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The American evangelist Billy Graham held several revival meetings – so-called crusades – in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Many thousands of Germans came to hear him. This article explores the reasons for Graham’s success in the Federal Republic in the context of a transatlantic religious and cultural history. Graham’s campaigns were embedded in the discourse of rechristianization and secularization after the end of the Second World War. Leading Protestant bishops such as Otto Dibelius and Hanns Lilje supported him. Furthermore, Graham’s campaigns played an important role in the West German culture of the Cold War as political stagings of the Free World consensus. In addition, the orchestration of the crusades reconciled religion and consumerism. Billy Graham’s crusades are a prism through which to explore important modernization processes in German Protestantism in the first two decades of the Federal Republic.
Since the late 1950s, nutrition experts have debated whether foods enriched with micronutrients such as protein could alleviate world hunger. Industrial production of such ›wonder foods‹ began in the 1960s, making the food industry an actor in international food aid. Following a brief review of the history of scientific nutrition research, the article analyzes the first boom of fortified foods between the 1950s and the 1970s. With particular reference to the NGO CARE and the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) with its product Incaparina, it shows how the conflict-ridden cooperation between humanitarian actors, governments, business and science developed. In addition to looking at contemporary debates about prices, quality controls and marketing strategies, consumer perspectives must be considered in order to understand the success or failure of new products. After a temporary slump in euphoria from the 1970s onwards, ›wonder foods‹ have experienced a revival since the 1990s – mainly because the networks between governments, nutrition experts, international organizations and the food industry were further cultivated and greater consideration was given to the needs of consumers.
Seit den späten 1950er-Jahren diskutierten ErnährungsexpertInnen, ob mit Mikronährstoffen wie Protein angereicherte Nahrungsmittel den Hunger auf der Welt lindern könnten. Die industrielle Produktion solcher »Wonder Foods« begann in den 1960er-Jahren. Damit wurde die Lebensmittelindustrie zu einem Akteur in der internationalen Nahrungsmittelhilfe. Nach einem kurzen Rückblick auf die Geschichte wissenschaftlicher Ernährungsforschung analysiert der Aufsatz den ersten Boom angereicherter Nahrungsmittel zwischen den 1950er- und den 1970er-Jahren. Am Beispiel der NGO CARE und des zentralamerikanischen Ernährungsinstituts INCAP mit seinem Produkt »Incaparina« wird gezeigt, wie sich die konfliktreiche Kooperation zwischen humanitären Akteuren, Regierungen, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft entwickelte. Neben dem Blick auf zeitgenössische Debatten über Preise, Qualitätskontrollen und Marketingstrategien müssen insbesondere KonsumentInnenperspektiven einbezogen werden, um Erfolg oder Scheitern neuer Produkte zu verstehen. Nach einem temporären Einbruch der Euphorie ab den 1970er-Jahren erlebten »Wonder Foods« seit den 1990er-Jahren ein Revival – vor allem deshalb, weil die Netzwerke zwischen Regierungen, ErnährungsexpertInnen, internationalen Organisationen und Lebensmittelindustrie weiter gepflegt wurden und die Bedürfnisse von KonsumentInnen mehr Berücksichtigung fanden.
What is the link between consumer society, fear of a nuclear war, design, modernity and utopia? According to the curators David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, the answer can be summarized in one concept: the Cold War. ‘Cold War Modern’ is an exhibit intending to show how the two postwar superpowers, the US and the USSR, engaged in aggressive contests in art, architecture and design in order to ‘demonstrate a superior vision of modernity’.
Few of Hannah Arendt’s declarations have had as enduringly a controversial legacy as the one she gave in her famous 1964 West German television conversation with Günter Gaus, proclaiming uncompromised loyalty to her first language – German – despite Hitler. The statement was misconstrued as a privileging of the language of the perpetrators and expressing a bias against Eastern European Jews. In conversation with the recent ›Taytsh turn‹ (Saul Zaritt) in Yiddish Studies, this article focuses instead on two Yiddish newspaper articles published by Arendt in 1942 and 1944 and explores what I call a ›Taytsh move‹ in Arendtʼs language politics. Taytsh, an alternative name for the Yiddish language meaning, literally, German, foregrounds (Jewish) cultures’ inherent translational mode and interconnectivity with the world that makes and sustains these cultures. Arendt reactivated the inherent unbordered nature of languages – with an awareness of the dangers of monolingualism; for the sake of overcoming reductive constructions of Jewishness and modern identity; against the atomizing forces of fascism.
