Pub Date : 2023-08-29DOI: 10.1017/s0008938923000018
Matthew Hershey
This article examines the spectrum of suicidal behaviors in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. It argues that the recorded suicides of August 1914 highlight core vectors that eventually led to Imperial Germany's collapse in 1918: the mass shattering of socioemotional ties and moral certainties, engendered by political and military authorities’ decisions to prosecute the war, as well as those they undertook during the conflict. But the spectrum extended beyond these recorded suicides and ironically included the quintessential “war-enthusiastic” figure: the warvolunteer (Kreigsfreiwilliger), who willingly joined the military despite widespread public knowledge of the new war's massive lethality. The self-destructiveness of this volunteerism was then largely concealed by its emotionally resonant moral coding by both state and nonstate actors as “national sacrifice,” in line with the “spirit of 1914.” Right from the beginning, suicide was not the “flipside” of sacrifice, but its largely unspoken, implicit shadow: what sacrifice risked becoming in the absence of an adequate victory.
{"title":"The Suicidal “Spirit of 1914”: Self-Destruction, National Sacrifice, and the Spontaneous Mobilization in Germany","authors":"Matthew Hershey","doi":"10.1017/s0008938923000018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938923000018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the spectrum of suicidal behaviors in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. It argues that the recorded suicides of August 1914 highlight core vectors that eventually led to Imperial Germany's collapse in 1918: the mass shattering of socioemotional ties and moral certainties, engendered by political and military authorities’ decisions to prosecute the war, as well as those they undertook during the conflict. But the spectrum extended beyond these recorded suicides and ironically included the quintessential “war-enthusiastic” figure: the warvolunteer (Kreigsfreiwilliger), who willingly joined the military despite widespread public knowledge of the new war's massive lethality. The self-destructiveness of this volunteerism was then largely concealed by its emotionally resonant moral coding by both state and nonstate actors as “national sacrifice,” in line with the “spirit of 1914.” Right from the beginning, suicide was not the “flipside” of sacrifice, but its largely unspoken, implicit shadow: what sacrifice risked becoming in the absence of an adequate victory.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46834527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-25DOI: 10.1017/s0008938923000468
L. Marhoefer
{"title":"Transgender Life and Persecution under the Nazi State: Gutachten on the Vollbrecht Case","authors":"L. Marhoefer","doi":"10.1017/s0008938923000468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938923000468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42078296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-25DOI: 10.1017/s000893892200139x
Marc Buggeln
Götz Aly's book Hitler's Beneficiaries considers the Nazi regime an “accommodating dictatorship.” According to Aly, the majority of the population benefited from the Nazis’ war. He sums up Nazi tax policy under the headings “Tax Breaks for the Masses” and “Tax Rigor for the Bourgeoisie.” This perspective represented progress in that, until then, tax policy had not featured in any of the major historical overviews of National Socialism. For a more in-depth assessment of Nazi tax policy, however, it must be compared against the tax policies of Germany's wartime enemies. I compare tax policies in Germany, Britain, and the United States and show that Aly's theories do not hold. They are neither consistent with the declared intentions of those who imposed these policies nor with the results as reflected in the relevant statistics.
{"title":"Was Nazi Germany an “Accommodating Dictatorship”? A Comparative Perspective on Taxation of the Rich in World War II","authors":"Marc Buggeln","doi":"10.1017/s000893892200139x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s000893892200139x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Götz Aly's book Hitler's Beneficiaries considers the Nazi regime an “accommodating dictatorship.” According to Aly, the majority of the population benefited from the Nazis’ war. He sums up Nazi tax policy under the headings “Tax Breaks for the Masses” and “Tax Rigor for the Bourgeoisie.” This perspective represented progress in that, until then, tax policy had not featured in any of the major historical overviews of National Socialism. For a more in-depth assessment of Nazi tax policy, however, it must be compared against the tax policies of Germany's wartime enemies. I compare tax policies in Germany, Britain, and the United States and show that Aly's theories do not hold. They are neither consistent with the declared intentions of those who imposed these policies nor with the results as reflected in the relevant statistics.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49519435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-22DOI: 10.1017/s000893892200173x
N. Ross
In 1935, the Nazi Party promulgated the Reich citizenship law, which, to protect the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft, denaturalized numerous people who perceived themselves as German. Despite this perceived threat to the national body, the Third Reich drafted some mixed-race men to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Traditionally, scholars have focused their studies of mixed-race veterans on the so-called Jewish Mischlinge who served in the Wehrmacht. This article expands the aperture by examining the oral history testimony of Hans Hauck, a Black German Wehrmacht veteran whose wartime experiences present a complex story of a man who claimed to be German despite legal structures and normative ideals about Germanness that excluded him. Drawing on Hauck's oral history testimonies regarding two periods of his military service, I argue that Hauck used his body, symbols, and physical spaces to seek recognition as a legitimate claimant of Germanness.
