Prawo osobowe na ziemiach polskich wcielonych do Rzeszy Niemieckiej podczas drugiej wojny światowej

The subject of this article are basic questions within the range of civil law. They concern the general position of a human and legal people in the sphere of this law on Polish territory, which was incorporated into the Third Reich. The position of individuals, the citizens of II RP, under the occupation of the Third Reich in years 1939–1945, is analysed by the author not from the perspective of literal meaning of regulations of general part of Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) from 1896, but from the perspective of their specific interpretation, congruent with strategic and ideological purposes of the Nazi regime. In the article, the following issues are touched upon in turn: 1) personal law in terms of classical civil law contra national-socialist regime; 2) racism towards civil rights of a subjective individual; 3) elimination of the Jews from the legal relationships of civil law; 4) difficulties in the sphere of access to certain professions for Polish people and some restrictions upon personal rights; 5) the dependence of possibilities of exercising the private personal right on the consent to denationalization; 6) ban concerning getting married and the right to motherhood and fatherhood; 7) legislation of sterilisation and euthanasia. The formal changes in the legislation which were in force in the Third Reich — except for personal and family law (as well as legal rules connected with it regarding health protection of offspring), and “peasant law” (Bauernrecht) — were not significant, as is proved by the author. The old legal order was reversed in the Third Reich due to its new interpretation: classical concepts and legal institutions were filled with a different content. After the formal extension of BGB to territories incorporated into the Reich, which followed the decree of 25 September 1941 introducing German civil law, these territories became a field of social-political and racial-nationalist experiments, which in fact had a little in common with the German Civil Code’s regulations. A principle of equal access to private subjective rights was respected only in case of German people, i.a. the part which passively gave up to indoctrination. In relation to Jews, racism spoiled in this case the idea and concept of private subjective rights.

‘“Gott Strafe England”: Ivor Gurney’s Strafes and Ways’

This essay describes Ivor Gurney’s use of the word ‘strafe’ in his poems of the First World War. At the outbreak of the War, the word was a new arrival in the English national consciousness. It had come to prominence in the German Army’s slogan, ‘Gott strafe England’ (‘God punish England’). Allied counterpropagandists soon redeployed this slogan as evidence that the German people were hateful and frenzied, and it gained currency as an informal English noun for a German artillery bombardment. In poems dating from during and after the War, Gurney draws on ‘strafe’s’ interlinguistic existence to express his contempt for the two powers’ propaganda. In treating the word as fluctuating between two languages, Gurney stages his separation from both English and German narratives of nationhood. Tracking his use of the word ‘strafe’ shows how he described the importance of individual experiences for understanding the War, portrayed a sense of ‘Wonder’ that he suggested could define soldier poets, and expressed his post-war belief that England had betrayed him. By outlining how Gurney attached these possibilities to ‘strafe’, this essay contributes to the wider critical understanding of how and why he wrote about his War experiences.

Marta Górnicka’s «Grundgesetz»: The Chorus as Portrait and Proxy of Political Community

This text analyzes the function of the chorus in Marta Górnicka’s open-air production Grundgesetz (Berlin, 2018) in redefining the political community of “the German people.” While examining its relation to the audience, the author refers to examples of German mass spectacles from the Weimar Republic that invested choruses to both represent a political community in the making and to shape political subjects through collective action. Based on aesthetic and political concepts of representation, which intertwine in the performance, the author shows how the chorus of Grundgesetz both portrays and enacts “the German people” as a plurality of bodies and voices united by fundamental rights. Making it thus an available community to stand for, the performance questions the agency of the audience as a collective body capable of acting together in public space.

Comparison of FORTA, PRISCUS and EU(7)-PIM lists on identifying potentially inappropriate medication and its impact on cognitive function in multimorbid elderly German people in primary care: a multicentre observational study

ObjectivesOur study aimed to assess the frequency of potentially inappropriate medication (PIM) use (according to three PIM lists) and to examine the association between PIM use and cognitive function among participants in the MultiCare cohort.DesignMultiCare is conducted as a longitudinal, multicentre, observational cohort study.SettingThe MultiCare study is located in eight different study centres in Germany.Participants3189 patients (59.3% female).Primary and secondary outcome measuresThe study had a cross-sectional design using baseline data from the German MultiCare study. Prescribed and over-the-counter drugs were classified using FORTA (Fit fOR The Aged), PRISCUS (Latin for ‘time-honoured’) and EU(7)-PIM lists. A mixed-effect multivariate linear regression was performed to calculate the association between PIM use patients’ cognitive function (measured with (LDST)).ResultsPatients (3189) used 2152 FORTA PIM (mean 0.9±1.03 per patient), 936 PRISCUS PIM (0.3±0.58) and 4311 EU(7)-PIM (1.4±1.29). The most common FORTA PIM was phenprocoumon (13.8%); the most prevalent PRISCUS PIM was amitriptyline (2.8%); the most common EU(7)-PIM was omeprazole (14.0%). The lists rate PIM differently, with an overall overlap of 6.6%. Increasing use of PIM is significantly associated with reduced cognitive function that was detected with a correlation coefficient of −0.60 for FORTA PIM (p=0.002), −0.72 for PRISCUS PIM (p=0.025) and −0.44 for EU(7)-PIM (p=0.005).ConclusionWe identified PIM using FORTA, PRISCUS and EU(7)-PIM lists differently and found that PIM use is associated with cognitive impairment according to LDST, whereby the FORTA list best explained cognitive decline for the German population. These findings are consistent with a negative impact of PIM use on multimorbid elderly patient outcomes.Trial registration numberISRCTN89818205.

