Studies in German History - Böcker

Protestant nuns and mixed-confessional convents are an unexpected anomaly in early modern Germany. According to sixteenth-century evangelical reformers' theological positions outlined in their publications and reform-minded rulers' institutional efforts, monastic life in Protestant regions should have ended by the mid-sixteenth century. Instead, many convent congregations exhibiting elements of traditional and evangelical practices in Protestant regions survived into the seventeenth century and beyond. How did these convents survive? What is a Protestant nun? How many convent congregations came to house nuns with diverse belief systems and devotional practices, and how did they live and worship together? These questions lead to surprising answers. Stripping the Veil explores the daily existence, ritual practices, and individual actions of nuns in surviving convents over time against the backdrop of changing political and confessional circumstances in Protestant regions. It also demonstrates how incremental shifts in practice and belief led to the emergence of a complex, often locally constructed, devotional life. This continued presence of nuns and the survival of convents in Protestant cities and territories of the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire is evidence of a more complex lived experience of religious reform, devotional practice, and confessional accommodation than traditional histories of early modern Christianity would indicate. The internal differences and the emerging confessional hybridity, blending, and fluidity also serve as a caution about designating a nun or groups of nuns as Lutheran, Catholic, or Reformed, or even more broadly as Protestant or Catholic during the sixteenth century.

No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkable transformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the 'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'high politics' alone. This book asks why. Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritage preservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture in communist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?

Interventions in other states on behalf of their subject populations is often portrayed as a novel phenomenon in state practice, one which breaches the old principle of sovereignty. But is this practice really so new? Patrick Milton argues that such interventions for the protection of other rulers' subjects occurred frequently as far back as the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is the first detailed study of interventions in the early modern period and focusses on central Europe, in particular the Holy Roman Empire. It therefore challenges the common view that in the period after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the legal scope for, and occurrence of, intervention, were reduced. The book sheds new light on the geopolitical and legal interconnections between the old German Reich and Europe, while also providing comparative insights. It investigates the norms inherent in central European interventions and thereby contributes to a better understanding of the political and legal culture of the Empire, while also assessing the relative importance of geopolitical considerations in such undertakings.

The book is a new, revisionist account of Sixties protest movements in West Germany. It challenges established narratives centring male intellectuals by foregrounding families, private lives, women, and old people. Worked from a wealth of new archival sources, the book argues that '1968' was just as much about gender conflict as it was about generational conflict--even if the former was often erased from public memory. The narrative follows three generations of Germans living in the provincial town of Bonn through the turbulent years of the late 1960s. It offers a genuine social history of the period, decentring the story of West Germany's 68 socially, geographically, and generationally. The five chapters cover the Shah of Iran's visit to Bonn and Berlin, the role of the Nazi past in framing generational differences, experiences of old people around '1968', the female dimension of the protests, and the sexual revolution. The book situates the West German case within the global and West European Sixties and engages with recent controversies on the role of female '68ers, the origins of new feminist movements, and the sexual revolution.Originally published in German in 2018 by C. H. Beck (titled Das andere Achtundsechzig: Gesellschaftsgeschichte einer Revolte, 978-3406719714), it has been translated into English by Rachel Ward.

This book is the first to examine the relation between German folklore studies and colonial anthropology in the age of empire. It expounds how anthropologists and folklorists aimed to compare rural cultures in the European hinterland to supposedly primitive societies in the colonial peripheries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This allows for a reconsideration of two fields that all too often have been examined in isolation. Whereas folklore studies has been interpreted as an aspect of nation-building, anthropology has been primarily examined in its relation to imperialism. The links between these two areas of research--and their eventual separation--have barely been examined in any detail to date. By taking Germany as an exemplary case, the book addresses the following questions: how did scholars think about comparing traditional cultures that were thousands of kilometres apart? Why were such cultural ties eventually severed at the turn of the twentieth century? How was the study of so-called primitive societies linked to metropolitan class struggles and assertions of territorial sovereignty, such as nationalism and imperialism? How far was the shifting relation between overseas and domestic primitivism caused, or accompanied, by the increasing importance of racial theories after the end of the First World War? And, last but not least, how was the study of primitivism linked to the concept of historical temporality?

