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It would be easy to presume that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had always been a symbol of opposition and dissent in the German Democratic Republic. Passed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, the UDHR contained a number of provisions that contradicted the political and social order of the GDR as run by the Socialist Unity Party (SED). It demanded an independent judiciary, prohibited arbitrary arrest and invasion of privacy, and guaranteed the right to leave one’s own country. In East Germany, where the judiciary was firmly an ideological organ, the Stasi regularly conducted mass surveillance and arbitrary detention and those seeking to leave the country illegally were shot at the border, this would seem to be a document seen to be inherently hostile to SED rule. Even the social rights contained in the UDHR, in particular the right to strike, were contrary to the legal realities of East Germany where citizens could not demand rights from the state that would obstruct the will of the party.
Yet over the course of East Germany’s existence, the Universal Declaration was more likely to be invoked by the SED than by its domestic opponents. The SED came to view the Universal Declaration and the UN human rights system as a whole as an ally to the Socialist Bloc and the contents of the UDHR reflected in the achievements of socialism within the borders of the GDR. For decades this was not challenged by East Germans on a mass scale, until very suddenly in the late 1980s, human rights and the UDHR became symbols of the democratic opposition. This article will trace the trajectory of the UDHR in East German public discourse from its passage in 1948 and the reaction by the SED in the Soviet Occupied Zone, through the commemorations of the UDHR on its many anniversaries before the ultimate collapse of SED in 1989.
UNRRA (1943-1947) was an international organization that coordinated relief for victims of the Second World War in areas liberated from Axis control. Existing historical scholarship has put an unbalanced emphasis on global post-war reconstruction: European experiences have attracted much attention whereas scholars pay little attention to non-Western cases, with a few exceptions such as Japan. For long, not only in Western media, but also in Chinese historical scholarship, China has been either regarded as a passive recipient of international humanitarianism, or has simply been overlooked. But looking at UNRRA in China provides us with an opportunity to investigate how non-Western actors and motivations could shape a transnational humanitarian project, in a way different from European cases.
The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a landmark event, encoding the lessons learned from five years of total war on the European continent. The debates over the universality and inalienability of rights that dominated the writing of the document brought together statesmen and -women from across the world. But, one state was conspicuously left out of this discussion: Germany. The defeated state’s exclusion was understandable given the violence, destruction, death, and genocide the Nazi regime had unleashed on the European continent from 1939 to 1945. In many ways, it was Germany’s waging of the Second World War and their perpetration of genocide that created the urgency for a document that codified the most basic rights of men and women in the immediate postwar years.
As Hannah Arendt anticipated in 1951, refugees have become a major issue in contemporary societies. Writing just three years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been adopted in 1948, Arendt argued that refugees exposed a fundamental tension between universal human rights and the sovereignty of nation-states. For Arendt, human rights were an abstraction; the only real rights were those possessed by citizens.
"There’s nobody left". Anti-Semitic exclusion and persecution in Rauischholzhausen, 1933-1942
(2018)
"I just can’t go back there. [...] I [would] like to go once more to Holzhausen, to the cemetery, and to Kirchhain. I want to see, but ... there’s nobody left." – Martin Spier, New York City 2009.
The people no longer left there are the Jewish residents of Rauischholzhausen. They were persecuted and deprived of their rights, then expelled and murdered. At the same time, the history of Jewish life in this village goes a long way back, as does the antisemitism there. In 1933, the village still had 20 Jewish residents.
On September 6, 1942, the last 18 Jewish individuals from Rauischholzhausen and the surrounding areas were forced onto lorries at the village square and transported from there to Theresienstadt. Three of them survived the Holocaust, returning to the village in 1945.
This book is the result of searching for those who are missing and the reasons for their absence. It is the result of an extensive search in archives and conversations with contemporary witnesses from the village. Yet, in particular, it is the result of conversations with four Jewish survivors, the siblings of the Spier family. On the basis of their memories, this book attempts to describe those years between 1933 and 1942—years that beggar description. It presents a history of events in Rauischholzhausen that developed their own dynamic and that in many respects preempted the state’s policies of exclusion and persecution.
In this issue
(2017)
This article examines the rise of aeromobile sprawl, which is defined here as aviation’s socio-environmental impact on people, places, and things, in Canada during the 1970s. It links aeromobile sprawl largely to state-led airport development and the effect that upgrading, expanding, and building new airports had on communities and landscapes. Accordingly, it shows that while aeromobile sprawl was to some extent an outcome of postwar developments not limited to aviation, the Canadian government and its partners also contributed to sprawl by endorsing various policies and strategies that shifted over the period in question. At the same time, these actions did not go unnoticed. Public critiques of aeromobile sprawl emerged as people increasingly objected to larger and busier airports operating near populated and non-industrial areas. This article demonstrates that debates in Canada about airport development and the rapid growth of aviation revealed sharply diverging views about how to best accommodate the mobility requirements of mass air travel within the country’s natural and built environments in the 1970s.
Koyaanisqatsi is a cult American movie and a reference point for many viewers. A strong critique of modernity, a manifesto against industrialization, as well as an artist’s view of the brutality of humankind against nature, its enthralling rhythm and music, sublime images and powerful message are still striking today, 35 years after its production. And, in many respects, the movie has become a cultural landmark about the use of modern technology and the destruction of the natural landscape.
Debating Consumer Durables, Luxury and Social Inequality in Poland during the System Transition
(2017)
This article examines policies and practices related to Turkish teachers in West German schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Different stakeholders in Turkish education in West Germany – school administrators, parents, consular officials, and the teachers themselves – understood the role of these teachers in different ways over time, reflecting contrasting and shifting notions about the knowledge teachers were expected to pass on to Turkish pupils. In the late 1970s, West German officials began to privilege teachers’ status as migrants capable of modeling their own successful integration for pupils, reflecting new assumptions about Turks in West Germany and their futures in the country.
