase in perceived injustice is driven mainly by a rising share of affluent respondents who find society unjust, resulting in a convergence across income groups towards more critical attitudes. We try to explain this puzzling development based on outcome-related justice assessments and perceptions of procedural justice. We find that outcome-related justice assessments cannot explain the trend over time, but affect the overall level of injustice perceptions. The influence of perceptions of procedural justice, however, is more pronounced among affluent respondents and partly explains the increase in injustice perceptions within this group. These results are robust for different operationalizations as well as model specifications and are not due to compositional effects. Since we cannot account entirely for the rise in injustice perceptions among the affluent, explanatory factors not covered by our data are likely to exist. We conclude with a discussion of potential explanations that future research should address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This article investigates single mothers' repartnering by analyzing two distinct transitions: the formation of a partnership with separate households and the subsequent formation of a household with a partner. Background: Previous research found impacts of repartnering on the well‐being of single‐mother families. However, detailed investigations of single mothers' repartnering have been rare and have mostly failed to differentiate the process of finding a partner from the process of forming a household with him. Method: Using pairfam data (www.pairfam.de; Waves 1–3, 2008–2009, 2009–2010, 2010–2011), the study provides event history analyses of a sample of 786 single mothers. It investigates the durations between (a) becoming a single‐mother family and finding a new partner and (b) finding a new partner and forming a household or, alternatively, dissolving. Results: Although a large proportion of the women were living alone with their children for several years, many maintained a relationship in separate households. Neither education nor employment status is found to affect the likelihood of repartnering, which suggests that socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers are not able to use repartnering as a strategy for quickly addressing their economic needs. The mother's age, the children's ages, and the partnership context at the time of entry into single motherhood are shown to affect partnership formation and household formation differently. Conclusion: The results illustrate that when investigating repartnering among single mothers, it is necessary to separate the analysis of partnership formation from the analysis of household formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of individual labor income as a moderator of parental subjective well-being trajectories before and after the birth of the first child in Germany. Analyzing the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), we found that income matters negatively for parental life satisfaction after the first birth, though with important differences by education and gender. In particular, among better educated parents, those with higher income experience a steeper decrease in their subjective well-being. Income is measured as the average of individual labor income within 3 years before the birth. We provide evidence that our results are robust to potential endogeneity between income and first childbirth using the individual labor income at 3 years from the event, and for an alternative measure, i.e. the equivalent household income. Results are discussed in terms of different aspirations and difficulties parents may experience, especially in terms of work and family balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws attention to the spatial dimensions of poverty and the importance of social networks as coping resources for the rural poor. We analyse data from an explorative, mixed‐methods study conducted in rural and urban areas in north‐eastern Germany, and show that spatial contexts shape poor people's social networks. Our quantitative analyses indicate that compared to the urban networks, the rural networks in our sample are smaller, and include more family members and fewer supportive relationships. Our analysis of qualitative interviews with rural poor people yields a typology of strategies for coping with poverty. It also shows that while social networks represent important resources for coping with poverty in rural areas, the support capacities of these networks are weakened by structural changes, the selective out‐migration of younger and better educated individuals, and by the ageing and shrinking of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The term "migration background" is commonly used in Germany today, but this neologism is only 20 years old. As an official category, it is even much younger. There has been only little research concerning the new population category, which emerged around the turn of the millennium. Thus, the question how the "migration background" could become the central category describing migration related diversity in Germany is not answered yet. This article fills this gap by exploring the context of the emergence of the "migration background" including the history of ethnic categories in German official statistics. It describes the actual definition of a "migration background" which became an official category in 2007 when the German Federal Statistical Office started publishing data regarding "the population with a migration background" based on the microcensus, a 1% household survey with mandatory participation. The central questions are: how national membership is imagined, how is it inscribed in definitions, and what adaptions had to be made over time? To answer these questions, different