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.

“Greetings from the Apocalypse”: Race, Migration, and Fear after German Reunification

In the early 1990s, reunified Germany faced surging numbers of asylum seekers and a wave of far-right violence against foreigners. In letters that German citizens wrote to President Richard von Weizsäcker, it is clear that some Germans feared that the arrival of large numbers of non-Germans would bring about the collapse of the state or the destruction of the German people. This article engages with the history of fear in postwar Germany by examining Germans’ post-reunification fears of migration and foreigners. I argue, first, that a biological understanding of race was still surprisingly widespread as late as the early 1990s. Second, I call for a substantially more nuanced understanding of German reunification, one that emphasizes uncertainty and the terrifying openness of the future. Finally, I highlight the intersection of race thinking and memory by showing that racial fears were frequently shaped by memories of Germany's dark past.

Book Reviews

Mark K. Cassell, Banking on the State: The Political Economy of Public Savings Banks (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2021).Bryce Sait, The Indoctrination of the Wehrmacht: Nazi Ideology and the War Crimes of the German Military (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).Frank Bösch, ed., A History Shared and Divided: East and West Germany since the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018).Christopher A. Molnar, Memory, Politics, and Yugoslav Migrations to Postwar Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).Eva Noack-Mosse, Last Days of Theresienstadt, trans. Skye Doney and Birutė Ciplijauskaitė (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).Michael H. Kater, Culture in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).Rolf Steininger, Germany and the Middle East: From Kaiser Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s protagonists and main subject: the other ‘68ers, a group of centre-right activists who had participated in the West German student movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and later commemorated their efforts as a form of democratic resistance against left-wing radicals. It argues that a close examination of the other ‘68ers’ ideas, experiences, repertoires, and remarkable career trajectories enables us to rethink the history of 1968 and its afterlives in important ways. Studying the hitherto neglected role these individuals played at the time, as well as their life paths and long-term impact on West German political culture, opens up new vistas for understanding the history of protest in 1968, the late Federal Republic, and the role that generation played in postwar Germany. The Introduction also discusses the different sources used for this study, including the oral history methodology on which parts of the book are based.