Since the 1950s, cycling policy in China has gone through three phases: from active encouragement (1955–1994) and systematic discouragement (1994–2008) to neglect and ambivalence (since the 2010s). Parallel to the expansion of automobility, the country has been unique in its development of innovations in electric-powered two-wheelers and a vibrant e-cycling practice since the 1980s. Electric bikes have given over 300 million low-status commuters and peddlers access to jobs and housing, even though planners have dismissed them as a problematic ›floating population‹ and remnants of the past. Given China’s current urban sustainable mobility challenges and ambition to become the world’s first ›Ecological Civilization‹ (2013), China’s bicycle industry, e-vehicle manufacturers, and the e-commerce sector may offer an alternative to the US-based ›car civilization‹ if ecological (e-cycles) and social (low-status workers) sustainability are brought into one analytical frame.
Research on the commons, and its historical enclosure, has largely restricted itself to rural areas and the frontier. This article examines the declining access to Rio de Janeiro’s urban commons, its streets and its squares. Into the nineteenth century, residents perceived Rio’s streets as remnants of nature, left intact to give access to the built environment. The streets served as a diverse human habitat, a place for community, play, work, and commerce. With the arrival of the automobile, Rio’s public spaces began to be transformed into spaces set aside largely for movement. The automotive class, which in Brazil remained a tiny minority, captured most of the streets’ spaces for driving and its squares and sidewalks for parking, in a sense closing the street off to many of its former functions. In fact, automotive movement justified – and its violence enforced – the elimination of street behaviors which the elite had been decrying unsuccessfully for decades. Compared to the developed world, the pace of automobilization in Rio was slow, but it had a profound impact from as early as the second decade of the century.
In this article I examine the context for the British bank Barclays’ decision to disinvest from South Africa in 1986, with special attention to the impact of the Anti-Apartheid Movement’s campaign against the bank. The 18-year long campaign against Barclays – the largest bank in South Africa at the time and the fourth largest foreign-owned corporation – points to significant developments within the fields of corporate social responsibility and the potential influence of social movements on multinational corporations. Applying the theoretical approach of subpolitics as developed by Ulrich Beck in combination with the later subdivision by Boris Holzer and Mads P. Sørensen into a passive and an active form, it is possible to analyse the decisions of both anti-apartheid activists and Barclays on similar terms. The conclusions drawn in this article emphasise the idea that economic decisions taken by multinational corporations may have unintended political consequences and, furthermore, that the awareness of this phenomenon has contributed to the development of corporate social responsibility. Finally, I suggest that the campaign against Barclays generated public attentiveness towards the social responsibility of businesses.
Music played an important role as a political medium for the anti-apartheid movement, particularly in the 1980s. Drawing on sources from the UK and South Africa, the article investigates the controversy surrounding Paul Simon’s album Graceland (1986) against the backdrop of the cultural boycott against South Africa. The aim of the boycott was to isolate the apartheid regime in the field of culture, but from the middle of the 1980s, the opposition within South Africa increasingly regarded it as an obstacle. The African National Congress (ANC) pursued a modification of the boycott against the resistance of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). The controversy over Graceland only served to compound the confusion: opinions differed as to whether Simon had really breached the cultural boycott by collaborating with South African musicians, and on how this could potentially be sanctioned (in either sense of the word). The incident shows that the attempt to control transnational cultural currents through political institutions in times of increased mediatisation was ultimately doomed to failure.
This article will first examine the emergence of Italian Fascism and provide insight into Italian Fascists’ self-perception. Second, taking the contemporary conceptualizations of fascism developed by its Marxist, liberal, and conservative opponents as a starting point, this article reviews research on fascism during the Cold War. Third, the approaches taken by more recent research on fascism will be discussed and a survey of current fields of empirical work will be presented. A concluding section summarizes the usefulness of the concept of fascism.
In this issue
(2017)
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.
As one of the most viewed films on apartheid South Africa, Sir Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-nominated Cry Freedom helped push the atrocities of the apartheid system to the forefront of public attention. The screenplay was based on South African journalist Donald Woods’ autobiographical books Biko (1978) and Asking for Trouble (1981), which detail Woods’ relationship with Biko and the court trial following Biko’s death in police custody.
Picture agencies are mediators between photographers and editorial staffs; they play a crucial role in producing mass media visibility. However, their part in the system of the visual propaganda of the Nazi state is largely unexplored. This article features a controversial case, the American Associated Press and its German subsidiary. By submitting to the Schriftleitergesetz (Editorial Control Law) in 1935, the German AP GmbH (LLC) followed its German counterparts in the process of Gleichschaltung (forcible coordination). Until the United States entered the war in December 1941, AP supplied the Nazi press with American pictures. This service proved to be of particular relevance for propaganda. AP was also allowed to continue its photographic reporting in the Reich. AP pictures taken under the aegis of the Propaganda Ministry, the Wehrmacht and the SS were ubiquitous in the Nazi press. Moreover, the New York headquarters supplied the North American press with these same pictures, where they were published either as news photos or as propaganda images.
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‹.
In this issue
(2016)
Environmental history is the history of the changing mutual relationship between humankind and nature. The various, more or less concrete attempts to define this area of historical study can be reduced to this basic common denominator. Though the notion of man and nature's mutual dependence may sound pithy at first, it's a rather fuzzy one upon closer inspection. Melanie Arndt describes this field of research in all its facets – because the valuable contribution of environmental history as a „subdiscipline” deserves much greater recognition from the outside world and from scholars working in other disciplines.
