Book Review: Marcel Thomas, Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany

Book Review: Marcel Thomas, Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided GermanyThe article is a presentation of the newest book of Marcel Thomas. It is devoted to the question of how villagers in the postwar Germany use the past to construct their own interpretations of the social change. Recenze knihy: Marcel Thomas, Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020Článek představuje novou knihu Marcela Thomase. Kniha se věnuje se otázce, jak vesničané v poválečném Německu využívají minulost ke konstrukci vlastních interpretací společenské změny.Marcel Thomas, Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.Artykuł jest prezentacją najnowszej książki Marcela Thomasa, która jest poświęcona kwestii wykorzystania przeszłości w procesie konstruowa­nia własnych interpretacji procesów zmiany społecznej w powojennych Niemczech.

Toward a New Communal Future

The changing musical practices of the Jewish community in West Berlin are traced through the later 1980s, only to look again at Berlin at large and its two communities side-by-side. In spite of ideological differences, the East and West Berlin communities came closer, and generally music and culture mirrored the political rapprochement. In the final years of Divided Germany, a Jewish-music festival culture emerged on either side of the curtain, which reveals commonalities and differences between the Berlin communities. If the image of the Iron Curtain suggests a strict East–West separation, the Wall as its physical manifestation had begun to crumble with contacts between the Jewish communities across borders. Indeed, small parts of the Wall fell long before the significant date in history in a slow process that began in the early 1980s and reached a pivotal point in 1989.

German-Polish scienti c cooperations in divided Germany – Janusz Korczak associations in East and West Germany since the 1970s

The Polish-Jewish paediatrician, pedagogue and writer Janusz Korczak (1878/79–1942) has not been honoured in Germany until many years after his death in Treblinka in 1942. The German division led to the development of two separate German academic associations since the end of the 1970s, which aimed – under different political circumstances – to popularise and disseminate the memory of Korczak and his works. Both associations estab- lished personal and academic contacts and cooperations with the Polish Korczak Committee, whose history can be traced back to 1946, when contemporary witnesses of Korczak founded the Committee to honour Korczak’s memory. This paper aims to reconstruct the early scientific cooperations of both German Korczak associations with Polish scientists and the Polish Korczak Committee. While in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) major research stimuli emanated at the faculties of education at Gießen and Wuppertal, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) a first publicly perceived research focus crystallised at the only existing, state-controlled publishing house for schoolbooks (Volk und Wissen – Volkseigener Verlag) in East- Berlin. In the early 1980s, the work of the young associations was focused on biographical and bibliographical studies. Here it becomes obvious, that Korczak studies in East and West were substantially inspired and advanced by the then still living contemporary eyewitnesses of Korczak and their personal contacts to individual members of the existing Korczak associations. The history of the international Korczak bibliography is a characteristic example, that shows, how closely contemporary witnessing is linked to scientific research on Korczak.

Trapped Within and Without: A Probe into the Causes of the Decline of the Hanseatic League

The rise of the Hanseatic League in the 13th century lasted for more than 400 years and had a profound impact on medieval European trade. The Hanseatic League was disbanded in 1669. There were many reasons for the decline of the Hanseatic League. First of all, the divided Germany could not provide support for the Hanseatic League. Secondly, the Hanseatic League, as the alliance of medieval commercial cities, also had the limitations of medieval cities. The organization of the Hanseatic League itself was relatively loose and did not achieve joint force. In the end, the opening of a new route and the formation of nation-states became the last straw that broke the camel's back. The Hanseatic League’s commercial status declined, trade partners began to protect their own domestic market, and the Hanseatic League eventually fell. As the most representative commercial alliance in the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League is of reference value for understanding the commercial trade in medieval Europe.

Strangers in the Village

The third chapter turns towards newcomers in Neukirch and Ebersbach and explores how the villagers responded to the growing inflow of non-locals into the locality in the postwar era. Unlike previous scholarship, which has often focused on one particular group of newcomers, it examines the continuities between different waves of migration in East and West. The chapter reveals that ethnic German refugees, foreign workers, and urban newcomers were in similar ways marginalized by long-standing locals who tried to claim ownership over the spaces of ‘their’ locality. While migration is remembered through very different narratives in Neukirch and Ebersbach, Easterners and Westerners failed to fully come to terms with diversity in their village. In the booming Ebersbach, locals remembered a continuous inflow of strangers that diversified the community. In the shrinking Neukirch, on the other hand, stop-and-go migration was silenced in a narrative of continued homogeneity of the community. The chapter thus demonstrates how migration and integration in the divided Germany played out in local contexts. Diversity in postwar society, it will be shown, was contested in debates over local identity and belonging.

Modern Villagers

The first chapter provides an introduction to the postwar remodelling of Neukirch and Ebersbach and examines how this process was informed by shifting notions of what it meant to be rural in postwar society. Rather than understanding ‘rurality’ as an inherent characteristic of localities at the periphery of society, the chapter shows that the remaking of the village in East and West was shaped by a similar chronology of a departure from, and subsequent return to, the rural. In the first two decades after the war, the state as well as local residents in both Germanies primarily envisioned the rural as backwards and in need of modernization. The modernization attempts of planning elites and the belief of villagers in a modern future culminated in the ‘planning euphoria’ of the 1970s. From the end of the decade onwards, however, experiences of crisis and a fading belief in progress led to a rediscovery of the rural in which traditional characteristics of rurality became reconciled with modernity. The chapter thus demonstrates that what it meant to be ‘rural’ became a key question in debates over the direction and outcomes of social and political renewal in both German states. It adds to our understanding of how the establishment of two very different societies in the divided Germany was debated and contested through peculiarly local meanings.