Author: Marcus Funck
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585442072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book Here
Book Description
Over the course of the 20th century, Germans from virtually all walks of life were touched by two problems: forging a sense of national community and coming to terms with widespread suffering. Arguably, no country in the modern Western world has been so closely associated with both inflicting and overcoming catastrophic misery in the name of national belonging. Within this context, the concept and ideal of "sacrifice" have played a pivotal role in recent German political culture. As the seven studies in this volume show, once the value of heroic national sacrifice was invoked during World War I to mobilize German soldiers and civilians, it proved to be a remarkably effective way to respond to a wide variety of social dislocations. How did the ideals of sacrifice play a role in constructing German nationalism? How did the Nazis use this idea to justify mass killing? What consequences did this have for postwar Germany? This volume opens up discussions about the history of 20th-century German political life.
Author: Stephan Malinowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198842554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the mountain of books that have been written about the Third Reich, surprisingly little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis' rise to power. While often confidently referred to, the 'fateful' role played by the German nobility is rarely, if ever, investigated in any real detail. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In a real twist of historical irony, members of the nobility were as prominent in the destruction of Weimar democracy as they were to be years later in Graf Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility's social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years - and the troubled mésalliance to which this was to lead between the majority of Germany's nobles and the National Socialists.
Author: Michael Geheran
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book Here
Book Description
At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming "evacuations." Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of Comrades Betrayed. Michael Geheran deftly illuminates how the same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, let alone comprehend, persecution under Hitler. After all, they upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, Michael Geheran presents a major challenge to the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, Geheran exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, Comrades Betrayed forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.
Author: Tim Grady
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 184631660X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nearly one hundred thousand German Jews fought in World War I, and some twelve thousand of these soldiers lost their lives in battle. This book focuses on the multifaceted ways in which these soldiers have been remembered, as well as forgotten, from 1914 to the late 1970s. By examining Germany's complex and continually evolving memory culture, Tim Grady opens up a new approach to the study of German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, he draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews, a story that extends past the Holocaust and into the Cold War.
Author: Henning Grunwald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199609047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
Get Book Here
Book Description
What role did the courts play in the demise of Germany's first democracy and Hitler's rise to power? Courtroom to Revolutionary Stage challenges the orthodox interpretation of Weimar political justice. Henning Grunwald argues that an exclusive focus on reactionary judges and a preoccupation with number-crunching verdicts has obscured precisely that aspect of trials most fascinating to contemporary observers: their drama. Drawing on untapped sources and material previously inaccessible in English, Grunwald shows how an innovative group of party lawyers transformed dry legal proceedings into spectacular ideological clashes. Supported by powerful party legal offices (which have hitherto escaped scholarly notice almost entirely), they developed a sophisticated repertoire of techniques at the intersection of criminal law, politics, and public relations. Harnessing the emotional appeal of tens of thousands of trials, Communists and (emulating them) National Socialists institutionalized party legal aid in order to build their ideological communities. Defendants turned into martyrs, trials into performances of ideological self-sacrifice, and the courtroom into 'revolutionary stage', as one prominent party lawyer put it. It is this political justice as 'revolutionary stage' that most powerfully impacted Weimar political culture. While it helps to explain Weimar's demise, this argument about the theatricality of justice transcends interwar Germany. Trials were compelling not because they offered instruction about the revolutionary struggle, but because in a sense they were the revolutionary struggle. The ideological struggle, their message ran, left no room for fairness, no possibility of a 'neutral platform': justice was unattainable until the Republic was destroyed.
Author: Richard Bessel
Publisher: Wallstein Verlag
ISBN: 9783892448259
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Claudia Siebrecht
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199656681
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Get Book Here
Book Description
An examination of German women's art produced during the First World War that places the artists' visual responses within the civilian war experience. Traces the thematic evolution of women's art from visual expressions of support for the national war effort to more nuanced and distraught representations of grief over wartime death.
Author: John Breen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824892216
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
Beyond Zen: D. T. Suzuki and the Modern Transformation of Buddhism is an accessible collection of multidisciplinary essays, which offer a genuinely new appraisal of the great Zen scholar-practitioner, D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966). Suzuki’s writings and lectures continue to exert a profound influence on how Zen, Buddhism more broadly, and indeed Japanese culture as a whole, are understood in the United States, Europe, and across the globe. With the publication of Beyond Zen, we have at last in a single volume a comprehensive assessment of Suzuki that locates him and his legacy in the context of the turbulent age in which he lived. Now is the perfect moment for reflection and stocktaking. The fiftieth anniversary of Suzuki’s death passed just a few years ago, the copyright on his literary output has expired, and his selected works have recently been published by a major American university press. The work comprises twelve essays by some of the best Zen scholars in the world, Anglophone and Japanese, seasoned and young. They take a fresh look at Suzuki, his life and legacy, and their themes range broadly. Readers will find here explorations of Suzuki as he engaged with Zen and Mahāyāna Buddhism; nationalism and international relations; war and peace; religion, literature, and the media; the individual and society; and family, friends, and animals. Beyond Zen is structured chronologically to reveal the development in Suzuki’s thought during his long and eventful life. All in all, this collection offers a compelling, provocative, and multidimensional reappraisal of an extraordinary man and his times.
Author: Karina Urbach
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3598441231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177
Get Book Here
Book Description
Whenever the British Press wants to attack the Royal Family, they make a jibe about “their foreign roots”. The Royals – as they say – are simply a posh version of German invaders. But did German relatives really influence decisions made by any British monarchs or are they just an “imagined community”, invented by journalists and historians? The Royal Archives at Windsor gave the authors – among others John Röhl, doyen of 19th century monarchical history – open access to Royal correspondences with six German houses: Hanover, Prussia, Mecklenburg, Coburg, Hesse and Battenberg.
Author: Gavin Schaffer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134905335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
Racializing the Soldier explores the impact of racial beliefs on the formation and development of modern armed forces and the ways in which these forces have been presented and historicized from a global perspective. With a wide geographical and temporal spread, the collection looks at the disparate ways that race has influenced military development. In particular, it explores the extent to which ideas of racial hierarchy and type have conditioned thinking about what kinds of soldiers should be used and in what roles. This volume offers a highly original military, social and cultural history, questioning the borders both of racialization and of the military itself. It considers the extent to which discourses of gender, nationality and religion have informed racialization, and probes the influence of expert studies of soldiers as indicators of national population types. By focusing mostly, but not exclusively, on colonial and post-colonial states, the book considers how racialized militaries both shaped and reflected conflict in the modern world, ultimately explaining how the history of this idea has often underpinned modern military planning and thinking. This book is based on a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.