I first came across Harlan Lane’s work towards the end of my PhD, which I was undertaking at University College London, UK. My dissertation was on the construction of ›difference‹ in the British Empire, particularly the differences ascribed to race and gender. Using nineteenth-century medical missionaries as a way in, I had started to think about differences evoked by health, disability, and the body. In particular, I noted the way in which missionaries used the language of disability as a discourse of racialisation. The African and Indian colonial subjects they encountered were described throughout missionary literature as ›deaf to the Word‹, ›blind to the light‹ and ›too lame‹ to walk alone. I have two d/Deaf cousins, one of whom is the sign language sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman, and around about this time Nick had started to familiarise me with some of the issues surrounding Deaf politics. Becoming interested and wanting to know more, I began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) and contemplate the connections between the historical work I was doing and contemporary struggles of Deaf politics and disability politics (I was particularly interested in DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts – given the contemporary climate of austerity in the UK). As I did so I became acquainted with the work of Harlan Lane. Here, although acutely aware of my own positionality as a white, British, hearing woman, I have taken up the challenge set by the editors of this special issue to re-read his work twelve years on from my initial encounter with it, using the insights into postcolonial study I have gained through my historical work.
The centennial of the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 has already produced a wave of new books, exhibitions, documentaries, films, articles, websites, and research projects on the war and will continue to do so over the course of the next years, at least until the centenary of the armistice in 2018. One might witness this rising tide with mixed feelings: the arbitrariness of anniversaries and the ambivalent suggestive power of round numbers are a topic which merits reflection in and of its own. But the First World War has continued to be of lasting and even growing interest for historians over the past decades independently of anniversaries. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost have noted that the number of volumes that were catalogued in the British Library under the rubric of ›The World War, 1914 to 1918‹ quadrupled between 1980 and 2001, and Roger Chickering gathered further evidence for the ›enduring charm of the Great War‹ in 2011. At the same time, these last decades have witnessed a number of methodological shifts and changes within the historical profession, which also affected the study of the First World War. The centennial might therefore be a good opportunity for taking stock of the current state of affairs in World War I studies and for pondering their possible future directions. This is why our journal has decided to contribute to the rising tide of World War I publications with a roundtable discussion.
Gendered critiques by historians and feminist international relations scholars have been animating international history for a good thirty years by complicating the supposedly binary relationships between states and societies, private and public, and local and international that traditionally structured the discipline. In this essay we would like to ask what a sensitivity to gender might add to international histories that are shifting their focus away from intergovernmental relations towards a reassessment of internationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through studies of transnational social movements, international organizations and norms, or practices of global governance. We are especially interested in how gender might contribute to a major emerging theme of international history today: the history of internationalism and international organizations as a struggle between competing or converging universalisms – ‘imperial and anticolonial, “Eastern” and “Western”, old and new’ – that sought to speak in the name of all humanity, rather than as the triumph of an international order imposed by the “West” on the rest.
In spite of the prevailing myth, neither the political self-conception of West Berlin that emerged soon after the war nor the city’s international image were mere by-products of the Cold War. They resulted, rather, from a binational campaign that was based on strategic considerations. Returned Social Democratic émigrés, sympathetic American officials, and certain journalists convinced the German and the American public of West Berlin’s heroic defence of democratic ideals with remarkable speed and success. They could rely on both tangible and intangible resources for their campaign of erecting an ›Outpost of Freedom‹ in what was left of the former Reichshauptstadt. While the heady Weimar days of pre-war Berlin provided countless images that appeared to authenticate this new narrative, the transatlantic network was also able to draw on considerable financial resources and media outlets to promote it. This article seeks to outline the historical actors behind the project and the narratives on which they drew.
