scholarly journals FROM IMPERIAL ARMY TO BUNDESWEHR: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE ROLE OF THE MILITARY IN GERMAN HISTORY Willensmenschen: über deutsche Offiziere. Edited by Ursula Breymayer, Bernd Ulrich and Karin Wieland. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999. Pp. 239. ISBN 3-596-14438-8. DM 28.80. Die anderen Soldaten: Wehrkraftzersetzung, Gehorsamsverweigerung und Fahnenflucht im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Edited by Norbert Haase and Gerhard Paul. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Pp. 240. ISBN 3-596-12769-6. DM 19.90. Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’ und der Bund Deutscher Offiziere. Edited by Gerd R. Ueberschär. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. Pp. 304. ISBN 3-596-12633-9. DM 24.90.

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-193
Author(s):  
ANNIKA MOMBAUER

Twentieth-century Germany's (military) history has been the subject of heated, sometimes acrimonious controversies in the Federal Republic. In recent years, historians and the German public have been engaged, for example, in debates over the relative merit of different kinds of German resistance against National Socialism, and over the place of deserters in German history of the Second World War. Such soul-searching has culminated in angry debates over the role of the Wehrmacht in crimes against humanity which followed in the wake of the exhibition ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht’ (crimes of the Wehrmacht) in Austria and Germany. The books under consideration here all have a contribution to make to our understanding of this troubled and contested past, and in particular to the question of the role of the military in German history.

Ethnicities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-201
Author(s):  
Stefan Benedik

Many paradoxes characterise the case of Romani communities, who have been dubbed one of Europe’s most eminent ‘problems’. On the one hand, European states are increasingly acknowledging Romani people as a victim group of National Socialism and the Second World War while, on the other hand, politics and public debate continue to discriminate against contemporary Romani communities. As part of identity politics, Romani organisations have been highlighting their history of persecution, a process initiated at the time when the memory of National Socialism has become established as the core of European collective memory. This paper examines how narratives of a violent past have been integrated into Austrian ‘national memory’ and how this intersects with the construction of Romani victimhood history – often as a consequence of Romani organisation’s own efforts of telling their community’s history. I argue that the mainstreaming of Romani suffering is first due to a successful integration of Romani victims into the framework of a new understanding of ‘racially’ diverse Austrian victimhood. Second, I trace the role of individual protagonists within these processes of acknowledgment and highlight the relevance of gendered positions in developing a new racialised history of persecution.


Author(s):  
David Hardiman

Much of the recent surge in writing about the practice of nonviolent forms of resistance has focused on movements that occurred after the end of the Second World War, many of which have been extremely successful. Although the fact that such a method of civil resistance was developed in its modern form by Indians is acknowledged in this writing, there has not until now been an authoritative history of the role of Indians in the evolution of the phenomenon.The book argues that while nonviolence is associated above all with the towering figure of Mahatma Gandhi, 'passive resistance' was already being practiced as a form of civil protest by nationalists in British-ruled India, though there was no principled commitment to nonviolence as such. The emphasis was on efficacy, rather than the ethics of such protest. It was Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, who evolved a technique that he called 'satyagraha'. He envisaged this as primarily a moral stance, though it had a highly practical impact. From 1915 onwards, he sought to root his practice in terms of the concept of ahimsa, a Sanskrit term that he translated as ‘nonviolence’. His endeavors saw 'nonviolence' forged as both a new word in the English language, and as a new political concept. This book conveys in vivid detail exactly what such nonviolence entailed, and the formidable difficulties that the pioneers of such resistance encountered in the years 1905-19.


The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how Poland was one of the principal areas where the Nazis attempted to carry out their planned genocide of European Jewry. It was there that the major death camps were established and that Jews were brought from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to be gassed, above all in Auschwitz, where at least 1 million lost their lives in this way. There is no more controversial topic in the history of the Jews in Poland than the question of the degree of responsibility borne by Polish society for the fact that such a small proportion of Polish Jewry escaped the Nazi mass murderers. The primary responsibility clearly lies with the Nazis. However, the recognition of the primary role of the Germans in the genocide has not prevented bitter arguments over Polish behaviour during the Second World War. Jews have harshly criticized what they see as Polish indifference to the fate of the Jews and the willingness of a minority to aid the Nazis or to take advantage of the new conditions to profit at Jewish expense.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Olzacka