Debating Consumer Durables. Luxury and Social Inequality in Poland during the System Transition
(2015)
This essay aims to discuss how cultural meanings of modern consumer durables, such as colour TVs, stereos and automatic washing machines, were embedded in the public debate towards social equality before and after the change of 1989 in Poland. In state socialism, availability of affordable electric appliances was one of the agendas of the state politics of collective consumption. Along with the system transition, affordability of consumer durables became extensively discussed within the framework of emerging consumer capitalism. At that time purchases and ownership of consumer durables became an indicator of the emergence of a new consumption culture based upon individual lifestyles in a society where social diversification and income inequality were intrinsic elements of social order.
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.
The paper explores representations of economic reform in Czechoslovakia immediately before and after the fall of the centrally planned economy in 1989/90. By what means was the concept of rapid economic transition towards a liberal market setting mediated into the academic and the public sphere? How did it achieve wide public consent? In the first part, the paper analyzes the Czechoslovak academic discussion about perestroika in the late 1980s, where a rapid liberal transition was cast by a distinct group of younger scholars as the only possible way of reforming the socialist economy. Their training was based above all on Paul A. Samuelson’s canonical textbook Economics, which presented this discipline almost as a natural science with universal standards. Immediately after 1989/90, when some of these scholars assumed executive positions within the new Czechoslovak government, what were at first purely economic ways of reasoning merged with certain images of the national past, creating a mixture of liberal economic knowledge and national exceptionalism.
The newly emerging historical scholarship on the era ›after the boom‹, on the marketization of societies in the wake of the neoliberal political reforms, deregulation, and privatization starting in the 1970s, has emphasized this threshold as an epochal break that was driven by large-scale structural shifts in the global economy, in social relations, and in cultural identities. This new accentuation of the economic and social transformation has, for good reason, eclipsed older historical traditions that focused on events, discourses, specific interests, and individual actors. The marketization of social relations is thus often considered to be the result of processes beyond the reach and scope of purposeful actors that promoted specific societal changes. While this historical focus is quite right in denying independent causal status to specific agents and the self-aggrandizement of vain leaders and their intellectual entourage, it tends to obscure the historical genesis of ideas and concepts that later became critical components of political leadership, and the specific constellations of interests, knowledge and actors that did prefigure and originally promote the marketization of economic and political institutions.
Milton Friedman hung up the phone in disgruntlement. The most influential economist of the postwar era had just called three different banks, one in Chicago and then two in New York, in order to initiate a financial transaction. He wanted to sell short $300,000 in pound sterling. Short selling is a technique for speculating on falling prices. Initially, speculators can only speculate on rising prices: they buy something and hope that it gains value, so that they can sell it at a profit. If the price for this asset goes down instead, the speculator incurs a loss when he resells it. So in order to profit from falling prices, speculators need to sell first and buy later – which is indeed possible if what is sold now is in fact only to be delivered a few weeks later. If the speculator is right and prices fall in the interim, he can buy cheap just before delivery is due and thus profit from having already sold what, at the time, he had not yet owned.
Marketization is a broad term with a wide range of meanings. It encompasses measures of deregulation and privatization as well as the perceived increase of an ›economic‹ logic in social relationships. For historical purposes, the term should not be narrowly defined, and nor should the concept of marketization be used in an ahistorical manner detached from contemporary usage. However, there are two questions which the historical analysis of marketization needs to address. First, what is the conceptual understanding of the market mechanism to which the term marketization is linked? Second, what is the relationship between marketization and economic theory?
Guerrilla Mothers and Distant Doubles: West German Feminists Look at China and Vietnam, 1968–1982
(2015)
Communist China and Vietnam looked like the future to many West German feminists in the years after 1968. This article reconstructs a lost history of influence, identification and emulation, tracing some of the ways that Chinese and Vietnamese communism inspired and attracted West German feminists from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Beginning in a spirit of socialist universalism, West German feminists drew on reports of the experience of East Asian women who they felt lived in the ›liberated zones‹ of post-revolutionary society. Like the French radicals who declared that ›Vietnam is in our factories‹, West German feminists created a global framework for their activism. Looking east, they borrowed or adopted models of consciousness-raising and direct action from China and Vietnam. This article tracks the arc of exchange, from the enthusiasm of the late 1960s and 1970s to the West German feminist disenchantment with both East Asian communism and the global South by the early 1980s.
In this Issue
(2015)
In 1967, an exhibition opened in East Berlin that proposed, through an overload of images, to unite the histories of the Soviet Union and the GDR, and to confront international photography exhibitions produced in the United States and West Germany. More than the design principles and methods of this show, entitled Vom Glück des Menschen or On the Happiness of People, directly connect it with Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man exhibition, first presented at MoMA in New York in 1953. Its original title was in fact The Socialist Family of Man, and its designers addressed Steichen’s show directly with a scathing critique that echoes the critical discourse in general around The Family of Man. Ultimately, and despite the acknowledged relationship of the exhibition to its Western model, Vom Glück des Menschen also departed from it, crafting a narrative through photographs specifically designed for a socialist society under construction.
Even if Hitler's shrill attacks on Britain could not have been more erroneous or pharisaic, they hint at a dimension of the international history of Nazism and the global 1930s and 1940s that has attracted little attention so far: the regime's attempt to promote its social policy programmes internationally, and the complex and ambivalent history of their reception in various parts of the world.
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.
In this Issue
(2014)
Historians have analyzed films, novels, records, theater plays etc. primarily in reference to their meaning and reception. This article makes a case for moving the focus to the actors, structures and processes that shape symbolic objects before these are consumed. To this end, we present a framework established in US sociology to study the fabrication, distribution and evaluation of symbolic content. We discuss the production of culture perspective as an approach that appears to be particularly useful for historical research and, by reviewing selected works from the sociological literature, demonstrate how this perspective can be applied to phenomena like popular music and literary fiction. We focus on genres as bundles of conventions as one lens through which historians may analyze the creation, reproduction, evaluation and consumption of culture.
