Memory as Political Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-64
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
West Germany ◽  
International Strategy ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Incentive Structures ◽  
International Audience ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Works

This chapter locates the origins of collective memory in international strategy. To that end it first looks at existing sociological and political works which situate collective memory’s beginnings in the domestic sphere. However, in the immediate aftermath of an often-traumatic event to be remembered, publics remain predominantly silent, leaving policymakers with little to gain from making politics with memory, at least at home. In the international sphere, incentive structures, on the other hand, are different. As such, this chapter moves the emerging struggle over the formation of collective memory from the domestic to the international sphere; and with it, away from its origins in a country’s public and into the hands of its foreign policy officials. The new assumptions on collective memory’s beginnings are then demonstrated in the cases of West Germany and Austria. The empirical study illustrates that the two successor states to the Third Reich started to confront their Nazi legacy first in the international, post-war environment. The question of reparation payments to the State of Israel in 1952 forms the ‘critical situation’ for qualitative analysis and demonstrates how West German and Austrian officials initially constructed collective memory as a political strategy directed at an international audience.

Collective Memory in International Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
World Politics ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Long Run ◽  
State Behaviour ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Over Time

This book traces the influence of collective memory in international relations (IR). It inquires where a country’s memory first emerges and how it guides states through time in world politics. It locates the origins of national memory in political strategies within the international environment. The study then turns to the domestic landscape, where among a country’s public, it finds memory to be the carrier of national identity over time. From there, however, the analysis reverts to the international sphere: in the medium term, collective memory begins to channel international state behaviour, whereas, in the long run, it circumvents a country’s normative horizons. In this book, collective memory is thus assumed to become manifest in world politics in four varying forms: as a country’s political strategy, as its public identity, as underwriting its international state behaviour, and finally, as a source for its national values. All four theorized manifestations of memory are tested in a comparative study of (West) Germany and Austria and the impact their diverse post-war interpretations of the Nazi legacy had on their international policies over time. With the illustrative help of the empirical cases, the book not only explores whether collective memory has an influence on political outcomes but how and why it matters for IR.

Forschungen Zur Judenfrage: A Notorious Journal and Some of its Contributors

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-415
Author(s):  
Reinhard Markner
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many

AbstractAmong the many publishing ventures of the “Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands,” the journal Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1936–1944) has gained most notoriety. In its nine volumes, various aspects of the “Jewish question,” ranging from the Jews in antiquity to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, were dealt with from a strictly National Socialist point of view. The ambitious project proved to be a failure even before the Third Reich collapsed. While some of the journal's contributors managed to pursue their academic careers in post-war West Germany, its founder, Walter Frank, committed suicide in 1945.

Memory as Public Identity

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
West Germany ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Public Identity ◽  
Critical Situation ◽  
Process Memory ◽  
Post War

This chapter places collective memory at the basis of a country’s identity and posits that memory returns from the international sphere to the domestic environment. In the course of this process, memory moves from being an official strategy to becoming part of the wider public identity. Memory’s impact thus transforms from a direct, active opportunity to an indirect, passive constraint for policymakers. Notably, as identity, collective memory is unexamined, and assumed to underwrite the mindset of a country’s public and its representatives. To illustrate this transformation, this chapter looks to the cases of West Germany and Austria in the second post-war decade. The ‘critical situation’ for analysis arrived in 1961 in the form of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The West German and Austrian reactions to the trial demonstrate that by the early 1960s these countries had come to view their role in World War II through the lens of a pre-existing national narrative in almost entirely unexamined ways.

Somethin’ about Scandinavia: Danish Shorts on the Post-war International Scene

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Collaboration ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
The Third ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
International Audience ◽  
Post War ◽  
Nordic Cooperation

Building on the picture of post-war Anglo-Danish documentary collaboration established in the previous chapter, this chapter examines three cases of international collaboration in which Dansk Kulturfilm and Ministeriernes Filmudvalg were involved in the late 1940s and 1950s. They Guide You Across (Ingolf Boisen, 1949) was commissioned to showcase Scandinavian cooperation in the realm of aviation (SAS) and was adopted by the newly-established United Nations Film Board. The complexities of this film’s production, funding and distribution are illustrative of the activities of the UN Film Board in its first years of operation. The second case study considers Alle mine Skibe (All My Ships, Theodor Christensen, 1951) as an example of a film commissioned and funded under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. This US initiative sponsored informational films across Europe, emphasising national solutions to post-war reconstruction. The third case study, Bent Barfod’s animated film Noget om Norden (Somethin’ about Scandinavia, 1956) explains Nordic cooperation for an international audience, but ironically exposed some gaps in inter-Nordic collaboration in the realm of film.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

Bauen nach dem Bauhaus

Architectura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 154-183
Author(s):  
Andreas Schwarting
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Industrial Architecture ◽  
Construction Tasks ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Mies Van Der Rohe ◽  
Contemporary Architecture ◽  
Second World

Abstract Hermann Blomeier is one of around 80 graduates from the Bau- und Ausbauabteilung, a comparatively small group among the more than 1200 students at the Bauhaus who have only recently come under the spotlight of research. The biographies of several graduates are known, such as Franz Ehrlich, Erich Consemüller, Howard Dearstyne, Selman Selmanagić, Herbert Hirche or Arieh Sharon; many more are lost, however. Although the Bauhaus was not a ›school‹ in the sense of a unified design approach and a binding canon of forms, it is instructive on an individual level to study the work of Blomeier, one of the Bauhaus graduates and students of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who has so far received little attention. On the basis of three projects from the 1950s, the viability of the design approaches conveyed at the Bauhaus for the construction tasks of the post-war period are examined. First, the ferry ports connecting Konstanz and Meersburg will be considered as the first major project by Blomeier after the Second World War. The buildings for the Bodensee-Wasserversorgung – at times the largest construction site in West Germany of the 1950s – represent an outstanding example of industrial architecture and technical infrastructure in their fusion of art, technology and landscape. The smallest of the three projects, the building for the rowing club Neptun, located directly opposite the old town of Konstanz on the Seerhein, points with its innovative modular primary structure well beyond contemporary architecture and anticipates developments of the late 1960s, such as the Japanese Metabolists or the Plug-In-City of Archigram.

Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953. By David Monod. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiv+325. $45.00. ISBN 0-8078-2944-7.

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-352
Author(s):  
Pamela M. Potter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
American Military ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Military

The impetus among Germany's cultural elite to mark the end of World War II as a “zero hour” has been analyzed mainly as a German phenomenon, with considerably less attention to the role of the occupying forces in fostering that mentality. Settling Scores offers a long-awaited analysis of the American Military Government's precarious navigation in the music world, one of the most sensitive cultural areas for both the conquerors and the conquered. Most histories of twentieth-century German music and culture suffer from a basic misunderstanding of this tumultuous time and uncritically accept many of the prejudices it engendered. As this study demonstrates, the notion of a musical “zero hour” is one such misconception, for the imperfect projects of denazification and reeducation left the musical world of the post-war period largely indistinguishable from its pre-war existence. Based on thorough archival research, interviews with eyewitnesses, and a wide range of literature, this highly readable and engaging history reveals in detail the successes and failures of the Military Government's ambitious agenda to root out the musical “Führers” of the Third Reich and to transform music from a tool of nationalist aggression to one of democratic tolerance.

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