scholarly journals Nightmarish Romanticism: The Third Reich and the Appropriation of Romanticism

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Bronte Wells

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.

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-522
Author(s):  
Christopher Dillon

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.”


Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider

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.


Fascism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-200
Author(s):  
Grant W. Grams

Louis Hamilton (1879–1948) was a British national that lectured at various institutions of higher learning in Berlin from 1904–1914, and 1919–1938. During the Third Reich (1933–1945) Hamilton was accused of being half-Jewish and his continued presence at institutions of higher learning was considered undesirable. Hamilton like other foreign born academics was coerced to leave Germany because the Nazi educational system viewed them as being politically unreliable. Hamilton’s experiences are an illustration of what foreign academics suffered during the Third Reich. The purpose of this article is to shed new light on the fate of foreign academics in Nazi Germany. Although the fate of Jewish professors and students has been researched non-Jewish and non-Aryan instructors has been a neglected topic within the history of Nazism.


1961 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-235
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wiskemann

1961 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Epstein

William shirer'sRise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, 1960) has been widely hailed as a great work of history. Harry Schermann, chairman of the board of directors of the Book of the Month Club, says that it “will almost certainly come to be considered the definitive history of one of the most frightful chapters in the story of mankind.” The book has already sold more widely than any work on European history published in recent years. It is probable that tens of thousands of American readers will take theirviews on recent German affairs from Shirer's pages for years to come. For that reason, it is important to point out the serious shortcomings of this work.


Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (291) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maischberger

The history of the archaeological disciplines in Germany during the Nazi era can be considered as a locus classicus of nationalist interpretation and misuse of the past. For some time now, various efforts have been made to enhance our understanding of this period, including several aspects related to archaeology and cultural politics. Most studies have been carried on by modern historians, but also archaeologists have engaged in historiographical research on their own discipline. Some freqiiently cited works like Bollmus (1970) Kater (1974) and Losemann (1977) are still fundamental for our understanding of important aspects of Nazi cultural politics as well as the involvement of traditional institutions into the dictatorial system.


2022 ◽  
pp. 175069802110665
Author(s):  
Anna Branach-Kallas

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.


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