Introduction: The Political Ambiguities of Pius XII

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13
Author(s):  
Simon Unger-Alvi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
German Occupation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This collection of essays evaluates the relations between Eugenio Pacelli and Germany from the beginning of his career as a papal nuncio in Munich in 1917 until his pontificate during the wartime and post-war periods. The contributions to this volume do not provide a complete overview of this topic. Instead, they should be understood as case studies on certain aspects of Vatican-German history. At the core of this work are the complexities and ambiguities of papal politics between four political systems from the Kaiserreich to the West German Federal Republic. Ultimately, this volume thus touches upon very diverse subjects ranging from Pacelli’s ‚concordat diplomacy‘ in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich to his silence during the Holocaust and the German occupation of Italy, the anti-communism of the Cold War, and the Vatican’s path towards reform in the post-war period.

scholarly journals Helmuth Plessner and The Delayed Nation

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-140
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
German History ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

Helmuth Plessner’s The Delayed Nation was a key text in the Sonderweg narrative that dominated the writing of German history from the later 1950s to the mid-1980s: the idea that the disaster of the Third Reich and the Holocaust could be explained in terms of Germany’s problematic path to modernity since the Middle Ages. The book had originally been published under a rather prolix title in Zurich in 1935 when Plessner was an émigré in the Netherlands. It made little impact then, and only attracted attention from 1959 under a short title which seemed to capture the essence of the emerging left-liberal view of the disastrous course of German history. The more accessible title in reality masked an extremely complex book which did not sit easily with the social history preoccupations of the avant-garde of post-war German historians. Plessner’s history was a narrative of intellectual degeneration that placed philosophy at the heart of the German problem. Plessner’s book can only be fully understand in relation to his own philosophical and political concerns in the 1920s. Its impact in the 1960s and after derives almost entirely from its suggestive and eye-catching title.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-142
Author(s):  
Jane Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German History ◽  
The Core ◽  
German States ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Core Questions ◽  
The Cold War

The Epilogue considers the core questions raised in earlier chapters: the place of National Socialism in German history and what it meant to be ‘German’ after the defeat of Nazism. Trials of leading figures in the regime in 1945–9 were a first step, but addressing responsibility for Nazi crimes was a prolonged and uneven process. How Germans confronted the Nazi past was affected by the establishment of two separate German states in 1949, the Cold War, the unification of Germany in 1990, and the eventual development of an international culture of Holocaust.

RECEPCIJA I REPREZENTACIJA HOLOKAUSTA U ISTOČNOM BERLINU I BEOGRADU NAKON DRUGOG SVETSKOG RATA

Lipar ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (75) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
Milena Nešić Pavković ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Second World

The goal of this paper is to investigate the memory of the Holocaust, i.e. the reception and representation of the suffering of the Jewish population during the rule of the Third Reich (under Nazi rule and occupation) in the capitals of the states constituted after the Second World War - in East Berlin, GDR, and Belgrade, SFRY, during the period from 1945 to 1989/1991. Relying on the achievements of memory studies and analyzing the political moods of that time and the ways of constructing official narratives about Jewish suffering in selected post-war Communist countries, the similarities and differences in the policy of representing Jewish suffering in these two countries and the memory of Jewish victims in places of remembrance and in the practices of remembrance in their capitals will be pointed out.

Hunger and the Remaking of History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Weinreb
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This chapter analyzes occupied Germany between 1945 and 1949, the years that saw the transition from the Second World War to the Cold War. During this time, the country was divided into four zones, each occupied by an Allied power (the United States, the USSR, France, and Great Britain.) This chapter argues that these years, known in Germany as the Hunger Years, played a key role in shaping modern discourses of human rights through assertions of the right of all individuals to food. Specifically, in the wake of the Third Reich, the hunger of German civilians acquired a moral weight that effectively depoliticized the category of “rights.” Analyzing civilian and medical debates about the causes and consequences of German hunger, the chapter explores the ways in which the different Allied rationing programs interpreted responsibility for Nazi crimes, and the ways in which Germans reacted to, challenged, and appropriated these categories.

scholarly journals ‘A Completely Open Race’: Anglo–Soviet Competition over German Military Science and Technology, 1944–1949

2019 ◽  
pp. 096834451983290
Author(s):  
Charlie Hall
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Science ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Fierce Competition ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

In the period immediately following the Second World War, during which Germany was occupied by the four victorious Allies, fierce competition erupted between them over the spoils of German military science and technology. Among this four-power squabbling, the British and Soviet authorities engaged in a particularly desperate struggle, especially over recruitment of expert German personnel, which they felt might give them the edge in any future conflict. This article explores the policies which arose from this struggle and shows that the first act of the Cold War arms race played out most vividly amongst the ruins of the Third Reich.

Multiple Restorations: German Political Traditions and the Interpretation of Nazism, 1945–1946

1993 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herf
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
German History ◽  
The Third ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
New Beginnings

In the longer continuity of German history, the year 1945 will always, in part, represent the “Stunde Null” (zero hour), of catastrophic military defeat and complete moral disgrace and bankruptcy following Nazism and the Holocaust.1 The term “Stunde Null” evokes the need for a new beginning, a moral and political break with disastrous and ultimately criminal national traditions. Yet, because the Third Reich lasted only twelve years, and because there were non- and anti-Nazi traditions and leaders that survived in inner and external emigration, the postwar rejection of Nazism took the form of multiple restorations of these still extant German political traditions. In the first postwar years, the turn away from Nazism in both Germanies, as well as the break with totalitarian dictatorship in general in Western Germany, was taken by political leaders who had been active in Weimar politics and who returned to take center stage in German politics after 1945.2 To be sure, they were all deeply affected in their lives and thinking by the Third Reich. But what changes it did bring about in their political views amounted to rearrangements and different emphases of long-held convictions rather than to wholly new beginnings.

scholarly journals Unrecognizable, abandoned, unnamed, avoided places: On the murders committed against Jews in Poland in the period after the Second World War and their commemoration

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-147
Author(s):  
Andrzej Rykała
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
Second World

The fall of the Third Reich, turning the “most tragic page” in the history of the Jewish nation, i .e . the Second World War, did not mean the end of the tragedy for Jews on Polish soil. Even before the end of the greatest confl in the history of humankind, in the areas liberated from Nazi Germany occupation, many survivors of the Holocaust experienced acts of ruthless violence. However, very few of the numerous victims of the post-war anti-Jewish terror have been commemorated in public space. To a very small extent the form of public commemoration also covered earlier wartime cases of collective murders committed against Jews by Polish Christians. Even if the sites of the dramatic events which occurred in the shadow of the Holocaust were marked, the complete truth about their course was not restored everywhere.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

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