6. Koselleck and conceptual history

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
New Techniques ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Systematic Knowledge

‘Koselleck and conceptual history’ reviews how the study of the history of political thought ended up as the site of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The question to ask is what had gone wrong with the German traditions of philology and lexicography that is associated with studies of the classical past? Systematic knowledge can be defined through foundational concepts. The disaster of modern history and the failure of historical sensibility in Germany can be used as new techniques to investigate how the past explained the sense of national and cultural failure. The project of ‘conceptual history’ was formulated in the 1950s by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.

scholarly journals Powstanie kawalerii SS Totenkopf i jej rola w niemieckiej polityce okupacyjnej na ziemiach polskich w latach 1939–1941

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-88
Author(s):  
Jarosław Dybek ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Third ◽  
General Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
False Image ◽  
The Third Reich

The topic of the article is one of the German SS regiments stationed in occupied Poland and its role in The German occupation policy. While the history of the SS formation is very well known in both academic and popular science literature, its cavalry has not been elaborated in great detail thus far. Although this topic seems interesting, it has not yet been discussed in any book in the Polish language. Most of the literature related to this topic was published in German and English. The 1st SS Death’s Head Cavalry Regiment operated primarily in the General Government and was under the Higher SS and Police Command. Some of its squadrons also operated in areas annexed to the Reich, i.e. the Warta Voievodship (Reichsgau Wartheland). From this article we will learn about the formation of the SS Death’s Head cavalry and its gradual inclusion in the brutal occupation policy of the Third Reich in Poland. In the case of its formation, we are dealing with tasks such as combating the early partisan units, searching for weapons, participating in the creation of ghettos, or helping to eliminate Polish levels of the intelligentsia. Noteworthy is the participation of this unit in the production of the propaganda film “Kampfgeschwader Lützow”, in which Polish cavalrymen were presented attacking German tanks with sabres. This false image was reproduced after the war in some movies or books, and contributed to the distorted presentation of Polish soldiers in the defensive battles of 1939.

scholarly journals Von «grossen Deutschen» und «stolzen Wipfeln» - Die Lehrbücher der deutschen Medizingeschichte und die Pathologie (1858 bis 1945)

Gesnerus ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 54 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 194-218
Author(s):  
Cay-Rüdiger Prüll
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
German History ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of Pathology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Cellular Pathology

Textbooks on German medical history are a valuable source when analyzing the discipline's view on the foundation of scientific medicine. This paper deals with descriptions of the history of pathology found in textbooks between 1858 and 1945: In particular, pathological anatomy and Rudolf Virchow's "cellular pathology" were the cornerstones of the foundation of modern medicine in the 19"* century. The way textbooks deal with the history of pathology mirrors the development of German history of medicine: Since the turn of the century the latter felt devoted to an ahistoric teleological approach which did not change in the "Third Reich". This situation hampered a critical histonography which would show relations of the history of pathology to cultural, social and political history.

Holocaust Film before the Holocaust: DEFA, Antifascism and the Camps

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-134
Author(s):  
David Bathrick
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Holocaust Film ◽  
Diary Of Anne Frank

AbstractThe period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productionsThe Diary of Anne Frank(1960), Stanley Kramer’sJudgment at Nuremberg(1961) and Sidney Lumet’sThe Pawnbroker(1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.

Ostmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Terrorist Activity ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Security Services ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

Social Psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Third ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Critical Literature

Chapter 9 examines social-psychological approaches to understanding the Holocaust. Since Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were published in the early 1960s, social-psychological formulations based on obedience and social influence have dominated the psychology of the Holocaust. There is also a significant critical literature that challenges some of the findings and interpretation of Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo as they apply to the Holocaust. Social cognition is the study of thinking as situated in a social milieu and offers a fruitful framework for considering the ways Germans thought about one another during the Third Reich. Modern approaches to prejudice and racism, especially the study of unconscious or implicit biases, may provide insight into anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent in Germany (and elsewhere) during the Nazi years.

Suicide in Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933-9

2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Goeschel
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
And Control ◽  
Good And Evil

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.

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