West German Rearmament Protests and the Reframing of Germany as Pacifist

This paper tracks the reactions of British and U.S. officials to a wave of anti-rearmament protests in West Germany in the early 1950s. The conversations that these protests encouraged were significant in that they represented the beginning of a gradual change in the reputation of the German people – whereas in 1945 the Germans were widely considered a militaristic and aggressive people, by the end of the Cold War they were seen as largely pacifist. This change speaks to the power of social movements to drive new trends in international relations.

The EDUCATION IN NAZI GERMANY FROM 1933 TO 1945

This paper studies education during the Nazi Germany period, from 1933 to 1945. In order to achieve their goals, the Nazis who founded the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSGWP), in addition to numerous laws and state programs, saw great importance in educational activities. The concretization of the goal of education during the period of Nazi Germany implied the education of children and youth on eugenics, nationalist, racist, anti-Semitic, ideological, occult, theosophical, militaristic and alchemical bases with the aim of encouraging and developing awareness of the importance and preservationof the pure Aryan race, about the German people as the most civilized and God-given to rule the world, with their sublime tradition and culture.

Polar Express: Polar Question Forms Expressing Bias-Evidence Conflicts in Italian

Past research has concentrated on the use of different forms of polar questions in specific contexts, defined in terms of the relationship between original bias and contextual evidence. It has been showed that, for English and German, people tend to prefer specific forms given the pragmatic context. Based on previous experiments, in this work, we observe that the same tendencies occur in Italian. Also, we adopt a more refined experimental setup with three different tasks and a more natural evaluation scale to better capture nuances in appropriateness evaluations, provided by human subjects, which therefore reflects the more realistic one-to-many relationship among forms and functions. In fact, the results show how specific forms of polar questions are especially typical of situations where the bias has the opposite value with respect to the evidence, i.e., in positive bias versus negative evidence, for which a high negative polar question in the past tense was more frequently selected by the subjects (Note 1).

“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.

Genuine Pacifism or Soviet Infiltration? Allied Responses to West German Rearmament Protests, 1950–52

This article examines the reactions of British and U.S. officials to the wave of anti-rearmament protests which erupted in West Germany in the early 1950s. It examines the discourse generated by these officials to argue that the West German protests were either encouraged or condemned by different diplomatic figures. Most officials blamed the Soviet Union for the dissent in Germany and called for widespread concessions to the German government to better calm the situation. Some officials, however, supported the protests and protesters and looked to use the demonstrations to argue for increased contact with the Soviet Union and a thawing of the Cold War. A lasting impact of this discussion was that the image of the German people began to change in the eyes of Western policy makers- with old stereotypes from the Second World War beginning to give way to a new appraisal of Germans as activists and pacifists.

Digital Political Participation of Western and Eastern Parts of Germany Residents (based on Change.org Online Petitions)

The article shows the results of a study aimed at finding the determinants, which describe the petitioning activity of the residents of the western and eastern parts of Germany. The research material consists of 1,036 petitions from the German-language segment of Change.org during the period of 2012–2018 (322 petitions from eastern part of Germany, 714 petitions from western part of Germany). A thematic classifier based on the analysis of electronic petitions was created. It subdivided all the petitions into 18 thematic groups, for example, human rights, animal protection, culture, politics, migration issues, proposals for reforming certain areas of life, transport system, Internet, protection and support for people with disabilities and rare diseases, financial questions, environmental protection, housing issues, weapons/spirits/tobacco/drugs, healthcare, elderly people, education, sports, sustainable development. Statistically significant differences between western and eastern territories were found only in the animal protection thematic group. It is stated that the bipolar construct East/West rooted in the historical logic of the legacy of socialism and capitalism on the German territories could not explain the logic of the petitioning activity of the contemporary Germans. Moreover, the historical heritage/separation factor is found in the socio-economic problems of the regions, but it is not critical while determining the values and civic activism of German people.