Abstract In the aftermath of the violent Revolution of Dignity (2013/2014) and the subsequent war in Donbas (2014–), a heroic story about the new beginning of a “united, Ukrainian nation” began to emerge. Shaping this new narrative are new museum projects devoted to Ukraine’s developing history. This article examines the process of these new institutions’ formation, the content of created exhibitions, and the activities conducted therein. It focuses on the role of the museums in activating, unifying, and integrating both the Ukrainian national community and civil society. This article is based on a qualitative analysis of materials collected during seven research stays in Ukraine, from June 2017 to August 2019, and focuses on four cases–Ukraine’s First ATO Museum in Dnipro; the Museum of the Heavenly Hundred in Ivano-Frankivsk; the Ukrainian East exhibition in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War in Kyiv; and a project of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. The examined institutions are presented not only as places for gathering artifacts but also as laboratories of civic activism, participation, and dialogue.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susie J. Pak

Focusing on the private investment bank of J. P. Morgan & Co., this article examines the unique perspective that the history of private investment banking offers the study of reputation with regard to the role of social ties. Drawing from a larger study that looks at intersecting social and economic networks of New York private bankers before the Second World War, the article studies the ways in which the Morgan partners' social networks worked to maintain their reputation by creating an institutional structure for firm cohesion, establishing access to information and resources outside the firm, and fostering a culture of exclusivity that signaled the firm's standing and its ties relative to their competitors or other elite bankers.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Fine ◽  
Dimitris Milonakis

AbstractIn this response to the symposium on our two books we try to deal as fully as possible in the brief space available with most of the major issues raised by our distinguished commentators. Although at least three of them are in agreement with the main thrust of the arguments put forward in our books, they all raise important issues relating to methodology, the history of economic thought (including omissions), and a number of more specific issues. Our answer is based on the restatement of the chief purpose of our two books, describing the intellectual history of the evolution of economic science emphasising the role of the excision of the social and the historical from economic theorising in the transition from (classical) political economy to (neoclassical) economics, only for the two to be reunited through the vulgar form of economics imperialism following the monolithic dominance of neoclassical economics at the expense of pluralism after the Second World War. The importance of political economy for the future of economic science is vigorously argued for.


Author(s):  
A.O. Naumov

The article is devoted to the study of the role of historical memory of the Great Patriotic War as a resource of soft power of the Russian Federation. The research methods used are the method of historicism, institutional approach and comparative analysis. In this context, the countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) and the BRICS (Russia, Brazil, India, China, South Africa) are considered as objects of implementation of the domestic soft power policy. The author reveals the awareness of the peoples of these states about the history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War, the attitude of political elites to the events of 1939-1945, peculiarity of state politics of historical memory in relation to this global conflict. Based on this analysis, proposals are formulated to optimize the Russian strategy of soft power in the EEU and BRICS countries. The author concludes that the narrative of the Great Victory is potentially a very effective resource of modern Russia’s soft power.


Author(s):  
Mara Gubaidullina ◽  
Laura Issova ◽  
Almagul Kulbayeva

Introduction. The article investigates the versatile activities of Polish diplomats on the example of the representative offices of the embassy of Poland (delegations) in Alma-Ata (Almaty) and Semipalatinsk (Semey). Documents in the Kazakhstani archives indicate the presence of nine delegations created during the war in Kazakhstan to facilitate the formation of the Polish army (Anders Army). Polish “delegates” – diplomats, military, civilian employees – helped to rescue the Poles from places of detention and settlements, to draw up their documents for further sending to the army. Materials. Documents of the “especially valuable” fund of the Semipalatinsk Archive (currently the Documentation Center of Modern History of the East Kazakhstan Region, Semey), which are put into scientific circulation for the first time, testify to the versatile activities of Polish delegations in a large space in the east of the country. Analysis and Results. Polish delegates organized not only military-political and consular issues, but also economic, social, humanitarian activities. Polish employees worked in contact with Soviet institutions. They provided social support to both the military and displaced, evacuated, orphans, and disabled people. The organization of orphanages and shelters for Polish children was carried out, including by the efforts of Polish diplomats. The Poles who returned after the war to their homeland organized societies of the so-called “sybyraki”. Today they act as a kind of bridge in relations between Kazakhstan and Poland.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document