Title: Weimar surfaces: urban visual culture in 1920s Germany
Author: Ward, Janet 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Literature | Architecture | Film | European Studies | European History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Germany of the 1920s offers a stunning moment in modernity, a time when surface values first became determinants of taste, activity, and occupation: modernity was still modern, spectacle was still spectacular. Janet Ward's luminous study revisits Weimar Germany via the lens of metropolitan visual cu . . . [more]
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Title: Weimar: a jurisprudence of crisis 
Author: Jacobson, Arthur J
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Law | Social and Political Thought | German Studies | Political Theory
Publisher's Description: This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism.   [brief]
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Title: Women in the metropolis: gender and modernity in Weimar culture
Author: Ankum, Katharina von
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: German Studies | Women's Studies | European Literature | Film | European History
Publisher's Description: Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City , the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Jazz, rock, and rebels: cold war politics and American culture in a divided Germany
Author: Poiger, Uta G 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: German Studies | Cultural Anthropology | European History | United States History | American Music | Jazz | Gender Studies | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In the two decades after World War II, Germans on both sides of the iron curtain fought vehemently over American cultural imports. Uta G. Poiger traces how westerns, jeans, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and stars like Marlon Brando or Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both Germanies, who eagerly adopted the new styles. Poiger reveals that East and West German authorities deployed gender and racial norms to contain Americanized youth cultures in their own territories and to carry on the ideological Cold War battle with each other. Poiger's lively account is based on an impressive array of sources, ranging from films, newspapers, and contemporary sociological studies, to German and U.S. archival materials. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels examines diverging responses to American culture in East and West Germany by linking these to changes in social science research, political cultures, state institutions, and international alliance systems. In the first two decades of the Cold War, consumer culture became a way to delineate the boundaries between East and West. This pathbreaking study, the first comparative cultural history of the two Germanies, sheds new light on the legacy of Weimar and National Socialism, on gender and race relations in Europe, and on Americanization and the Cold War.   [brief]
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Title: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: between Judaism and German philosophy
Author: Gordon, Peter Eli
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | German Studies | Religion | Judaism | European History | Intellectual History | Jewish Studies | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) is widely regarded today as one of the most original and intellectually challenging figures within the so-called renaissance of German-Jewish thought in the Weimar period. The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a "Jewish thinker," often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, The Star of Redemption. Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig's thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger's engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy - and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both.   [brief]
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Title: In the shadow of catastrophe: German intellectuals between apocalypse and enlightenment
Author: Rabinbach, Anson
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | German Studies | Social and Political Thought | Philosophy
Publisher's Description: These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time.Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia , Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment , Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.   [brief]
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Title: Hollywood in Berlin: American cinema and Weimar Germany 
Author: Saunders, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Film | United States History | European History
Publisher's Description: The setting is 1920s Berlin, cultural heart of Europe and the era's only serious cinematic rival to Hollywood. In his engaging study, Thomas Saunders explores an outstanding example of one of the most important cultural developments of this century: global Americanization through the motion picture.The invasion of Germany by American films, which began in 1921 with overlapping waves of sensationalist serials, slapstick shorts, society pictures, and historical epics, initiated a decade of cultural collision and accommodation. On the one hand it fueled an impassioned debate about the properties of cinema and the specter of wholesale Americanization. On the other hand it spawned unprecedented levels of cooperation and exchange.In Berlin, American motion pictures not only entertained all social classes and film tastes but also served as a vehicle for American values and a source of sharp economic competition. Hollywood in Berlin correlates the changing forms of Hollywood's contributions to Weimar culture and the discourses that framed and interpreted them, restoring historical contours to a leading aspect of cultural interchange in this century. At the same time, the book successfully embeds Weimar cinema in its contemporary international setting.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond the conceivable: studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust
Author: Diner, Dan 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: German Studies | Jewish Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: The major essays of Dan Diner, who is widely read and quoted in Germany and Israel, are finally collected in an English edition. They reflect the author's belief that the Holocaust transcends traditional patterns of historical understanding and requires an epistemologically distinct approach. One can no longer assume that actors as well as historians are operating in the same conceptual universe, sharing the same criteria of rational discourse. This is particularly true of victims and perpetrators, whose memories shape the distortions of historical narrative in ways often diametrically opposed. The essays are divided into three groups. The first group talks about anti-Semitism in the context of the 1930s and the ideologies that drove the Nazi regime. The second group concentrates on the almost unbelievably different perceptions of the "Final Solution," with particularly illuminating discussions of the Judenrat, or Jewish council. The third group considers the Holocaust as the subject of narrative and historical memory. Diner focuses above all on perspectives: the very notions of rationality and irrationality are seen to be changeable, depending on who is applying them. And because neither rational nor irrational motives can be universally assigned to participants in the Holocaust, Diner proposes, from the perspective of the victims, the idea of the counterrational. His work is directed toward developing a theory of Holocaust historiography and offers, clearly and coherently, the highest level of reflection on these problems.   [brief]