{"title":"Bodies and Spaces: Citizenship as Claims-Making in Germany, 1942–1949","authors":"N. Ross","doi":"10.1017/s000893892200173x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s000893892200173x","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1935, the Nazi Party promulgated the Reich citizenship law, which, to protect the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft, denaturalized numerous people who perceived themselves as German. Despite this perceived threat to the national body, the Third Reich drafted some mixed-race men to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Traditionally, scholars have focused their studies of mixed-race veterans on the so-called Jewish Mischlinge who served in the Wehrmacht. This article expands the aperture by examining the oral history testimony of Hans Hauck, a Black German Wehrmacht veteran whose wartime experiences present a complex story of a man who claimed to be German despite legal structures and normative ideals about Germanness that excluded him. Drawing on Hauck's oral history testimonies regarding two periods of his military service, I argue that Hauck used his body, symbols, and physical spaces to seek recognition as a legitimate claimant of Germanness.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42092610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1017/s0008938923000432
Jennifer V. Evans, Swen Steinberg, David Yuzva Clement, Danielle Carron
This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University (www.carleton.ca/populistpublics), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups—homegrown and imported—in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.
{"title":"Settler Colonialism, Illiberal Memory, and German-Canadian Hate Networks in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries","authors":"Jennifer V. Evans, Swen Steinberg, David Yuzva Clement, Danielle Carron","doi":"10.1017/s0008938923000432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938923000432","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University (www.carleton.ca/populistpublics), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups—homegrown and imported—in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45418040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/s0008938922001078
Sven Bethke
Looking at Blau-Weiss as the first Zionist youth movement in Germany between 1912 and 1927, the article examines the role of dress in expressing new feelings of national belonging as “Jewish” in modern Germany. Drawing on publications of the movement, memoirs, and photographs, the article shows how Blau-Weiss members tried to become visible as Jews while at the same time trying to copy the dress codes of the nationalist German youth movement Wandervogel. It further shows how, after the First World War, Blau-Weiss tried to forge their own way of Zionist dressing. The article argues that it was not the actual clothes worn or the perception of others that was most crucial to the creation of a national Jewish identity, but rather the inner function that reflections and debates on dress had for Blau-Weiss members in forging and redefining their feelings of belonging and identification as Zionist Jews in Germany.
{"title":"Forging National Belonging: Transformation, Visibility, and Dress in the German-Jewish Youth Movement Blau-Weiss, 1912–1927","authors":"Sven Bethke","doi":"10.1017/s0008938922001078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938922001078","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Looking at Blau-Weiss as the first Zionist youth movement in Germany between 1912 and 1927, the article examines the role of dress in expressing new feelings of national belonging as “Jewish” in modern Germany. Drawing on publications of the movement, memoirs, and photographs, the article shows how Blau-Weiss members tried to become visible as Jews while at the same time trying to copy the dress codes of the nationalist German youth movement Wandervogel. It further shows how, after the First World War, Blau-Weiss tried to forge their own way of Zionist dressing. The article argues that it was not the actual clothes worn or the perception of others that was most crucial to the creation of a national Jewish identity, but rather the inner function that reflections and debates on dress had for Blau-Weiss members in forging and redefining their feelings of belonging and identification as Zionist Jews in Germany.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42998669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/s0008938923000213
Till Kössler
{"title":"Verfassungswidrig! Das KPD-Verbot im Kalten Bürgerkrieg By Josef Foschepoth. Second edition. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021. Pp. 494. Hardback €50.00. ISBN: 978-3525311288.","authors":"Till Kössler","doi":"10.1017/s0008938923000213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938923000213","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56743074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/s0008938923000171
Laura J. Hilton
{"title":"Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe By Ruth Balint. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii + 190. Cloth $44.95. ISBN: 978-1501760211.","authors":"Laura J. Hilton","doi":"10.1017/s0008938923000171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938923000171","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45045433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/s0008938922001601
Nicole Dombrowski Risser
{"title":"Hitler's Refugees and the French Response, 1933–1938 By Julius Fein. Lanham and Boulder: Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 246. Cloth $120.00. ISBN: 978-1793622280.","authors":"Nicole Dombrowski Risser","doi":"10.1017/s0008938922001601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008938922001601","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43819500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1017/S0008938923000080
M. Roseman
Reviewing the the so-called “Second Historian's Debate”, in which he had played such an important role, in February 2022, Michael Rothberg wrote that the opponents to his multidirectional approach were confusing history and memory. “Naturally, history and memory cannot be entirely separated from each other, but the target of my own work and also of Moses's catechism essay is public memory, not historical scholarship.” I understand what he means about not targeting the discipline. Rothberg and Moses are both aware that many positions controversial in the German public sphere have long been accepted in the academy, a distinction they clearly make in their critiques. But the comment did prompt me to wonder whether part of the problem of the debate is that Rothberg's and Moses's critique of memory practices is actually more about history than it lets on.
{"title":"Memory or History?","authors":"M. Roseman","doi":"10.1017/S0008938923000080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938923000080","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewing the the so-called “Second Historian's Debate”, in which he had played such an important role, in February 2022, Michael Rothberg wrote that the opponents to his multidirectional approach were confusing history and memory. “Naturally, history and memory cannot be entirely separated from each other, but the target of my own work and also of Moses's catechism essay is public memory, not historical scholarship.” I understand what he means about not targeting the discipline. Rothberg and Moses are both aware that many positions controversial in the German public sphere have long been accepted in the academy, a distinction they clearly make in their critiques. But the comment did prompt me to wonder whether part of the problem of the debate is that Rothberg's and Moses's critique of memory practices is actually more about history than it lets on.","PeriodicalId":45053,"journal":{"name":"Central European History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44656287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"人文科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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