The Mind of the Nation

The Mind of the Nation
Author: Egbert Klautke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782380205

Völkerpsychologie played an important role in establishing the social sciences via the works of such scholars as Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Ernest Renan, Franz Boas, and Werner Sombart. In Germany, the intellectual history of “folk psychology” was represented by Moritz Lazarus, Heymann Steinthal, Wilhelm Wundt and Willy Hellpach. This book follows the invention of the discipline in the nineteenth century, its rise around the turn of the century and its ultimate demise after the Second World War. In addition, it shows that despite the repudiation of “folk psychology” and its failed institutionalization, the discipline remains relevant as a precursor of contemporary studies of “national identity.”

Germany On Their Minds

Germany On Their Minds
Author: Anne C. Schenderlein
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2019-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789200059

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.

The German Public Mind in the Nineteenth Century

The German Public Mind in the Nineteenth Century
Author: Frederick Hertz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2019-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000008061

Originally published in 1975, this volume covers the period from the age of Napoleon to the dismissal of Bismarck – a period of national liberation, of revolution, the development of political movements, of parties and the press and the achievement of nationhood. The book is a history of ideals and ideologies, of the beliefs that the people held of themselves, and of others, and of the principles that inspired statesmen, reformers and their adversaries.

Of Mind and Matter

Of Mind and Matter
Author: Peter Thaler
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781557535245

Thaler contributes to the literature on national identity in border areas, and fills a gap in English-language history of the particular region. For many centuries, he explains, the duchy of Sleswig between the North and Baltic Seas formed a link and buffer between southern Denmark and northern Germany. It is now partitioned between the two states, and about the only people who even use the name are local people of one nationality who ended up in the other country. It is there that he analyzes the composition and changeable nature of identity, and explores what has motivated local inhabitants to define themselves as Germans or Danes. Self-identification is important, he points out, because there is little else to distinguish the two groups. Among the dimensions he explores are politics, history and culture, changing times, and biographies during the age of nationalism.

Sex between Body and Mind

Sex between Body and Mind
Author: Katie Sutton
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472131605

Ideas about human sexuality and sexual development changed dramatically across the first half of the 20th century. As scholars such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, and Karen Horney in Berlin and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, and Helene Deutsch in Vienna were recognized as leaders in their fields, the German-speaking world quickly became the international center of medical-scientific sex research—and the birthplace of two new and distinct professional disciplines, sexology and psychoanalysis. This is the first book to closely examine vital encounters among this era’s German-speaking researchers across their emerging professional and disciplinary boundaries. Although psychoanalysis was often considered part of a broader “sexual science,” sexologists increasingly distanced themselves from its mysterious concepts and clinical methods. Instead, they turned to more pragmatic, interventionist therapies—in particular, to the burgeoning field of hormone research, which they saw as crucial to establishing their own professional relevance. As sexology and psychoanalysis diverged, heated debates arose around concerns such as the sexual life of the child, the origins and treatment of homosexuality and transgender phenomena, and female frigidity. This new story of the emergence of two separate approaches to the study of sex demonstrates that the distinctions between them were always part of a dialogic and competitive process. It fundamentally revises our understanding of the production of modern sexual subjects.

Mountains and the German Mind

Mountains and the German Mind
Author: Sean Moore Ireton
Publisher: Studies in German Literature L
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1640140476

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.

They Thought They Were Free

They Thought They Were Free
Author: Milton Mayer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2017-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 022652597X

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.