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The article discusses research related to society of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). Topics discussed include social structure and working-class culture shaped by DDR; modernization and advantage in terms of equality to DDR women; and impact on West German politics from increasing Right-wing radicalism and xenophobia in the new federal states.

Despite being one of the pinnacles of philosophy in the second part of the 20th century, the work of Hans Blumenberg is still little known in Mexico and Latin America. In the present work, we will seek to demonstrate that, although Blumenberg is not, in the strict sense, a political philosopher, this does not prevent identifying -from key notions such as distancing, myth, polytheism and rhetoric- a strong political thought coherent with the whole of his work. For the rest, Blumenberg's work constitutes a key and an access route for understanding the intellectual tensions experienced by the culture of the German Federal Republic during the second part of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Konrad Adenauer's government in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) engaged in a large-scale media campaign to create political consent for the FRG's integration into the West, a policy that rested to a large extent on rearmament and entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. To counter public criticism of rearmament, the West German authorities used Mobilwerbung, a company that maintained a fleet of mobile film screening vans. Clandestinely financed by the government, Mobilwerbung brought government-commissioned films and political speakers into the FRG's remotest areas. Based on archival records on deployments in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, this article traces Mobilwerbung's role as a government unit that reacted dynamically to competing events. Through highly detailed reporting on audience reactions, Mobilwerbung served both as a public relations vehicle to foster consent and as an analytical tool that allowed the mapping of public sentiment regarding rearmament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a research project of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte and the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung historical institutes on the history of West Germany's Bundeskanzleramt chancellorship office especially under Hans Globke and its relationship with Germany's national socialist past. Questions addressed by the project are outlined including the alleged influence of national socialism on staffing at the Kanzleramt, alleged cooperation between victims and perpetrators of Nazi persecution at the Kanzleramt, and the alleged influence of national socialism on the behaviors of cabinet officers.

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany's relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of 'anti-imperialism'. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the 'Third World', West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno's increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In treating the theme of labor and politics in West Germany, this study will focus on the sixteen industrial unions joined together in the German Trade Union Confederation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund-DGB) and their relations at the national level to the two major parties of the Federal Republic: the Social Democratic party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU). The DGB is by far the predominant labor organization in the Federal Republic, encompassing about 85 percent of organized employees in 1972. In dealing with the SPD and CDU/CSU, the analysis will concentrate on their parliamentary parties in the Bundestag, since these include the decisive decision-makers in national political life: those party leaders who are part of the government or who head up the opposition, Fraktion leaders, and technical experts and interest group members in the Fraktion. The major thesis of this study is that among the economic interest groups in the Federal Republic and in the spheres of labor, social, and economic policy at the national level, the DGB since 1969 has been politically pre-eminent, some- what more than first among equals.

The article discusses the significance of 1968 student protests in the history of West German society and politics. Topics include opposition to German liberal and leftist politics by the New Right movements, the role of left-wing extremists in violence, and the significance of the year 1968 in relation to women in West Germany and the importance of East Germany.