In the Holy Roman Empire 'no prince... can forbid men passage in the common road', wrote the English jurist John Selden. In practice, moving through one the most fractured landscapes in human history was rarely as straightforward as suggested by Selden's account of the German 'liberty of passage'.Across the Old Reich, mobile populations-from emperors to peasants-defied attempts to channel their mobility with actions ranging from mockery to bloodshed. In this study, Luca Scholz charts this contentious ordering of movement through the lens of safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key framework for negotiating freedom of movement and its restriction in the Empire.Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire draws on sources discovered in twenty archives, from newly unearthed drawings to first-hand accounts by peasants, princes, and prisoners. Scholz's maps shift the focus from the border to the thoroughfare to show that controls of moving goods and people were rarely concentrated at borders before the mid-eighteenth century. Uncovering a forgotten chapter in the history of free movement, the author presents a new look at the unstable relationship of political authority and human mobility in the heartlands of old-regime Europe.

In the early medieval world, the way people remembered the past changed how they saw the present. New accounts of former leaders and their deeds could strengthen their successors, establish novel claims to power, or criticize the current ruler. After 888, when the Carolingian Empire fractured into the smaller kingdoms of medieval western Europe, memory became a vital tool for those seeking to claim royal power for themselves. Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony looks at how the past was evoked for political purposes under a new Saxon dynasty, the Ottonians, who came to dominate post-Carolingian Europe as the rulers of a new empire in Germany and Italy. With the accession of the first Ottonian king, Henry I, in 919, sites commemorating the king's family came to the foreground of the medieval German kingdom. The most remarkable of these were two convents of monastic women, Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, whose prominence and prestige in Ottonian politics have been seen as exceptional in the history of early medieval western Europe. In this volume, Sarah Greer offers a fresh interpretation of how these convents became central sites in the new Ottonian empire by revealing how the women in these communities themselves were skilful political actors who were more than capable of manipulating memory for their own benefit. In this first major study in English of how these Saxon convents functioned as memorial centres, Greer presents a new vision of the first German dynasty, one characterized by contingency, versatility, and the power of the past.

Forging Germans explores the German nationalization and eventual National Socialist radicalization of ethnic Germans in the Batschka and the Western Banat, two multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderland territories currently in northern Serbia. Deploying a comparative approach, Caroline Mezger investigates the experiences of ethnic German children and youth in interwar Yugoslavia and under Hungarian and German occupation during World War II, as local and Third Reich cultural, religious, political, and military organizations wrestled over young people's national (self-) identification and loyalty. Ethnic German children and youth targeted by these nationalization endeavors moved beyond being the objects of nationalist activism to become agents of nationalization themselves, as they actively negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the "Germanness" ascribed to them.Interweaving original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and diverse historical press sources, Forging Germans provides incisive insight into the experiences and memories of one of Europe's most contested wartime demographics, probing the relationship between larger historical circumstances and individual agency and subjectivity.

The division of Germany separated a nation, divided communities, and inevitably shaped the life histories of those growing up in the socialist dictatorship of the East and the liberal democracy of the West. This peculiarly German experience of the Cold War is usually viewed through the lens of divided Berlin or other border communities. What has been much less explored, however, is what division meant to the millions of Germans in the East and West who lived far away from the Wall and the centres of political power. This volume is the first comparative study to examine how villagers in both Germanies dealt with the imposition of two very different systems in their everyday lives. Focusing on two villages, Neukirch (Lausitz) in Saxony and Ebersbach an der Fils in Baden-Württemberg, it explores how local residents experienced and navigated social change in their localities in the postwar era. Based on a wide range of archival sources as well as oral history interviews, the work argues that there are parallel histories of responses to social change among villagers in postwar Germany. Despite the different social, political, and economic developments, the residents of both localities desired rural modernisation, lamented the loss of 'community', and became politically active to control the transformation of their localities. The work thereby offers a bottom-up history of divided Germany which shows how individuals on both sides of the Wall gave local meaning to large-scale processes of change.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Networks of Modernity: Germany in the Age of the Telegraph, 1830-1880 offers a fresh perspective on the history of Germany by investigating the origins and impact of the 'communications revolution' that transformed state and society during the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the period 1830-1880, exploring the interactions between the many different actors who developed, administered, and used one of the most important technologies of the period-the electric telegraph. It reveals the channels through which scientific and technical knowledge circulated across Central Europe during the 1830s and 1840s, stimulating both collaboration and confrontation between the scientists, technicians, businessmen, and bureaucrats involved in bringing the telegraph to life. It highlights the technology's impact upon the conduct of trade, finance, news distribution, and government in the tumultuous decades that witnessed the 1848 revolutions, the wars of unification, and the establishment of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Following the telegraph lines themselves, it weaves together the changes which took place at a local, regional, national, and eventually global level, revisiting the technology's impact upon concepts of space and time, and highlighting the importance of this period in laying the foundations for Germany's experience of a profoundly ambiguous, networked modernity.

