Organized sport in the Weimar Republic was dominated by three strands—so-called bourgeois sport, the gymnastics movement (Turnen) and the workers’ sports movement (Arbeitersport). While scholarship has rightly pointed out the differences between their federations, it has neglected a significant feature they had in common: the struggle to communicate key messages to their members. For the first time, this article examines debates about and developments in the communications of Weimar’s leading sports organizations. It shows that through the 1920s producing journals, running news services and lobbying the press became as important as competing in or watching sport itself, as the organizations sought to raise their profile, gain new members and retain the members they already had. Each of them, while envying the others, failed to meet its goals for similar reasons: inadequate internal structures, poor decision-making and the allure of commercialized sport and the papers and magazines it fed and produced. While scholarship has often noted the high level of sports coverage in the mainstream press, it has not explored the dynamic pull of such reporting on readers. By examining the effects of the professional media on the active members of the three main federations, this article therefore also sheds light on the power of new forms of writing and entertainment to influence individuals as the shift to consumer habits increased in all social classes throughout the Weimar Republic. In doing so, it bridges between empirically orientated forms of sports history and cultural histories of the press.
{"title":"Communication Breakdown: Sports Federations and Media Politics in the Weimar Republic","authors":"Christopher Young","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Organized sport in the Weimar Republic was dominated by three strands—so-called bourgeois sport, the gymnastics movement (Turnen) and the workers’ sports movement (Arbeitersport). While scholarship has rightly pointed out the differences between their federations, it has neglected a significant feature they had in common: the struggle to communicate key messages to their members. For the first time, this article examines debates about and developments in the communications of Weimar’s leading sports organizations. It shows that through the 1920s producing journals, running news services and lobbying the press became as important as competing in or watching sport itself, as the organizations sought to raise their profile, gain new members and retain the members they already had. Each of them, while envying the others, failed to meet its goals for similar reasons: inadequate internal structures, poor decision-making and the allure of commercialized sport and the papers and magazines it fed and produced. While scholarship has often noted the high level of sports coverage in the mainstream press, it has not explored the dynamic pull of such reporting on readers. By examining the effects of the professional media on the active members of the three main federations, this article therefore also sheds light on the power of new forms of writing and entertainment to influence individuals as the shift to consumer habits increased in all social classes throughout the Weimar Republic. In doing so, it bridges between empirically orientated forms of sports history and cultural histories of the press.","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43751486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Press photography was an important medium of public communication in Germany in the 1920s. Scholarship on the topic has had two distinct foci. First, research on the ‘golden age’ of visual news has mainly concentrated on the visual coverage and political implications of singular events or certain topics. Secondly, the history of photography tends to concentrate on the period’s most prominent photographers, highlighting exceptional and high-quality examples of the genre. This article argues for a change of perspective, emphasizing press photography as an industry that disseminated thousands of pictures to a wide public. Focusing on its production side and a form of ‘distant seeing’ gives a better understanding of the transnational iconography of the present as it was manufactured within this professional field. Examining portfolios distributed by important actors, such as Georg Pahl’s Berlin-based photo agency, helps chart the visual media landscape through which people became acquainted with local events and national and international politics. This iconography contributed to an image of ‘Weimar’ as a society which appeared much more ‘normal’ and more comparable to the developments in other countries than ex post interpretations of Weimar as a society in crisis suggest. Global press photography fostered homogenization of the ‘mattering maps’ of a transnational public. This concentration on the global embedding of press photography and its products balances interpretations which use photographic sources to stress either the glamorous or the dramatic aspects of life in the 1920s. The transnational collation of visual news created an image of Weimar as only one among several societies challenged by modern crisis.
