Transnational Far Right and Nazi Soft Power in Eastern Europe: The Humboldt Fellowships for Romanians

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542093779
Author(s):  
Irina Nastasă-Matei
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Iron Guard ◽  
Shed Light

Foreign students and researchers in Germany became, after 1933, a tool of Nazi propaganda. Those receiving financial support from the Germans, such as the recipients of the Humboldt fellowships, were further compromised. This article aims to shed light on the role played by Humboldt fellowships in the political and ideological transfer between Nazi Germany and Romania. It aims to re-create the profile of the fellows and the influence of the fellowship on the Romanian fellows’ political and ideological development, in order to establish how they functioned as Nazi propaganda tools. Throughout the 1930s, the number of young Romanians going to study and carry out research in Nazi Germany increased considerably, while the financial support they received from the Germans became more significant—including a larger number of Humboldt fellowships. This shows not only that Nazi Germany had a special interest in developing its relations with Romania but also that Romania was embarked on a path of far-right radicalization, with students and youth becoming sympathizers of Nazi Germany and sometimes members of the Iron Guard. The Romanian Humboldt fellows were politically instrumentalized by the Third Reich: they were engaged in far-right political activism, were influenced in their professions and writings by the Nazi ideology, and sometimes they even went on to occupy various positions in the Romanian bureaucratic or diplomatic apparatus.

The Arabs as Nazis? Some Reflections on “Islamofascism” and Arab Anti-Semitism

2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 450-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Flores
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Close Affinity ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Anti Jewish

One of the main constituents of the so-called Islamofascism is, in the eyes of those who subscribe to this conception, the close affinity of Arabs (and sometimes, Muslims) to Nazi ideology and possibly practice. To bolster this notion, its proponents do basically three things: first, they try to prove that a massive majority of Arabs took a pro-Nazi stand during the Third Reich and especially during World War II and that important Arab figures collaborated with Nazi Germany during the War. Secondly, they point to widespread—real and alleged—anti-Jewish beliefs among present-day Arabs. And thirdly, they claim that there is a personal, political and ideological continuity between both phenomena and that, thus, present-day Arab Judeophobia has the same character, scope and possible effect as the anti-Semitism of the Nazis. During the War, so the argument goes, Arab attitudes were part and parcel of Nazi ideology, and they largely retained this quality although, after the War, Nazism was overcome in Europe. In this article, three more recent publications which subscribe to the above mentioned argument will be critically discussed.

scholarly journals Science and Nazism. The unconfessed collaboration of scientists with National Socialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Martí Domínguez
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Level Of Involvement ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
First Moment ◽  
Scientific Value

This monograph seeks to show the level of involvement of the German academic world with Nazi postulates. Reading the articles, we can deduce that renowned scientists participated in the policies of the Third Reich, fully integrated within Nazi ideology, which resulted in the death and forced displacement of millions of people. This active and often even enthusiastic participation should motivate a deeper reflection on how educated minds of exceptional scientific value were abducted by the Nazi postulates, warning us against the resurgence of totalitarian and far-right movements in the world and thus redoubling our efforts to combat them from the very first moment. 

scholarly journals Rewriting theReich: German Women Journalists as Transnational Mediators for Germany's Rehabilitation

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-584
Author(s):  
Deborah Barton
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
Allied Occupation ◽  
Women Journalists ◽  
Dual Identity ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article looks at the transnational impact of two diaries written by the female German journalists Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and Ursula von Kardorff, whose journals shed light on German wartime experiences, resistance activities, and, to a lesser extent, the press. In the postwar years, both journalists sought to influence (West) Germany's relationship with its former enemies, in particular the United States. In their autobiographical writing, they presented both an image of Germany as a victim of Nazism, as well as an early acknowledgment of German crimes. In this way, they achieved a balanced narrative that received a positive reception from American and German audiences. Though the ways in which Friedrich and Kardorff presented aspects of journalism and everyday life in the Third Reich were not unique, their dual identity as women and journalists underlay their ability to act as “legitimate” mediators for Germany's rehabilitation. Western allied occupation authorities and overseas audiences viewed them, in contrast to men, as largely apolitical because they were women, and as objective witnesses because they were journalists. Through their autobiographical writings, both journalists situated themselves among the predominantly male US and German elites devoted to developing amicable relations between the two countries via soft-power diplomacy.

Book Reviews

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Sabine von Mering ◽  
Luke B. Wood ◽  
J. Nicholas Ziegler ◽  
John Bendix ◽  
Marcus Colla ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Forced Labour

Dolores L. Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018)Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)Constantin Goschler, ed. Compensation in Practice: The Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Rochester: Camden House, 2018)Claudia Sternberg, Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni, and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis: Mutual Recognition Lost? (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)

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 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.”