Prostitution played an important part in structuring gender relations in medieval Germany. Prostitutes were often viewed as an example of the extreme female sinfulness which all women risked falling into, yet their social role was also seen as vital to the unmarried men for whom they provided a sexual outlet. Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany is the first full-length study of medieval prostitution to focus primarily on how gender discourse shaped the lives of prostitutes themselves. Based on three legal case studies from the late medieval Empire, Prostitutes and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany examines constructions of subjectivity between 1400 and 1500. This period saw the rapid rise of tolerated prostitution across much of western Europe and the emergence of the public brothel as a central institution in the regulation of social order, followed by its equally rapid suppression from the early 1500s. By analysing how individuals interacted with cultural discourses surrounding the body, sexuality, and sin, the book explores how the concepts which defined prostitution in the Middle Ages shaped individual lives, and how individuals were able - or not - to exert agency, both within the circumstances of their own lives, and in response to official attempts to regulate sexual behaviour.

Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, c. 1520-1635 investigates how religious coexistence functioned in six towns in the multiconfessional region of Upper Lusatia in Western Bohemia. Lutherans and Catholics found a feasible modus vivendi through written agreements and regular negotiations. This meant that the Habsburg kings of Bohemia ruled over a Lutheran region. Lutherans and Catholics in Upper Lusatia shared spaces, objects, and rituals. Catholics adopted elements previously seen as a firm part of a Lutheran confessional culture. Lutherans, too, were willing to incorporate Catholic elements into their religiosity. Some of these overlaps were subconscious, while others were a conscious choice.This book provides a new narrative of the Reformation and shows that the concept of the 'urban Reformation', where towns are seen as centres of Lutheranism has to be reassessed, particularly in towns in former East Germany, where much work remains to be done. It shows that in a region like Upper Lusatia, which did not have a political centre and underwent a complex Reformation with many different actors, there was no clear confessionalization. By approaching the Upper Lusatian Reformation through important individuals, Martin Christ shows how they had to negotiate their religiosity, resulting in cross-confessional exchange and syncretism.

The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation explores ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about being gay in the 1970s, an influential decade sandwiched between the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1969, and the arrival of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Moving beyond divided Cold War Berlin, it also focuses on lesser-known cities, such as Aachen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Münster, and Stuttgart, to name just a few of the 53 localities that were home to a gay group by the end of the 1970s. These groups were important, and this book tells their story. In 1970s West Germany gay liberation did not take place only in activist meetings, universities, and on street demonstrations, but also on television, in magazine editorial offices, ordinary homes, bedrooms, and beyond. In considering all these spaces and individuals, this book provides a more complex account than previous histories, which have tended to focus only on a social movement and only on the idea of 'gay pride'. By drawing attention to ambivalence, this book shows that gay liberation was never only about pride, but also about shame; characterized not only by hope, but also by fear; and driven forward not just by the pushes of confrontation, but also by the pulls of conformism. Ranging from the painstaking emergence of the gay press to the first representation of homosexuality on television, from debates over the sexual legacy of 1968 and the student movement to the memory of Nazi persecution, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation is the first English-language book to tell the story of male homosexual politics in 1970s West Germany. In doing so, this book changes the way we think about modern queer history.