sources as questionnaires, publications of results of the microcensus and national reports on children and youth are analysed. Using interpretative methods, it is shown how a new taxonomy of the population in Germany was created, how it was influenced by international and national educational research, and to which extent it reshaped the perspectives on newcomers and natives. It is shown that the new category is tightly bound to citizenship and summarizes a number of older ethnic categories, but excludes also immigrated Germans who immigrated shortly after Second World War and from the former German Democratic Republic. Therefore, the label "migration background" is misleading because inherited citizenship and ancestry is in the centre of the definition rather than migration experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment affects future working conditions and job security negatively, thus reducing life satisfaction after reemployment. These employment-related scars of unemployment should not matter anymore when a person has retired. Using German panel data, we analyze unemployed persons' transition into retirement to test whether unemployment leaves scars beyond working life and thus for reasons that are not employment-related. We find that involuntary unemployment between the last job and retirement causes a loss in life satisfaction after retirement. People who influenced or even initiated unemployment, by contrast, show no scarring. The scarring effect goes beyond what can be explained by the income loss originating from reduced pensions. It shows up independently of whether the unemployment spell directly before retirement was the only experience of unemployment in a person's career, or whether she had also experienced unemployment at earlier times. We do not find evidence that early retirement or involuntary retirement are the reasons why formerly unemployed retirees display unemployment scarring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate how the attitude of natives-defined as the perceived trustworthiness of citizens from different countries-affects immigrants' labor market outcomes in Germany. Evidence in the literature suggests that barriers to economic assimilation might be higher for some groups of immigrants, but the role of natives' heterogeneous attitudes toward immigrants from different countries of origin has received little attention. Using individual-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the years 1984 to 2014, we apply survival analysis methods to model immigrants' unemployment durations. We find that lower levels of trust expressed by natives toward the citizens of a given country, measured using Eurobarometer surveys, are associated with increased unemployment durations for immigrants from this country. We show that this result is not driven by origin-specific unobserved heterogeneity and that it is robust to different specifications and alternative explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assumption that the communist dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) drove many people to suicide has persisted for decades, and it is still evident in academic and public discourse. Yet, high suicide rates in eastern Germany, which can be traced back to the nineteenth century, cannot be a result of a particular political system. Be it monarchy, democracy, fascism, or socialism, the frequency of suicide there did not change significantly. In fact, the share of politically motivated suicides in the GDR amounts to only 1–2 percent of the total. Political, economic, or sociocultural factors did not have a significant impact on suicide rates. An analysis of two subsets of GDR society that were more likely to be affected by repression—prisoners and army recruits—further corroborates this: there is no evidence of a higher suicide rate in either case. Complimentary to a quantitative approach "from above," a qualitative analysis "from below" not only underlines the limited importance of repression, but also points to a regional pattern of behavior linked to cultural influences and to the role of religion—specifically, to Protestantism. Several factors nevertheless fostered the persistence of an overly politicized interpretation of suicide in the GDR: the bereaved in the East, the media in the West, and a few victims of suicide themselves blamed the regime and downplayed important individual and pathological aspects. Moreover, state and party officials in the GDR unintentionally reinforced the politicization of suicide by imposing a taboo on the subject, which only fueled the flames of speculation about its root causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) State Security Service (Stasi) had to archive vast amounts of data about the everyday lives of GDR citizens. Simplifications and reductions are common features of record-keeping in every institution and there was considerable variation in how detailed the Stasi records of wiretapped phone conversations were. The special focus of this study is the detail that shapes phone records into powerful objects of knowledge among other documentary genres of the Stasi archive. The article describes, in the context of suspicion, how decisions were made about the level of detail in the records given the information overflow, and which communicative and institutional tasks were solved using the different levels of detail in the textualization. Records fulfilled the function of (subjective) information selection for the creation of such categories as 'strange', 'dangerous', 'suspicious' and 'guilty'. Objectifying practices were necessary to legitimize the records as objective proof of suspicion. The 'subjective–objective' relationship turns from a dichotomy to a co-presence within one record and serves to legitimize the record as evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does