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Author: Sean A. Forner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107627834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.
Author: Sean A. Forner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107627834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.
Author: Sean A. Forner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107049571
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.
Author: Sean Forner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316076651
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
"This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War and the Holocaust. Focusing on a diverse network of intellectual elites in the immediate postwar years, Professor Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals how they formulated an internally variegated, but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fuelled critique and dissent in both East and West Germany in the 1950s. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and which would influence the political struggles of later decades in Germany and across the globe"--
Author: Axel Fair-Schulz
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438465386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
With German reunification and the demise of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, East German historians and their traditions of historiography were removed from mainstream discourse in Germany and relegated to the periphery. By the mid-1990s, few GDR-trained historians remained in academia. These developments led to a greater degree of intellectual pluralism, yet marginalized many accomplished scholars. East German Historians since Reunification assesses what was gained and lost in the process of dissolving and remaking GDR institutions of historical scholarship. The collection combines primary and secondary sources: younger scholars offer analyses of East German historiography, while senior scholars who lived through the dismantling process provide firsthand accounts. Contributors address broad trends in scholarship as well as particular subfields and institutions. What unites them is a willingness to think critically about the achievements and shortcomings of GDR historiography, and its fate after German reunification.
Author: Sara Lorenzini
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805395432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
The histories of European unification and of West European democracy during the second half of the twentieth century have often been considered as separate or even antagonistic processes with the institutions of European integration being regarded as bastions of bureaucratic rule. A More Democratic Community challenges this assumption and argues that European integration benefited from the democratic accountability of member states while contributing to the validation of national democratic institutions. However, it also unveils a paradox: as integration deepened, it diminished the power of national parliaments, sparking a democratic accountability crisis within the Community.
Author: Avihu Zakai
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030540707
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
This book examines works of four German-Jewish scholars who, in their places of exile, sought to probe the pathology of the Nazi mind: Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941), Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), and Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949). While scholars have examined these authors’ individual legacies, no comparative analysis of their shared concerns has yet been undertaken, nor have the content and form of their psychological inquiries into Nazism been seriously and systematically analyzed. Yet, the sense of urgency in their works calls for attention. They all took up their pens to counter Nazi barbarism, believing, like the English jurist and judge Sir William Blackstone, who wrote in 1753 - scribere est agere ("to write is to act").
Author: Pepijn Corduwener
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134996330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
The current perception of democratic crisis in Western Europe gives a renewed urgency to a new perspective on the way democracy was reconstructed after World War II and the principles that underpinned its postwar transformation. This study accounts for the formation of the postwar democratic order in Western Europe by studying how the main political actors in France, West Germany and Italy conceptualized democracy and strove over its meaning. Based upon a wide range of librarian and archival sources from these countries, it tracks changing conceptions of democracy among leading politicians, political parties, and leaders of social movements, and unveils how they were deeply divided over key principles of postwar democracy – such as the political party, the free market economy, representation, and civic participation. By comparing three national debates on the question what democracy meant and how it should be institutionalized and practiced, this study argues that only in the 1970s conceptions of democracy converged and key political actors accepted each other as democrats with similar conceptions of democracy. This study thereby deconstructs the myth of the quick emergence of one consensual Western European model of democracy after 1945, demonstrates that its formation was a long and contentious process in which national differences were often of crucial importance, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of the historical roots of the current sentiment of democratic crisis.
Author: Terence Renaud
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
A groundbreaking history of Europe's "new lefts," from the antifascist 1920s to the anti-establishment 1960s In the 1960s, the radical youth of Western Europe's New Left rebelled against the democratic welfare state and their parents' antiquated politics of reform. It was not the first time an upstart leftist movement was built on the ruins of the old. This book traces the history of neoleftism from its antifascist roots in the first half of the twentieth century, to its postwar reconstruction in the 1950s, to its explosive reinvention by the 1960s counterculture. Terence Renaud demonstrates why the left in Europe underwent a series of internal revolts against the organizational forms of established parties and unions. He describes how small groups of militant youth such as New Beginning in Germany tried to sustain grassroots movements without reproducing the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and supposedly obsolete structures of Social Democracy and Communism. Neoleftist militants experimented with alternative modes of organization such as councils, assemblies, and action committees. However, Renaud reveals that these same militants, decades later, often came to defend the very institutions they had opposed in their youth. Providing vital historical perspective on the challenges confronting leftists today, this book tells the story of generations of antifascists, left socialists, and anti-authoritarians who tried to build radical democratic alternatives to capitalism and kindle hope in reactionary times.
Author: Johan Östling
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9198376829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
This book is about the idea of the university in modern Germany. Its primary focus is how the Humboldtian tradition was transformed and how it gave direction to debates around higher education. By combining approaches from intellectual history, conceptual history and the history of knowledge, the study investigates the ways in which Humboldt’s ideas have been appropriated for various purposes in different historical contexts and epochs. Ultimately, it shows that Humboldt’s ideals are not timeless – they are historical phenomena and have always been determined by the predicaments and issues of the day. Nevertheless, many of the key concepts and fundamental ideas have endured throughout the twentieth century, though they have been interpreted in different ways.
Author: Thomas W. Goldstein
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139206
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In the German Democratic Republic words and ideas mattered, both for legitimizing and criticizing the regime. No wonder, then, that the ruling SED party created a Writers Union to mold what writers publicly wrote and said. Its chief task was ideological: creating a socialist and antifascist culture. But it was also supposed to advance its members' professional interests and enable them to act as public intellectuals with a say in the direction of socialism. Many writers demanded that it pursue this second function as well, which brought it into conflict with the SED. This book explores how the union became a site for the contestation of writers' roles in GDR society with consequences well beyond the literary community. Union leaders, pressured by the SED or the secret police, usually acquiesced in enforcing regime demands, but by the 1980s many authors had adapted to the rules of the game, exploiting their union membership to insulate themselves from reprisal for their carefully worded critiques and in so doing beginning to break down limitations on public speech. The book explores how and why in the 1970s the Writers Union helped normalize relations between writers and state, yet over the course of the 1980s inadvertently aided the expansion of permissible speech, ultimately helping destabilize the East German system. Thomas W. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri.
