Nostalgia and Propaganda in Picturebooks about German History

"In Germany the discussion [of immigration] is taking place between two extreme positions, one that denies Germany is de facto an immigration country...and one that compares Germany with traditional immigration societies like the United States, Canada, or Australia. As will be demonstrated, both arguments are too simplistic.... To illustrate the importance of migration movements for Germany's national fabric, first an overview of the history of pre- and postwar migrations and refugee movements as well as their effects on the domestic situation in Germany are presented. Next, the origins of the contradictory nature of the current asylum, citizenship and naturalization regulations and the need to redefine Germany's legal framework, immigration policy, and national identity after unification are discussed."

At the end of the sixteenth century, when the humanist and geographer Matthias Quad tried to find the boundaries for " Germany," he was forced to conclude that "there is no country in all of Christendom which embraces so many lands under one name." Two hundred years later, Goethe and Schiller wrote their famous epigram: " Germany? But where is it? I don't know how to find such a country." In 1832, Leopold von Ranke remained pessimistic that an answer to this question might easily be found:

In this article the author deals with dramatic art of West and East Germany in the first post-war years and studies the issue of fathers and sons in works “ The Man Outside” ( “Drausen vor der Tur”) by W. Borchert (1947, West Germany) and “Wie Tiere des Waldes” by F. Wolf (1948, East Germany). The main topic of both plays is the war issue, the motive of guilt and responsibility growing into a generation gap. The representatives of the younger generation try to find out how their “fathers” could let fascism and war happen, why the “children” who had gone to war were forced to kill and to be killed. In the setting of the main conflict the one with authorities and God in both plays arises, there is an issue of depreciation of human life, a madness issue. As a result of comparison of plays the author comes to a conclusion that despite the common topic and the main conflict of plays the resolution becomes different. The play of East German F. Wolf has a more optimistic nature. The total hopelessness of a situation is observed in the work of Borchert. It is probably connected with the fact that optimism and belief in better future were important components of the socialist ideology and the principle of a socialist realism dominating in East Germany.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the ways in which contemporary Germans engage in diverse artistic and social forms of Holocaust memory work today that repudiate the ethos of silence and forgetting that dominated the post-war decades. The examples considered include W.G. Sebald's hybrid novel Austerlitz, Gunter Demnig's ‘stumbling stones’ action art project, and the installation ‘We Were Neighbors’ in the Berlin-Schöneberg town hall. These examples employ narrative as a way of opening up channels for the belated process of mourning; they engage their work through ‘Spurensuche’, that is, the process of searching for the traces of evidence of National Socialist crimes that were covered up and forgotten; and they confront critically the repression of memory of the National Socialist crimes in the post-war years.

Ever since the First World War, but especially during the Weimar period, Bismarck's dismissal has exercised a strong attraction on German historians, and has probably received more attention than any other event in the history of the Second Reich. In the troubled post-war years, 20 March 1890 seemed to stand out prominently as the fateful turning point of Germany's history. Wilhelm Schvissler, the first to exploit the unprecedented wealth of evidence available in consequence of the monarchy's collapse, did not hesitate to claim that ‘even at that time [1890] the downfall (Untergang) of the German Reich was written in the stars’. ‘Who would doubt’, he asked, ‘that our misfortune began there…and led to the catastrophe of the Imperial Monarchy and the German Reich—exactly 20 years after his [Bismarck's] death!’ This highly emotional approach to the subject was fully shared by Wilhelm Mommsen, whose standard work on the role of the political parties in the crisis appeared in 1924. Bismarck's fall, he wrote, ‘appears to us today as a turning point of German history, and it is only with deep feeling that we can recall the events of March 1890’. It is perhaps partly for this reason that these early writers tended to misinterpret the nature of Bismarck's relations with the parties in the crucial months before his fall. There was, for one thing, an inclination to idealize the bygone age in which ‘the State’ was thought to have stood incorruptibly ‘above the parties’, and as a result the party struggles of 1889 and 1890 were relegated to a self-contained compartment whence, it was held, they were able to influence the course of events only in the negative sense of providing no obstacle to the chancellor's dismissal. The influential work of Hans Rothfels probably typified this attitude, but even Mommsen warned his readers that his study of the parties could throw at best an oblique light on the crisis ‘since the parties had no direct and at any rate no significant effect on the course of those events’. According to Hans Herzfeld's summary of the present state of knowledge on the subject, this view is still widely accepted today.