the number of interest groups vary across economic sectors? Interest groups are an important channel through which companies can transmit their policy preferences to decision-makers. However, empirical research shows that the number of interest groups varies considerably across sectors. We argue that the size and the wealth of the potential constituency as well as government activity positively affect interest group density. We test our theoretical expectations based on an unprecedented longitudinal analysis of interest groups that registered at the German Bundestag from 1978 until 2013 and show that the number of firms, the wealth of an economic sector, and government activity positively influence interest group density. However, we also find that the relationship between interest groups and legislative activity is reciprocal as legislative activity positively impacts the number of interest groups in an economic sector, but at the same time interest group density also positively affects legislative activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider the gender gap in political participation by analyzing recent survey data about German adolescents. Differentiating between institutional, non-institutional, and expressive participation, we show that, even in Germany where there is strong gender equality, type-specific gender differences persist. Testing for resource, socialization, and attitudinal explanations, in multivariate regression analyses, we identify socialization in civic forms of participation together with the lower confidence of women in their personal and political skills as major drivers for the sexual differences in political engagement, especially so for institutionalized forms of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To a large extent, master surveys of the Federal Republic's history have failed to weave into their narratives the rise of female emancipation or challenges to male domination. This article addresses the reasons for this failure, as well as the implications of its reversal. It analyzes the role of women activists during West Germany's "1968," underlining the gender bias of common narratives of the West German Sixties. The addition of feminist agency to West German history necessarily changes the definition of "success" in the Westernization narrative of the Federal Republic, and also the way in which we define generations and engage in public forms of commemoration. Die Emanzipation der Frauen und die Infragestellung männlicher Dominanz spielen in den Überblickswerken zur Geschichte der Bundesrepublik nur eine untergeordnete Rolle. Warum dies so ist, und welche Folgen eine Umkehr dieser Tendenz hätte, ist Thema dieses Aufsatzes. Am Beispiel feministischer Aktivistinnen des westdeutschen "1968" wird aufgezeigt, wie geschlechtsspezifisch verzerrt die gängigen Narrative der Protestbewegung und des Wertewandels in den 1960er Jahren sind. Sobald wir die Narrative der westdeutschen Geschichte mit feministischer "agency" zusammendenken, verändert sich notwendigerweise die Definition von "Erfolg" in der "Erfolgsgeschichte" der Bundesrepublik. Zudem werden die Kategorien des "Westens" und der "Verwestlichung", der "politischen Generation" und des "Generationskonflikts" als geschlechtsspezifische Konstrukte erkennbar, die bislang eine männliche Perspektive in der Geschichtsschreibung wie in der öffentlichen Erinnerungskultur privilegiert haben. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), thousands of East Germans lived in flats occupied without state permission. What factors enabled and what practices shaped both the emergence and the persistence of informal housing in an East European dictatorship? The socialist authorities did not tolerate informality but contrary to the totalitarian rhetoric of state and party officials, local bureaucrats endeavoured to transform the grey zone of unauthorised housing dubbed 'Schwarzwohnen' into black (illegal) or white (legal). The high frequency of legalisation highlights the relative autonomy of these 'social gatekeepers'. A partial identity of interests between informal occupiers of flats (Schwarzwohner) and the state led to the blurring of boundaries between formal and informal practices. A substantial proportion of Schwarzwohner, however, had little or no contact with authorities, which is indicative of a partly dysfunctional dictatorship. At the same time, Schwarzwohnen developed several unique features different from the squatting of buildings in the Global North-West and from informal settlements in the Global South, most notably a far-reaching compliance with the law which sometimes included unsolicited rent payments. In addition, Schwarzwohner used specific tactics to achieve legalisation such as 'consentful contention'. The effect of the informality was ambiguous as it undermined the state's authority but alleviated the housing shortage and thus (unintentionally) stabilised the state at the same time. Schwarzwohnen vanished with the GDR but has been partly revitalised by the 'Guardian House' scheme in several East German cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an inquiry into the powers at play in the everyday practices of making the city, and the social and spatial relations through which those who inhabit its margins put these powers to work. This exploration is based on a case study that considers informal housing practices and their regulation in allotment gardens in Berlin. To trace the mechanisms through which residents work to stay put in these sites, despite regulations prohibiting residency therein, the paper relates a debate on the transformative potential of the everyday to anthropological literature on the workings of the state, embedding this discussion in relational approaches to power and place. Joining these perspectives, I argue that the