After a seven-year period of military dictatorship and following the reestablishment of parliamentary democracy in 1974, historical studies have been a continuously developing field in Greece. Similarly as in Spain and Portugal at much the same time, archives became accessible for academic historians. The general public’s expectations about the establishment of historical ‘truth’ concerning the recent past were pressing.1 It is against this backdrop that we propose to review the changing conditions of historical research and especially the challenges involved in gaining access to primary sources, in particular those related to ‘national matters’. We will try to show the ways in which the particularities of the Greek case have to do with the history of civil rights in the country in the twentieth century, both during the interwar years and – more dramatically – during the Cold War period.
In France, the culture of secrecy continues to dominate access policies. The acceptance of or resistance to this culture by various social actors, including government officials, civil servants such as archivists, historians, independent scholars, and journalists, partly explains the historical tension between advocates of a more restrictive or liberal policy of access to government records deemed ‘sensitive’. Unlike the American case with its long-established right to access, in France, access to information is just starting to be considered a citizen’s right. Initial reactions to the first version of my book (1994) sparked a rather violent debate. In the controversy, most of the archivists and some influential historians either denied or justified the difficulty of accessing so-called ‘sensitive archives’. Indeed, thanks to the ‘invisibility’ of this question until then, a book dedicated to the ‘Vichy Syndrome’, which had been published some years before, did not even mention this problem as evidence of France’s difficulties in facing the past.
The supposedly commercial products of the culture industry are increasingly facing sales difficulties because growing numbers of self-assertive consumers are downloading products at will, thus no longer following the given rules of the market. Not only multinational record companies, but also representatives of ‘high’ culture are adamant in their criticism of the current ‘culture for free’ tendency. The latter can hardly be characterized as profit-oriented – nor would they describe themselves that way – but they contend that bootleg copies are a threat to their livelihood, and that the culture of piracy paves the way for harebrained mass products. The discussion encompasses copyright laws and the ways consumers are appropriating cultural products as well as the question whether or not these tendencies will fundamentally change the production of culture. Such debates are charged with cultural criticism, but in essence of economic nature. In addition, the cultural sector is faced with the accusation of waning societal relevance. In the arts and features sections of newspapers and magazines, journalists and essayists bemoan that pop culture is no longer ‘the voice and mirror of political and social change, like twenty or thirty years ago’. Although popular culture may have evolved from its original return and distribution strategies as well as its constitutive (at least for some) connection to youth and protest movements, a medially conveyed, market-driven culture that is accessible to a wide audience remains a characteristic feature of modern societies and their self-perceptions.
In this issue
(2013)
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.
As a striking phenomenon of Soviet consumption, Beriozka stores appeared in the late 1950s and existed until the end of the 1980s. This chain of stores was a state trade organization selling goods that were otherwise in short supply (cars, fashionable clothes, household appliances, etc.) for special ‘checks’ used as equivalents of foreign currency by special groups of Soviet citizens. Similar stores existed in other socialist countries. The article shows that these stores on the one hand became an element of the existing system of state-granted entitlements. The customers were Soviet citizens who earned money abroad as well as people who did not go abroad but received remittances from foreign sources. On the other hand, the development of the black market (barely persecuted by the state) made it possible to purchase Beriozka checks for roubles; so it granted access to sought-after goods (among them even goods from the West) to a wide range of consumers. Paradoxically, Beriozka was criticized and much frequented at the same time.
In the 1980s, when computers became affordable for private households, a hacker or cracking scene, which was the term used by members of this subculture, developed in several western and northwestern European countries. These (almost exclusively male) groups of adolescents ‘cracked’, copied and exchanged computer games. On the basis of magazines and published interviews with former members of this scene, this article shows how cracking became an important current in the broad spectrum of teenage subculture – with specific ethical codes and rituals of masculinity. Its members were by no means lone specialists who eschewed contact with the outside world, but rather developed their own forms of community and communication. This scene did not construe itself as a political counter-culture; it was rather part of the diversifying popular and consumer culture of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, when law enforcing agencies began to prosecute software piracy more resolutely, this computer subculture began to fade. However, it lived on in the field of computer graphics, in electronic music and in the growing IT sector.
By the late 1970s, it was technologically possible to manufacture microcomputers – very small, stand-alone computers for personal use – in very large quantities. Selling them, however, meant creating a mass market where none existed: conventionally, only trained professionals, and a few devoted enthusiasts, interacted directly with the machines. Designers, marketers, retailers and other promoters therefore sought to build meanings into the design and presentation of computers which would connect them with new audiences. Such meanings reflected – and might themselves modify – the prevalent hopes, fears, desires and expectations of the users’ cultures.
The web and tomorrow’s historiography. Since the 1990s the world wide web (or simply, the web) has been an integral and important part of the communicative infrastructure of modern societies. On the one hand the web has developed as a new medium in its own right, in continuation of other media types such as newspapers, film, radio and television. On the other hand, the web has been intimately entangled in the social, cultural and political life taking place outside of the web. For example, within the realm of politics the web has been essential for the extreme left and right since the mid 1990s (as a platform for discussion and mobilisation as well as for the diffusion of political ideas). And in everyday life an important part of modern youth culture has for a number of years been closely connected to such web phenomena as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Caricature can be defined as an art engagé which aims to transmit a social or political message. In order to achieve this goal, the satirical picture triggers an emotional reaction in the audience and guides it through a cathartic coming-of-awareness process. The feelings evoked by caricature must not necessarily be expressed through laughter; but they are a joyful or indignant shock reaction to gazing at something absurd. William A. Coupe, following Schiller, therefore defines the nature of caricature as the outcome of a dialectical struggle between the ideal and the real: ‘This conflict of ideal and real may, however, be seen and expressed in two different ways, in an emotional and serious or in a humorous and jesting fashion.’