Narrating Crisis and Continuity in Migration Debates in the Visegrád States

Reviewed by: Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 Donald Loffredo Lerner, Paul. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. xi + 326 pp. In his new book, Hysterical Men, Paul Lerner painstakingly chronicles the histories of trauma and male hysteria in German Society and the efforts of German Psychiatry and the German State to deal with both. Beginning with the industrial accidents of the 1880s, Lerner carefully reconstructs the evolution of male hysteria as a recognized psychiatric problem and the treatment systems designed to deal with it, particularly during and immediately after World War I. In this volume, Lerner manages to touch on the cultural history as well as the medical history of this important time in German History and presents both in an effective way. Lerner’s work provides an interesting and important link between the events of World War I and the emergence of the extreme German right-wing politics that ultimately led to the establishment of the Third Reich. One clearly gets a sense from Lerner’s work of the almost antiseptic way the German State dealt with its traumatized soldiers and its focus and concern more on pension policy than on the well-being of these broken men. Although some of the individuals seeking war-related pensions after World War I may have been malingering, most likely were not. Coupled with the draconian measures of the Versailles Treaty, it is not surprising that many traumatized returning soldiers identified with extreme right-wing accusations of “being stabbed in the back” by those running the German State. As Lerner points out, relations between mental health practitioners and traumatized patients deteriorated during the postwar years so much so that many doctors feared for their lives. According to Lerner, “many patients who were examined for war-related nervous or mental disorders complained that doctors harassed them, suspected them of political subversion and cast aspirations on their patriotism” (219). Given the plight of the German State after defeat, the Versailles Treaty, and the depletion of its financial resources, it seems clear after reading Lerner’s book why Germany may have focused more on the financial instead of the emotional costs of the war and in doing so failed to realize some of the terrible consequences that would follow. By initially presenting the state of German psychiatry at the beginning of the text, Lerner gives the reader the opportunity to see and understand the series of events that culminated in its failure to adequately serve the unprecedented number of damaged souls returning from the war. The plight of these individuals and that of German Psychiatry and the German State seems more clearly entwined and thus more sympathetic since the reader is presented with the larger issues. The middle chapters of Hysterical Men focus on the treatment systems developed to treat the traumatized and indicate some of the insensitivity of those who were supposed to heal. The detail of many of the treatments used is interesting and revealing. The concluding chapters of Hysterical Men are particularly illuminating in that they clearly reveal some of the terrible human and political costs of World War I and the inability of the Weimar Republic to deal with the despair, devastation, and sense of betrayal many traumatized soldiers must have experienced by a seemingly uncaring medical and political establishment. [End Page 307] Readers who are familiar or interested in history of the first half of the twentieth century will find Lerner’s book a useful contribution to understanding how World War I and the way it was unsuccessful resolved likely contributed to the extreme right-wing German politics that led to World War II. The scholarship that went into this book is laudable. The entire history presented is superbly researched and documented. Lerner’s Hysterical Men is likely to be an important contribution in understanding a tragic time in human history. Donald Loffredo University of Houston-Victoria Copyright © 2004 symploke

