The Soul of Europe: Two Different Ways of Thinking Germany’s Debt to Greek Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-160
Author(s):  
Simona Forti
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

This chapter compares two opposing ways of conceiving the idea of the “Soul of Europe”. Both of them trace the origin of the idea to Greek philosophy and especially Plato. On the one hand, it is the Platonism adopted by the so-called 'Nazi philosophical anthropology' that interprets the Germany of the Third Reich, its Idea of Rassenseel, as the moment in which not only the debt of German culture to Greek culture is paid but in which Germany will finally be able to demonstrate that it is the only true heir of ancient Greece and that for this reason it must conquer the whole of Europe. On the other hand, as an example of an opposite vision, it is the work of Jan Patocka who is convinced that German philosophy can 'today' represent the soul of Europe, but for whom both the notion of soul and that of Europe are constitutively open and infinite, connected to the concept of a debt that can never be settled.

Jewish Frontkämpfer and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
Legal Status ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
War Veterans ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One

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.

Un-settling Scores: A Review of Michael H. Kater's Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 80-93
Author(s):  
Steven M. Whiting
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Present Review ◽  
European Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Distinguished Research ◽  
The One ◽  
Nazi Era

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.

The Third Reich’s War on the Occult

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the regime's policies toward occultists in the early to middle years of the Third Reich, including ‘Hitler's Magicians' Controversy’ — a debate over whether to allow professional anti-occultists to debunk ‘magic’ and occultism. When the regime worked to repress or ‘coordinate’ esoteric groups, it had more to do with controlling than eliminating occult ideas. Indeed, like border scientists generally, many Nazis worked carefully to distinguish between commercial and popular occultism on the one hand and ‘scientific’ occultism on the other. While the Nazis indicated considerable hostility toward commercial occultism, practitioners of the scientific variety enjoyed remarkable latitude, even sponsorship, by the Third Reich. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the ‘Hess Action’ against the occult and its longer term consequences.

scholarly journals Refleksje na temat książki Sebastiana Fikusa „Trudny spadek dysydentów III Rzeszy w Republice Federalnej Niemiec”

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 163-168
Author(s):  
Maria Zmierczak
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
The Third ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One

REFLECTIONS ON SEBASTIAN FIKUS’S TRUDNY SPADEK DYSYDENTÓW III RZESZY W REPUBLICE FEDERALNEJ NIEMIEC DIFFICULT LEGACY OF THE THIRD REICH’S DISSIDENTS IN FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANYThe reviewed book contains a description of state policy towards the German opponents of Hitler’s regime after the fall of the Third Reich. The death sentences of military courts, Volksgericht and special war courts were treated as legal and the victims and their descendants were not vindicated until 2009. It means that they figured as criminals for more than 50 years. The author suggests that this was connected mainly with economic reasons and the need to restore the national economy. The commentary of the reviewer underlines the importance of other aspects: on the one hand, it was not easy to declare that the Federal Republic of Germany is a new state and to break the continuity of state, especially in the face of the existing German Democratic Republic. On the other hand, it is not easy to declare that the law was not legal, and to punish judges or officers who had acted according to the legal prescriptions; not to mention the old sentence lex retro non agit. 

The One Hundred Days

2021 ◽  
pp. 336-356
Author(s):  
Peter Fritzsche
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Great Achievement ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter studies how the transformations which occurred in less than “one hundred days” in Germany evoked the original template for the one hundred days: Napoleon Bonaparte's return from Elba and the reestablishment of the empire until his abdication in the wake of Waterloo in 1815. Each of the hundred days—Napoleon's, Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Adolf Hitler's—recharged history. The one hundred days consolidating the New Deal and the Nazi seizure of power gave new shape to the future in the extraordinary year of 1933. Ultimately, the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life. Not everyone agreed with the Nazis on every point, but most adjusted to National Socialism by interpreting it in their own way, adhering to old ideas by pursuing them in new forms. As a result, more and more Germans had accepted the Third Reich. This reassembly closed off any consideration of returning to the democratic governments of the Weimar Republic; it was neither recognized as a possibility nor desired.

The Opera Underneath

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-136
Author(s):  
Emily Richmond Pollock
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann recapitulated two cultural traditions simultaneously: first, the drive for opera to return to the imagined purity of ancient tragedy, and second, a German obsession with the Greeks. Setting Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles word for word in a declamatory vocal style with minimal, percussive accompaniment, Oedipus der Tyrann was estranged from opera and ascetic to the extent that some critics heard it as “an opera without music.” Orff eschewed intuition and operaticism, believing that a stripped-down approach would give him access to the universality of experience the classics had often represented for German culture. But the Germans’ Greeks were less apolitical and universal than Orff wanted to believe, and Orff inherited not only the elemental strengths of the “Greeks” but also the baggage of previous German appropriations of antiquity, from idealist philhellenism to the more recent nationalist reception of Greek culture during the Third Reich.

Alexander B. Rossino. Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. xv, 343 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-383
Author(s):  
David Engel
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
University Of Kansas ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
German Army ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Third Reich

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).

The German Minority in Inter-War Yugoslavia

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-143
Author(s):  
Peter Mentzel
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Third ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Face ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
German Minority ◽  
The Third Reich

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.

scholarly journals Paul von Klenau og hans niende symfoni. Kilderne, værket, receptionen

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 229
Author(s):  
Niels Krabbe
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Music History ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
Private Collection ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One

Niels Krabbe: Paul von Klenau and his ninth Symphony – the sources, the work, the reception In 2001, the Royal Library learned about a comprehensive private collection in Vienna that contained music, letters and lecture manuscripts, photographs and other archive materials of the Danish composer Paul von Klenau (1883–1946). A preliminary survey of the collection revealed that the contents included a number of music manuscripts (symphonies, chamber music concerts and more), which were not known from the rest of the library’s major collection of Klenau works. The collection’s greatest and most interesting work was a major complete “Ninth Symphony” for orchestra, choir and four soloists in eight movements, for a Latin text with a mix of liturgical texts from the Catholic requiem and texts of unknown provenance.In 2005, the library succeeded in acquiring the collection and it was transferred to the Royal Library. Subsequently, the Danish Centre for Music Publication (DCM) organised a philological adaptation and published Symphony No. 9 for the purpose of the premier performance of the work, which duly took place 70 years after it was written, performed as a Thursday Concert in March 2014 and conducted by Michael Schønwandt.Klenau had worked in Germany as a composer and conductor in the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to Denmark in 1939 where he stayed for the rest of his life. Because of his extensive German background he did not receive high recognition in Danish music, despite the range and nature of his musical output. This was mainly because of his relationship with the Third Reich and Nazism, which affected his last years and his posthumous reputation.Symphony No. 9 was composed in the years 1944–45, and is a mix of requiem and a symphony, each in four movements. Due to the text, the work is both a traditional requiem and a requiem about the war. Both in its expression and in its length, it is probably the greatest symphony ever written by a Danish composer.The premier in 2014 received mixed reviews, and Klenau’s attitude to Nazism was discussed once again. The work was criticised for its eclectic character with its mix of late romantic forms of expression on the one side and its accomplished dodecaphonic passages on the other.The newly available Klenau collection from Vienna, including the treated Symphony No. 9, has nuanced and problematised Klenau’s position in Danish music history.

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