Keeping the Peace in the Village is a study of how rural society evolved in the century after 1650. Based on extensive research in German archives, particularly in local court records, the book examines how rural people sought peace in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. An understandable desire for peace and order co-existed with the reality of day-to-day conflicts common to any face-to-face community. An important consequence of the tension between conflict and the desire for peace was that people increasingly used local courts to help in resolving conflicts.One focus of the book is on the nature of conflicts in rural society. While the majority conflicts that appear in the archival record are between propertied men, women, farm laborers, and servants also found reasons for conflict and also brought their cases to court. Honor disputes were ubiquitous in this society and everyone defended their honor, in court, with their fists, and with their words. Slander cases made up a large part of each court session.Despite high levels of conflict, people placed great value on peace. Local people and state officials constantly searched for settlements of conflicts. These settlements were often negotiated informally, sometimes involved the intervention of intermediaries, and sometimes were reached formally through a court decision. Every court decision ended with an appeal for peace between the parties and a handshake and promise of friendship between the parties. Local courts and officials were well aware of the dangers of conflicts, especially if they were public, and tried to prevent the spread of gossip and rumor. Of course, peacemaking was not always successful, and feuds and on-going conflicts were common.The interplay of peacemaking and conflict at the local level, and the growing role of local courts, had important implications for the growth of state power. Although study examines developments in several small and lightly governed southwest German states, there is nevertheless clear evidence of state formation in the century after 1650. Key to this process was the way local people used local officials and local judicial institutions to solve local conflicts. The result was a kind of state formation from below. This study argues that a local perspective is vital for understanding the development of the state and provides evidence of popular support for a state that provided important services to rural people.

The First World War transformed modern politics. No example demonstrates this more powerfully than the enactment and use of emergency powers by all belligerents. Wartime governments passed extensive emergency legislation that allowed them to pursue their war efforts with little democratic scrutiny and legal restrictions. In Britain, the Defence of the Realm Act transferred law-making powers from Parliament to the government and suspended vital elements of the unwritten constitution. In Germany, the declaration of the state of siege meant that the military assumed executive powers on the home front. These powers were initially used to suppress dissent, establish censorship of the press, and combat espionage. Yet, by 1918, they had been extended to regulate almost any aspect of everyday life on the home front. Understanding the political and social dynamics on the home front is only possible when the crucial importance of these emergency powers is considered. The experience of life under a permanent state of exception during the war transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens. Yet it also marked the rise of the state of exception as a paradigm of rule. Using Britain and Germany as examples of the wartime state of exception, André Keil offers a detailed analysis of the use of emergency powers during the war. By drawing on a wide range of archival sources, he explains the rise of this new paradigm of government and how it shaped politics in Britain and Germany well beyond the First World War. The book offers a wealth of local examples that explain how ideologies and perceptions of the 'enemy within' shaped the use of repressive emergency powers by politicians, police, and military. It also traces how the critique and resistance against these measures helped to establish civil liberties as a new field of political activism. In essence, Keil offers a unique perspective on German and British politics during the First World War and tests the notion of the war being a 'laboratory for the state of exception'.

Gender history has alerted us to the fact that it is misleading to assume transhistorical features when it comes to issues such as childbearing, mother- and fatherhood, and gendered systems of labour division. Instead, all of these are culturally inflected and thus variable across time. Gendered Practices of Rulership at the Court of Württemberg, 1568-1634 explores the ways in which socially constructed differences between men and women supported the dynastic practice of power in the early modern duchy of Württemberg. The book investigates three generations of the Württemberg ducal family from the late sixteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. In five chapters, five gendered practices are examined. They include the gendering of courtly space, of high ceremonial events, and of dynastic marriage and concubinage, as well as the gendering of kinship practices. The history of the Württemberg dynasty in this period, allows for the observation of a range of approaches to the practice of power. It is documented by rich archival sources - many of which are analysed here for the first time - and thus provides opportunities for comparison between different ruling couples. Duke Friedrich I rarely saw eye to eye with his wife Duchess Sibylla von Anhalt (r. 1593-1608), and he engaged in numerous extramarital affairs, even seeking to institutionalise concubinage. This couple's son Duke Johann Friedrich enjoyed a much more harmonious relationship with his wife Duchess Barbara Sophia von Brandenburg (r. 1608-1628), with the couple amicably sharing many tasks of rulership. The book, however, does not merely seek to show how individual men, women, and couples engaged in dynastic rulership through gendered relationships. Instead, it also seeks to identify the types of gendered work the dynastic system relied on in order to remain functional over a long period of time. To do so, examples of failed relationships are at least as useful as those of marriages built on common understanding. As a result of this methodological shift, aspects of life at court emerge that have previously escaped in-depth discussion; for instance, the emotionally cohesive effects of gendered court topography, as well as the crucial emotion work dynastic women were expected to perform in their marital relationships, and which had wide-reaching political consequences.