Abstract: Anthony King's 1976 article ‘Modes of executive–legislative relations: Great Britain, France and West Germany’ is a classic in legislative studies. It argued that it is simplistic to analyse relations between ‘the executive’ and ‘the legislature’ in parliamentary systems, because parliaments are complex organisations comprised of competing actors. Instead, we must consider the various ‘modes’ through which these actors can interact to challenge the executive. As King pointed out, the classic view of the British Parliament was of a dominant ‘opposition mode’ and yet, in fact, the most important relationship was the ‘intraparty mode’: between the government and its own backbenchers. Other options, such as the ‘non‐party mode’ or ‘cross‐party mode’ were considered weak in Britain. This article revisits King's modes in the light of changes at Westminster during the intervening forty years. Developments such as the establishment of the select committee system and a more confident and party‐balanced House of Lords require significant changes to his conclusions. But his central insights, encouraging readers to focus on the multiple relationships inside legislatures, including those within political parties, remain fundamentally important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the responses of former Nazi elite school staff to the pressures of denazification. Teachers of the National Political Education Institutes, known as Napolas for short – boarding schools for the Third Reich’s racial elite – were especially affected by the purge of National Socialist supporters from positions of influence, due to the schools’ intimate relationship to Heinrich Himmler’s SS. The introduction of the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism in the US occupation zone in 1946, however, allowed Napola apologists to construct a selective interpretation of the past, which rehabilitated the Napolas’ postwar image and successfully reintegrated alumni into West German society, in many cases long before the Adenauer government issued a series of amnesty laws. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1960s and early 1970s were characterized by planning optimism and major reforms associated with notions of efficiency on the one hand, and a change in political culture on the other. When government bodies in the Federal Republic of Germany initiated in a top-down way a comprehensive territorial reform and intervened into the everyday life of many people this provoked resistance from citizens. Using the example of the municipal territorial reform as carried out in the Federal Republic, the article addresses tensions as well as a governance processes between the representatives of the state, the municipalities and citizens alongside with a fundamental change in political culture during the 1960s and 1970s. The article shows how the local municipalities reacted to territorial and functional reforms elaborated by the federal and state governments and the ministerial bureaucracy of West Germany with a special focus on North Rhine-Westphalia. It sheds light not only on new players in the political arena, municipalities and local citizens' initiatives that were increasingly trying to take an active role in decision-making, but also a general change in political culture. Claims for political and social participation and political transparency, a "vital civic spirit" which opposed state planning optimist approaches - demands that those responsible for the reform had to react on. The article examines the redefinitions of the relationship between state and municipality, and citizens in the course of reform processes and related political debates, and analyses how far decisions-making processes changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the interplay between the political authorities and economic actors in the Federal Republic of Germany in the process of establishing relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. Within this framework, the article will assess the role played by the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Eastern Committee of German Economy), a semi-official organization recognized by the West German government. Both the ability of German economic actors and China's urgent need for economic contact with the West caused German-Chinese trade relations to circumvent the strict non-recognition policy followed by the West German government. The article also argues that, while economic relations heralded official recognition of the People's Republic of China by other Western European countries, in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany a division between the two spheres was finally accepted by the major actors involved, and ended only after the change of attitude imparted by the Nixon presidency in the United States during the early 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This analysis finds basis largely on the protocols of the three West German diplomatic conferences held in Africa in 1959, 1962, and 1968. It scrutinises the idea, advanced by part of Bonn's foreign policy élite at the end of the 1950s, that the Federal Republic of Germany had a "special mediatory role" to play between the West and Africa in the age of decolonisation. The Federal Republic played a significant indirect role, especially on the economic side, in keeping Africa tied to the West after the end of colonialism. However, because of its exposed political situation in Europe, it was never in a position to pursue a real mediating effort in Africa's decolonisation conflicts, therefore limiting its ambitions to that of "junior partner" of the former colonial Powers in the second half of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pensions reform of 1957 marked a turning point in the history of the German welfare state, ushering in a root-and-branch reorganization of the old-age pension system in order to 'secure living standards'. The present article seeks to identify the key values underpinning this reconfiguration and finds that norms of social justice were of central importance. The normative backbone of the Adenauer government's pensions reform was the notion of performance-based justice, in which the principle of equivalence of contributions and pensions benefits converged with the central theme of maintaining citizens' social status in retirement. Closely bound up with this was the principle of equality between the generations, which found expression in the linkage of pensions to income development. We can only adequately explain the key role of the issue of justice, and the vigorous affirmation of the performance principle, in light of the erosion of social hierarchies by two world wars and two periods of severe inflation. These wiped out most of the assets that the middle classes in particular had set aside for old age, assets on which they had built their hopes of maintaining their social position in retirement. More than anything else, the pensions reform of 1957 was intended to reconstruct a system of social inequality that had perished in the first half of the twentieth century, one intended to ensure that all senior citizens occupied the position attained during their working lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article