The Myths of Reparations

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Marks

Reparations after World War I can be divided into two categories: non-German reparations, which remain largely terra incognita to the historian, and German reparations, an excruciatingly tangled thicket into which only a few intrepid explorers have ventured. Understandably, most students of twentieth-century history have preferred to sidestep the perils of travel on territory of extreme financial complexity and, as a consequence, a number of misconceptions about the history of German reparations remain in circulation. This brief summary is not addressed to those few brave trailblazers, whose work it indeed salutes, but rather to those many who have assiduously avoided the subject and to the myths about reparations which still adorn studies of the Weimar Republic and interwar history.

Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel S. Migdal ◽  
Baruch Kimmerling

No period was more decisive in the modern history of Palestine than the British Mandate, which lasted from the end of World War I until 1948. Not only did British rule establish the political boundaries of Palestine, the new realities forced both Jews and Arabs in the country to redefine their social boundaries and self-identity. But the cataclysmic events that continued through 1948, with the creation of Israel and what Arabs called al-Nakba (the catastrophe of dispersal and exile), took shape in the wake of key changes stretching over the last century of Ottoman rule. What was to be Palestine after World War I became increasingly more integrated territorially during the nineteenth century. And Arab society in the last century of Ottoman rule underwent critical changes that paved the way for the emergence of a Palestinian people in the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Motta

Abstract The history of antisemitism in Romania is strictly connected to the religious and cultural framework of those territories, as well as to their political integration from the age of emancipation and independence to the establishment of a Greater Romania after World War I. This article aims to analyse the different intersections of this historical process and the continuity between the old forms of anti-judaism and their re-interpretation according to modernist dynamics during the first half of the Twentieth-Century. The Romanian case illustrates the transformation and re-adapting of old religious prejudice in new doctrines of xenophobia, nationalism and antisemitism.


1983 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
George L. Bernstein

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Schneer

This article examines Jane Cobden's campaign for the London County Council (L.C.C.) in 1888–89 and its controversial aftermath. Cobden's effort, a pioneering political venture of British feminism, illuminates late-Victorian concepts of gender. It provides at once an anticipation of, and a distinct contrast to, the militant suffragism of the Edwardian era. In addition, it suggests new ways of thinking about the connection between women's-suffragist and labor politics. Perhaps because the campaign was a comparatively obscure incident when measured against the broad sweep of British political history, however, no scholar has done much more than sketch its bare outline. Hopefully, the fuller depiction provided below will accord it the treatment it really deserves.This article approaches the subject from a tangent, however. Cobden's campaign was a significant if little-known episode not only in the history of British suffragism but also in the life of a man who went on to play a major role in British politics long after the first county council elections had been forgotten. This was George Lansbury, Cobden's political agent during 1888–89 and secretary of the Bow and Bromley Radical and Liberal Federation. Lansbury eventually became one of the main architects of the socialist movement in East London and a chief male supporter of the militant suffragettes during the Edwardian era (in 1912 he temporarily lost his seat in the House of Commons and went to prison on their behalf). He also became a founder and editor of the quintessential “rebel” newspaper, theDaily Herald(which was designated Labour's official organ after Lansbury left it in 1922), a pacifist opponent of World War I, and, from 1931 to 1935, leader of the Labour party itself.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-45

The history of National Socialism is mostly narrated and researched within its national, German context. While it appears obvious that Germany was interconnected with the broader world at the time, this has had little impact on our understanding of the history of National Socialism. This article investigates the Turkish dimension of especially early National Socialism and shows how debates on Turkey and recent events there influenced and shaped debates in the German media in the early Weimar republic. The Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923) as well as the Armenian Genocide during World War I Turkey were topics of public debate in the early Weimar Republic. While this seems surprising, if not unlikely at first, it is through translation of these events into wholly German terms and dimensions that they became highly relevant to Germany at the time. This is a contribution to entangled history and media history as it proposes a new way to understand international history and influences through public debates, news coverage, and political discourse.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-151
Author(s):  
Áine Sheil

AbstractRelatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the performance and reception history of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), but as this article will demonstrate, the opera played an indispensable role in the repertories of Weimar-era opera houses. Despite an evident desire on the part of some Weimar Republic directors and designers of Die Meistersinger to draw on staging innovations of the time, productions of the work from this period are characterised by scenic conservatism and repetition of familiar naturalistic imagery. This was not coincidental, I will argue, since Die Meistersinger served as a comforting rite for many opera-going members of the Weimar-era middle classes, at least some of whom felt economically or socially beleaguered in the aftermath of World War I. But no matter how secure the conservative theatrical conventions surrounding the Weimar Republic Meistersinger appeared, the repressed turmoil of the period seeped into ideas about the work, haunting the performance and reception of constructed German stability.


1982 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 125-139

Leonard Hawkes, during the past three decades one of the elder statesmen of British geology, was one of the few remaining leaders in the subject who received their training before World War I. A lifelong academic, he devoted his best years to the service of Bedford College in the University of London. A very active field-worker in early years, he became in his time a leading authority on the geology of Iceland, pursuing studies in volcanology, igneous petrology and glaciology. He served as a Secretary of the Geological Society of London for a long period at a critical stage in the history of that Society, and was later on its President. He will be remembered as one of the most amiable of characters in the post World War II scene.


1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Haddon Willmer

Guilt has proved an irresistible category for making and interpreting the twentieth-century history of which Germany has been the focus. In that history individuals, organizations, and nations have become guilty. The history of guilt is not made by the wrongdoers alone, but also by those who judge them. Doing wrong and being moralistic often have an evil symbiosis in individuals and communities. Guilt has not always been accurately allocated, and accusations of guilt have been manipulated for political purposes so producing more complex evil. There was guilt for the First World War, but it was untruthfully imposed on Germany alone by Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Within Germany, assigning guilt to political opponents, while refusing to accept any responsibility for what had happened, intensified the divisions within the nation and ensured that its policies were inspired by inward as well as outward enmity and unreality. The theologian H. J. Iwand argued in 1954 that the Nazis had taken the Freund-Feind conception of politics to absurdity, blaming (versündigt) the Left for all that happened after 1918. Consequently, Iwand judged the nationalist front in the Weimar Republic to have represented die organisierte Unbussfertigkeit of the German people. Too late, after 1945, it had become politically clear to many, but not to all, that complex historical guilt must be met by a complex response lest its power escalate yet again beyond the control of truth, understanding, and humanity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Michiel Purmer

Natuurmonumenten, a Dutch NGO for nature conservation, currently owns a wide variety of landed estates and country houses, formerly owned by nobles. The precarious economic position of the nobility after World War I, forced many to dispose of their costly ancestral estate in the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I explore the relationship between Natuurmonumenten and the nobility by looking at the acquisition history of the properties acquired by Natuurmonumenten. I particularly focus on two case studies, the estates of Hackfort and Eerde, which, after decades of negotiation and discussion, both became property of Natuurmonumenten in the early 1980s. These and other cases clearly demonstrate the vital importance of the board members’ personal networks for the acquisition of landed property. Nobles and nature conservationists – many of the board members of Natuurmonumenten were of noble birth themselves – both wanted to preserve landed estates. This mutual desire is still reflected in the management and preservation of estates and country houses owned by Natuurmonumenten today.


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