CALDWELL, Peter C., and Karrin HANSHEW – Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. 366. Writing a survey of a nation’s history is an immense task. Writing a comparative historical survey of a divided nation is exponentially more difficult. In their history of Germany since 1945, Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew succeed in their effort of bringing together the divergent histories of postwar Germany, weaving a narrative that is approachable and informed. In the introduction, Caldwell and Hanshew trace the events that led to Germany’s division, from the rise of German nationalism in the nineteenth century to the defeat of the Third Reich. The authors end the introduction by presenting German post-1945 historiographical perspectives, intended as a tool for the reader to use while engaging with the book’s contents. The book is divided into three parts: “Divided Germany, 1945-70,” “New beginnings, 1969-92,” and “The Berlin Republic, 1990-2017.” Along with the core text, the authors provide a number of primary sources and eyewitness accounts in separate text boxes throughout the book, which enhances the authors’ narrative. Each chapter is equipped with a short bibliography. These mostly include monographs, but also memoirs and works of fiction by authors such as Günter Grass and Christa Wolf, giving the more curious of readers a broad selection of further readings. The first part of the book comprises the first 25 years of the two newly formed German states, ending with the social changes that occurred in the second half of the 1960s. Caldwell and Hanshew’s focus here on the creation of two separate Germanies is justified. The early postwar years were marked by Allied pressure and top-down decision-making, such as the introduction of the Basic Law in the West and the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the East. By the 1950s, the two Germanies⎯the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)⎯were experiencing colossal and different changes. West Germany’s economic boom of the postwar years, which ushered in a period of stability and prosperity, is discussed in detail here. The authors give a nuanced account, juxtaposing the creation of a social market economy⎯sanctioned by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and shepherded by the finance minister Ludwig Erhard⎯with less than noble practices that also facilitated it. One example given was the exploitation of ethnic German expellees from eastern Europe, who provided a pool of cheap labour, thereby lowering wages and undermining the unions’ power. The authors argue that this is indicative of a number of other “‘hidden’ sources of West Germany’s economic miracle” (p. 64), also pointing out the importance of women in German reconstruction, beyond the mythical “rubble women” that helped clear the debris after the Second World War. The postwar changes in East Germany reached even further. The uprising on June 17, 1953 and the subsequent violent crackdown by Soviet forces exposed the SED’s lack of legitimacy, while reinforcing Moscow’s willingness to prop up the East German regime. The second Berlin Crisis (1958-1962) marked another watershed moment for East Germany. While the crisis certainly represented the absolute moral bankruptcy of the East German leadership, its end also marked the beginning of the GDR’s most stable period, comprising relatively strong economic growth and a flourishing culture. But the authors contextualize this period: neither was the East German economy superior to the West, nor did East German artists and writers enjoy the same freedoms as their counterparts in the West. Similarly, the economic miracle years in the West were not devoid of dissent. The student protests and the countercultural movement that culminated in 1967 with the murder of student Benno Ohnesorg are also discussed in detail. The main point of contention for the West German youth was the older generations’⎯and to a large extent the government’s⎯refusal to effectively deal with the country’s Nazi past. The second part of the book focuses on the transition from the era dominated by the governments of Willy Brandt and Erich Honecker of the early 1970s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent...

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the selfbecameimportant for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions.

Refugee movements constitute one of the most important and difficult problems facing the international community in the post–Cold War era. During the last decade, the forced mass movement of people across international boundaries has appeared with increasing frequency on the agendas of international affairs. It is now clear that we are living in an era in which fundamental political and economic changes in the international system result in large-scale movements of people. It is also a time when mass migrations themselves affect political, economic, and strategic developments worldwide. Indeed, it was the outpouring of refugees from East to West Germany in late 1989 that brought down the Berlin Wall, led to the unification of the two Germanies, and generated the most significant transformation in international relations since World War II. Two years later, in the first major post–Cold War refugee crisis, the huge buildup of Iraqi Kurds at the Turkish and Iranian borders constituted such a serious threat to international security that the UN Security Council authorized an international intervention in the domestic affairs of a member state. In 1992, the Security Council approved a United States–led intervention in Somalia to provide humanitarian relief to starving civilians caught in interclan warfare.