Like any political, economic, or social happening, the building of architecture can be understood as an historical event. But unlike those other, particularly discrete, types of events, an architectural “event” takes on a concrete form that not only preserves the moment of its beginning but also registers, to a palpable extent, further developments within its context - a process that can be understood as the development of scars upon the architectural surface. It is no coincidence, then, that Reinhart Koselleck used an architectural metaphor to describe the layering of "geschichtliche Zeiten" (historical times) that emerge between "Vergangenheit" and "Zukunft" (past and future), "Erfahrung" and "Erwartung" (experience and expectation): „Wer sich im Alltag von geschichtlicher Zeit eine Anschauung zu machen sucht, der mag auf die Runzeln eines alten Menschen achten oder auf Narben, in denen ein vergangenes Lebensschicksal gegenwärtig ist. Oder er wird sich das Nebeneinander von Trümmern und Neubauten in Erinnerung rufen, und er wird auf den augenfälligen Stilwandel blicken, der einer räumlichen Häuserflucht ihre zeitliche Tiefendimension verleiht, oder er wird auf das Neben-, Unter- und Übereinander unterschiedlicher modernisierter Verkehrsmittel schauen [...].“
Modeled after the Soviet propaganda magazine SSSR na stroike (›USSR in Construction‹, published 1930–1941, 1949), the Japanese overseas propaganda photo magazine FRONT (1942–1945) provided visual propaganda for the so-called ›Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere‹, a concept that was proclaimed in 1940 and served to disguise Japan’s quest for hegemony in Asia. Employing the aesthetics of Russian Constructivism and Socialist Realism of SSSR na stroike, FRONT created a visual aesthetic that could be termed Japanese Co-Prosperity Realism. Its dynamic and modernistic design was a transculturally inspired practice by Japanese photographers, graphic designers, journalists and producers of visual media, some of whom had been left-wing intellectuals or had lived and worked in the Soviet Union. In a comparative perspective, this paper carves out the political, cultural and gendered semantics of the (in)visibility of power, political religion and ethnic diversity that such aesthetics entailed. It explores some of the shifting backgrounds against which photographic techniques were enacted, from their avant-garde beginnings to their application in authoritarian regimes.
Bis Ende 2015 werden 50 Prozent aller Chinesen über einen Internetzugang verfügen. Die Möglichkeiten für eine größer werdende Anzahl von Chinesen, online zu kommunizieren und zu konsumieren, hat eine Reihe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern dazu inspiriert, sich mit Themen wie Zensur, Überwachung und Nutzung von sozialen Medien zu beschäftigen. Ein Großteil dieser Forschung baut auf der Prämisse einer antagonistischen Beziehung zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft auf. Allerdings weiß man bisher nur wenig darüber, welche Auswirkungen die staatlich geförderten und internetbasierten Kommunikationskanäle zwischen Regierungsbeamten und chinesischen Bürgern auf die Transformation der autoritären Einparteienherrschaft in China haben. Der vorliegende Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dieser Frage, indem er Chinas E-Government-Strategie einerseits zu globalen Entwicklungen in Beziehung setzt, andererseits im Kontext der sich verändernden Anreize untersucht, die politische Reformen in China in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten ermöglicht haben. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Bemühungen der chinesischen Einparteienregierung, die Interaktion zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft zu digitalisieren, großes Potenzial dafür birgt, das Wesen des chinesischen Staates zu verändern. Allerdings stellen diese Veränderungen keinen Paradigmenwechsel dahingehend dar, wie China regiert wird. Der wichtigste Aspekt dieser Veränderungen ist, dass sie die Möglichkeit bieten, das oftmals als „Diktatoren-Dilemma“ bezeichnete Problem zu lösen: Menschen in nichtdemokratischen Regierungssystemen haben Angst davor, den Herrschenden gegenüber ihre Meinung auszudrücken, und entziehen so dem Staat eine wichtige Informationsgrundlage. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Entwicklung hochintegrierter E-Government-Plattformen, wie sie sich die Technokraten der Kommunistischen Partei Chinas vorstellen, bestehender institutioneller Logik folgt und dringende Probleme zu lösen vermag. So wird die Chance darauf erhöht, dass diese Plattformen nachhaltig eingeführt werden.
A Cold War Museum for Berlin
(2009)
The Cold War is ancient history to young people now. They have no idea of the underlying issues that fueled the Cold War or how it evolved and affected people’s lives. Current college and university students (aged 18-26) were between zero and six years old when the Berlin Wall came down, which is to say they did not live during the Cold War and have no direct understanding of what it was. It really is history to them, seemingly as distant as World War II or maybe even the French Revolution. The Cold War world, of mutually assured destruction, communism vs. capitalism, and Berlin on the front line divided by a wall, has been replaced by fears of terrorism, global warming, and financial crisis.
What is striking about recent research on residential care is not only its national bias and its tendency to neglect regional variations in ‘texture’, but also its preoccupation with contemporary issues and its lack of historical context. The notion of contingency, that is, the idea that things might have evolved differently, often seems to be missing. Moreover, most of the literature appears to be one-dimensional, downplaying the diversity, complexity and ambiguity of real developments. It often lacks an awareness of the power of precedents in shaping society’s attitudes to residential care and the practical responses to this problem. This is particularly important because, as this article tries to demonstrate, the present situation of residential care reflects the cumulative impact of traditions and cultural norms, of past decisions and commitments.