In this Issue
(2012)
Timothy S. Brown highlights in his article that the year „1968” must be conceived as a cipher for the political and social change in the second half of the 20th century. He inquires the generational connection and the transnational entanglement of the “Global Sixties”. Despite the numerous research in the course of the 50th anniversary of “1968” remains the subject fruitful: Brown points out the potential of interdisciplinary studies, which give more weight to the cultural aspects of “1968” and the new kinds of the political, focus on the analysis of reactions of the states and their elites as well as on the changes in gender relations and in general on the long-term effects of this “epoch-making” year.
Writing in the 1960s, the novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner insisted that the postwar history of Berlin cried out for epic literary treatment: "The great book on Berlin is going to be a sort of Iliad, a story that dramatizes a power struggle in terms of the men who waged it." Indeed, the experience of Germany's once and future capital after 1945 is full of high drama and powerful personalities, from Stalin and Truman to Ernest Bevin, Lucius Clay, Ernst Reuter, Willy Brandt, Walter Ulbricht, John F, Kennedy, and the "daring young men” who flew the Airlift in 1948—49. Berlin seemed to be the epicenter of the Cold War, the site of superpower confrontation, of “wars of nerves,” of America’s “finest hour," the place where two competing political, economic, and cultural systems collided and competed spectacularly. After August 1961 it was the site of the Wall, that grisly and constant reminder of the abnormal division of the world and of a great city.
‘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.
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’.
The study of organized sound is the business of musicology – yet this routine observation carries a wealth of complexities, especially in the context of interdisciplinary discourse. Although musicology’s pluridisciplinary foundations offer open access to such disciplines as history, literary studies, mathematics, or sociology, the field’s intradisciplinary discourses and methodologies have shaped musicology in ways that turn most interdisciplinary exchange into a challenge. The scholarly exploration of sound in the twentieth century presents a case in point. Meaningful research on, for example, the music of the contemporary avant-garde composer Kaija Saariaho demands highly sophisticated technical skills in the spheres of the analysis, aesthetics, and technologies of music. While one could imagine interdisciplinary research on Saariaho involving, for example, the humanities or social sciences – perhaps with respect to, say, cultural politics in the late twentieth century – the specialist areas of music research usually remain disciplinarily hermetic. My current work on music in the USA during World War II offers striking examples of the need for, yet problems of, squaring interdisciplinary engagement with intradisciplinarities. The following remarks will address some of those disciplinary intersections.
This article investigates the little known phenomenon of tourism to the Iron Curtain, using the example of the inter-German border. The practice of traveling to the demarcation line to see where Germany and Europe were divided peaked during the mid-1960s but was already in full swing by the mid-1950s and lasted until the fall of the border in 1989. Based on archival documents, postcards and tourist guidebooks, the article analyses the growth of a tourist infrastructure on the western side of the inter-German border and situates this travel as a form of ‘dark tourism’. It argues that seeing the border and visualising the partition of the country did little for overcoming it but rather tended to underwrite the political and territorial status quo. In the Cold War battle for public opinion, seeing the border allowed West Germans and their visitors from abroad to juxtapose freedom and prosperity with captivity and decay, thus advertising the superiority of the capitalist model over its socialist other.
In this Issue
(2011)
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.
The word "anti-Semitism" serves on the one hand as a generic term for every type of hostility towards Jews. More specifically on the other hand, as a term formed in the final third of the 19th century, it characterizes a new, pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice that no longer argued religiously but employed qualities and characteristics associated with "race". A distinction needs to be drawn between the older religiously-motivated anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.
By expanding historical image research, visual history has in the recent past established itself as a field of research in late modern and contemporary history, which considers images in a wider sense both as sources as well as independent artifacts of historiographical research and likewise looks at the visuality of history and the historicity of the visual. Its exponents advocate understanding images beyond their pictorialness as a medium and as an activity with an independent aesthetic that condition the way of seeing things, shape perceptual patterns, convey interpretations, that organize the aesthetic relationship of historic subjects to their social and political reality and which are able to generate own realities.
The peculiar admiration that National Socialists had for Henry Ford and the supposed sympathies that the Detroit industrialist harbored for Nazism keep attracting the curious, both academic historians and Internet dilettantes. There is something irresistible about the connection between the man taken to symbolize American industrial modernity and the quintessential villains of the twentieth century.
Towards Another Concept of the State: Historiography of the 1970s in the USA and Western Europe
(2011)
After years of neglect, the 1970s have recently entered the array of academic interest. In the USA and in Western Europe a growing number of historians are finally pulling the decade out of the shadows of the 1960s and the 1980s. As can be expected in such an early phase of academic exploration, there is still littel that ties all publications about the Seventies together.
The internationalization of ideas is an old idyll, and an old anxiety. “The invasion of ideas has followed on from the invasion of the barbarians”, the aged François-René de Chateaubriand wrote in 1841, in his last reflections on the new “universal society” which was no more than a confusion of needs and images”: “when steam power will have been perfected, when, together with the telegraph and the railways, it will have made distances disappear, there will not only be commodities which travel, but also ideas which will have recovered the use of their wings”. This universe of fluttering and floating ideas is at first sight exhilarating for intellectual history. A world in which ideas soar across the frontiers of distance and nationality is also a world full of ideas, and a world of opportunity for intellectual history. But all is not, I fear, as encouraging as it appears. The international or transnational turn which is such a powerful preoccupation of present historical scholarship may even, in the end, be subversive of the old enterprise that Marx described disobligingly in 1847 as “sacred history – the history of ideas”.
