Coping with the Nazi Past

Coping with the Nazi Past
Author: Philipp Gassert
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2007
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1845455053

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Based on careful, intensive research in primary sources, many of these essays break new ground in our understanding of a crucial and tumultuous period. The contributors, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, offer an in-depth analysis of how the collective memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced, and was influenced by, politics and culture in West Germany in the 1960s. The contributions address a wide variety of issues, including prosecution for war crimes, restitution, immigration policy, health policy, reform of the police, German relations with Israel and the United States, nuclear non-proliferation, and, of course, student politics and the New Left protest movement.

German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal

German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal
Author: Sean A. Forner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107049571

This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.

Nazi Culture

Nazi Culture
Author: George Lachmann Mosse
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 460
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780299193041

George L. Mosse's extensive analysis of Nazi culture - ground-breaking upon its original publication in 1966 - is now offered to readers of a new generation. Selections from newspapers, novellas, plays, and diaries as well as the public pronouncements of Nazi leaders, churchmen, and professors describe National Socialism in practice and explore what it meant for the average German.

Disciplining Germany

Disciplining Germany
Author: Jaimey Fisher
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2007-06-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0814337430

A look at how the discussions, debates, and controversies in Germany about youth and reeducation after World War II helped Germans come to terms with their Nazi past, negotiate Allied occupation, and construct postwar German identity. During Hitler’s reign, the Nazis deliberately developed and exploited a youthful image and used youth to define their political and social hierarchies. After the war, with Hitler gone but still requiring cultural exorcism, many intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers turned to these images of youth to navigate and negotiate the most difficult questions of Germany’s recent, nefarious past. Focusing on youth, education, and crime allowed postwar Germans to claim one last realm of sovereignty against the Allies’ own emphatic project of reeducation. Youth, reeducation, and reconstruction became important sites for the occupied to confront not only the recent past, but to negotiate the present occupation and, ultimately, direct the future of the German nation. Disciplining Germany analyzes a variety of media, including literature, news media, intellectual history, and films, in order to argue that youth and education played a central role in Germany’s coming to terms with the Nazi past. Although there has been a recently renewed interest in Germany’s coming to terms with the past, this attention has largely ignored the role of youth and reeducation. This lacuna is particularly perplexing given that the Allies’ reeducation project became, in many ways, a cipher for the occupational project as a whole. Disciplining Germany opens up the discussion and points toward more general conclusions not only about youth and education as sites for wider socio-political and cultural debates but also about the complexities of occupation and the intertwining of different national cultures. In this investigation, the study attends to both "high" and "low" cultural text—to specialized versus popular texts—to examine how youth was mobilized across the generic spectrum. With these interdisciplinary approaches and timely interventions, Disciplining Germany will find a diverse readership, including upper-division and graduate courses in German studies and German history as well as those general readers interested in Nazi Germany, cultural history, film and literary studies, youth culture, American studies, and post-conflict and occupational situations.

German Scholars in Exile

German Scholars in Exile
Author: Axel Fair-Schulz
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2011-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0739150480

German Scholars in Exiledeals with intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and found refuge in either the United States or in American Services in Great Britain and post-WWII Germany. The volume focuses on scholars who were outside the commonly known Max Horkheimer-Hannah Arendt circles, who are less well-known but not less important. Their experiences ranged from an outstanding career at an Ivy-League university to a return to the German Democratic Republic and a position as an economic advisor to East Berlin's party leadership. None had actual political power, but many asserted some degree of influence. Their intellecutal legacies can still be seen in today's political culture.

Another Country

Another Country
Author: Jan-Werner Müller
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300083880

This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II, while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers.

Intellectual Collaboration with the Third Reich

Intellectual Collaboration with the Third Reich
Author: Maria Björkman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2019-05-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351185098

The book investigates the rather neglected "intellectual" collaboration between National Socialist Germany and other countries, including views on knowledge and politics among "pro-German" intellectuals, using a comparative approach. These moves were shaped by the Nazi system, which viewed scientific and cultural exchange as part and parcel of their cultural propaganda and policy. Positive views of the Hitler regime among intellectuals of all sorts were indicative of a broader discontent with democracy that, among other things, represented an alternative approach to modernization which was not limited to the German heartlands. This book draws together international experts in an analysis of right-wing Europe under Hitler; a study which has gained new resonance amidst the wave of European nationalism in the twenty-first century.

Nazi Germany and The Humanities

Nazi Germany and The Humanities
Author: Anson Rabinbach
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2014-07-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1780746164

MERGEFIELD AI_Copy In 1933, Jews and, to a lesser extent, political opponents of the Nazis, suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany’s universities. With few exceptions, the academic elite welcomed and justified the acts of the Nazi regime, uttered no word of protest when their Jewish and liberal colleagues were dismissed, and did not stir when Jewish students were barred admission. The subject of how German scholars responded to the Nazi regime continues to be a fascinating area of scholarship. In this collection, Rabinbach and Bialas bring some of the best scholarly contributions together in one cohesive volume, to deliver a shocking conclusion: whatever diverse motives German intellectuals may have had in 1933, the image of Nazism as an alien power imposed on German universities from without was a convenient fiction.

Law, History, and Justice

Law, History, and Justice
Author: Annette Weinke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1805399020

Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners
Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307426238

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer