Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany - Böcker

Germans have been one of the most mobile and dispersed populations on earth. Communities of German speakers, scattered around the globe, have long believed they could recreate their Heimat (homeland) wherever they moved, and that their enclaves could remain truly German. Furthermore, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland who formed new communities that often retained their Germanness. Emigrants, including political, economic, and religious exiles such as Jewish Germans, fostered a nostalgia for home, which, along with longstanding mutual ties of family, trade, and culture, bound them to Germany. The Heimat Abroad is the first book to examine the problem of Germany's long and complex relationship to ethnic Germans outside its national borders. Beyond defining who is German and what makes them so, the book reconceives German identity and history in global terms and challenges the nation state and its borders as the sole basis of German nationalism. Krista O'Donnell is Associate Professor of History, William Paterson University.Nancy Reagin is Professor of History, Pace University.Renete Bridenthal is Emerita Professor of History, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

"A lucid, innovative work of top-flight scholarship. Gross shows us the depths of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany; he explains why the German Kulturkampf had such force and why prominent liberals imagined it as a turning point not only in Germany but in world history."---Helmut Walser Smith, Vanderbilt University"A marvelously original account of how the Kulturkampf emerged from the cultural, social, and gendered worlds of German liberalism. While not neglecting the 1870s, Gross's analysis directs historians' attention to the under-researched 1850s and 1860s-decades in which liberals' anti-Catholic arguments were formulated against a backdrop of religious revival, democratic innovation, national ambition, and the articulation of new roles for women in society, politics, and the church. The drama of these decades resonates in every chapter of Gross's fine study."---James Retallack, University of Toronto"Michael Gross has put the culture back into the Kulturkampf! Integrating social and political analysis with illuminating interpretations of visual and linguistic evidence, Gross explores the work of religious cleavage in defining German national identity. An emerging women's movement, liberal virtues, and Catholic difference come together to explain why, in a century of secularization, Germany's Catholics experienced a religious revival, and why its liberals responded with enmity and frustration. Vividly written and a pleasure to read, this groundbreaking study offers real surprises."---Margaret Lavinia Anderson, University of California, BerkeleyAn innovative study of the relationship between the two most significant, equally powerful, and irreconcilable movements in Germany, Catholicism and liberalism, in the decades following the 1848 Revolution. After the defeat of liberalism in the Revolution of 1848, and in the face of the dramatic revival of popular Catholicism, German middle-class liberals used anti-Catholicism to orient themselves culturally in a new age. Michael B. Gross's study shows how anti-Catholicism and specifically the Kulturkampf, the campaign to break the power of the Catholic Church, were not simply attacks against the church nor were they merely an attempt to secure state autonomy. Gross shows that the liberal attack on Catholicism was actually a complex attempt to preserve moral, social, political, and sexual order during a period of dramatic pressures for change. Gross argues that a culture of anti-Catholicism shaped the modern development of Germany including capitalist economics, industrial expansion, national unification, and gender roles. He demonstrates that images of priests, monks, nuns, and Catholics as medieval, backward, and sexually deviant asserted the liberal middle-class claim to social authority after the Revolution of 1848. He pays particular attention to the ways anti-Catholicism, Jesuitphobia, and antimonastic hysteria were laced with misogyny and expressed deeper fears of mass culture and democracy in the liberal imagination. In doing so, he identifies the moral, social, and cultural imperatives behind the Kulturkampf in the 1870s.By offering a provocative reinterpretation of liberalism and its relationship to the German anti-Catholic movement, this work ultimately demonstrates that in Germany, liberalism itself contributed to a culture of intolerance that would prove to be a serious liability in the twentieth century. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of culture, ideology, religion, and politics.

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-semitism. She also provides oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black Germans for the book. In the end, the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities? The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it meant to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as racially impure at best.

"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making 'race' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history."---Frank Biess, University of California, San DiegoWhat happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity. After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University. Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan. Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.

German Literature on the Middle East explores the dynamic between German-speaking and Middle Eastern states and empires from the time of the Crusades to the end of the Cold War. This insightful study illuminates the complex relationships among literary and other writings on the one hand, and economic, social, and political processes and material dimensions on the other. Focusing on German-language literary and nonfiction writings about the Middle East (including historical documents, religious literature, travel writing, essays, and scholarship), Nina Berman evaluates the multiple layers of meaning contained in these works by emphasizing the importance of culture contact; a wide web of political, economic, and social practices; and material dimensions as indispensible factors for the interpretive process.This analysis of literary and related writing reveals that German views about the Middle East evolved over the centuries and that various forms of action toward the Middle East differed substantially as well. Ideas about religion, culture, race, humanism, nation, and modernity, which emerged successively but remain operative to this day, have fashioned Germany's changed attitudes toward the Middle East. Exploring the interplay between textual discourses and social, political, and economic practices and materiality, German Literature on the Middle East offers insights that challenge accepted approaches to the study of literature, particularly approaches that insist on the centrality of the linguistic construction of the world. In addition, Berman presents evidence that the German encounter with the Middle East is at once distinct and yet at the same time characterized by patterns shared with other European countries. By addressing the individual nature of the German encounter in the larger European context, this study fills a considerable gap in current scholarship.The interdisciplinary approach of German Literature on the Middle East will be of interest to the humanities in general, and specifically to scholars of German studies, comparative literature, Middle Eastern studies, and history.Nina Berman is Professor of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. Jacket image: Map of Europe by Giovanni Magini, from his “Geography.” Venice, [1598]. From the University of Michigan Map Library. Political Map of the World, April 2008. From the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library, Map Collection.

Combining the tools of political, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany explores strategies of legitimization developed by advocates of militant resistance to certain manifestations of consumer capitalism. The book contributes to a more sober evaluation of West German protest movements, not just terrorism, as it refrains from emotional and moral judgments, but takes the protesters’ approaches seriously, which, regarding consumer society, had a rational core. Political violence is not presented as the result of individual shortcomings, but emerges in relation to major societal changes, i.e., the unprecedented growth of consumption. This new perspective sheds important light on violence and radical protest in post-war Germany, as previous books have failed to examine to what extent these forms of resistance should be regarded as reactions to changing regimes of provision. Continuing the recently growing interest in the interdependence of countercultures and consumer society, the focus on violence gives the argument a unique twist, making the book thought-provoking and engaging.

Beyond Berlin breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past. The contributors challenge reigning views of Germany's postwar memory work by examining how specific urban centers apart from the nation's capital have wrestled with their respective Nazi legacies. A wide range of West and East German cities is profiled in the volume: prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, and idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg. In employing historical, art historical, anthropological, and geographical methodologies to examine these and other important urban centers, the volume's case studies shed new light upon the complex ways in which the confrontation with the Nazi past has directly shaped the German urban landscape since the end of the Second World War."Beyond Berlin is one of the most fascinating, deeply probing collections ever published on Germany's ongoing confrontation with its Nazi past. Its editors, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, have taken the exploration of Germany's urban memorial landscape to its highest level yet."---James E. Young, Professor and Chair, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge"This is a top-notch collection of essays that positions itself in the populated field of memory studies by bringing together original contributions representing the best of new scholarship on architecture, urban design, monuments, and memory in East and West Germany. Taken together, the essays remind readers that the Nazi past is always present when German architects, urban planners, and politicians make decisions to tear down, rebuild, restore, and memorialize."---S. Jonathan Wiesen, Department of History, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

"Though its primary focus is on the immediate postwar, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism will surely illuminate the contemporary crisis around citizenship and definitions of Germanness in the context of European Union and globalization."---Geoff Eley, University of Michigan In May of 1945, there were more than eight million "displaced persons" (or DPs) in Germany---recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. In the aftermath of National Socialism, Germany thus ironically became a temporary home for a large population of "foreigners." Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons---Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish---created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups.Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.

This literary-historical study seeks to dismantle the prevailing notion that Germany, in the period following the Second World War, exhibited an “inability to mourn,” arguing that in fact this period experienced a surge of affect. Anna Parkinson examines the emotions explicitly manifested or addressed in a variety of German cultural artifacts, while also identifying previously unacknowledged (and undertheorized) affective structures implicitly at work during the country’s national crisis. Much of the scholarship in the expanding field of affect theory distrusts Freudian psychoanalysis, which does not differentiate between emotion and affect.One of the book’s major contributions is that it offers an analytical distinction between emotion and affect, finding a compelling way to talk about affect and emotion that is informed by affect theory but that integrates psychoanalysis. The study draws on the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich, and André Green, while engaging with interdisciplinary theorists of affect including Barbara Rosenwein, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among many others.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, representations of Poland and the Slavic East cast the region as a primitive, undeveloped, or empty space inhabited by a population destined to remain uncivilized without the aid of external intervention. These depictions often made direct reference to the American Wild West, portraying the eastern steppes as a boundless plain that needed to be wrested from the hands of unruly natives and spatially ordered into German-administrated units.While conventional definitions locate colonial space overseas, Kristin Kopp argues that it was possible to understand both distant continents and adjacent Eastern Europe as parts of the same global periphery dependent upon Western European civilizing efforts. However, proximity to the source of aid translated to greater benefits for Eastern Europe than for more distant regions.

German Colonialism Revisited brings together military historians, art historians, literary scholars, cultural theorists, and linguists to address a range of issues surrounding colonized African, Asian, and Oceanic people’s creative reactions to and interactions with German colonialism. This scholarship sheds new light on local power dynamics; agency; and economic, cultural, and social networks that preceded and, as some now argue, ultimately structured German colonial rule. Going beyond issues of resistance, these essays present colonialism as a shared event from which both the colonized and the colonizers emerged changed.

Historians are increasingly looking at the sacrifices Germans had to make during World War II. In this context, Svenja Goltermann has taken up a particularly delicate topic, German soldiers’ experience of violence during the war, and repercussions of this experience after their return home. Part I of her book explores the ways in which veterans’ experiences of wartime violence reshaped everyday family life, involving family members in complex ways. Part II offers an extensive analysis of the psychiatric response to this new category of patient, and in particular the reluctance of psychiatrists to recognize the psychic afflictions of former POWs as constituting the grounds for long-term disability. Part III analyzes the cultural representations of veterans’ psychic suffering, encompassing the daily press, popular films, novels, and theater.Originally published in German as Die Gesellschaft der Uberlebenden, The War in Their Minds examines hitherto unused source material—psychiatric medical files of soldiers—to make clear how difficult it was for the soldiers and their families to readjust to normal, everyday life. Goltermann allows these testimonies of violence, guilt, justification, and helplessness speak for themselves and sensitively explores how the pension claims of returning soldiers were to compete with the claims of the Holocaust victims to compensation.

Bodies and Ruins explores changing German memories of World War II as it analyzes the construction of narratives in the postwar period including the depiction of the bombing of individual German cities. The book offers a corrective notion rising in the late 1990s notion that discussions of the Allied bombing were long overdue, because Germans who had endured the bombings had largely been condemned to silence after 1945. David Crew shows that far from being marginalized in postwar historical consciousness, the bombing war was in fact a central strand of German memory and identity. Local narratives of the bombing war, including photographic books, had already established themselves as important “vectors of memory” in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The bombing war had allowed Germans to see themselves as victims at a time when the Allied liberation of the concentration camps and the Nuremberg trials presented Germans to the world as perpetrators or at least as accomplices. The bombing war continued to serve this function even as Germans became more and more willing directly to confront the genocide of European Jews—which by the 1960s was beginning to be referred to as the Holocaust.Bodies and Ruins examines a range of local publications that carried photographic images of German cities destroyed in the air war, images that soon entered the visual memory of World War II. Despite its obvious importance, historians have paid very little attention to the visual representation of the bombing war. This book follows the search for what were considered to be the “right” stories and the “right” pictures of the bombing war in local publications and picture books from 1945 to the present, and is intended for historians as well as general readers interested in World War II, the Allied bombing of German cities, the Holocaust, the history of memory and photographic/visual history.

The study of African languages in Germany, or Afrikanistik, originated among Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century and was incorporated into German universities after Germany entered the “Scramble for Africa” and became a colonial power in the 1880s. Despite its long history, few know about the German literature on African languages or the prominence of Germans in the discipline of African philology. In Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945, Sara Pugach works to fill this gap, arguing that Afrikanistik was essential to the construction of racialist knowledge in Germany. While in other countries biological explanations of African difference were central to African studies, the German approach was essentially linguistic, linking language to culture and national identity. Pugach traces this linguistic focus back to the missionaries’ belief that conversion could not occur unless the “Word” was allowed to touch a person’s heart in his or her native language, as well as to the connection between German missionaries living in Africa and armchair linguists in places like Berlin and Hamburg. Over the years, this resulted in Afrikanistik scholars using language and culture rather than biology to categorize African ethnic and racial groups. Africa in Translation follows the history of Afrikanistik from its roots in the missionaries’ practical linguistic concerns to its development as an academic subject in both Germany and South Africa throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Jacket image: Perthes, Justus. Mittel und Süd-Afrika. Map. Courtesy of the University of Michigan's Stephen S. Clark Library map collection.

This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from Sigmund Freud’s theories of homosexuality in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “third sex” in Berlin. Together, they provided a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and literature. It also provides a fascinating insight into the historical roots for our thinking about gender and sexuality today. The book will be of relevance to an academic readership of students and faculty in German studies, literary studies, European history, and the interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities, and the history of sexuality.

This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. How did women approach themes commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? Women in German Expressionism centers its analysis on gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. It moves beyond the masculine, “New Man,” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examines alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day.

Germany held a monopoly on the manufacture and export of bisque toy dolls in Europe before WWI. Yet, dolls’ omnipresence in the material, visual, and literary culture of the modern German-speaking world has so far not been properly addressed. In demonstrating this cultural affinity for dolls, Christophe Koné draws upon a range of stories and seminal essays on dolls, as well as toys, sculptures, paintings, and photographs. He examines how E.T.A. Hoffmann’s romantic tale The Sandman (1815) has been a major source of inspiration for German-speaking doll makers because of how it centers imagination and inventiveness. Using Hoffmann’s tale as an early example of an amalgam between doll thinking and making in German culture, Koné shows how it initiated a genealogy of doll thinkers (Freud & Jentsch), writers (Rilke), painters (Kokoschka), photographers (Bellmer), and makers (Pritzel). Uncanny Creatures then explores how this unusual interest in human-like figures continues a long tradition of thought devoted to conceptualizing “things,” from Immanuel Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself to Martin Heidegger’s lecture on the thing, and Eduard Mörike or Rainer Maria Rilke’s thing-poems. Because dolls occupy a liminal space—not quite things and more than mere objects—they appear as uncanny creatures which have held a fascination for writers, thinkers, and artists alike. Uncanny Creatures moves past the Freudian discourse of fetishism to propose a new reading of doll artifacts in German culture centered on their ability to evoke a feeling of uncertainty and unsettlement in the viewer.

In Topographies of Class, Sabine Hake explores why Weimar Berlin has had such a powerful hold on the urban imagination. Approaching Weimar architectural culture from the perspective of mass discourse and class analysis, Hake examines the way in which architectural projects; debates; and representations in literature, photography, and film played a key role in establishing the terms under which contemporaries made sense of the rise of white-collar society.Focusing on the so-called stabilization period, Topographies of Class maps out complex relationships between modern architecture and mass society, from Martin Wagner's planning initiatives and Erich Mendelsohn's functionalist buildings, to the most famous Berlin texts of the period, Alfred Döblin's city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and Walter Ruttmann's city film Berlin, Symphony of the Big City (1927). Hake draws on critical, philosophical, literary, photographic, and filmic texts to reconstruct the urban imagination at a key point in the history of German modernity, making this the first study---in English or German---to take an interdisciplinary approach to the rich architectural culture of Weimar Berlin.Sabine Hake is Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of numerous books, including German National Cinema and Popular Cinema of the Third Reich.Cover art: Construction of the Karstadt Department Store at Hermannplatz, Berlin-Neukölln. Courtesy Bildarchiv Preeussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY

The German Patient takes an original look at fascist constructions of health and illness, arguing that the idea of a healthy "national body"---propagated by the Nazis as justification for the brutal elimination of various unwanted populations---continued to shape post-1945 discussions about the state of national culture. Through an examination of literature, film, and popular media of the era, Jennifer M. Kapczynski demonstrates the ways in which postwar German thinkers inverted the illness metaphor, portraying fascism as a national malady and the nation as a body struggling to recover. Yet, in working to heal the German wounds of war and restore national vigor through the excising of "sick" elements, artists and writers often betrayed a troubling affinity for the very biopolitical rhetoric they were struggling against. Through its exploration of the discourse of collective illness, The German Patient tells a larger story about ideological continuities in pre- and post-1945 German culture.Jennifer M. Kapczynski is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the coeditor of the anthology A New History of German Cinema.Cover art: From The Murderers Are Among Us (1946). Reprinted courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek."A highly evocative work of meticulous scholarship, Kapczynski's deftly argued German Patient advances the current revaluation of Germany's postwar reconstruction in wholly original and even exciting ways: its insights into discussions of collective sickness and health resonate well beyond postwar Germany."---Jaimey Fischer, University of California, Davis"The German Patient provides an important historical backdrop and a richly specific cultural context for thinking about German guilt and responsibility after Hitler. An eminently readable and engaging text."---Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan"This is a polished, eloquently written, and highly informative study speaking to the most pressing debates in contemporary Germany. The German Patient will be essential reading for anyone interested in mass death, genocide, and memory."---Paul Lerner, University of Southern California

The Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany’s exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. Jonathan O. Wipplinger explores the history of jazz in Germany as well as the roles that music, race (especially Blackness), and America played in German culture and follows the debate over jazz through the fourteen years of Germany’s first democracy. He explores visiting jazz musicians including the African American Sam Wooding and the white American Paul Whiteman and how their performances were received by German critics and artists. The Jazz Republic also engages with the meaning of jazz in debates over changing gender norms and jazz’s status between paradigms of high and low culture. By looking at German translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry, as well as Theodor W. Adorno’s controversial rejection of jazz in light of racial persecution, Wipplinger examines how jazz came to be part of German cultural production more broadly in both the US and Germany, in the early 1930s.Using a wide array of sources from newspapers, modernist and popular journals, as well as items from the music press, this work intervenes in the debate over the German encounter with jazz by arguing that the music was no mere “symbol” of Weimar’s modernism and modernity. Rather than reflecting intra-German and/or European debates, it suggests that jazz and its practitioners, African American, white American, Afro-European, German and otherwise, shaped Weimar culture in a central way.

Weimar Germany (1919–33) was an era of equal rights for women and minorities, but also of growing antisemitism and hostility toward the Jewish population. This led some Jews to want to pass or be perceived as non-Jews; yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. Being visible as a Jew often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Passing Illusions examines the constructs of German-Jewish visibility during the Weimar Republic and explores the controversial aspects of this identity—and the complex reasons many decided to conceal or reveal themselves as Jewish. Focusing on racial stereotypes, Kerry Wallach outlines the key elements of visibility, invisibility, and the ways Jewishness was detected and presented through a broad selection of historical sources including periodicals, personal memoirs, and archival documents, as well as cultural texts including works of fiction, anecdotes, images, advertisements, performances, and films. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (photographs, works of art, cartoons, advertisements, film stills) complement the book’s analysis of visual culture.

Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus’ signature step in which you vigorously hop and stomp late into the night.Yet behind the razzle dazzle of these depictions and experiences was one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany’s first democracy (1918-1933). Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment.Extensively illustrated and with color plates, Marking Modern Movement is a clearly written book accessible to general readers and undergraduates. Coming at a time of a growing number of major art museums showcasing large-scale exhibitions on images of dance, the audience exists for a substantial general-public interest in this topic. Conversing across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, Marking Modern Movement is intended to engage readers coming from a wide range of perspectives and interests.

Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum examines efforts by European museums to investigate colonialism as part of an unprocessed past, confront its presence, and urge repair. A flurry of exhibitions and the overhaul of numerous large museums in the last decade signal that an emergent colonial memory culture is now reaching broader publics. Exhibitions pose the question of what Europeans owe to those they colonized.Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum shows how museums can help visitors mourn historic violence and identify the contemporary agents, beneficiaries, victims, survivors, and resisters of colonial presence. At the same time, the book treats the museum as part of the racialized power relations that activists, academics, and artists have long protested against. This book asks whether museums have made the dream of activists, academics, and artists to build equitable futures more acceptable and more durable—or whether in packaging that dream for general audiences they curtail it. Confronting colonial violence, this book argues, pushes Europeans to face the histories of racism and urges them to envision antiracism at the global scale.

This book explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experiences within the larger context of German history, questioning how ideas of African racial difference that developed from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries impacted East German attitudes toward the students.The book additionally situates African experiences in the overlapping contexts of the Cold War and decolonization. During this time, nations across the Western and Soviet blocs were inviting Africans to attend universities and vocational schools as part of a drive to offer development aid to newly independent countries and encourage them to side with either the United States or Soviet Union in the Cold War. African leaders recognized their significance to both Soviet and American blocs, and played on the desire of each to bring newly independent nations into their folds. Students also recognized their importance to Cold War competition, and used it to make demands of the East German state. The book is thus located at the juncture of many different histories, including those of modern Germany, modern Africa, the Global Cold War, and decolonization.

Socialist Subjectivities works within the logics of queer time to reanimate East German subjectivities in the 1970s and 1980s beyond the narrative of the German Democratic Republic’s long march towards demise. While East Germany certainly ended in dissolution, not all East Germans experienced late socialism in a singular manner. Rather, even after a generation of building socialism, East Germans under Honecker continued to pursue a range of socialist presents and a multiplicity of socialist futures up to and beyond 1989. This edited volume utilizes queer temporalities to interrogate how individuals lived non-normative possibilities in a highly normative world.Whether one was an apparatchik, artist, or alcoholic, the everyday interactions, experiences, and rituals of late socialism proved crucial to establishing the conditions around which subjecthood was constructed. Despite stereotypes of apathy and inertia, East Germans lent a considerable dynamism to their society, and by generating a cacophony of opinions and a heterogeneity of ideas, they constantly transformed state socialism. By foregrounding socialist subjects and the iterative nature of socialism during these decades, this volume paints a richer portrait of East Germany—one that illuminates how East Germans imagined their futures in a society whose collapse they could not foresee.