Different factors have been proposed to explain the longevity of the communist system in Romania: social control by the secret police, external pressures, or foreign control. However, the most common explanation is that of the Romanian people’s ‘passivity’. Many commentators distinguish between two groups in Romanian society, victims and collaborators, and hold the entire Romanian nation responsible for communism since it did not oppose the system and its authorities. Over the last few years, Romanian sociologists have begun to study communist society more systematically. They have developed new interpretations of the causes of the longevity of the system in terms of the transformation of social identity under communism and general fear. This article advances a complementary explanation, focusing on the perception of social security, and draws on a series of interviews conducted in the summer of 2009 in Romania and a number of public surveys conducted between 1999 and 2009.
Migration has been a constant feature of human history – "homo migrans" has existed ever since "homo sapiens". Moving away from the traditional nation-based dichotomy of emigration – immigration, the less specific term migration allows for many possible trajectories, time spans, directions and destinations. It can be temporary or long-term, voluntary or forced. It can occur in stages or in cycles, and can be mono-directional or more varied. Generally speaking, however, human migration can be defined as crossing the boundary of a political or administrative unit for a certain minimum period.
There is no single answer to the question: What is intellectual history? Commenting in the mid-1980s on two recent volumes dedicated to the sub-discipline's methods and perspectives, John Pocock wryly remarked: "I recommend reading them, but after doing so myself, I am persuaded that whatever 'intellectual history' is, and whatever 'the history of ideas' may be, I am not engaged in doing either of them." In the United States, in many respects the heartland of intellectual history, the scholarly community has grappled with the ambiguous relationship of "intellectual history" to "the history of ideas" for almost a century.
"Global history" refers to a wide range of research approaches that are typically characterized by a rising interest in alternative conceptions of space beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. It builds on a multitude of detailed research projects in all branches of historiography, ranging from economic history to cultural history and from gender history to environmental history.
In this Issue
(2009)
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In this issue
(2009)
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’.
Northeim is a town on the Leine River situated in the hilly region of Lower Saxony between Hildesheim and Göttingen; to historians it is known as the location of William Sheridan Allen’s path-breaking study of the Nazi Machtergreifung. The book was based on a 1962 dissertation at the University of Minnesota, and Allen first published it while at the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1965. Within two years, it appeared in England and was translated into German and French. Allen had settled at the State University of New York in Buffalo by the time I read the second, revised edition (New York 1984), which I used to write this review. In the forty years since its publication, Allen’s readable history became a standard for undergraduates in North America; and his microhistory of the Machtergreifung has been replicated in most German localities. A number of American scholars in particular have followed in Allen’s footsteps: Peter Fritzsche, David Imhoof, Rudy Koshar, and others, including myself. Part of the reason for the interest of American doctoral students in German Mittelstädte is, of course, pragmatic. When one has limited time and money for a research trip abroad, it seems reasonable to select for study an ‘überschaubare’ provincial town. The peculiarities of American culture is surely another reason that historians from the United States look for the German equivalent of ‘middle America’ in what Mack Walker called ‘German home towns’.1 But in the end, German historians from many countries, including Germany, have adopted Allen’s method because close investigations of events ‘on the ground’ offer a necessary balance to modern German histories ‘writ large’.
What have been the contributions of social memory studies to the discourse of German history, particularly about the Nazi past? This essay seeks to distinguish between the memory boom in politics and culture and the more durable insights of social theory and historiography about memory, including insights about this memory boom itself. In particular, it explores mythologies of ‘turning points’ in the discourse of memory, arguing that the attribution of such turning points is often overstated. To be sure, 1989 did mark significant ruptures. But comparing present debates to the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the mid-1980s, and the Historikerstreit to earlier debates shows that as much has stayed the same as has changed. We remember not just the Nazi past, but the previous ways in which we have remembered the Nazi past, and our mnemonic practices are as much comments on earlier practices as on the event itself.
After the Second World War, West German Catholics placed more faith in religious miracles than they did at almost any other period in the modern era. West German congregations reported eleven apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Church officials be-tween 1945 and 1954, as well as Europe’s most prominent twentieth century case of stigmata. Existing scholarship links the popularity of these alleged miracles to the ways in which Marian symbolism articulated anxieties about war trauma and the Cold War. This article illustrates how an interconnected movement of rural women, provincial priests, concentration camp survivors, and former prisoners of war based around Marian visions and stigmata emerged as a reaction not only to the Cold War, but also to Americanisation, consumerism, and the Nazi past. To frame the bitter conflicts between Marian pilgrims and Church hierarchy about the recognition of religious miracles, the article utilises Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘religious field’. It also takes into account the gendered character of the conflicts.
Rereading a book is always an uncanny experience in multiple temporalities. If the linguistic turn has taught us anything, it is that the context of reading shapes the meaning of the text that is read. The historicist impulse to reconstruct the original context on the basis of the text itself is at best an asymptotic, at worst a quixotic, pursuit. Yet texts remain, some more so than others. Those texts which continue to be read and reread long after their original context has passed we call ‘classics’. This is a term most frequently applied to literature, of course, but also to philosophy and other scholarly works animated by a generalising impulse. It pertains to works, in other words, which lay claim to a significance transcending their original context. It is rarely applied to works whose principle value is empirical or narrowly scholarly. These are presumed to be only temporarily useful interventions into an ongoing scholarly debate, in which later works draw on and ‘supersede’ the insights of earlier ones, rendering their predecessors superfluous. (Rather the reverse of Jove and his children.) Consequently, relatively few works of historical scholarship are considered classics in the full sense. History’s emphasis on the particular, its frequent skepticism of theoretical generalisations, and its embrace of archival empiricism have all tended to preclude the emergence of a broad canon of ‘historical classics’. There have, however, been exceptions to this rule.
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.
