scholarly journals THE SUBJECTIVE DIMENSION OF NAZISM

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1107-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER

ABSTRACTThe present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reich's modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female ‘help’ within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a ‘Nazi subject’ than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitler's movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.

Author(s):  
Maysaa Husam Jaber

This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 257-268
Author(s):  
Jagjeet Lally

The endurance of terrestrial forms of connectivity over the Eurasian continental interior lies at the heart of this book. By reviewing the life of such connections in the twentieth century, this chapter draws out this book’s four major interventions. The first concerns the value of examining long-term patterns of change and the virtue of thinking across such divides as Mughal and British, pre-colonial and colonial. The second relates to the way this book thinks about empires in novel ways, whether by taking a trans-imperial framework or by focussing on the ways non-political entities—such as merchant networks—persisted through periods of imperial flux and the rise and fall of empires. The third is the focus on space, particularly interior or inner-continental space, and its place within global history. The final contribution is to provide an impetus to scholars to think of the synchronicity of multiple forms of globalisation and their interrelation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43
Author(s):  
Jeffrey McDonough ◽  
Zeynep Soysal

This essay argues that, with his much-maligned “infinite analysis” theory of contingency, Leibniz is onto something deep and important – a tangle of issues that wouldn’t be sorted out properly for centuries to come, and then only by some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. The first two sections place Leibniz’s theory in its proper historical context and draw a distinction between Leibniz’s logical and meta-logical discoveries. The third section argues that Leibniz’s logical insights initially make his “infinite analysis” theory of contingency more rather than less perplexing. The last two sections argue that Leibniz’s meta-logical insights, however, point the way towards a better appreciation of (what we should regard as) his formal theory of contingency, and its correlative, his formal theory of necessity.


Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.


Author(s):  
Sabine von Mering

This chapter discusses Women in the Holocaust. This book shows how men and women experienced the Holocaust differently owing to culturally defined gender roles, gender-related expectations, and differences in the way the Nazis treated them. The twenty-one original articles in this book present a wide spectrum of historical detail, personal narrative, short fiction, description of experiences, statistical evidence, and theoretical conclusions. They highlight women’s suffering and ingenuity, their mistakes, and their unfailing resilience in nurturing relationships, supporting others, and sacrificing everything for their children. They also tell the story of women’s professional versatility, courage, and even creativity in the face of a monstrous machinery of death.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-125
Author(s):  
Cornelius Holtorf

ln this paper I will begin a discussion about the ways in which megaliths appear in archaeological images. My discussion of examples is not comprehensive and the selection of images far from complete, but I hope nevertheless to present some key elements of the pictorial vocabulary with which megaliths have been seen and depicted by archaeologists working in Sweden during the twentieth century. However, entering the third millennium of our chronometrical tirnescale should not only be an occasion to look back, but also an opportunity to look forward and reflect upon the way ahead. Recent discussions about the problems with established ways of depicting archaeological sites and objects, and suggestions for new kinds of images and illustrations, should concern us all and lead to an active engagement of archaeologists with questions of visual (re)presentation.


1993 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Yvonne Shafer

The Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin was a theatrical showplace in several incarnations. The building itself was initially a great market situated near the Spree River in the center of Berlin. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it was converted to an enormous circus which drew crowds to see outstanding exhibitions of horsemanship and other circus acts. It also served as a great meeting hall for such events as Robert Koch's international congress dealing with tuberculosis in 1890. The large amphitheatre in the huge building was a symbol of the growing population of Berlin and its increasing prosperity. The history of the various uses to which the theatre was put in the twentieth century is an important reflection of the changes in German society in this period. During the time of the Third Reich it was an important element in culture and propaganda under the direction of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. This paper will analyze the unusual architecture of the theatre and the productions of several plays which were important during the Third Reich.


1998 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 421-430
Author(s):  
Sean Gill

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.


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