20th Century German History

While the book mainly deals with questions of German Jews, who escaped to Japan and Korea during the 1930s and early 40s, my contribution covers the history of the German East Asiatic Society (OAG) from its foundation in 1873 to 1945, focusing mostly on the 1930s and early 40s.

The corpus of narratives produced in Germany since 1943 about the battle of Stalingrad appears as a multifaceted "grand narrative" in which historiographical and mythical morphology coexist. The Nazi myth of Stalingrad contributed to shaping the cultural memory of the event during the war, and historians lately integrated that myth into the historical discourse about the "overcoming of the past" (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). In the meantime, hundreds of veterans published their witness-accounts about the great battle, blending the two spheres of history and myth on the level of storytelling. While historiographical discourse aims to consolidate positive knowledge of the battle in terms of chronology, witness-narratives blur chronological storytelling with the mythical archetypes of conquest, defeat, fall, and resurrection. I will examine the morphological characteristics of the "grand narrative" of Stalingrad by combining the notion of "structure" (Koselleck) with that of the narrative archetype (Frye) and by integrating these tools with the theory of adaptive and evolutional narratives (Carrol; Scalise-Sugyjama) to claim that the "grand narrative" of Stalingrad can be read as the mythic-historical account of how the German community survived defeat and was reborn from its own ashes.

The name Mildred Fish-Harnack is commemorated in American academic circles. On the other hand, the German resistance group known as "Rote Kapelle" is hardly known, due to the convictions of its protagonists Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid von Harnack, and their Soviet connections. This article attempts to illuminate the biographical background of the members of this group and their motives in which patriotic and socialist ideals merged. In its complexities, the history of the  Rote Kapelle reveals facets of German antifascism that have been excluded from memory. P.S. Dert agent Alexander Korotkov ("Erdberg") (mentioned p. 8) was most likely an emissary from the Soviet military intelligence GRU (not from the NKVD). Trepper´s group in Brussels also belonged to a net set up by the GRU.

This piece consists of two parts and deals with three German East Asia experts that cooperated more or less with the National-Socialist regime during the 1930s: Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Hack, Prof. Dr. Karl Haushofer and Dr. Hermann von Raumer. Here, your find part one.

The purpose of this essay is to reconstruct the comics controversy in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, paying special attention to the debate over effects, which was paramount. A guiding principle of this investigation is to relate the arguments of the comics debate to a broader political, social, and cultural context. The main source of information are selected articles published in the German press at that time.

In the first half of 1944, tens of thousand Ukrainians left their country together with the withdrawing German occupiers in order to avoid confrontation with the approaching Red Army and the Soviet authorities. Between the summer of 1941 and their time of departure, all of these Ukrainians had had some kind of experience with the Holocaust, either as observers, as rescuers or as perpetrators. In the second half of the 1940s they were relocated from DP camps to various western countries such as Australia, Canada, the USA and the United Kingdom, while some remained in West Germany and Austria. In their newspapers and numerous memoirs they frequently described and discussed the Second World War, but they either did not mention the Holocaust at all or portrayed it as a crime committed only by the Nazis and a small group of unpatriotic Ukrainians. The participation of the Ukrainian police, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and various types of ordinary local Ukrainians did not appear in these memoirs and historical discourses. On the contrary, some of these actors, in particular the members of the OUN and the partisans of the UPA, were commemorated as freedom fighters and national heroes. Concentrating on western Ukraine, this article explores how, during the Cold War, the Ukrainian Diaspora forgot the annihilation of the Jews, turned Holocaust perpetrators and war criminals into heroes of Ukraine, and argued that survivors from eastern Galicia and Volhynia, who mentioned Ukrainians as perpetrators, were Soviet propagandists and Jewish chauvinists.

The author Julia Warth was awarded the Gerhard-Ritter-Preis for her biography of Walther von Seydlitz-Kurtzbach. Taken prisoner after surrendering in Stalingrad, the general, descended from a famous military family, came forward as the leader of the "Bund Deutscher Offiziere" and vice-president of the "Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland"  founded in September resp. July 1943 in the POW camp Lunyovo near Moscow. Aside from certain unsubstantiated value judgements concerning Seydlitz´ patriotic motives this detailed biography conveys an objective portrait of the ill-fated Prussian-German officer who fell out with Hitler when attemtping to save his country from total demise.