Is popular music a tool of consumer capitalist recuperation or can it be a weapon of revolutionary change? The career of the radical rock band Ton Steine Scherben, founded in West Berlin in 1970, suggests that at certain moments, radical music and radical politics can be mutually constitutive. The band’s history provides a richer understanding of the radical left-wing scene in West Berlin at a key moment of transition from the student movement of the 1960s to the anarchist and terrorist scenes of the 1970s, illustrating how an analysis of popular music in its social and cultural setting can broaden historical analysis.
In this Issue
(2008)
In this issue
(2008)
Labour Policy in Industry
(2008)
From 1933 onwards industrial law was transformed from one which protected employees to one intended to secure the regime’s power over them. In the Third Reich the political and ideological aims of the regime - under the cloak of ‘Volk und Rasse’ (nation and race) - became the guiding principles of a new labour law. Evidence of this can be found in the destruction of trade unions, the arbitrary treatment to which non-conforming employees could be subjected, the integration of employees into the network of National Socialist institutions, the authoritarian wage policy, the rapidly vanishing significance of labour courts and the ascendancy of legal offices of the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF), which propagated the theory of a racist national community (Volksgemeinschaft).
The first half of nineteen-seventies Europe was marked by visible signs of detente in the area of international relations and the resolutions from the final round of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki. It drew an important dividing line in the history of the twentieth century Europe, especially for the inhabitants of the eastern half of the continent. They had ever hopefully been looking for improvements to their situation since the end of the Second World War and the division of Europe, which was an indirect result of the war and was symbolically expressed in Winston Churchill’s famous words: 'From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line, lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia ...'.
The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) is widely considered to be one of the most important books which facilitated the ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theory by introducing space, as an interpretative concept, into sociological, political, economic, historical and cultural analysis. This reorientation was the programmatic objective of this book which aimed to relate and define ‘all possible spaces, whether abstract or real, mental or social’ (p. 299), and thus account for a wide range of spaces, from those of the body to those of the planet.
A radical process of standardization of tourist destinations around the globe, particularly in urban contexts, has been described by numerous scholars during the last decades. Indeed, the reinvention of many cities as tourist destinations has made evident ‘an odd paradox: whereas the appeal of tourism is the opportunity to see something different, cities that are remade to attract tourists seem more and more alike’. In such a context, both scholars and practitioners point to abstract elements such as images, identities, flairs, and experiences, as the main elements defining destinations’ profiles. The American historian Catherine Cocks argued that the attribution of a ‘personality’ to the city was a key aspect in the transformation of American cities into tourist destinations. Urban personalities made the city easily available, readable and intelligible, transformed it into a salable commodity, and offered a compelling reason to visit it and to come back. Similarly, contemporary European cities can be seen as bearers of specific local urban identities that remain relatively fixed even when information, stereotypes and attributes may prove to be inaccurate or simply false. Wolfgang Kaschuba has in this sense described the production of urban identities as a cultural technique that is predominantly performed in certain societal spaces such as literature, tourism, mass media, pop culture, and history marketing. This article focuses on one of such spaces, tourism, and explores how tourist communication transforms Berlin into a distinct and unique destination. It asks how the city is enacted by tourism as a singular and bounded entity, to which multiple orderings of identity are attributed.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the problem of European frontiers ceased to exist. This is because they are no longer determined by a sense of European identity, but rather by a consensus reached in Brussels. The European borderlands disappeared generations ago and were substituted by peripheries of the capitalist world-economy. It may be said that both concepts are of only academic interest. However, I am not convinced.
»Hits für das Tonbandgerät, Alben für den Plattenspieler? Die Markteinführung des Tonbandgerätes in Westdeutschland und die Urheberrechtsdebatte über Musikaufnahmen jugendlicher Konsumenten in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren«. Since the late 1950s, tape recorders were increasingly to be found in West German households. This device for the first time gave the consumers the opportunity to record music from records or from the radio. This triggered off discussions between the record industry and the GEMA (Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights) on the one hand and tape recorder producers and users on the other hand. Whereas the former complained about falling record sales and called for the introduction of copyright fees, the latter argued that the tape recorder offered a large range of applications and that therefore a collective charging of producers and/ or users would not be justified. Against the background of the changing legal situation, the article retraces the copyright debate and evaluates the opponents’ arguments. In spite of the manifold functions of the tape recorder, young consumers predominantly employed it to record their favourite light music. But these appropriation practices did not cause an overall decline in record sales but rather a change in music consumption patterns. While the possibility of recording single hits did in fact lead to falling sales figures of 45rpm-discs, sales of longplaying-records rose considerably
The ideological lines between the conservation movement and the Nazi regime have received much attention. This article explores a new perspective by focusing on the level of practical politics. After several setbacks and disappointments since 1933, the passage of the national conservation law in 1935 became the crucial turning point. The law instilled a secular boom of conservation work, which lasted until about 1940, nourishing an atmosphere of almost unlimited enthusiasm for the Nazi regime in conservation circles. At the same time, conservationists were crossing sensitive thresholds in their desire to use the law to
the greatest extent possible.
In this issue
(2006)
Narratives of Indian responses to the British Empire are usually structured around the ‘national movement’. This essay attempts instead to understand some of the psycho-social and psycho-political dynamics of a colonised society in the first half of the twentieth century. It takes a strategically subjectivist view of the British Indian empire in attempting to approach the subject not from the perspective of retrospective scholarly work, but from perspectives that can be seen to have been relevant to those who experienced that empire. In doing so, it also decentres the national paradigm, which merely reifies the category ‘Indian’, without enabling us to get any closer to non-elite figures, or indeed to relatively elite figures who did not belong adequately in the ‘national movement’. This narrative, therefore, tries to address some of the perspectives of marginal figures and groups, to the extent this is possible, while acknowledging that an Alltagsgeschichte of the British Indian Empire remains to be written.