Body Size in Early Modern Germany uncovers the significance of fatness and thinness in early modern German society and culture. It explores how early modern people conceived of fat and thin bodies, in terms of both the cultural meanings attached to body size and personal perceptions of the body. Holly Fletcher argues that body size became an increasingly prominent concern throughout the German-speaking regions from the late-fifteenth to the early-seventeenth century. During this period, perceptions and practices relating to body size shifted dramatically, as the size and shape of people's bodies attracted unprecedented attention. Body size became embedded in everyday habits and experiences like never before. This transformation took place against the backdrop of profound social, religious and cultural developments which characterised the sixteenth century. Drawing on a wide array of sources, the book charts changing attitudes towards body size in relation to these developments, including the proliferation of printed medical advice, artistic theories of proportion, Reformation debates, and new body-moulding fashions. It also connects shifting ideals for women's and men's bodies to the embodied experiences of early modern protagonists. By revealing the enormous importance that early modern Germans attached to body size, this study overturns the false assumption that concern with body size is a modern phenomenon and sheds new light on sixteenth-century German culture.

In this book, Morgan Golf-French offers a new interpretation of late Enlightenment German historiography in relation to ideas about race, culture, and politics. By paying close attention to the institutions within which these ideas were articulated, Golf-French reveals their complex and idiosyncratic development in the work of the prominent—and controversial—historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Christoph Meiners, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and Charles de Villers. As the book shows, these ideas and their authors not only shaped the major controversies of the time, from the rise of abolitionism to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, but produced tropes and arguments of lasting significance in European thought.The book argues that the ideas about race and culture which emerged in the years preceding the French Revolution were crucial in shaping German responses to the crises years of 1789–1815. Readers will discover both the contemporary significance of these ideas in early modern Germany and important insights into their long-term impact. As the book argues, the Enlightenment should be understood on its own terms, as an important phase in European intellectual history ultimately bound to the world of ancien régime^R Europe.

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

A comprehensive analysis of political violence in Weimar Germany with particular emphasis on the political culture from which it emerged.“Today’s readers, living in what Charles Maier calls ‘a new epoch of vanished reassurance’, will find this book absorbing and troubling.”—The HistorianThe Prussian province of Saxony—where the Communist uprising of March 1921 took place and two Combat Leagues (Wehrverbände) were founded (the right-wing Stahlhelm and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner)—is widely recognized as a politically important region in this period of German history. Using a case study of this socially diverse province, this book refutes both the claim that the Bolshevik revolution was the prime cause of violence and the argument that the First World War’s all-encompassing “brutalization” doomed post-1918 German political life from the very beginning. The study thus contributes to a view of the Weimar Republic as a state in severe crisis but with alternatives to the Nazi takeover.From the introduction:After the phase of civil war, political violence assumed a distinctly limited form. It was no longer aimed at killing or wounding as many opponents as possible; instead, it served political parties and organizations as an instrument for exerting pressure in the struggle over control of the street. This development was driven by the Combat Leagues (Wehrverbände) of all political camps, who, with their uniforms and marches, injected militaristic elements into the political culture. However, since the violence they perpetrated followed a political and not a military logic, it was, as I will show, in principle controllable and did not pose a fundamental threat to the political order, not even in 1932, that particularly turbulent year before Hitler’s assumption of power.

After 1945, those responsible for conservation in Germany resumed their work with a relatively high degree of continuity as far as laws and personnel were concerned. Yet conservationists soon found they had little choice but to modernize their views and practices in the challenging postwar context. Forced to change by necessity, those involved in state-sponsored conservation institutionalized and professionalized their efforts, while several private groups became more confrontational in their message and tactics. Through their steady and often conservative presence within the mainstream of West German society, conservationists ensured that by 1970 the map of the country was dotted with hundreds of reserves, dozens of nature parks, and one national park. In doing so, they assured themselves a strong position to participate in, rather than be excluded from, the left-leaning environmental movement of the 1970s.

