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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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Klaus Nathaus and C. Clayton Childress convincingly argue that cultural and symbolic objects are produced before they are consumed and that therefore cultural historians should take a closer look at the social and economic conditions of cultural production. Instead of taking it for granted that mass reception inversely indicates the existence of a demand already ‘being there’, historians should dig into the production processes influenced (among others) by individual taste, material interest, and arbitrary decisions – or, as Nathaus, Childress and the often cited Richard A. Peterson would call it – contingency. While most of Nathaus and Childress’s examples stem from the field of music, I will in my response apply the cultural production concept to a non-musical field, namely documentary photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Further, I will raise some questions that still seem to be unanswered. Given that the causal relation between production and consumption by and large equals the chicken and egg problem, what sense does it make to shift attention from reception to production – especially when dealing with modifications of objects, commodities, or genres rather than inventions in the sense of ‘there was nothing like this before’? I will suggest to extend the concept beyond the study of ‘classical’ cultural objects – like novels or records – and to include commodities like food, clothes, or cars. Finally, I will raise the question of how to apply the production of culture perspective to socialist economies after 1945, which to my knowledge has not been tried yet.
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.
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 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.
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?
Theory matters. Most historians would probably agree with this postulate, in the sense that theories from disciplines such as sociology, economics or psychology can sharpen historical analyses of any topic (though many of them may prefer quite pragmatic, common-sense approaches in their own empirical studies). But when it comes to a historical understanding of a phenomenon like marketization, theory does remain an analytical resource – and at the same time turns into a multifaceted object of research. The way we think about markets is highly affected by theorists, and not only by their ideas but also by their effectiveness in making them influential over specific periods of time.