gardeners' possibilities to stay put depend on the ways in which they meditate the presence of regulatory practices through their relations to state actors or institutional frames. These mediations not only highlight that people co-construct the order that takes shape, but also point to the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion built up along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-work poverty contradicts the belief that a job should provide a decent standard of living. Nevertheless, the share of working poor in most European countries has risen. Studies show that the development of in-work poverty is attributable to changes in the distributive performance of the labour market, households and the welfare state, as measured by their ability to prevent people from falling below the poverty line. However, such studies have been limited to standard employment and did not address activation, i.e., welfare state transformation through deregulation, recommodification, and social investment. Taking the case of Germany, I analyse changes in the distributive performance of institutions within the context of activation policies (Hartz reforms) for employees that differ in work duration and intensity. Based on descriptive trend analysis of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I retrace the process of income distribution and look at how institutional changes have contributed to the development of in-work poverty. I find that an increase of in-work poverty can be attributed to a decrease of the distributive performance of the labour market after the implementation of the Hartz reforms; that individuals in non-standard employment were more affected than people in standard-employment, and that increases in the performance of households and the welfare state do not absorb this development. Activation has shifted responsibility from the labour market to the other distributive institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents views of cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer on the social history of Germany with reference to rag collector. Various topics discussed include history of human behavior, monographs of history, rag collection, hypothesis of rag collecting, heroic scientism and social science research.

The article discusses social theory of Theodor W. Adorno which takes the stand that oppression is created through politics, economics, culture and materialism with reference to national socialism in Germany. Topics include social development in Germany, political consciousness of former war returnees was from 1956 to 1957 and organizational sociology.

The article presents the author's views on diversification of communities of Italian immigrants in Germany. Topics discussed include immigrants' communities, inclusion strategy used in their diversification, overview of Italians in Germany, its sociological aspects and brief definition of social milieus.

Sociological literature suggests a causal effect of poverty on the risk of social isolation. While previous research on this link is only based on cross-sectional data, this article presents more valid evidence for this assumption by applying fixed-effects regression methods and panel data (German Socio-economic Panel). First, the study shows that the poverty effect on isolation occurs regardless of time-constant unobserved heterogeneity. Second, it examines whether poverty and isolation are correlated because of a mutual association with critical life events (health deterioration, dissolutions of couple relationships, and job loss) that may increase both the risk for poverty and the risk for isolation. Regarding men, the effect of isolation on poverty is not attributable to the cited biographical transitions. Regarding women, it is only in part—but not in whole—attributable to dissolutions of couple relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the cooperation that took place between the East German DEFA and Czechoslovakia’s Barrandov film studios, in terms of their coproductions and the recruitment of Czechoslovak talent to work on nominally East German productions. By analysing these ventures from their inception in 1957 onwards, I consider the conditions supervising the transfer of professional skills between the studios, especially during periods of intensive exchange: the mid-1960s and the 1970s. I argue that DEFA utilized Barrandov-contracted talent to facilitate its production of commercially viable light entertainment. In the 1960s, ‘travelling filmmakers’ helped DEFA to launch a series of East German-produced musicals and Indianerfilme. In the 1970s, DEFA functionaries aimed to benefit from the creative input Czechoslovak scriptwriters, directors and producers brought to children’s films. I suggest the two periods in question were shaped by distinct sets of institutional, political and creative circumstances. The recruitment of individual Czechoslovak personnel in the earlier period enabled DEFA to train in-house talent. A decade later, purges enacted by the Czechoslovak Communist Party limited creative possibilities for this country’s film-makers, incentivizing a newfound desire to partner with a studio that Barrandov had previously deemed beneath it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information on the Geschichte eines Leitmediums. Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung von ihrer Gründung 1949 bis zur Gegenwart, a conference that was held at the Universität Würzburg in Würzburg, Germany on January 16, 2018 is presented. Topics discussed include social and political history of Germany, newspaper publishing in the country and research on media companies.

The article presents the author's experience of conducting a project in Syria, her growing up as a traditional German women, and the effects of the Syrian civil war on the world.

