scholarly journals FAR-RIGHT VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM RISES IN GERMANY: NATIONAL SOCIALIST UNDERGROUND (NSU) TERRORIST GROUP AND THE MURDERS OF EIGHT TURKISH-GERMAN CITIZENS

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teoman Ertuğrul Tulun
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
World War ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Federal Prosecutor ◽  
German Reich ◽  
Second World

Between 2000-2007, ten people were killed in Germany by unknown perpetrators. Four days after the explosion, the missing woman – later revealed as Beate Zschäpe – turned herself in. As the German authorities started to put the pieces together, they recognized that they had discovered the underground cell of at least three wanted neo-Nazis that had gone clandestine in the late 1990s. All in all, the NSU caused the most severe crisis of the German internal security system after the Second World War – a process called by the Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range Germany's 'September 11' in March 2012 (FAZ 2012). By now a total of ten assassinations, three bomb attacks and fourteen bank robberies between 1998 and 2011 were attributed to the NSU and the trial in Munich against the last surviving member – Beate Zschäpe – and the four most important supporters is already the most extensive terror trail in post-Second World War Germany. Instead, according to people who were at the meeting, he spoke extensively about the danger posed by far-right extremists and so-called Reichsbürger, a fringe group that rejects modern Germany and instead adheres to the old German Reich. This represented 'one of the biggest challenges' for Germany's security apparatus. It is quite unfortunate that nowadays we are obliged to talk about far-right domestic terror acts against politicians in Germany who are defending human values. It is time to stop sweeping the serious threats emerging in Western Europe under the rug and face the real problem. It is a fact that certain sections of the Western European societies are moving steadily to far-right quarters feeding from white supremacist and racist ideas.

Der Krieg der Richter

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Petter Graver
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
University Of Oslo ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World ◽  
Weak Resistance

In his book ‘Der Krieg der Richter’ (The Judges’ War), Hans Petter Graver, a professor at the Department of Private Law at the University of Oslo, analyses the role of German and Norwegian courts during Germany’s occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945. During the Second World War, ‘cruel judges and magistrates’ also fulfilled their ‘duty’ in Norway, above all those from the ‘Reichskriegsgericht’, the highest military court in Nazi Germany, the SS and police court in Oslo, and various special tribunals and drumhead court martials. While Nazification affected almost the entire Norwegian legal system, not least through the Norwegian far-right party Nasjonal Samling, there were some protests among the judiciary. However, how can their relatively weak resistance be explained? How did they reconcile the National Socialist ethos with their understanding of their own occupation and their professional ethics? In this book, Hans Petter Graver now provides German-speaking readers with a fascinating insight into a time replete with moral issues.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 271-284
Author(s):  
Ken Hirschkop
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Richard Rorty ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second World

The conclusion examines the situation after the Second World War. It shows how the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy ended and how the social democratic settlement in Western Europe gave birth to the new linguistic turns known as structuralism. The author explores the former by examining the career of Richard Rorty and the latter by looking at how Roland Barthes combines ideas from Saussure with a project for a radical analysis of French everyday life in the Mythologies. The book concludes with a review of how the various linguistic turns overinvested in the idea of language.

Living Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-254
Author(s):  
Martin Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Second World

This chapter focuses on the consumption of democracy. What happened in the roughly twenty-five-year period from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s is perhaps best regarded as a process of gradual acculturation. At different speeds and by different paths, a large majority of Western Europeans came to feel at home in democracy, and began to practise democracy for themselves. However, the new democracies were more equal in their formal structures than in their social reality. The reassertion of boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and age, after the more fluid and often chaotic experiences of the war years, was reinforced by the evolving but persistent inequalities of social class. Western Europe emphatically remained a class society after 1945. The rapid economic growth that occurred during the post-war years generated new forms of affluence, but these were distributed in ways that reinforced pre-existing class divisions. In particular, the post-war years witnessed a resurgence in the fortunes of the middle class. Whether assessed in terms of its material prosperity, its influence within and over government, or its wider social and cultural ascendancy, the middle class was the dominant social class of the post-war era.

‘The Business Had to March On’ De Arbeiderspers in Time of War

Quaerendo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 256-283
Author(s):  
Frederike Doppenberg
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
Party Press ◽  
Second World

AbstractDuring the Second World War the social-democratic publisher De Arbeiderspers [The Workers’ Press] was transferred into National Socialist hands. The National Socialists wanted to transform the party press of the SDAP, the social democratic party of the Netherlands, into a National Socialist platform. The publisher, however, had a secure circle of socialist customers whom the new management did not want to deter. This article is a study, based on a reconstruction of the list of publications during the period ’40 -’45, of how the National Socialist managers attempted to change the ideological foundation of De Arbeiderspers.

