Archival Totality in the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden

This chapter uncovers the history of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, the central archive of the German Jews, which operated from 1903 until it was confiscated by the Nazis in 1943. It details the Gesamtarchiv’s attempt to create a singular archive of German Jewish history in Berlin, and also opposition to the project of centralization, and it situates the archive within the wider trends of archival science. It thereby explicates the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of total archives and traces its legacy across the arc of the twentieth century. This archive was intended to help produce the history of Germany’s Jews and also to help manage its communities, but it was ultimately turned into an instrument for the domination of Jewish life by the Nazi regime. Altogether, this chapter offers the Gesamtarchiv as a starting point for a global network of Jewish archives that followed the Gesamtarchiv’s vision of archival totality.

Triumph of the Will: A memorial in film

Despite Hitler’s efforts to transform Berlin into Germania, the capital of the new world he envisioned and which he believed would bear comparison with Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, there is little in the way of monumental architecture to bear witness to that ambition. Though there is only limited public evidence of Hitler’s architectural hubris present either in stone or steel, the same cannot be said of film. Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will (1935) (German: Triumph des Willens) is the most famous propaganda film of all time and a staple of university film schools and secondary schools across the world. At the time of its creation, celluloid motion picture film was a relatively new technology and the documentary format a nascent art form. Nevertheless, it was lauded almost immediately as a visually stunning imagining of the new regime and its leader. Though the film maker was subsequently reviled for her Nazi associations, as an art work her film has retained an almost miasmic aura that justifies continued re-assessment of its standing as a monument to the Nazi regime and the horrors perpetrated in its name.

The Expulsion of Academic Teaching Staff from German Universities, 1933–45

In spring 1933, a political purge began in German universities, affecting around one fifth of their academic staff. This study examines the various stages of this process, uses new data to create a collective portrait of those dismissed and asks why they received so little support from their unscathed colleagues. An analysis of the reasons for their dismissal shows that approximately 80% were driven out on antisemitic grounds, even though less than a third belonged to the Jewish community. Their lives after their dismissal varied greatly. Whereas some managed to pursue highly successful careers while in emigration, others were murdered by the Nazis or committed suicide. At the same time the purge policy improved the career chances of younger academics and it is no coincidence that it was from their ranks that the largest number of supporters of the Nazi regime were recruited. Not until the second half of the war did leading German politicians and academic leaders recognise a further effect of this policy, namely that the emigration of numerous influential scholars had provided the Allies with a ‘considerable gain in potential’, including in highly significant military research.

LAW ART

Taking Sides, a 1995 play by British playwright Ronald Harwood, reconstructs the American investigations, during the post-war United States denazification, of the German conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwängler on charges of having served the Nazi regime. In Collaboration (2008) Harwood dramatizes the artistic cooperation between Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig on the opera The Silent Woman, the political circumstances and repercussions of its première in Dresden and the composer’s involvement with Hitler’s regime. Considering the similarity of the issues raised by these works, the essay aims to examine, in an historical-juridical perspective, the two dramas as if they were one with the same subject: the fatal confrontation between culture and power and between freedom and compromise.

Facts and Values

This chapter introduces the first of the four main subjects of the book, Philippa Foot, as well as sketching the philosophical outlook against which all four would argue in later years. A young Foot, recently returned to Oxford, confronts for the first time the horrors of the Nazi regime, through a newsreel exposing conditions in the concentration camps. For Foot, this moment encapsulated a major failing of philosophical ethics in the mid-twentieth century: its inability to grapple with real evil. The contemporary philosophy against which Foot and her friends would revolt depended on a background picture, the “billiard-ball” picture of the universe as nothing but inert, value-free matter. A fact–value dichotomy was grounded in this picture, positing that no ethical propositions can validly derive from fact statements; these together led to what Lipscomb calls the “Dawkins sublime”—the Romantic view that adults must bravely face this harsh and denuded world.

