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Abstract: We can glean the ethical shortcomings of Romantic irony from its immediate reception. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard aggregates contemporaneous arguments against irony and focuses on what he sees as a Romantic overestimation of the ironic individual’s ability to function as an ethical subject. Along with Hegel, Kierkegaard casts the ironic worldview of Friedrich Schlegel, in particular, as a pragmatically poor philosophy incapable of expressing intentional concern for social life.1 Viewing “irony” and “Romanticism” as interchangeable terms, Kierkegaard’s main thrust against both concepts is that they appear to constitute “infinite absolute negativity;”2 a term that, drawing from Hegelian concepts ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In einem 1901 verfassten Fragmentgedicht “<An Clara Westhoff IX>” erwähnte Rainer Maria Rilke eine “Verwandtschaft mit allen Dingen.”1 Nach fast 20 Jahren charakterisierte und verstand er seine ganze Weltanschauung sowie das Wesen seiner Dichtung so: “Meine Welt beginnt bei den Dingen.”2 Diese Verbundenheit zwischen den Dingen als Gegenständen und dem Dichter als einem Fühlenden auf dem geistigen Gebiet ist wesentlich für die dichterischen Schöpfungen Rilkes. Unter der Vielzahl von Dingen sind Blumen von besonders großem Stellenwert. Wie die Verszeilen Rilkes “jede Blume deutet / viel dir” (SW 3:36) im Gedicht “Die Sprache der Blumen” oder “uns sei Blume-sein groß” (SW 2:258) im Gedicht “Geschrieben für Frau Helene ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the past decade I have written extensively about the Ottoman orphan children who were sent to Germany during the World War I.1 A few people reached out to me to say that they had great uncles, grandfathers, or great grandfathers who went to Germany as apprentices.2 The most fortuitous of these contacts came at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdowns in April 2020. I received a short message from Ateş Dağlı informing me that he had read my publications and that both his father and uncle were among the orphans sent to Germany. I got extremely excited, as he was not talking about a grandfather who had passed away long ago, but his own father. We started to correspond and, as a result, I got access to the modest ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On May 11, 1952, the West German city of Essen prepared for a large protest against the General Treaty being negotiated between Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s government and the western Allies. The Caravan for Peace, as the march was termed by its participants, brought approximately 30,000 young Germans to the city to express their opposition to the rearmament of the Federal Republic. While the organizers portrayed it as a demonstration for peace and unity free from any political agenda, it was in fact a carefully orchestrated event designed to challenge the rearmament policies of Chancellor Adenauer. The most prominent group involved in the march—and the one that had worked behind the scenes to organize it—was the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In 1967, just two months before his death, Konrad Adenauer, former Chancellor of the FRG, paid an official visit to Spain (Figure 1). The abundant coverage of this visit in the media, including the Franco regime’s official cinema newsreels known as the No-Do, gives an idea of the importance of the event. Even though the conservative German leader had already withdrawn from politics, his presence constituted a valuable endorsement for the Francoist dictatorship. As noted in Vicente Sánchez Biosca’s analysis of No-Do reports on the visit, Adenauer “saw places as exotic for a person responsible for German denazification” such as the Valley of the Fallen, one of the largest monuments built to commemorate the fascist ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: On May 9, 1983, a brief article appeared inside Neues Deutschland, the official newspaper of East Germany’s ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED).1 The piece titled “New exhibition about Berlin: ‘Rising from the Ruins’” announced that the exhibition had opened the previous afternoon, put on by the official East Berlin tourism organization, Berlin-Information.2 “Rising from the Ruins”—showcasing the postwar transformation of East Berlin—featured hundreds of photographs on display in the ruins of a church gutted by Allied bombing in World War II.In his 2015 book on the SED’s Erinnerungsarbeit, or memory work, Jon Berndt Olsen shows how the dictatorial regime of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic or ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: With the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and other text-generating machine learning systems, the old boundaries between the “two cultures” of the humanities on the one hand and what is now called STEM on the other seem to be fraying by the day.1 As “large language models” become more sophisticated and capable of producing writing that is at least in certain cases indistinguishable from human-written text, it is less and less clear that the instance of writing can be so easily located. This is not only a challenge for literary studies, for which the discussion of the “author function” is one of its core competencies.2 Engineering—the “E” in STEM—in the form of artificial intelligence ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The concept of the transnational, as Celia Applegate and Frank Trommler note in their 2016 assessment for the German Studies Review of key developments in the field, is of methodological significance because of the fundamental challenge it poses to the discipline’s “reliance on the nation as the container of histories, societies, and cultures” (489). As many subsequent studies into the transnational dimensions of German-language culture have demonstrated, engaging with the prefix trans enables scholarship to interrogate movements across, through, between, before, and beyond the nation state, demonstrating definitively how that culture has always been entangled, productively and problematically, with the wider ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Helene J. Sinnreich’s book, The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Łódź, and Kraków Ghettos during World War II, is an absorbing, horrifying, and—by thinking broadly about what she terms “the atrocity of hunger”—smartly conceived study worth careful attention, not only for students of the Holocaust but also for those working on famines and mass violence in general. Its ten comparatively brief chapters, organized by topic but following a rough chronology, might also work in the classroom. Having just assigned several chapters to my students, I will know more about that soon.Sinnreich’s book is part of a relatively recent historiographical trend, spearheaded mostly by women historians such as Svenja ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The year 2023 brought many worrisome signs of an escalation of human-caused climate change. This growing crisis is having a profound impact on the field of German history, as exemplified by Stephen G. Gross’s important study on energy transitions in Germany since 1945. Gross demystifies the interplay of economic ideas, politics, and developments in world resources markets and technologies in his analysis of five major energy transitions in West Germany and reunited Germany since 1945, involving coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Though capitalist in orientation, German policymakers did not succumb to what he terms “market fetishization.” They realized that so-called energy markets ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Belinda Davis, Friederike Brühöfener, and Stephen Milder’s edited volume Rethinking Social Movements after ’68 is a needed contribution to the study of German politics and society in the influential “long 1970s.” Overall, the diverse set of contributions adds to the ongoing recontextualization of these eventful years, not merely perceived as the culmination of the heroic efforts of “1968,” but also as representing truly novel concerns and forms of organization that still affect the present. The authors also push back at the hegemonic view of fragmented, uncoordinated, single-issue concerns and show that much more collaboration and communication was actually occurring. Instead of the conventional position that these ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In this study on Günter Grass’s political engagement in the Berlin Republic, Friederike Stausberg offers a well-organized and insightful discussion of his political activities and impact, drawing on an impressive amount of documentation that includes published and unpublished materials. As the title of this study indicates, Stausberg intends to examine the Nobel laureate in terms of his communicative power, suggesting that he drew on his reputation, contacts, and linguistic skills to exert influence on German policies during and after reunification. Indeed, most previous scholarship on his political side has concentrated on his work for the SPD under Willy Brandt in the 1960s. Previous efforts to collect and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: As scholars continue to pay attention to German colonial history and legacy, historian Matthew Unangst’s Colonial Geography has offered a brilliant understanding of the German colonial past in East Africa (Ostafrika). Focusing on the latter part of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, Unangst shows various attempts by Germany to transform the colony based on its changing conceptions of race and space from 1884 to 1905. To trace these changes, Unangst draws from critical geography that highlights the connection between the conception of space and economic changes and carefully examines pertinent primary sources: colonial propaganda, maps, (un)published writings of explorers and travelers, and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Over the course of the nineteenth century, political grievances, religious and social repression, and the search for opportunities motivated millions of Germans to depart from Europe and fashion new lives around the globe. Some demographically minded Germans insisted that emigration siphoned away Germany’s military and economic strength. The sapping effects of emigration joined with a declining birth rate around the turn of the twentieth century—reversing the trend many Germans considered a crucial element in the nation’s recent ascendance to the world stage. France’s own relative decline appeared to prove the point. They further argued that rapid urbanization and the modern cityscape promoted the moral and ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Reginald Elias Kirey delivers a much-needed contribution to the historiography with his latest monograph, Memories of German Colonialism in Tanzania. Kirey examines postcolonial oral histories and physical sites of memory as historical topics in their own right rather than as historical sources for accessing and reconstructing the colonial past. The distinction is critical, as it pivots the conversation away from methodologies for colonial history and toward investigations of postcolonial legacies. Conceptually, he argues that such memories are situational, contested, and often quite paradoxical, depending on who is remembering, what they are remembering, and where in the country they are remembering. He shows that ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: How can the force of mass hysteria be explained rationally' Or how is it that the irrational appears rational or vice versa' Brett E. Sterling places such weighty questions at the center of his compendious study of the Austrian author Hermann Broch’s theoretical and literary works on the masses. Best known for his monumental novels Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers) and Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil), Broch is rarely cited in studies of theories of the masses, yet as Sterling shows, Broch began writing about masses as early as 1918, and he dedicated much of his life in exile to the pursuit of fighting fascism. Sterling weaves together the traces of the masses across Broch’s career as a published thinker ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The cultural ferment and political turmoil of Weimar Berlin are well known and well documented. The experiences and contributions of Berlin’s large and diverse Russian population are less so. Weimar’s “Russian Berlin” encompassed émigrés who left to escape the Russian Revolution and Soviet ideologues alike. It was linguistically and ethnically diverse—including ethnic Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, and nearly every other group that made up Russia’s polyglot empire. While exact figures do not exist, the largest estimate of Russian Berlin put its population at its height at over 300,000, encompassing 10 percent of the population of the German capital. What existing studies of this community often do is to fold it into ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: How capitalistic were the Nazis' Interwar fascists often claimed to be pioneering a third way between a Soviet-style planned economy and Anglo-American liberal capitalism, but that rhetoric scarcely translated into economic reality. Frankfurt School theorists framed Nazism as a kind of crisis capitalism, and several notable Marxist historians controversially blamed the leaders of German big business for the Nazis’ rise to power. After years of strident debate around this cluster of issues, the field has reached a sort of consensus that the Nazi regime did not depart significantly from capitalist principles or economic liberalism—at least for those included in the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), even as the ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: When reviewing a new textbook on the Third Reich, one generally looks for three elements: an original narrative, a consideration of central themes and problems, and the incorporation of recent research. Alan Steinweis’s well-conceived, fluently-written new history accomplishes these three tasks. By building the narrative around the concept of “people’s dictatorship” (akin to Mary Fulbrook’s concept of “participatory dictatorship”), Steinweis provides an analytical framework that acknowledges the regime’s consensual elements (the Third Reich “revolutionized German society in important respects . . . backed by popular consensus”) while reaffirming the fact that the Third Reich, dependent as it was on “a system of ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Paul Bartrop’s edited volume Sources for Studying the Holocaust: A Guide is an introduction to the types of sources that are utilized by historians studying the Holocaust and a guide to criticism and use of those sources. The volume divides these sources into three categories: the “personal” (i.e., ego documents, such as diaries and letters, as well as oral testimonies), the “public” (i.e., print media, propaganda, official documents, and memorial displays), and the “popular” (i.e., mass media, such as film and literature). These categorizations are somewhat arbitrary (propaganda leaflets and newspapers are intended to be “popular,” while films are certainly “public”), but they provide a more-or-less logical ... Read More PubDate: 2024-05-19T00:00:00-05:00