Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-146
Author(s):  
Rebecca Ayako Bennette
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Conscientious Objection ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Radical Pacifism

This chapter covers the narrative of dissent and medicalization during World War I into the post-1918 era, and provides a summary of some of the larger conclusions that can be taken from the re-examination of wartime psychiatry. It discusses pre-war pacifism that never embraced conscientious objection as a stance before the war. It also refers to the pacifists who during the fighting between 1914 and 1918 refused to serve and became leaders of the growing movement of more radical pacifism in Weimar Germany. The chapter recounts the subsequent development of the radical pacifism of Weimar and its roots in the dissent that was evident in the medicalized system dealing with psychologically traumatized soldiers. It reviews wartime psychiatry that fundamentally informs larger historical questions concerning modern German history.

scholarly journals Either-Or: The Narrative of “Crisis” in Weimar Germany and in Historiography

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 592-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Graf
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Republic

The notion of “crisis” plays an important role in both the history of the Weimar Republic and the historiography on this period of German history. Modifying Max Horkheimer's famous dictum on the intrinsic connection between capitalism and fascism, one might even say that anyone who does not want to talk about “crisis” should remain silent about Weimar Germany. In the brief period between 1918 and 1933 Germany not only had to cope with the consequences of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, but also it was struck by two severe economic crises. Moreover, strong political forces relentlessly tried to overcome the unpopular democratic political system. After the National Socialists finally succeeded in overthrowing the republic, Weimar came to be conceptualized as the ill-born precursor of National Socialism, as the critical stage of German history before the establishment of a rule of terror that intentionally led into the most devastating war in human history. This perspective on the failure of Germany's first democracy stems largely from the dominance of National Socialism as a negative point of reference in historical as well as public debates in the Federal Republic.

Racist Hysteria to Pragmatic Rapprochement? The German Debate about Rhenish ‘Occupation Children’, 1920–30

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA ROOS
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Family ◽  
Illegitimate Children ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Policy Discourses

AbstractThis essay revisits 1920s German debates over the illegitimate children of the Rhineland occupation to examine hitherto neglected fluctuations in the relationship between nationalism and racism in Weimar Germany. During the early 1920s, nationalist anxieties focused on the alleged racial ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race children of colonial French soldiers. After 1927, plans for the forced sterilisation and deportation of the mixed-race children were dropped; simultaneously, officials began to support German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers. This hitherto neglected shift in German attitudes towards the ‘Rhineland bastards’ sheds new light on the role of debates over gender and the family in the process of Franco–German rapprochement. It also enhances our understanding of the contradictory political potentials of popularised foreign policy discourses about women's and children's victimisation emerging from World War I.

Arms intervention: Weimar Germany, post-imperial influence and weapons trafficking in warlord China

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 510-528
Author(s):  
Ned Richardson-Little
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
World War ◽  
German State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
Arms Trade ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Arms Embargo

The Treaty of Versailles aimed to strip Germany of both its colonial empire and the global reach of its arms industry. Yet the conflicts in warlord-era China led to the reestablishment of German influence on the other side of the world via the arms trade. Weimar Germany had declared a policy of neutrality and refused to take sides in the Chinese civil war in an effort to demonstrate that as a post-colonial power, it could now act as an honest broker. From below, however, traffickers based in Germany and German merchants in China worked to evade Versailles restrictions and an international arms embargo to supply warlords with weapons of war. Although the German state officially aimed to remain neutral, criminal elements, rogue diplomats, black marketeers and eventually military adventurers re-established German influence in the region by becoming key advisors and suppliers to the victorious Guomindang. Illicit actors in Germany and China proved to be crucial in linking the two countries and in eventually overturning the arms control regimes that were imposed in the wake of World War I.

How post-imperial democracies die: A comparison of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Steffen Kailitz ◽  
Andreas Umland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Status ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis

While socioeconomic crisis — like in Germany after World War I and in Russia after the Cold War — is a necessary precondition for democratic erosion resulting in a breakdown of democracy, it is not a sufficient condition. We identify, in the cases of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, a post-imperial syndrome that includes nationalist irredentism and an ambition to return to the status quo ante of a “great power” as a main reason why democratization faces specific and enormous challenges for former “great powers.” A slide back to authoritarianism in post-imperial democracies takes a high toll. It is facilitated by international political conflicts, including annexation and wars, with new neighbouring states that harbor territories perceived as external national homelands like the Sudetenland or Crimea.

The Reichstag and the New Berlin

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Ann Ross
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
German Society ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Parliament ◽  
The City ◽  
Democratic Country

This work examines the Reichstag’s emblematic role in Berlin’s history. Today the Reichstag is a major tourist attraction and home to Germany’s democratic parliament. However, the building has had a complicated history spanning five distinct times in German history: the Imperial Age and World War I, the troubled Weimar Republic, Nazism and World War II, the divided Cold War, and finally a unified Germany. The progressions of the building mirror those of German society and the city of Berlin over the pasts century, culminating in the vibrant Western European democratic country, city, and building we see today. Specifically, the revitalization of the Reichstag building itself through Christo’s wrapping project and Sir Norman Foster’s reconstruction were vital steps for a torn city to embrace its past while transitioning the building from a history museum into the seat of the German parliament. Furthermore, this change is emblematic of Berlin as a whole, in its quest for its own Hauptstadtkultur as the capital moved back to Berlin from Bonn. Architecture has played a significant role in this New Berlin, and the case of the Reichstag building is no different. Foster’s design, adding a modernist glass and steel dome to the nineteenth century building, emphasizes political transparency while maintaining traces of the past. Focusing on the example of the Reichstag, I argue that this merging of history and hope for the future has proved essential and successful, though often controversial, in recreating a unified, vibrant, and strong Berlin.

Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Olivia Landry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.

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