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Title: A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat 
Author: Applegate, Celia
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies
Publisher's Description: At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat - the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.The ideas and activities clustered around Heimat shed new light particularly on problems of modernization. Instead of viewing the Germans as a dangerously anti-modern people, Applegate argues that they used the cultivation of Heimat to ground an abstract nationalism in their attachment to familiar places and to reconcile the modern industrial and urban world with the rural landscapes and customs they admired. Primarily a characteristic of the middle classes, love of Heimat constituted an alternative vision of German unity to the familiar aggressive, militaristic one. The Heimat vision of Germany emphasized cultural diversity and defined German identity by its internal members rather than its external enemies.Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention.   [brief]
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Title: From monuments to traces: artifacts of German memory, 1870-1990
Author: Koshar, Rudy
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: German Studies | History | Architectural History | European History
Publisher's Description: Rudy Koshar constructs a powerful framework in which to examine the subject of German collective memory, which for more than a half century has been shaped by the experience of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Finding the assumptions of many writers and scholars shortsighted, Koshar surveys the evidence of postwar German memory in the context of previous traditions. From Monuments to Traces follows the evolution of German "memory landscapes" all the way from national unification in 1870-71 through the world wars and political division to reunification in 1990. The memory landscapes of any society may incorporate monuments, historical buildings, memorials and cemeteries, battlefields, streets, or natural environments that foster shared memories of important events or personalities. They may also be designed to divert public attention from embarrassing or traumatic histories. Koshar argues that in Germany, memory landscapes have taken shape according to four separate paradigms--the national monument, the ruin, the reconstruction, and the trace--which he analyzes in relation to the changing political agendas that have guided them over time. Despite the massive ruptures of Germany's history, we see that significant continuities have served to counterbalance the traumas of the German past.   [brief]
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Title: The war come home: disabled veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939
Author: Cohen, Deborah 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies | Military History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Disabled veterans were the First World War's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by injury or disease. In The War Come Home, Deborah Cohen offers a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent nations--Germany and Britain--cared for their disabled. At the heart of this book is an apparent paradox. Although postwar Germany provided its disabled veterans with generous benefits, they came to despise the state that favored them. Disabled men proved susceptible to the Nazi cause. By contrast, British ex-servicemen remained loyal subjects, though they received only meager material compensation. Cohen explores the meaning of this paradox by focusing on the interplay between state agencies and private philanthropies on one hand, and the evolving relationship between disabled men and the general public on the other. Written with verve and compassion, The War Come Home describes in affecting detail disabled veterans' lives and their treatment at the hands of government agencies and private charities in Britain and Germany. Cohen's study moves from the intimate confines of veterans' homes to the offices of high-level bureaucrats; she tells of veterans' protests, of disabled men's families, and of the well-heeled philanthropists who made a cause of the war's victims. This superbly researched book provides an important new perspective on the ways in which states and societies confront the consequences of industrialized warfare.   [brief]
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Title: The Nietzsche legacy in Germany, 1890-1990
Author: Aschheim, Steven E 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: German Studies | Intellectual History | Social and Political Thought | Politics | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Countless attempts have been made to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German li . . . [more]
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Title: Protecting motherhood: Women and the family in the politics of postwar West Germany 
Author: Moeller, Robert G
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction.The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West.Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics."   [brief]
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Title: Berlin metropolis: Jews and the new culture, 1890-1918
Author: Bilski, Emily D 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Art | History | Jewish Studies | German Studies
Publisher's Description: Between 1890 and 1918 the city of Berlin evolved into a commercial and industrial hub that also became an international center for radical new ideas in the visual, performing, and literary arts. Jews were key leaders in developing this unique cosmopolitan culture. Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 vividly documents the many ways that Jewish artists and entrepreneurs participated in this burst of artistic creativity and promoted the emergence of modernism on the international scene.The book and exhibition at The Jewish Museum highlight leading cultural figures such as Max Liebermann, a founder of the Berlin Secession, and Herwarth Walden, who founded Der Sturm; artists such as Ludwig Meidner and Jakob Steinhardt; pioneers of cabaret, theater, and film, including Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch; art dealers, publishers, and writers; and leading intellectual and political figures such as Martin Buber and Georg Simmel. These and other fascinating individuals are represented by more than 200 diverse objects: paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, books, letters, posters, graphic arts, theater memorabilia, and film. The book includes eight essays by scholars of German and Jewish culture and art history that provide a truly interdisciplinary interpretation of the Berlin renaissance.The period represented in Berlin Metropolis was a time when Jews were traditionally restricted from participating in major areas of German public life such as the army, government, and the university. But by turning to the "alternative public spheres" characteristic of urban society - galleries, cafés, journals, theaters, cabarets - they emerged as innovative cultural leaders whose intellectual and artistic impact is still felt today.The exhibition, Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 , will be at The Jewish Museum, New York , from November 14, 1999, to March 5, 2000; and the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida , from April 1 to June 11, 2000.   [brief]