Fruitful Death: Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger on Human Sacrifice, 1937–1945

Numen ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristiano Grottanelli
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Human Sacrifice ◽  
World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Ewe Lamb ◽  
Iron Guard ◽  
Second World

AbstractMircea Eliade, the writer and historian of religions, and Ernst Jünger, the hero of the Great War, novelist, and essayist, met in the 1950s and co-edited twelve issues of the periodical Antaios. Before they met and cooperated, however, and while the German writer knew about Eliade from their common friend, Carl Schmitt, they both dealt with the subject of human sacrifice. Eliade began to do so in the thirties, and his interest in that theme was at least in part an aspect of his political activism on behalf of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, or the Iron Guard, the nationalistic and anti-Semitic movement lead by Corneliu Codreanu. Sacrificial ideology was a central aspect of the Legion's political theories, as well as of the practice of its members. After the Iron Guard was outlawed by its allies, and many of its members had been killed, and while the Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu was still fighting alongside the National Socialist regime in the Second World War, Eliade turned to other aspects of sacrificial ideology. In 1939 he wrote the play Iphigenia, celebrating Agamemnon's daughter as a willing victim whose death made the Greek conquest of Troy possible; and as a member of the regime's diplomatic service in Lisbon he published a book in Portuguese on Romanian virtues (1943), in which he presented what he called Two Myths of Romanian Spirituality, extolling his nation's readiness to die through the description of the sacrificial traditions of Master Manole and of the Ewe Lamb (Mioritza). Jünger's attitude to sacrifice ran along lines that were less traditional: possibly already while serving as a Wehrmacht officer, in his pamphlet Der Friede, the German writer attributed sacrificial status to all the victims of the Second World War, soldiers, workmen, and unknowing innocents, and saw their death as the ransom of a peace "without victory or defeat." In this article, the sacrificial ideologies of the two intellectuals are compared in order to reflect upon the complex interplay between traditional religious themes, more or less freely re-interpreted and transformed, political power, and violent conflict, in an age of warfare marked by fascisms and by the terrible massacre some refer to by the name of an ancient Greek sacrificial practice.

Falls and rises: meanings and universals

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Cruttenden
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Second World War ◽  
English Language Teaching ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
World War ◽  
Discourse Function ◽  
The Real ◽  
Second World

The study of intonation has gone through phases in which it has been fashionable to ascribe the meaning of intonation to one particular sort of function.1 Most traditionally that function has been grammatical (see, e.g., the earliest British attempts at intonation analysis (e.g. Butler, 1634) and many recent textbooks on English language teaching). More recently (i.e. since the second world war), speakers' attitude has often been taken as most important (e.g. Pike, 1945; Kingdon, 1958). In the light of current fashion, the discourse function is often seen as most important (e.g. Brazil,, 1975, 1978; Pilch, 1977).I argue in this article that intonation operates with its own set of meanings which are of higher abstraction than those of grammar, attitude or discourse; and that it is only at a lower level that these meanings of higher abstraction become relevant to one or more of these functions (in so far as the functions can in any case be clearly separated). Such a hypothesis is relevant to the question of how intonation is acquired by children (where the real problem for investigators has always been WHAT exactly is being acquired). It is also important to questions of cross-dialectal intonational translation (whether across social or regional boundaries) and also to possible intonation universals.

Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor Alliance (NTS), United States Intelligence Agencies and Post-War Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
World War ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

From Reconstruction to ‘Leisure Society’: Free Time, Recreational Behaviour and the Discourse on Leisure Time in the West German Recovery Society of the 1950s

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Schildt
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
German Society ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Expert ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Post War ◽  
Industrial Standards ◽  
Second World

Little more than a decade after having lost the Second World War, the society of the western part of Germany, the Federal Republic, had changed fundamentally in the eye of the observer. The economic expert Henry C. Wallich was not the only one to speak of the ‘German miracle’. Not only had the previously achieved industrial standards long been regained and surpassed, but also a boom had set in – as in all of Western Europe – which came to an end only in the 1970s. Simultaneously, both economy and society had been modernised in the process of reconstruction. The transition to a new stage of modernity, ‘society in affluence’, was discussed animatedly. The emergence of new leisure lifestyles in particular was considered a mark of present times. However, in current reviews it is often forgotten that the West German society of the 1950s was to a far greater extent determined by continuity with the interwar period and by the consequences of the war and post-war years than a first glance at the spectacular novelties suggests.

Paul V. Dutton,Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 251 pp. $65.00 cloth; $27.00 paper.

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 194-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herrick Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
World War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Funded Pensions ◽  
Private Government ◽  
Second World

Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?

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