While most Europeans lived through an exceptionally peaceful period of history, termed ‘The Long Peace’ by John Lewis Gaddis,2 the populations of other continents were decidedly less fortunate. What was a ‘Cold War’ for the Europeans was anything but ‘cold’ for the Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, for most Arab peoples, the Afghans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Indians, the populations of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea, and of most of Latin America. How, then, can one be so sanguine as to characterise this period as that of a ‘Cold War’ or a ‘long peace’? The reason is that the long-expected Third World War has not (yet?) taken place. It was the prospect of such a Third World War, a ‘total’ and in all probability nuclear war, that attracted the attention of concerned minds in Europe and North America, the cultures that over centuries produced most publications on the subjects of war, strategy, military affairs and international relations.
How will Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine end? What kinds of political scenarios could stop the suffering and bring stability to the region? Of all the different future scenarios none is particularly encouraging. In particular, the prospect of a ›Finlandized‹ Ukraine has met with near universal rejection. Yet, ever since Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea, ›Finlandization‹ of Ukraine has been discussed as a potential solution.
‘Silenced Power’. Warfare Technology and the Changing Role of Sounds in Twentieth-Century Europe
(2011)
How did the technological ability to manipulate the sounds of weapons affect warfare in Europe during the twentieth century? The article first observes the role of warfare sounds in Europe prior to the First World War. The focus here is on the connection between the large-scale use of artillery and rapid-fire technologies and the development of sonic perceptions of ‘sounded power’ during the late nineteenth century. The second part discusses the introduction of ‘soundless weapons’ during the First World War. The horror of ‘silenced power’ as a force undermining the long-term tradition of ‘sounded power’ on the battlefield is exemplified by the case of gas warfare in the First World War and its long-term influence in Germany during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. The paper points to existing gaps in research regarding the role of sound and silence on the battlefield, and further argues that although the notion of ‘silenced power’ was more prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century its potential horror could not be ignored after 1945.
My main argument here is that the story seen from the perspective of the influential year of 1962 reveals a very different historical context, with a different set of actors and a different trajectory and causalities regarding the human rights breakthrough, from those stories focusing on Western agency in the 1940s and the 1970s. It repositions the history of human rights in significant ways and makes apartheid and racial discrimination more crucial to the human rights story than has hitherto been acknowledged. It is also important to emphasize that the positions and arguments presented by countries from the Global South in these UN debates were richly nuanced. These nuances are important if we are to fully appreciate the dynamics during these years. Tanzania differed significantly from, for instance, Senegal in the way it envisaged the scope and applicability of international human rights law and investigatory measures. Tanzania wanted a sole focus on Southern Africa and not beyond; Senegal had a wider perspective. This should remind us that when we are imagining Africa as a historical-political space, we need to allow for diversity, individual histories and agency, aspects that cannot be adequately captured by labels such as ›The Third World‹, ›Global South‹ or indeed even ›Africa‹.
This article reassesses the emergence of human rights advocacy in 1970s West Germany from the perspective of memory politics. Focusing on the campaigns against political violence in South America, the article first traces the boom and bust of antifascist activism against the Chilean junta in the early 1970s. It then analyzes the displacement of abstract antifascist discourses by a more humanitarian human rights talk closely intertwined with concrete references to National Socialist crimes. Taking the perspective of grassroots advocates, this article explores how and why activists referenced the crimes of Nazism to defend human rights in the present. Finally, the article moves beyond the claim that human rights politics were minimalistic and even anti-antifascist, by showing how some human rights activists continued to think of themselves as antifascists. They infused antifascism with entirely new meanings by recovering the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler as an acceptable example of anti-government violence.
Rethinking the boundaries of Europe is an earnest exercise that calls for critical reconsideration of our existing spatio-temporal constructions. First of all, it should be established that this kind of an exercise does not only necessitate a re-mapping of the cartographical space within which “Europe” is placed, but more so a re-thinking of the intellectual space within which history is situated.
Having for a long time been an area of research mainly reserved for specialists in international relations and political scientists, the international organizations (IOs) that first emerged in the twentieth century’s pre-World War II decades have also attracted renewed interest of historians for the past several years. This development has its place in a movement of ‘globalization’ within the discipline, evident in both themes and practice. The nation, the region, and the village remain pertinent units for study, but the historian interested in global history approaches them in relation to other spaces, reflecting renewed attention to connections and forms of circulation traditionally neglected in specialized studies. As will be argued below, in their role as observation posts, the IOs and international associations here comprise an especially productive area of research, in effect opening access to work on complexly intermeshing ‘circulatory regimes’.