The Other Germany: Resistance to the Third Reich in German Literature

1968 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Heinz D. Osterle
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

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.


AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-383
Author(s):  
David Engel

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).


1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-143
Author(s):  
Peter Mentzel

The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inherited a considerable number of Germans along with its ex-Habsburg territories when it was established in December 1918. The two most important German communities in inter-war Yugoslavia were the Germans of Slovenia and the Germans of the Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, the so-called Donau Schwaben (Swabians). There were also scattered pockets of ethnic Germans in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Yugoslavian ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), like the other Yugoslavian non-Slav minorities, were objects of discrimination by the Yugoslavian government. The Slovenian German community responded to this hostility by developing a virulent German nationalism which, after 1933, rapidly turned into Nazism. The Swabian community, on the other hand, generally tried to cooperate with the central government in Belgrade. The Swabians remained rather ambivalent toward the rising Nazi movement until the tremendous successes of the Third Reich in 1938 made Nazism irresistibly attractive. In the face of the government's anti-German policies, why did each of these German communities manifest such different attitudes towards the Yugoslav state during the inter-war period? This article will show how several factors of history, demography, and geography combined to produce the different reactions of the two groups.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Piotr Szymaniec ◽  
Lech Kurowski

ECONOMIC POLICY OF THE THIRD REICH PRESENTED BY POLISH ECONOMISTS OF THE 1930S AND 1940SThe aim of this paper is to present Polish pre-war literature on Nazi economic policy and to compare Leopold Caro’s views with analyses of a well-known postwar economist, Paweł Sulmicki, presented in his doctoral thesis of 1946. The comparison of these two interpretations enables the authors to show not only the change of views on the totalitarian economy of Germany, but also the transformations that took place in the Polish theory of economics at that time. In terms of methodology, the work of Leopold Caro published in 1938 did not go beyond what the German historical school offered. Paweł Sulmicki, on the other hand, explained the processes taking place in the German economy from the point of view of the theory of multiplier which was relatively new at that time. Sulmicki did not explicitly state that the phenomena analyzed by him were paradoxes in the light of Keynesian theory, but he described the factors that led to the success of the economic policy at a low level of the multiplier.


2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 650
Author(s):  
Kathleen Condray ◽  
Debbie Pinfold

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

This chapter examines the changes to Jewish war veterans' legal status after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and the ways in which many of these men tried to retain their sense of Germanness in the face of intensifying state-sponsored terror and persecution. Although the Nazis succeeded in banning Jews from the civil service and most veterans' organizations, this did not mean that Jewish veterans were abruptly cast to the margins of German public life. Not all Germans shared Himmler's radical vision of a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft. This inconsistency in experience — persecution on the one hand, and limited solidarity with the German public on the other — obscured the gravity of the Nazi threat, leading many Jewish veterans to contemplate accommodation with the Third Reich.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-93
Author(s):  
Steven M. Whiting

After Different Drummers (1992) and The Twisted Muse (1997), MichaelH. Kater has presented Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits, as“the last in a trilogy on the interrelationship between sociopoliticalforces on the one side, and music and musicians in the Third Reich,on the other” (264). The author is Distinguished Research Professorof History at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies(York University). The author of the present review, a musicologist,must express his gratitude to Professor Kater for helping tomake it professionally unacceptable to restrict oneself anymore to“the music itself” when considering certain composers active in Germanyof the 1930s. By the same token, Kater’s reticence about “themusic itself” (which presumably springs from humility) will leavemany a musicologist itching to adduce (if not consult) the scores toconfirm or to contest Kater’s points, for Kater is writing about lives,not works, unless the works have impinged on biographical issues.


1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Biddiss

Over the last two decades none has done more than Fritz Fischer to compel major reinterpretation of German ambitions between the 1890s and the end of the Third Reich. In 1959–60 this Hamburg historian published two articles that hinted at the coming storm. It broke dramatically in 1961 with the appearance of his huge Griff nach der Weltmacht This densely documented treatment of Germany's objectives in the First World War was striking enough to become before long the object of official displeasure at Bonn. Nor did Fischer's thesis win any easy support from professional colleagues, who argued bitterly about it during the 1964 German Historical Convention. Its still wider impact was clear from the deliberations of the International Historical Congress held at Vienna in 1965. That same year saw the publication of Fischer's Weltmacht oder Niedergang, a brief volume in rebuttal of criticism, and soon scholars in many countries were swelling the tide of relevant literature. By 1969 this included Kreig der Illusionen in which Fischer greatly amplified his original arguments. All three books are, at last, available in English. The translation of Griff nach der Weltmacht dates from 1967, but only lately have the other two been similarly treated. It seems appropriate to review these alongside recent works by Dr John Moses, on Fischer's revolutionary place in a national historiographical tradition, and by Professor Norman Rich, on the German aims associated with the war that broke out in 1939.


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