scholarly journals Commentary: Masculinity and the Racial State

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-522
Author(s):  
Christopher Dillon
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

In their 1991 monograph on Nazi Germany,The Racial State, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann asked why it was “acceptable to use anthropological categories in the case of youth or women, and apparently unacceptable to employ them in the case of men?” The expansive historiography of Nazism, they complained, offered nothing “beyond an isolated venture into the realm of male fantasies, or a few studies of homosexuals.” The answer, in fact, had a lot more to do with scholarly motivation than acceptability. Put starkly, there was no intellectualfrissonin recovering the history of “men” as a social category in Nazi Germany. Influential asThe Racial Stateproved to be in driving the research agenda for historians of National Socialism, the authors’ ensuing chapter, “Men in the Third Reich,” merely confirmed as much. It presented a dry, empirical overview of Nazi racial and economic policies, excised of those specifically directed at women and children. The termsgender,masculine, ormasculinitydo not appear once in thirty-six dense pages of text. To be sure, this reflected the wider state of knowledge in the academy. Now, almost three decades later, historians can draw on a sociology of gender relations that was still in its infancy when Burleigh and Wippermann were writing. They study “men” to decode historical configurations of power. They no longer conceive of women, children, and men as discrete actor groups, but as protagonists in systems of gender relations. A sophisticated interdisciplinary literature has rendered men legible as gendered subjects, rather than as an unmarked norm. This scholarship stresses the plurality of masculine identities. It advises that a racial state, like all known states, will be a patriarchal institution, and that the gendering of oppressed ethnic minorities plays a key role in the construction of majority femininities and masculinities. By pondering the relationship between racial and social identities in Nazi Germany, Burleigh and Wippermann nevertheless raised questions with which historians continue to grapple. Each of the contributors to this special issue ofCentral European Historyfocuses productively on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and power in the “racial state.”

scholarly journals Nightmarish Romanticism: The Third Reich and the Appropriation of Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Bronte Wells
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Attempting to trace the intellectual history of any political movement is, at best,problematic. Humans construct political movements and the intellectual, philosophical underpinnings of those movements, and, in general, it is not one person who is doing the creating, but rather a multitude of people are involved; the circumstance of how politics is created is a web, which makes it difficult for researchers to trace the historical roots of movements. Nazi Germany has been the focus of numerous research projects to understand the intellectual roots of Nazism and the how and why they were successful in gaining and consolidating power. In line with popular theories in Sociology and History, earlier researchers have traced the intellectual roots of the Nazis in order to situate Nazi Germany as anti-modern, which by extension would situate their crimes against humanityand fascism in the same camp. In particular, Romanticism has been the movement that some historians have cited as a possible root for Nazism. The primary goal of this paper will be to disrupt the historical continuation argument, deconstruct the main parts of each of the camps, and provide support for the appropriation argument. This goal is designed to connect to the much larger debate of the state of anti-modern/modern of Nazism, and aid in showing Nazism as a modern movement. It is through researching and analyzingthe how and why the Nazis appropriated Romanticism that allows academics to study the influences from the past in the development of National Socialism, while accounting for the frame that the Nazis used to read the Romantics and the purpose for the way that Romantic literature was framed within Nazi-Germany.

1. Hitler myths

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Jane Caplan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship

‘Hitler myths’ introduces the history of National Socialism through three myths or images encapsulating different dimensions of the power attached to Hitler and his regime: the claims that Hitler had survived long after 1945; the image of a monolithic, all-powerful totalitarian regime commanding mass obedience; and the power of Germans’ belief in ‘the Führer’ to reconcile them to Nazi dictatorship. Each offers a key to the history of Nazi Germany: the nature of power and leadership; the relationship between ideology, consent, and terror; and the climax of war and genocide.

Ägyptologen im Dritten Reich: Biographische Notizen anhand der sogenannten „Steindorff-Liste“

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
John Wilson ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

Abstract The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. This article gives a detailed overview of the biographies of Egyptologists in National Socialist Germany and their later careers after the Second World War. It scrutinizes their attitude towards the ideology of the Third Reich and their involvement in the political and intellectual Gleichschaltung of German Higher Education, as well as the impact National Socialism had on the discourse within the discipline. A letter written in 1946 by Georg Steindorff, one of the emigrated German Egyptologists, to John Wilson, Professor at the Oriental Institute Chicago, which incriminated former colleagues and exonerated others, is first published here and used as a framework for the debate.

Drinking Rituals, Masculinity, and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-389
Author(s):  
Edward B. Westermann
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
The Third ◽  
Killing Fields ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractDuring the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of violence and atrocity by the men of theSturmabteilung(SA), theSchutzstaffel(SS), and the police. Scholars have extensively documented its use and abuse on the part of the perpetrators. For the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that not only bound the perpetrators together, but also became a facilitator of acts of “performative masculinity”—a type of masculinity expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. In many respects, the relationship among alcohol, masculinity, sex, and violence permeated all aspects of the Nazi killing process in the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, such practices were increasingly radicalized, with drinking and celebratory rituals becoming key elements for these closed male communities of perpetrators, who used them to prepare for acts of mass killing and, ultimately, genocide.

The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Public Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

This book provides an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel’s classic The Dual State (1941), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel’s was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. His sophisticated––not to mention courageous––analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. Because of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the racial regime. This book brings Fraenkel’s innovative concept of “the dual state” back in, restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Uniquely blending insights from legal theory and legal history, it tells in an accessible manner the truly suspenseful gestation of Fraenkel’s ethnography of law inside the belly of the behemoth. But this is also a book about the ordering presence of institutions more generally. In addition to upending conventional wisdom about the law of the “Third Reich,” it explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. It theorizes the idea of an authoritarian rule of law, a cutting edge topic in law-and-society scholarship, and thus also speaks to the topic of democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Louis Hamilton: A British Scholar in Nazi Germany

Fascism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Grant W. Grams
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
The Third ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Louis Hamilton (1879–1948) was a British national that lectured at various institutions of higher learning in Berlin from 1904–1914, and 1919–1938. During the Third Reich (1933–1945) Hamilton was accused of being half-Jewish and his continued presence at institutions of higher learning was considered undesirable. Hamilton like other foreign born academics was coerced to leave Germany because the Nazi educational system viewed them as being politically unreliable. Hamilton’s experiences are an illustration of what foreign academics suffered during the Third Reich. The purpose of this article is to shed new light on the fate of foreign academics in Nazi Germany. Although the fate of Jewish professors and students has been researched non-Jewish and non-Aryan instructors has been a neglected topic within the history of Nazism.

Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-325
Author(s):  
Samuel Clowes Huneke
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
Single Frame ◽  
Female Homosexuality ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

1961 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-235
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wiskemann
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich
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