German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 investigates the ways German-speaking Europe’s cultural narratives reflect histories of entanglement with the colonial world. Drawing from an impressive range of sources, Patricia Anne Simpson decodes the ironclad colonial logic that reproduces and inflects tropes of the conquistador, scientific explorer, and pioneers. She brings them into dialogue with a cast of historical agents who reimagine the cannibal, the enslaved, the conquered, Indigenous interlocutors, and the ungovernable. Throughout, intersectional attributes of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion reconfigure around shades of European whiteness. Individual chapters explore the Hohenzollern legacy in early modernity; debates about sovereignty and enslavement; recruitment literature, prose and fiction about migration and colonization in Africa and the Americas; and colonial memoirs driven by recolonial fantasies after 1918. German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies advances efforts to decolonize the multiple disciplines that intersect the field of German studies, including literary criticism, history, philosophy, art history, and anthropology.German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 draws from a wide range of sources, from a seventeenth-century Brandenburg fort on the coast of Ghana to a novella about a beleaguered colonial administrator in German East Africa, to advance an interdisciplinary discourse at the nexus of colonial narratives and national imaginaries. Through detailed case studies, Simpson argues for the inclusion of voices that pushed back against imperialist expansion or intervention, as well as those historical actors who disputed the supremacy of whiteness and the persuasive power of German-centric national history.

Interrogating Integration explores how international sporting spectacles, media campaigns, and public debates construct racialized national identity in an era of rising right-wing nationalism. Across Europe, “integration” has emerged as a guiding concept to regulate cultural differences, particularly in Germany, where integration became a watchword after the introduction of birthright citizenship in 2000. The legal expansion of German citizenship threatened the homogeneous definition of the nation and spurred increased scrutiny of immigrants and Germans of color, primarily Muslim and Black Germans. This opened a new chapter in the long struggle over German identity. The celebrations, scandals, and debates analyzed here reveal how the admission of new citizens inspired an optimistic cosmopolitanism that claimed to differentiate the new Germany from its fascist past while simultaneously reinscribing racialized hierarchies and providing fuel for rising far-right politics.Using touchstones of public memory, including events surrounding men’s World Cup soccer and the record-breaking success of a book blaming Muslims for Germany’s decline, Zambon examines persistent problems in European conceptions of race, where racializing projects take place under an “ideology of racelessness” and the atrocities of historical and transnational racisms are used to deny current local forms of racism.

The Photographic Fix explores how photographs from World War I were used in personal photo albums and mass-market picture books to determine the meaning and legacy of the postwar Weimar Republic. Due to their publication success and wide reception, picture books should be considered no small part of this broad struggle of ideas to cement the war’s legacy in the Weimar era. Drawing from a large archive of photographs created during the war by amateur soldier-photographers and professional reporters alike, Justin Court explores how visual depictions of the war were used to construct and distort memory in the highly contested realm of war commemoration in the Weimar. These books of photography reveal an effort to shape how the war was visually remembered in order to influence public opinion on myriad matters following in the war’s wake, including notions of German guilt and responsibility, the legitimacy of the Republic, and the political future of the German nation. By utilizing relatively neglected sources, The Photographic Fix expands scholarship on German war photography to illuminate how images from the war and Weimar period reflected the public’s understanding of the medium at the time.

Icon Dresden explores how memory and politics in Dresden after its 1945 bombing are deeply intertwined with the city’s urban history. It highlights the complex origins of Dresden’s reputation as an exclusively cultural center, focusing on urban planning, marketing, tourism, and the city’s visual archive since the 17th century. Based on this iconic status, a narrative of victimhood arose after its destruction that ignored responsibilities while highlighting the city’s innocence. Despite its origin in Nazi propaganda, this narrative influenced postwar political discourse in socialist and post-reunification Germany. Icon Dresden also provides insight into Dresden’s role under National Socialism and the GDR’s evasive response to this history. It reveals how the strong presence of far-right movements in the city today stems from multiple discourses formed over centuries and communicated from generation to generation. Drawing on urban, heritage, and tourism studies, visual and memory studies, and environmental psychology, Icon Dresden examines Dresden’s history, identity, visual representations, and rebuilding decisions. It exposes the narratives that define its place in German and international memory and how, paradoxically, they support both Dresden’s current image as a symbol of peace and reconciliation and its backing of nativist and far-right movements.