Es war wie das gleichsam letzte Aufflackern des "roten Jahrzehnts" der 1970er Jahre, als in den Jahren 1983 und 1984, vor nun einem Vierteljahrhundert, zwei Aufsatz-Bände des politischen Psychologen und Theoretikers Peter Brückner im Westberliner Wagenbach-Verlag erschienen. Die dort versammelten Aufsätze und Artikel bilden einen nicht unwesentlichen Teil des denkerischen Nachlasses des 1982, kurz vor seinem 60.Geburtstag viel zu früh verstorbenen Vordenker der westdeutschen Neuen Linken.

Ernst Bloch-ist das nicht der linke Philosoph mit der Pfeife und dem »Prinzip Hoffnung«? Das dürfte-jenseits der kleinen, aber eingeschworenen Bloch-Forscher und-Anhänger, die sich weitgehend abseits von der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit austauschen-das erste und wahrscheinlich auch einzige Bild sein, das sich die meisten Menschen machen, die seinen Namen nicht mit dem erfolgreichen Fernsehkommissar Bloch verwechseln. Auch hier gilt noch immer das bekannte Diktum Hegels, dass, was bekannt, zumeist noch nicht erkannt ist.

This article introduces the Völkerpsychologie of the German psychologist and liberal politician Willy Hellpach. It shows how Hellpach used the once venerable approach of Völkerpsychologie, introduced by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the nineteenth century, to adapt to the Third Reich and distract the authorities from his political career. The article provides a close reading of Hellpach's main text on the subject, the Einführung in die Völkerpsychologie published in 1938, and explains the ease with which he was able to make this approach compatible with Nazi ideology. Hellpach's case thus illustrates the proximity of national-liberal thinking to ‘Nazi ideology’. Moreover, on account of the post-war reception of Hellpach's Völkerpsychologie by scholars such as Ralf Dahrendorf, the article examines the uneasy and incomplete repudiation of Völkerpsychologie after 1945. It concludes that the origins of widely used concepts such as ‘national habitus’ or ‘national identity’ can be traced back to the tradition of Völkerpsychologie and related studies of national character.

This article is devoted to Birth Anniversary of Kurt Knispel, the highest scoring tank ace of World War II with a total of 168 confirmed tank kills. He was born in Salisfeld (Salisov) near the town of Zuckmantel (Zlaté Hory) in Sudetenland (now Jesenicko District, Land of Silesia, Czech Republic).

Die Grenzlanduniversität Kiel gilt als nationalsozialistische Musterhochschule, an der der Parteiwille regierte und die Professoren und Studierenden dem NS-Regime zuarbeiteten. Doch ausgerechnet zu den studentischen Funktionären des Studentenbundes existiert bislang keine eigenständige Untersuchung. Erstmalig wird daher das jungakademische »Führerkorps am Beispiel der Kieler Universität vor dem Hintergrund einer Politkarriere« betrachtet.

Die Studie widmet sich auf breiter Quellen- und Literaturbasis den spannungsreichen, von Kooperation wie Konfrontation geprägten Beziehungen zwischen dem studentischen Funktionärskorps, den Hochschulbehörden und den nationalsozialistischen Staats- und Parteistellen im Zeitraum von 1927 bis 1945 – einer Zeit gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche und zahlreicher politischer Konflikte.

After World War II the victorious United States and Great Britain sought to demobilize their armed forces but soon realized they had too little manpower left not only to do important jobs but also to guard prisoners of war and war criminals. For this reason service units made up of soldiers of Polish descent were formed to carry out precisely these tasks. But soon after the army ran out of Polish-origin soldiers attention turned to refugees from the Baltic States. Former officers of the Lithuanian Army began to command these services; in this way they could apply their professional knowledge, partially rehabilitate themselves for having left their homeland, and improve their own and their men’s material conditions. Service in these units allowed them both to preserve their Lithuanianness and to gain familiarity with Anglo-Saxon culture. This helped them with their social and professional integration when later most of these service members and their commanding officers emigrated to the United States and other English-speaking countries. Although there were plans to reconstitute these units into a Lithuanian army in exile, they never became reality. Still, the Lithuanians who served in them left a favorable impression and thereby contributed to defeating negative stereotypes about the Balts. High-ranking U. S. and British officers described these Lithuanian soldiers in the best of terms; and the trust of the former in the latter is reflected in the fact that the Lithuanians were entrusted with such important duties as guarding Nazi criminals at Nuremberg and serving during the Berlin blockade, a service which earned them the accolade of “a job well done”.