Narcissism scores are higher in individualistic cultures compared with more collectivistic cultures. However, the impact of sociocultural factors on narcissism and self-esteem has not been well described. Germany was formerly divided into two different social systems, each with distinct economic, political and national cultures, and was reunified in 1989/90. Between 1949 and 1989/90, West Germany had an individualistic culture, whereas East Germany had a more collectivistic culture. The German reunification provides an exceptional opportunity to investigate the impact of sociocultural and generational differences on narcissism and self-esteem. In this study, we used an anonymous online survey to assess grandiose narcissism with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) and the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI) to assess grandiose and vulnerable aspects of narcissism, and self-esteem with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE) in 1,025 German individuals. Data were analyzed according to age and place of birth. Our results showed that grandiose narcissism was higher and self-esteem was lower in individuals who grew up in former West Germany compared with former East Germany. Further analyses indicated no significant differences in grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism or self-esteem in individuals that entered school after the German reunification (≤ 5 years of age in 1989). In the middle age cohort (6–18 years of age in 1989), significant differences in vulnerable narcissism, grandiose narcissism and self-esteem were observed. In the oldest age cohort (> 19 years of age in 1989), significant differences were only found in one of the two scales assessing grandiose narcissism (NPI). Our data provides empirical evidence that sociocultural factors are associated with differences in narcissism and self-esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of the Treuhandanstalt agency in the privatization of formerly state-operated corporate entities and publicly-owned real estate in the wake of German reunification. Information is provided on the socioeconomic consequences of the agency's alleged financial mismanagement, ineptitude, and corruption.

Efforts by health authorities to stress the importance of herd immunity in the light of a resurgence of seemingly vanquished childhood diseases have frequently met with poor response rates. Investigating whether reunified Berlin can achieve a desirable herd immunity of 80% - 85% against diphtheria, this paper examines the potential influence of socio-demographic variables (age, gender, social circumstances, migration background) on vaccine-uptake. Secondly, it investigates historically diverging vaccinal policies in Berlin as well as recent changes to monitoring coverage in their effect on immunisation-related behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among social scientists, humanist and freethinker organizations are often described as secularizing agents within society with a critical and confrontational relation to religions. This article provides a re-evaluation of this theory with respect to a contemporary example of German freigeistig organizations, the German Humanist Association (Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands [HVD]). Through being incorporated into German religiopolitical arrangements, the author argues, the HVD rather imitates religion, thereby unfolding secularization-opposing effects. Drawing on a grounded theory-based analysis of found data as well as interviews and participant observations, and with reference to the comparative frameworks regarding 'multiple secularities' (Burchardt/Wohlrab-Sahr) or 'different modes of nonreligion' (Quack), the article concludes by distinguishing two different types of freigeistig organizations in contemporary Germany, only one of which can by described as a secularizing agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the powerful stereotypical media discourse that shapes and reproduces a certain racialised and prejudiced perception of people identified as “Roma” in Germany. Using a close analysis of a single picture – appearing as harmless at first glance – and through the reconstruction of its various interpretational contexts and semantics the paper identifies mechanisms used in stereotypical media coverage of “Roma”. This qualitative analysis draws on media analysis of antigypsyism as well as on research of photographic construction of the “gypsy” in order to analyse the contemporary visual regime of “Roma” in Germany. As it portrays “the Roma” as a fundamentally different and socially deviant group, this visual stereotyping is shown to be an integral element of the persistent antigypsyist ideology, deeply embedded in German society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides elements of a theoretical framework to embed the discussion of regional path dependence and transformation into evolutionary approaches of complex adaptive systems. The evolutionary perspective avoids the focus on lock-in as a major challenge of path dependence, while allowing for more options along path-dependent processes including path plasticity and path creation. The empirical part is based on a qualitative study of transformation processes in three German cities, Stuttgart, Dortmund and Chemnitz, during the last 25 years, showing the variety of combinations between micro, meso and macro interactions as well as the diversity of relevant policies to gain influence on local transformation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines depictions of social dissent in East German television detective series in the 1970s and 1980s. It discusses the popularity of the detective series "Polizeiruf 110" and "Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort" and their role in the processes of social and moral engineering in the German Democratic Republic. It also describes the shows' projection of images and norms compatible with the Communist social order during the Cold War.