{"title":"Ordinary Weimar: Global Press Photography, ‘Distant Seeing’ and the Normalcy of Crisis in the 1920s","authors":"Malte Zierenberg","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad046","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Press photography was an important medium of public communication in Germany in the 1920s. Scholarship on the topic has had two distinct foci. First, research on the ‘golden age’ of visual news has mainly concentrated on the visual coverage and political implications of singular events or certain topics. Secondly, the history of photography tends to concentrate on the period’s most prominent photographers, highlighting exceptional and high-quality examples of the genre. This article argues for a change of perspective, emphasizing press photography as an industry that disseminated thousands of pictures to a wide public. Focusing on its production side and a form of ‘distant seeing’ gives a better understanding of the transnational iconography of the present as it was manufactured within this professional field. Examining portfolios distributed by important actors, such as Georg Pahl’s Berlin-based photo agency, helps chart the visual media landscape through which people became acquainted with local events and national and international politics. This iconography contributed to an image of ‘Weimar’ as a society which appeared much more ‘normal’ and more comparable to the developments in other countries than ex post interpretations of Weimar as a society in crisis suggest. Global press photography fostered homogenization of the ‘mattering maps’ of a transnational public. This concentration on the global embedding of press photography and its products balances interpretations which use photographic sources to stress either the glamorous or the dramatic aspects of life in the 1920s. The transnational collation of visual news created an image of Weimar as only one among several societies challenged by modern crisis.","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44906126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former world-power status through propaganda. Two transnational propaganda campaigns are examined in closer detail: the German struggle against the Versailles ‘war-guilt clause’ and the fight against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr. They illustrate how exaggerated expectations of the power of propaganda were accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. One important reason for this simultaneity was that Germans discussed propaganda in the light of national media cultures and constructed it as alien to the German nature. Many authors distinguished supposedly genuinely German values such as ‘truthfulness’, decency and profundity from the values of other national cultures, simultaneously complaining that Germany was struggling harder in the field of propaganda than other countries because of this deep-seated disposition. Such national auto-stereotypes extended into the scholarly study of propaganda, making it difficult to conceptualize it as a phenomenon of modern mass communication. The Germans’ ambivalent relationship to propaganda was also evident in politics: while the Weimar governments displayed uneasiness towards propaganda, the Nazi movement called for its unscrupulous use. In this way, the Nazis not only prepared for the destruction of democracy, but also stood for a different understanding of ‘Germanness’.
{"title":"Transnational Propaganda and National Media Cultures in Weimar Political Thought","authors":"Benno Nietzel","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad049","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former world-power status through propaganda. Two transnational propaganda campaigns are examined in closer detail: the German struggle against the Versailles ‘war-guilt clause’ and the fight against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr. They illustrate how exaggerated expectations of the power of propaganda were accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. One important reason for this simultaneity was that Germans discussed propaganda in the light of national media cultures and constructed it as alien to the German nature. Many authors distinguished supposedly genuinely German values such as ‘truthfulness’, decency and profundity from the values of other national cultures, simultaneously complaining that Germany was struggling harder in the field of propaganda than other countries because of this deep-seated disposition. Such national auto-stereotypes extended into the scholarly study of propaganda, making it difficult to conceptualize it as a phenomenon of modern mass communication. The Germans’ ambivalent relationship to propaganda was also evident in politics: while the Weimar governments displayed uneasiness towards propaganda, the Nazi movement called for its unscrupulous use. In this way, the Nazis not only prepared for the destruction of democracy, but also stood for a different understanding of ‘Germanness’.","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135286048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Communication has always featured prominently in Weimar research. Disputes about how the war was lost, the disdain in which the republic was held by its foes, the scepticism with which it was regarded by many of its citizens, and the manifold ways its various crises were interpreted—the history of the republic offered many angles from which to assess how communication was used to process events. Taking their cue from more recent trends in Weimar scholarship, however, the essays in this issue set new emphases. Not only have their authors chosen innovative topics, but they have approached them with an acute sensitivity to situations, settings, discourses and practices. They pose questions about the specific conditions, channels and practices of communication in the Weimar Republic and consider the complex mixture of interconnected communicative actions between different groups at different levels of society, nationally and internationally. By so doing they address the issue of communication as one of the most vibrant aspects of a society that was marked by rapid technological developments as well as political change.