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Title: What difference does a husband make?: women and marital status in Nazi and postwar Germany
Author: Heineman, Elizabeth D 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | German Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In October 1946, seven million more women than men lived in occupied Germany. In this study of unwed, divorced, widowed, and married women at work and at home across three political regimes, Elizabeth Heineman traces the transitions from early National Socialism through the war and on to the consolidation of democracy in the West and communism in the East.Based on thorough and extensive research in German national and regional archives as well as the archives of the U.S. occupying forces, this pathbreaking book argues that marital status can define women's position and experience as surely as race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Heineman finds that, while the war made the experience of single women a dramatic one, state activity was equally important. As a result, West German women continued to be defined in large part by their marital status. In contrast, by the time of reunification marital status had become far less significant in the lives of East German women.In one broad, comprehensive sweep, Elizabeth Heineman compares prewar and postwar, East and West, lived experience and public policy. Her sharp analytical insights will enrich our understanding of the history of women in modern Germany and the role of marital status in twentieth-century life worldwide.   [brief]
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Title: Cool conduct: the culture of distance in Weimar Germany 
Author: Lethen, Helmut
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Sociology | German Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way o . . . [more]
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Title: The emancipation of writing: German civil society in the making, 1790s-1820s
Author: McNeely, Ian F 1971-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European Studies | German Studies | European History | Sociology | Political Theory | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The Emancipation of Writing is the first study of writing in its connection to bureaucracy, citizenship, and the state in Germany. Stitching together micro- and macro-level analysis, it reconstructs the vibrant, textually saturated civic culture of the German southwest in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasions. Ian F. McNeely reveals that Germany's notoriously oppressive bureaucracy, when viewed through the writing practices that were its lifeblood, could also function as a site of citizenship. Citizens, acting under the mediation of powerful local scribes, practiced their freedoms in written engagements with the state. Their communications laid the basis for civil society, showing how social networks commonly associated with the free market, the free press, and the voluntary association could also take root in powerful state institutions.   [brief]
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Title: Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland
Author: Berdahl, Daphne 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | German Studies | Geography | European Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life - including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality - in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.   [brief]
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Title: The dark mirror: German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood
Author: Koepnick, Lutz P. (Lutz Peter)
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | German Studies | Music | Film
Publisher's Description: Lutz Koepnick analyzes the complicated relationship between two cinemas - Hollywood's and Nazi Germany's - in this theoretically and politically incisive study. The Dark Mirror examines the split course of German popular film from the early 1930s until the mid 1950s, showing how Nazi filmmakers appropriated Hollywood conventions and how German film exiles reworked German cultural material in their efforts to find a working base in the Hollywood studio system. Through detailed readings of specific films, Koepnick provides a vivid sense of the give and take between German and American cinema.   [brief]
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Title: Heisenberg and the Nazi atomic bomb project: a study in German culture
Author: Rose, Paul Lawrence
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | German Studies | European Studies | Science | Technology and Society | Physics | History and Philosophy of Science
Publisher's Description: No one better represents the plight and the conduct of German intellectuals under Hitler than Werner Heisenberg, whose task it was to build an atomic bomb for Nazi Germany. The controversy surrounding Heisenberg still rages, because of the nature of his work and the regime for which it was undertaken. What precisely did Heisenberg know about the physics of the atomic bomb? How deep was his loyalty to the German government during the Third Reich? Assuming that he had been able to build a bomb, would he have been willing? These questions, the moral and the scientific, are answered by Paul Lawrence Rose with greater accuracy and breadth of documentation than any other historian has yet achieved.Digging deep into the archival record among formerly secret technical reports, Rose establishes that Heisenberg never overcame certain misconceptions about nuclear fission, and as a result the German leaders never pushed for atomic weapons. In fact, Heisenberg never had to face the moral problem of whether he should design a bomb for the Nazi regime. Only when he and his colleagues were interned in England and heard about Hiroshima did Heisenberg realize that his calculations were wrong. He began at once to construct an image of himself as a "pure" scientist who could have built a bomb but chose to work on reactor design instead. This was fiction, as Rose demonstrates: in reality, Heisenberg blindly supported and justified the cause of German victory. The question of why he did, and why he misrepresented himself afterwards, is answered through Rose's subtle analysis of German mentality and the scientists' problems of delusion and self-delusion. This fascinating study is a profound effort to understand one of the twentieth century's great enigmas.   [brief]
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