Introduction

2005 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 593-596
Author(s):  
James C. Albisetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
World War ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
East German ◽  
Degree Of Stability ◽  
Willy Brandt

All historians must grapple with the complexities of continuity and change. Yet those who study twentieth-century German history face greater difficulties than most, given the variety of political regimes Germany experienced in that era and their major differences in ideology, degree of stability, and relations with their neighbors. Some Germans, such as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, born in 1913, and former East German leader Erich Honecker, born in 1912, experienced all the changes, from childhood under the Kaiser through World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazis' “Twelve-Year Reich” (in exile and prison, respectively), the occupation regimes, forty years of what Brandt called “two states in one nation,” and the (re)unification of 1990.

Continuity and Change in the Regimes of Ethnicity in Austria, Germany, the USSR/Russia, and Turkey: Varieties of Ethnic Regimes and Hypotheses for Change

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sener Akturk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Political Science ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Social Category ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
World War ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Core ◽  
Ethnic Populations

After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as a social category. One can therefore speak of distinct Austrian, German, Soviet/Russian, and Turkish models in managing multi-ethnic populations, models which persisted since the 1920s. Both the emergence of different regimes of ethnicity in the 1920s and the persistence of these policies throughout the twentieth century present very intriguing puzzles for political science. It is not possible to “explain” either the emergence or the persistence of these distinct policies within the confines of this paper. Instead, the major differences between state policies in these four countries will be described in detail in order to highlight the important differences and the most significant features of each case. Since the major contours of these policies did not change throughout the twentieth century, I will limit myself to a brief description of period-specific nuances in the distinct national trajectories between the 1920s and the 1990s. Finally, I will focus on a period of significant change in the late 1990s in Germany, Russia, and Turkey, and inquire as to the causes of these changes.

The Myths of Reparations

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Marks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
World War ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Reparations after World War I can be divided into two categories: non-German reparations, which remain largely terra incognita to the historian, and German reparations, an excruciatingly tangled thicket into which only a few intrepid explorers have ventured. Understandably, most students of twentieth-century history have preferred to sidestep the perils of travel on territory of extreme financial complexity and, as a consequence, a number of misconceptions about the history of German reparations remain in circulation. This brief summary is not addressed to those few brave trailblazers, whose work it indeed salutes, but rather to those many who have assiduously avoided the subject and to the myths about reparations which still adorn studies of the Weimar Republic and interwar history.

Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Olivia Landry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.

Journalists and Freedom of Expression in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Volker R. Berghahn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
German History ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Underground Resistance ◽  
The Right

This introductory chapter briefly reviews the lives of the three journalists under discussion—Marion Countess Dönhoff, Paul Sethe, and Hans Zehrer—and places them within the context of German history under the shadow of World War II. It shows that the three journalists were all anti-Nazis in the Weimar Republic who had been enjoying liberal press freedoms under Article 118 of the Constitution. According to this article, “every German” had “the right, within the limits of general laws, to express his opinions freely.” Their freedom became threatened when from 1930 onward they witnessed the rise of Nazism and then Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. Sethe, Zehrer, and Dönhoff (though she was not yet a journalist) continued to keep their distance from the regime thereafter. Unlike millions of other Germans, they never became members of the Nazi Party, nor did they emigrate or join the early underground resistance. Instead, this chapter argues that these three journalists went into “inner emigration.”

Weimar Republic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Silas Peterson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Internal Struggle ◽  
German Reich

The Weimar Republic (1918/1919–1933) is a term used to describe the German Reich (Deutsches Reich) after the end of World War I and after the dissolution of the German monarchy up to 1933 with the establishment of Nazi Germany. It refers first to the new federal state, constitutional government and parliamentary democracy that initially convened in Weimar. The term also refers to a cultural period of German history associated with the Golden Twenties, Expressionism and the rise of mass culture. It can be divided into three periods: 1919–1923, the founding of the Republic and internal struggle; 1924–1929, the phase of relative stability; and 1930–1933, the phase of economic and political crisis.

scholarly journals Die Schöne Heimat? Depictions of Germany in a Popular Photobook from the Second Empire to the Federal Republic

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Matthew Jefferies
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
German History ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
The One

Abstract While existing studies of twentieth-century German photobooks have understandably sought out volumes by the most iconic photographers, with the most innovative typography, or with the most radical political messages, no photobook series better documents the continuities and ruptures of modern German history than the conventional and highly commercial Blauen Bücher, published by Karl Robert Langewiesche starting in 1907. Die Schöne Heimat, first published in 1915, was the series’ best-selling title. By 1971, and the 619,000th copy, Germany had changed fundamentally, yet the book was still recognizable as the one dedicated to “those who have defended their homeland and ours” during World War I. The article explores the remarkable longevity of this popular but problematic publication.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

„Zurück zu Schleiermacher! und von Schleiermacher aus vorwärts!“

2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Psychological Method ◽  
Dialectical Theology ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.

Prisoners’ fantasies in Weimar film

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofer Ashkenazi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Weimar Cinema ◽  
Public Criticism

Prison cells constituted a unique sphere in post-World War I German films. Unlike most of the modern city spheres, it was a realm in which the private and the public often merged, and in which reality and fantasy incessantly intertwined. This article analyses the ways in which filmmakers of the Weimar Republic envisaged the experience within the prison, focusing on its frequent association with fantasies and hallucinations. Through the analysis of often-neglected films from the period, I argue that this portrayal of the prison enabled Weimar filmmakers to engage in public criticism against the conservative, inefficient and prejudiced institutions of law and order in Germany. Since German laws forbade direct defamation of these institutions, filmmakers such as Joe May, Wilhelm Dietherle and Georg C. Klaren employed the symbolism of the prisoner’s fantasy to propagate the urgent need for thorough reform. Thus this article suggests that Weimar cinema, contrary to common notions, was not dominated by either escapism or extremist, anti-liberal worldviews. Instead, the prison films examined in this article are in fact structured as a warning against the decline of liberal bourgeois society in the German urban centres of the late 1920s.

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