{"title":"Introduction: Communication in the Weimar Republic","authors":"Christopher Young, Malte Zierenberg","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Communication has always featured prominently in Weimar research. Disputes about how the war was lost, the disdain in which the republic was held by its foes, the scepticism with which it was regarded by many of its citizens, and the manifold ways its various crises were interpreted—the history of the republic offered many angles from which to assess how communication was used to process events. Taking their cue from more recent trends in Weimar scholarship, however, the essays in this issue set new emphases. Not only have their authors chosen innovative topics, but they have approached them with an acute sensitivity to situations, settings, discourses and practices. They pose questions about the specific conditions, channels and practices of communication in the Weimar Republic and consider the complex mixture of interconnected communicative actions between different groups at different levels of society, nationally and internationally. By so doing they address the issue of communication as one of the most vibrant aspects of a society that was marked by rapid technological developments as well as political change.","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135520860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Currywurst & Co.: Die Geschichte des Fast Food in Deutschland","authors":"P. Panayi","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45011356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational Imaginations of Socialism: Town Twinning and Local Government in ‘Red’ Italy and the GDR","authors":"A. McEwan","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43753924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal Article Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg Get access Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg. By Sean Dunwoody. Leiden: Brill. 2022. xii + 318pp.€105.00(hardback/e-book). Martin Christ Martin Christ University of Erfurt, Germany martin.christ@uni-erfurt.de Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 41, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 498–500, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad043 Published: 17 August 2023
期刊文章《热情的和平:16世纪后期奥格斯堡的情感与宗教共存》肖恩·邓伍迪著。莱顿:布里尔，2022。Xii + 318页，105.00欧元(精装本/电子书)。Martin Christ Martin Christ德国埃尔福特大学martin.christ@uni-erfurt.de搜索作者的其他作品:牛津学术谷歌学者德国历史，第41卷，第3期，2023年9月，第498-500页，https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad043出版:2023年8月17日
{"title":"Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg","authors":"Martin Christ","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad043","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg Get access Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg. By Sean Dunwoody. Leiden: Brill. 2022. xii + 318pp.€105.00(hardback/e-book). Martin Christ Martin Christ University of Erfurt, Germany martin.christ@uni-erfurt.de Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 41, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 498–500, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad043 Published: 17 August 2023","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136272322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moderate Modernity: The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy","authors":"P. Fritzsche","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47385429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Journal Article Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam Get access Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. By Christina Schwenkel. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2020. 403 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $31.95 (paperback). Alena Alamgir Alena Alamgir Georgia Institute of Technology, USA alena.alamgir@mse.gatech.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, ghad039, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad039 Published: 11 August 2023
{"title":"Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam","authors":"Alena Alamgir","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad039","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam Get access Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. By Christina Schwenkel. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. 2020. 403 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $31.95 (paperback). Alena Alamgir Alena Alamgir Georgia Institute of Technology, USA alena.alamgir@mse.gatech.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, ghad039, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad039 Published: 11 August 2023","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article relates the biography of a seventeenth-century gilt-silver cup from its origins in Nuremberg in the 1630s to its use in civic drinking rituals in the small town of Bernkastel-Kues on the Moselle River during the twentieth century. It investigates in particular two of the cup’s physical features, its 1661 inscription and the lobate forms populating its surface, which facilitate different modes of social relation and offer distinct orientations to permanence and the historical past. Recounting the cup’s history over centuries occasions discussion of the shifting significance of ceremonial drinking (Ehrentrunk) and council plate or civic plate (Ratssilber) in German cities and towns.
{"title":"Inscription, the Embossed Surface and the Ceremonial Sip: The Traubenpokal of Bernkastel-Kues, 1661–2001","authors":"Allison Stielau","doi":"10.1093/gerhis/ghad037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghad037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article relates the biography of a seventeenth-century gilt-silver cup from its origins in Nuremberg in the 1630s to its use in civic drinking rituals in the small town of Bernkastel-Kues on the Moselle River during the twentieth century. It investigates in particular two of the cup’s physical features, its 1661 inscription and the lobate forms populating its surface, which facilitate different modes of social relation and offer distinct orientations to permanence and the historical past. Recounting the cup’s history over centuries occasions discussion of the shifting significance of ceremonial drinking (Ehrentrunk) and council plate or civic plate (Ratssilber) in German cities and towns.","PeriodicalId":44471,"journal":{"name":"German History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43941091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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