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.Germany is a key test case for the burgeoning field of environmental history; in no other country has the landscape been so thoroughly politicized throughout its past as in Germany,and in no other country have ideas of 'nature' figured so centrally in notions of national identity. The essays collected in this volume — the first collection on the subject in either English or German — place discussions of nature and the human relationship with nature in their political co texts. Taken together, they trace the gradual shift from a confident belief in humanity ’s ability to tame and manipulate the natural realm to the Umweltbewußtsein driving the contemporary conservation movement. Nature in German History also documents efforts to reshape the natural realm in keeping with ideological beliefs — such as the Romantic exultation of 'the wild' and the Nazis' attempts to eliminate 'foreign' flora and fauna — as well as the ways in which political issues have repeatedly been transformed into discussions of the environment in Germany.

The 20th century, declared at its start to be the "Century of the Child" by Swedish author Ellen Key, saw an unprecedented expansion of state activity in and expert knowledge on child-rearing on both sides of the Atlantic. Children were seen as a crucial national resource whose care could not be left to families alone. However, the exact scope and degree of state intervention and expert influence as well as the rights and roles of mothers and fathers remained subjects of heated debates throughout the century. While there is a growing scholarly interest in the history of childhood, research in the field remains focused on national narratives. This volume compares the impact of state intervention and expert influence on theories and practices of raising children in the U.S. and German Central Europe. In particular, the contributors focus on institutions such as kindergartens and schools where the private and the public spheres intersected, on notions of "race" and "ethnicity," "normality" and "deviance," and on the impact of wars and changes in political regimes. Dirk Schumann is a Professor of Modern History at Georg-August-University Gottingen.He was Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., from 2002 to 2007 and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bielefeld. From 1999 to 2002 he taught as Visiting Professor at Emory University. He is the author of Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War (English edition, Berghahn Books, 2009) and has co-edited Life After Death (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Violence and Society after the First World War (first issue of Journal of Modern European History, 2003), and Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (Berghahn Books, 2008).

The history of criminal justice in modern Germany has become a vibrant field of research, as demonstrated in this volume. Following an introductory survey, the twelve chapters examine major topics in the history of crime and criminal justice from Imperial Germany, through the Weimar and Nazi eras, to the early postwar years. These topics include case studies of criminal trials, the development of juvenile justice, and the efforts to reform the penal code, criminal procedure, and the prison system. The collection also reveals that the history of criminal justice has much to contribute to other areas of historical inquiry: it explores the changing relationship of criminal justice to psychiatry and social welfare, analyzes representations of crime and criminal justice in the media and literature, and uses the lens of criminal justice to illuminate German social history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.

The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR’s ‘new’ society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy’s starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR’s lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure.

During the three decades from 1945 to 1975, the Catholic Church in West Germany employed a broad range of methods from empirical social research. Statistics, opinion polling, and organizational sociology, as well as psychoanalysis and other approaches from the “psy sciences,” were debated and introduced in pastoral care. In adopting these methods for their own work, bishops, parish clergy, and pastoral sociologists tried to open the church up to modernity in a rapidly changing society. In the process, they contributed to the reform agenda of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Through its analysis of the intersections between organized religion and applied social sciences, this award-winning book offers fascinating insights into the trajectory of the Catholic Church in postwar Germany.

Entrepreneur and Nazi functionary Fritz Kiehn lived through almost 100 years of German history, from the Bismarck era to the late Bonn Republic. A successful manufacturer, Kiehn joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and obtained a number of influential posts after 1933, making him one of the most powerful Nazi functionaries in southern Germany. These posts allowed him ample opportunity to profit from "Aryanizations" and state contracts. After 1945, he restored his reputation, was close to Adenauer's CDU during Germany's economic miracle, and was a respected and honored citizen in Trossingen. Kiehn's biography provides a key to understanding the political upheavals of the 20th century, especially the workings of the corrupt Nazi system as well as the "coming to terms" with National Socialism in the Federal Republic.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germans exhibited a widespread cultural passion for tales and representations of Native Americans. This book explores the evolution of German national identity and its relationship with the ideas and cultural practices around “Indianthusiasm.” Pervasive and adaptable, imagery of Native Americans was appropriated by Nazi propaganda and merged with exceptionalist notions of German tribalism, oxymoronically promoting the Nazis’ racial ideology. This book combines cultural and intellectual history to scrutinize the motifs of Native American imagery in German literature, media, and scholarship, and analyzes how these motifs facilitated the propaganda effort to nurture national pride, racial thought, militarism, and hatred against the Allied powers among the German populace.