In this Issue
(2005)
The blossoming of military history in Germany offers the chance to set new agendas beyond conventional narratives. The notion of a distinct authoritarian Prusso-German militarism, set against political modernity and civil society, has long served as the master narrative of modern German military history. But this narrative no longer holds any promise. It fails to situate the German experience within a common European and transatlantic military political realm and war culture; it ignores the centrality of technocratic reasoning and industrialized warfare for any understanding of the German military; it offers too overblown and simplistic a portrayal of societal militarization; and it downplays militarist multiplicities and the transformations of the early 20th century. This narrative has the additional disadvantage of cutting off the history of the military and war after 1945 from what came previously.
“Silent Dust”, released in February 1949, was one of a group of films that explored the problems of the returning Second World War veteran. Although the maladjusted veteran is a feature of all major wars, it assumes an added significance in this instance because the Second World War, in Britain and America at least, is conventionally understood “almost universally as honourable and noble, fought with right and justice exclusively on the Allied side”. Angus Calder has argued that the dominant narrative constructed about the Second World War in Britain was what he terms the “myth of the Blitz”, a heroic myth of courage, endurance and pulling together. This myth, through its perpetuation in an enormous array of cultural practices - notably a cycle of combat films in the 1950s such as “The Dam Busters” (1955) and “Reach for the Sky” (1956) - became the accepted view and was almost impossible to dislodge. It was a myth that was officially ratified in the British state’s commemoration of the war and, like all dominant discourses, served to marginalise alternative constructions of the conflict, particularly those that represent it as a traumatic and possibly brutalising experience. By analysing “Silent Dust” in detail and in relation to its social and cultural context, I hope to recover this repressed narrative and restore it to its rightful place as an important discourse about the Second World War.
This article discusses key aspects of the symbolic politics of the British and West German anti-nuclear-weapons movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s. More specifically, it examines the interaction between protest, politics, the media and the public sphere. It proposes two analyses of the protests: first, as the creation of a public sphere by means of "street politics" and, second, as a key to establishing an emotional community of protesters both in a national and transnational context. The media played a crucial role by enabling isolated protests to be perceived as parts of broader movements. The article argues that protests in both countries by and large adhered to, rather than transcended, the dominant national cultural codes. These movements thus exemplify the ways in which international relations, transnational links and national protest traditions interact.
By discontinuing their war against Israel in the late 1970s, the surrounding Arab states made room for the resumption of a different, new/old war, which first erupted prior to the Arab-Israeli interstate war: the civil war between the Jewish-Zionist settler society and Palestinian Arabs, a war over Palestine. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not one, but rather two conflicts, both of which are complexly and inextricably linked in a number of ways. Zionist Jews in Palestine (or the pre-1948 Jewish autonomy in the country) and later the state of Israel have been a permanent party to these conflicts. In contrast, the "Arabs" – or the Palestinians and the Arab states surrounding Palestine – have been changing parties to the overall conflict and its many different wars.
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.
The first thesis the paper argues is that a certain collective identity emerged at the shop floor („we“, the workers as opposed to „them“, party leaders, intelligentsia, peasants, the self-employed) that was built - and declared - increasingly in opposition to the official ideology and the communist party.5 Important factors in this process were the growing economic difficulties, the party’s apparent inability to solve them and the increasing materialism people experienced in the everyday life - including party member- and leadership. From the mid-70s onwards, the workers could perceive the worsening economic situation of the country by the decrease of the real wages and the need to do overwork or take extra jobs (first in the agriculture and then in the so-called vgmk-s) to keep the former standards of living. The continuously increasing prices made the impact of the „global market“ real regardless of the stance of the Central Committee. The sharpening criticism of the system is formulated, however, not from the viewpoint of the individual but that of the worker, which suggests the existence of a collective identity. One may call it a paradox of the Communist ideology that the system, after all, was successful to develop working-class collective identities but these were built in opposition to the Communist regime and not for it. The paper will attempt to show how these „oppositionist“ identities were formulated and in what ways they are indicative of the alienation of the workers from the workers’ state.
How does the collapse of the Soviet Union alter or confirm existing theories about empires? Perhaps the most important element of the Soviet collapse for theories of empires was the very fact that the Soviet Union was labeled an empire in the first place. After all, the Soviet Union was founded, as Terry Martin has put it, as “the world’s first postimperial state,” to the European imperial system.
Modern Societies and Collective Violence: The Framework of Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies
(2005)
If discussions on the topicality of research regarding processes of state violence and genocide arc still necessary today, does this not imply that we have failed with respect to a decisive challenge raised by National Socialism, namely the imperative to ensure that such atrocities are not repeated, the commitment to a "never again"?
The semantics of the term "empire" is overloaded with superlatives and loud epithets. The concept of empire is so universal and all-encompassing that it appears to have no particular meaning at all. Indeed, empire embodies the grim totality of unlimited domination and coercion; at the same time, it turns out to be a synonym for the clumsy neologism of "world-system" (or "world civilization") and evokes a unifying principle for a universe surrounded by the destructive elements of chaos and barbarism.
In this issue
(2004)
`Contemporary history' is inherently relevant to, indeed an integral part of, political and social processes in the present. Yet, despite a high level of politicisation of historical debates, the issue of `objectivity' or `value neutrality' cannot be addressed solely in terms of the views of the individual historian, or the wider functions fulfilled by a particular historical interpretation. Attention needs to be shifted to the conceptualisation and `emplotment' of a historical narrative within a given theoretical paradigm. Professional history entails not (merely) the imposition of creative stories, as post-modernists would have it, nor (only) the digging up of ever more `facts' about the past, as on the empiricist view. Rather, it is a puzzle-solving discipline requiring appropriate conceptual tools for the investigation of specific, theoretically constructed, questions. This article reviews recent developments in German contemporary history in the light of this framework.