outlines the debate on the expansion of the welfare state in Western Germany during the 1950s. This debate does not only provide important insights into the self-perception of Western German society. It can also be read as a risk debate, because the contemporaries were aware of the ambivalent effects of the preventive measures against poverty: While especially social democrats emphasised the stabilising effect of the fight against poverty on democracy, politicians from economic-liberal circles stressed the risk that such measures could give the state excessive power over its citizens. Despite the consensual conviction of all relevant political actors that an expansion of the welfare state was historically consequent and expected by the population, the weighing of individual freedom on the one hand and social security on the other hand coined the debate on, as well as the organisation of, the Western German welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the material dimensions of international relations by analysing West German diplomacy after 1945. First, it focuses on the meaning of individual objects in communications and encounters between two states. Second, diplomatic practices are understood as attempts to create and shape specific atmospheres, as assemblages involving various objects, persons and practices. Diplomacy is thereby emphasised as a construct repeatedly connected to the material. Third, at the meta level, individual diplomatic objects and assemblages are embedded in an international system of materiality. It is argued that the material participates in the construction of international regimes of perception. Overall, the different material dimensions make it evident that objects are fundamentally involved in the history of relationships between states at the micro level (individual objects), at the meso level (assemblages) and at the meta level (patterns of systems). The end of a president's and a government's term in office initiates the making of a balance sheet. Actual achievements and deeds are checked against political promises, state representatives' articulated goals and expectations. The balance sheet may take shape prosaically in long speeches and newspaper articles; or it may find its way into the language of numbers with various kinds of statistics. In the case of foreign policy and diplomacy, it may also turn up as a balance of objects. Such was the case at the end of the term of Heinrich Lubke, West Germany's second federal president, who held office from September 1959 to June 1969. Der Spiegel, Hamburg's weekly news magazine, in its 2 June 1969, issue summed up the material legacies of Lubke's two terms.1 These were the objects that Lubke had received as gifts during his fourteen visits to thirty countries, along with the souvenirs that foreign guests had presented to him in the course of their numerous visits to the president's residence in Bonn. The range of gifts extended from "sandals, leather bags and textiles" to "lances, shields, sculptures and objets d'art", from valuable tapestries and vases to animals, including lions, cheetahs, monkeys and cranes, which had been directly transferred to zoos. The president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, actually honoured Lubke with an uncut diamond worth 100,000 German marks (DM). At the end of Lubke's term, many of these gifts were passed on to museums or government institutions or else were transformed into charitable donations to residents of retirement homes and orphanages. Such presents brought by guests highlight a specific material dimension of state representation and diplomacy: They emphasise how important individual objects may be in communications and encounters between two states. These gifts point to the principle of reciprocity, which is both characteristic for diplomatic relationships between states and generally marks the relationship between a guest and a host. But as this chapter will elaborate in its first section, there are additional reasons for why single objects are important to diplomacy. That is, although these individual items may be of great diplomatic importance, they still represent only one of several material dimensions of diplomacy. Indeed, the variety of the gifts that Lubke amassed indicates that seldom did a thing have only one unique meaning. Rather, diplomacy is characterised precisely by the methodical interplay of several things and people in the framework of so called 'assemblages'. As the second section of this chapter shall reveal, it is the skilful combination and spatial arrangement of objects that create diverse atmospheres and thereby determine the setting in which diplomatic actions are performed. The criteria according to which these settings are produced are due to more than just general guidelines and situative decisions concerning staging and representation: for instance, they may confer a particularly splendid aura on a certain situation or, conversely, create a more intimate setting. In fact, as argued in the third section of this chapter, these things and assemblages reflect how the international state system has always also been a material system. Merely by taking into account Lubke's extensive collection of gifts, we become aware of how the material dimensions of diplomacy might pose great challenges to governments, as summed up in the final section of this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations," by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba is presented, relative to its 50th anniversary since its publication. It explores topics discussed in the book including change, continuity and challenges faced by the Federal Republic of Germany, with particular consideration on the political culture, democracy, and political attitudes.

This article marks the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. It is divided into two parts, assessing the status of this unique relationship in 2015 and in 1965, respectively. Angela Merkel's recent criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's stance on the peace process with the Palestinians and the heavy protests that took place in Germany in the wake of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in summer 2014 have cast doubt on the strength of the bilateral partnership fifty years after the first exchange of ambassadors between the two countries. However, by examining the state of German-Israeli cooperation in a number of areas (security, commerce and knowledge exchange, among others), the first part of the article challenges popular interpretations of contemporary German-Israeli relations as being 'at a nadir'. Fifty years ago, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard proposed to his Israeli counterpart Levi Eshkol the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries amid a severe political crisis in Bonn, following a visit of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht to Gamal Abdel Nasser. While much has changed since then, the second part of the article argues that looking at the momentous events of 1965 can provide useful reference points for understanding the current state of relations between Germany and Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]