Introduction

Strange Bird ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele K. Troy
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

This book explores the curious relationship between Albatross Press—a British-funded publisher of English-language books with Jewish ties—and the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. Albatross began printing its books in Germany in May 1932, barely a year before Hitler came to power. It made its name not in the trade of mild classics but in edgy, modern British and American books. From its titles to its packaging, Albatross projected a cosmopolitan ethos at odds with German nationalism. This book tells the story of survival against the odds, of what happened when a resolutely cosmopolitan, multinational publishing house became entwined with the most destructively nationalistic culture of modern times. It asks how Albatross was allowed to print and sell its books within the nationalistic climate of Nazi Germany, became the largest purveyor of English-language paperbacks in 1930s Europe and then vanished with so little trace.

scholarly journals Le délicat problème des restes humains en archéologie

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-209
Author(s):  
Philippe Charlier
Keyword(s):  
Human Remains ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nazi Ideology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The City ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

The problem I am interested in is above all that of the biomedical management of human remains in archaeology, these ancient artifacts “unlike any other”, these “atypical patients”. In the following text, I will examine, with an interdisciplinary perspective (anthropological, philosophical and medical), how it is possible to work on human remains in archaeology, but also how to manage their storage after study. Working in archaeology is already a political problem (in the Greek sense of the word, i.e., it literally involves the city), and one could refer directly to Laurent Olivier’s work on the politics of archaeological excavations during the Third Reich and the spread of Nazi ideology based on excavation products and anthropological studies. But in addition, working on human remains can also pose political problems, and we paid the price in my team when we worked on Robespierre’s death mask (the reconstruction of the face having created a real scandal on the part of the French far left) but also when we worked on Henri IV’s head (its identification having considerably revived the historical clan quarrel between Orléans and Bourbon). Working on human remains is therefore anything but insignificant.

scholarly journals Een protestantse Flamenpolitik? Otto Bölke - dominee, heemkundige, Jongvlaams propagandist

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-327
Author(s):  
Winfried Dolderer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local History ◽  
World War ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
First World

De Duitse dominee Otto Bölke (1873 – 1946) was geboren en werkzaam op de Fläming, een streek ten zuidwesten van Berlijn die in de middeleeuwen door inwijkelingen onder meer uit Vlaanderen en Nederland was gekoloniseerd. De vermeende Nederlandse afkomst van zijn voorouders heeft hem levenslang geïntrigeerd en aangezet tot een intense heemkundige bedrijvigheid alsmede een vroegtijdige belangstelling voor de Vlaamse beweging. Vanuit die belangstelling ontbolsterde Bölke zich tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog tot propagandist van de Flamenpolitik. Hij was betrokken bij een netwerk van Duitse sympathisanten van de meest radicale, Jongvlaamse variant van het activisme. De stichting van België kwam voor hem neer op een ‘verovering’ door de franstaligen; de Belgische staat noemde hij een ‘fabriek’ tot Romanisering van de Germaanse bevolking. Met Domela Nieuwenhuis maakte Bölke begin 1917 in Berlijn kennis. Domela leefde in onmin met het burgerlijke bezettingsbestuur, maar beschikte over Duitse vrienden in militaire evenals uiterst rechtse annexionistische kringen aan wie hij tot op het laatst verknocht bleef, De talrijke protestantse dominee's in dit netwerk waardeerden niet alleen de Nederlandse ambtsbroeder, maar evenzeer zijn politiek radicalisme dat strookte met hun eigen antidemocratisch conservatisme. Bölke toonde na de oorlog belangstelling voor het Vlaams nationalisme en kwam uiteindelijk in nationaalsocialistisch vaarwater terecht. Hij was een typische vertegenwoordiger van een Duits-nationaal protestantisme dat uit het keizerrijk doorgroeide tot in het Derde Rijk. ________ A Protestant Flamenpolitik (Flemish policy)? Otto Bölke – protestant pastor, expert on local history, propagandist of the Young FlemishThe German pastor Otto Bölke (1873 – 1946) was born and worked in the Fläming, a region southwest of Berlin, that had been colonised during the Middle Ages by immigrants from areas including Flanders and the Netherlands. The supposed Dutch origin of his ancestors intrigued him throughout his life and inspired his profound interest in local history as well as his early interest in the Flemish Movement.During the First World War that interest turned Bölke into a propagandist of the Flamenpolitik. He was involved in a network of German sympathizers of the most radical Young Flemish version of the activism. He considered the foundation of Belgium the equivalent of a ‘conquest’ by French speakers. He described the Belgian state as a ‘factory for romanising the Germanic population.’ Bölke made the acquaintance of Domela Nieuwenhuis in Berlin at the beginning of 1917. Domela was at odds with the civilian occupying administration but had German friends at his disposal in military as well as far right circles favouring annexation, to whom he remained attached until the end. The numerous Protestant pastors in this network valued not only their Dutch colleague, but also his political radicalism that reflected their own antidemocratic conservatism.  After the war Bölke was interested in Flemish nationalism and finally ended up in the National Socialist arena. He was a typical representative of a German national Protestantism that evolved from the Empire to the Third Reich.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document