Dying for a Cause: Meaning, Commitment, and Self-Sacrifice

Some people willingly risk or give up their lives for something they deeply believe in, for instance standing up to a dictator. A good example of this are members of the White Rose student resistance group, who rebelled against the Nazi regime and paid for it with their lives. I argue that when the cause is good, such risky activities (and even deaths themselves) can contribute to meaning in life in its different forms – meaning-as-mattering, meaning-as-purpose, and meaning-as-intelligibility. Such cases highlight the importance of integrity, or living up to one's commitments, in meaningful living, or dying, as it may be, as well as the risk involved in commitment, since if you die for a bad cause, you have only harmed yourself. However, if leading a more rather than less meaningful life benefits rather than harms you, there are possible scenarios in which you yourself are better off dying for a good cause than living a longer moderately happy life. This presents a version of a well-known puzzle: what, then, makes dying for a cause a self-sacrifice, as it usually seems to be? I sketch some possible answers, and critically examine relevant work in empirical psychology.

Examining the Dutch Resistance Movement During World War II

This paper is an analysis of the Dutch resistance movement during World War II. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 102,000 Dutch Jews were deported and killed, which amounted to approximately 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population in the Netherlands. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of Dutch civilians were forced to work in German work camps to fuel the German war machine. Despite this, only 4% of Dutch citizens participated in the resistance movement. This paper will examine the roles of these resistance fighters, as well as several primary sources that demonstrate their importance and significance. It will explain that resistance work was incredibly dangerous work done by many local organizations that when combined formed a national movement. The resistance movement was recognized and encouraged by the Dutch government in exile and was viewed as a threat by the German occupiers. Ultimately, members of the resistance movement should be viewed as heroes who were willing to stand up to the evil of the Nazi regime and risk their lives for freedom.

Transformation of the image of the nazi regime in the soviet propaganda (23 august 1939 – june 1941): a source study aspect

The article, based on a wide range of historical sources, examines the key events associated with changes in the coverage of the Nazi regime by Soviet propaganda bodies in connection with the signing of the Soviet-German treaties: on non-aggression (August 1939), on friendship and the border (September 1939 g.). It is noted that both sides tried to find common ground on a number of secondary, "peripheral" issues, that the turn in Soviet propaganda, which began in August 1939, gave an impetus to create a positive cultural image of the former enemy. However, for reasons, primarily of an ideological nature, it was not possible to fully use the expected advantages from this political rapprochement in order to develop cultural ties. The reasons for the unsuccessful attempt at cultural rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich are analyzed. It points to the attempts of the Soviet leadership to study the experience of propaganda work in Germany with a view to further use. It is noted that, starting in the summer of 1940, in the conditions of a gradual deterioration in Soviet-German relations, the nature of the activities of propaganda structures is gradually changing. Increasingly, criticism of the Nazi regime is voiced in a veiled form. It is shown that in May June 1941, a new anti-Nazi turn in Soviet propaganda took place. It is concluded that if during the warming of relations with Germany in Soviet propaganda the class paradigm was temporarily replaced by a national or cultural-historical one, then the political and ideological campaign that unfolded in May-June 1941 had a clearly anti-German and anti-Nazi character.

Gestalt Theory: Its Past, Stranding and Future...

This article focuses on the contributions of the founders of Gestalt theory, not only for the high value they carried even back then, but also for the strong relevance they have today. The main purpose is to point to the deficient, even wrong transmission of this perspective particularly in the past 50 years and to highlight its potential to connect the immense amount of accumulated but disconnected scientific facts and pieces within psychology as of today. The first part of this article discusses Max Wertheimer’s important 1912 “phi phenomenon” article and recounts the Gestalt theorists’ launch of their influential journal Psychologische Forschungen in 1922, the rise of the oppressive and violent Nazi regime in Germany, and the resulting emigration of the Gestalt founders to the US where they had to face a radically different perspective to psychology. The second part discusses the main postulates of the theory, focusing on how the movement emerged, its main theoretical perspective, and its work on perception. In a second and third article (Mungan, 2021a; 2021b), I will review their intriguing research and conceptualizations on memory and productive thinking, respectively. Hence, the current article should be read as the first in a series of three.