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 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.

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.”

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.

scholarly journals Afro-Germans, multidirectional memory and French colonial aphasia: The legacy of the First World War in Galadio by Didier Daeninckx

2022 ◽  
pp. 175069802110665
Author(s):  
Anna Branach-Kallas
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Paul Gilroy ◽  
French National Identity ◽  
Oblique Approach

This article offers an analysis of mnemonic traces in Galadio, Didier Daeninckx’s 2010 novel. I demonstrate that by fictionalizing the history of the persecution of Afro-Germans under National Socialism, the novel exposes antiblackness as a neglected phenomenon of the Third Reich. Synchronously, applying Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework, the article discusses the dialogue between Jewish and Afro-German legacies of violence in the novel, as well as the intricate relation between colony, camp and what Paul Gilroy defines as camp mentality. Furthermore, I argue that Daeninckx engages with French colonial aphasia: in my interpretation, his oblique approach to the French imperial past conveys its simultaneous presence and absence, which is key to disabled memory. Finally, I focus on the ethics of commemoration in Galadio, which claims space for black soldiers in French collective memory of the two world wars, yet at the same time challenges imperial loyalties and homogeneous approaches to French national identity.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willeke Sandler
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Party Organizations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Public Sphere

This introduction situates the book’s analysis of colonialist lobbying in the Third Reich within its historical and historiographical contexts. After a short background on the history of German overseas colonialism and advocacy for this empire in Germany, the introduction addresses the historiographical question of how to situate colonialism and National Socialism in German history. This chapter also explores how the activities of the colonialist movement—a group of non-Party organizations intervening publicly into political debates—can be situated within established understandings of Nazi control of the public sphere. The introduction ends with a description of the structure of the book.

The Debate about the Rechtsstaat in Nazi Germany, 1933–1936

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Theoretical Study ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter provides the legal and historical context necessary for appreciating the contribution of Fraenkel’s ethnography of Nazi law. I begin with a brief history of the idea of the Rechtsstaat in Germany. I trace the term’s evolution from its emergence in the early nineteenth century until 1933. In the second section I overview the most important Nazi critiques of the liberal Rechtsstaat, with a particular focus on the theoretical study of public law. The focus is on the major intellectual faultlines in the legal subfield of Staatsrechtslehre, from which Jewish protagonists were purged. In the third section, I focus on intellectual efforts inside the Nazi academy to “racialize” the Rechtsstaat, to bring it in line with the racial imaginary. The final section explains why, and when, the concept of Rechtsstaat was abandoned by legal theorists in the “Third Reich,” and the consequences for the practice of law.

The German Right from Weimar to Hitler: Fragmentation and Coalescence

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Geoff Eley
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Institutional Approach ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Third Reich

As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

Krupp

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold James
Keyword(s):  
Family Business ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Steel Mill ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Small Steel

The history of Krupp is the history of modern Germany. No company symbolized the best and worst of that history more than the famous steel and arms maker. This book tells the story of the Krupp family and its industrial empire between the early nineteenth century and the present, and analyzes its transition from a family business to one owned by a nonprofit foundation. Krupp founded a small steel mill in 1811, which established the basis for one of the largest and most important companies in the world by the end of the century. Famously loyal to its highly paid workers, it rejected an exclusive focus on profit, but the company also played a central role in the armament of Nazi Germany and the firm's head was convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg. Yet after the war Krupp managed to rebuild itself and become a symbol of Germany once again—this time open, economically successful, and socially responsible. This book presents a balanced account, showing that the owners felt ambivalent about the company's military connection even while becoming more and more entangled in Germany's aggressive politics during the imperial era and the Third Reich. By placing the story of Krupp and its owners in a wide context, this book also provides new insights into the political, social, and economic history of modern Germany.

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