Für Amerikaner und Westeuropäer war der Kalte Krieg nur am Rande ein bewaffneter Konflikt und mehr als eine reine Auseinandersetzung zwischen den zwei großen Ideologien Kommunismus und liberaler Kapitalismus. Er beeinflusste Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft und Kultur in den westlichen Staaten in ganz erheblichem Maße: Der Rüstungswettlauf war einerseits Projektionsfläche tiefgreifender Ängste vor einem atomaren Holocaust. Andererseits sollte diese Angst durch Planung und Verwissenschaftlichung in kollektive Sicherheit transformiert werden. In diesem Sinne versteht der vorliegende Band den Kalten Krieg als ‚Krieg der Imaginationen‘ (Mary Kaldor). Er führt Beiträge von Militär-, Sozial- und Ideenhistorikern in einer sozialen Ideengeschichte zusammen und bereichert unser Wissen über eines der am tiefsten einschneidenden Phänomene des 20. Jahrhunderts um wichtige, bislang aber vernachlässigte Facetten.

Die jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in der Weimarer Republik entwickelte sich in besonderem Maße wegen der Fürsorgefragen von osteuropäischen jüdischen Migranten und Flüchtlingen von einer traditionellen sozialen Fürsorgearbeit, die auf „schnelle Hilfe“ und die zügige Wiederherstellung der Eigenverantwortlichkeit von Personen abzielte, auch zu einer Sozialpolitik, die sich gegen die antisemitische Migrationspolitik der Reichs- und Landesregierungen stellte. Eine erfolgreiche Politik der Produktivierung, der Integration möglichst vieler jüdischer Arbeiter und Migranten war das wichtigste Ziel der jüdischen Sozialpolitik zu Beginn der 20er Jahre in Deutschland.

A History of World Egyptology is a ground-breaking reference work that traces the study of ancient Egypt. Spanning 150 years and global in purview, it enlarges our understanding of how and why people have looked, and continue to look, into humankind's distant past through the lens of the enduring allure of ancient Egypt. Written by an international team of scholars, the volume investigates how territories around the world have engaged with and have been inspired by Egyptology, and how that engagement has evolved over time. Each chapter presents a specific territory from an institutional and national perspective, while examining a range of transnational links as well. The volume thus touches on multiple strands of scholarship, embracing not only Egyptology, but also social history, the history of science and reception studies. It will appeal to amateurs and professionals alike.

The domination of twentieth century history by World War Two and its aftermath are still heavily analysed and debated today. Despite this vast amount of research, little has been written about the emotional effects and the subjective experience of the Germans during and postwar. Every aspect of peoples’ lives was effected, thus creating a wealth of memory which can be used to analyse the emotional consequences of the war on the individual and on society. This piece of work looks at three main elements of postwar reaction and memory. 1.) The war’s impact on gender relations and the family unit 2.) Ideological warfare, the return of soldiers, and the idea of victimhood 3.) The destruction of towns and cities and the subsequent impact on concepts of history and nationhood.

Peeling the Onion. A Look Backwards on National Bolshevism in the 1900s.
This article aims at analyzing the problematic trajectory of National Bolshevism, an “oxymoronic” provocative political concept, born and developed throughout the Twentieth Century. Such concept appears
in several different contexts, employed more or less legitimately. This article will attempt to outline a kind of conceptual mapping, located in clear historical as well as geographic coordinates (Germany, France, Soviet Union, Russia and some short mentions to Italy) through an
accurate historiographical overview and an extensive examination of the press of that period. This mapping will identify some of the circumstances, in which the National Bolshevik thought emerges as a part of the broader history of exchanges and intertwining between the ideas of Socialism and Nation.