Unresolved Questions of German Medicine and Medical History in the Past and Present

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Kater

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Alexander Williams

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.


1972 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 330-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Fink

Germany under the Weimar Republic played the role of champion of minorities in Europe. A combination of revisionist hopes, völkisch arrogance, and humanitarian concern for the fate of lost kin motivated the Minderheitenpolitik of the Reich. Most historians have interpreted this episode as a link between the imperialism of Wilhelmian Germany and that of the Third Reich, a refinement—dictated by weakness—of Berlin's continuing efforts to dominate Eastern Europe.


2019 ◽  
pp. 49-54
Author(s):  
Iryna Grabovska ◽  
Tetyana Talko

The article explores the problem of the ideology of Putinism. It draws attention to the fact that in modern analytical texts about the phenomenon of Putinism, the dispute between scholars has shifted toward clarifying its ideological foundations. A few years ago, an intense scientific debate about the correctness of usage of the term "Putinism" itself took place. The authors investigate the current analytical publications on the ideological foundations of Putinism. The article points out the divergence of views of researchers on the existence of state ideological doctrine developed in the current Kremlin regime. The purpose of this article is defined as proving the fact that Putinism is not only a practical but also an ideological phenomenon of our age. The authors conclude that the ideology of Putinism exists. It seems convincing to consider Putinism as an ideological doctrine of the hybrid type, the general characteristic of which can be defined as neo-imperialism of the autocratic type with the elements of totalitarianism, "assembled" from a set of different doctrines of the past and present. Among them: Pan-Slavism, Russo-Centrism, Eurasianism and Neo-Eurasianism, Duginism (ideologically extremely close to the ideology of the Third Reich and the ideologists of the German "conservative revolution" at the same time, according to L. Lux), Messianism, Isolationism, Anti-Westernism and Anti-Americanism, Neo-Stalinism, Orthodox Fundamentalism, the role of the strong leader. Putinism as a neo-imperialist ideology is in line with the Kremlin's practice, beginning with Putin's rise to power when neo-colonial wars began on the perimeter of the former Soviet empire. It is partly orientated to suppress internal separatist movements, as it was in the case of Chechnya and partly to attempts to "gathering lands" as in the case of Georgia and now – of Ukraine.


2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (6) ◽  
pp. 388-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco López-Muñoz ◽  
Cecilio Alamo ◽  
Pilar García-García ◽  
Juan D. Molina ◽  
Gabriel Rubio

Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.


1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Few tools of Nazi propaganda were as potent or as permanent asarchitecture. At the instigation of Hitler, who had once aspired to bean architect, the Nazi regime placed unusual importance on thedesign of environments—whether cities, buildings, parade grounds, orhighways—that would glorify the Third Reich and express its dynamicrelationship to both the past and the future. Architecture and urbandesign were integral to the way the regime presented itself at homeand abroad. Newsreels supplemented direct personal experience ofmonumental buildings. Designed to last a thousand years, these edificesappeared to offer concrete testimony of the regime’s enduringcharacter. A more subtle integration of modern functions and vernacularforms, especially in suburban housing, suggested that technologicalprogress could coexist with an “organic” national communityrooted in a quasi-sacred understanding of the landscape.


2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Jan Konst

This article discusses five historical novels by Louis Ferron: Gekkenschemer (1974), Het stierenoffer (1975), De keisnijder van Fichtenwald (1976) De gallische ziekte (1979) and Plicht! (1981). They deal with German history, particularly that of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This article shows that the characters in these novels can be viewed in the light of Theodor Adorno's theory on the Authoritarian Personality.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Vera

Interwar Germany represents a highly interesting period from the perspective of police history. This book focuses on the German police force as an instrument of state authority and analyses its role, function and importance in interwar Germany based on the articles published between 1918 and 1939 in the journal ‘Die Polizei’. It reveals that the failure of the Weimar police as an instrument of state authority contributed significantly to the rise of National Socialism and the destruction of the Weimar Republic. After the Nazi takeover, the German police rapidly became a loyal and highly effective instrument of rule for the regime. Hence, the German police in the Third Reich blatantly failed in moral terms, but not as an instrument of state authority.


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