Beyond National Socialism? S. Jonathan Wiesen and Geoff Eley When Sabine Hake suggested that someone address the theme “Beyond National Socialism,” we volunteered with alacrity. We did so, however, not to defend its underlying assumption—that the Third Reich should now surrender its central place in German history—but to scrutinize it. As historians who have explored how Germans arrived at, experienced, and extracted themselves from this terrifying twelve-year period, we saw “Beyond Nazism” as a welcome provocation. Historians should always be testing the boundaries of their field; almost seventy years after the end of National Socialism, fresh perspectives might indeed complicate Nazi-centered narratives. And yet, the following essay takes a less revisionist tack. Is it even feasible in the first place to decenter National Socialism? If possible, would it be desirable? Putting a question mark at the end of our title implies no aversion to challenging scholarly norms. But what might we lose by pushing Nazism and the Holocaust prematurely toward the margins? Most commonly, “moving beyond” National Socialism bespeaks a cris de coeur, a wish among some Germans to rid themselves of the moral, political, and financial obligations attending historical memory. While some academics might share in this desire, worrying about Nazism, its place in German history, and the state of the field clearly has a scholarly purpose. In a 2011 German History forum, six noted scholars offered measured and thoughtful suggestions about how we can decenter Nazism and the Holocaust.1 By embedding the Third Reich within broader developments in the history of politics and culture and placing it in a global context, they assert, we can move the field into new directions no longer beholden to Nazism as their structuring theme. So far, so good. Yet the GH forum betrays a disquieting cynicism. By focusing our pedagogy and scholarship on the Third Reich, Germanists have been “indulging the public’s obsession,” “pandering” to students, and “fixating” on Nazism. Most provocatively, we continue to “genuflect” before the enormity of National Socialism “to keep our union cards.” On that basis, German historians would seem to be opportunists (we study the Third Reich because it sells) or cowards (we’re afraid not to study the period for fear of professional ostracism). While decidedly a caricature, [End Page 475] such hyperbole bespeaks real concerns. Why pay obeisance to increasingly barren scholarly conventions? “Are there empirical and ethical reasons,” asks Glenn Penny, “for moving on to new perspectives?”2 What would we lose morally, psychologically, and politically by such a shift? As most GSR readers would agree, the memory of Nazism has been crucial to the Federal Republic’s health over the last six decades; it binds the country to a parliamentary democracy that pays wrenching deference to the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s and to the goal of avoiding them in the future. If the Nazi past works as a “moral cudgel,” to use Martin Walser’s controversial phrase, it does so to the good of Germany and Europe more broadly. By holding Germany’s feet to the fire, as it were, historians continue to make vital contributions to sustaining democracy. The Third Reich is both a reminder of the potential for barbarism and an incitement to countervisions—of political and social pluralism and peaceful international relations. Even after the post-Holocaust genocides, Nazi crimes still form the main ground of this pedagogy; facing them sustains an optimism about learning from the knowledge that we gain. Pushing ourselves beyond National Socialism in those terms would mean ceding a perspective on the past that remains rife with meaning: about individual morality, political passion, hatred, cowardice, and courage. The philosophical, moral, and political legacies of National Socialism continue to haunt us. They will not easily be dismissed. And yet the critics have a point. As scholars we are obliged to seek new perspectives. Historians, of course, have been doing this for some time. Recently, German history has been considered “from the margins”—from the vantage point of those previously consigned to the social, cultural, and political peripheries: Jews, backwoods localities, German diasporas, particularists, women, immigrants, and Afro-Germans, to cite the inventory of one insightful collection.3 That perspective...

BOOK NOTICES 193 & Fodor, since, according to G, their theory has been particularly influential in psycholinguistics . Certain inadequacies with model-theoretic semantics are also pointed out, but it is not clear that they are inherent in this approach and could not be remedied by extending semantic and pragmatic theory within the model-theoretic framework. Since this thesis was published 6 years after it was written, a 20-page postscript has been added to cover recent theoretical and experimental work. There have been exciting developments in this area since 1981 . G discusses the work of Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Bonnie Lynn Webber, Hans Kamp, Irene Heim, Jon Barwise & John Perry, and Philip JohnsonLaird , all of which is consistent with the ideas advanced by G. Perhaps the biggest omission is a formally precise account of mental models, but the experimental evidence should prove revealing to anyone interested in discourse representation . [Alex Franz, University of Pittsburgh.] Untersuchungen zum Russisch-niederdeutschen Gesprächsbuch des Tönnies Fenne, Pskov 1607: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Sprachgeschichte. By an Autorenkollektiv under the direction of Hans Joachim Gernentz . Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1988. Pp. 267. DM 42.00. The facsimile copy of the unique manuscript of a Russian-Low German conversation manual by one Tönnies Fenne, a late Hanseatic merchant in Pskov during the Russian 'Time of Troubles', was published in Copenhagen, 1961, as a first volume under the title Tönnies Fenne's Low German manual ofspoken Russian, Pskov 1607, edited by L. L. Hammerich, Roman Jakobson , and others. A second volume. Transliteration and translation, was published in 1970. Projected third and fourth volumes, analyzing the manuscript's Russian and Low German language materials respectively, have not appeared. Since the appearance of Transliteration and translation, Soviet Slavicists especially have studied the (Old) Russian texts of Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual. Publication of studies dealing with the manual and its (Middle) Low German texts, however, was to await the volume under review here, representing the efforts of an author-collective made up of East German Germanists at the University of Rostock and Latvian Germanists at the University of Riga. It should be noted particularly that the subtitle of the volume reflects the author-collective 's view that its 'investigations' are a contribution to the history of (modern) German— that is, High German, not Low German. In the first chapter (13-86) Hans Joachim Gernentz, Tamara Korol, and Irmtraud Rosler locate Tönnies Fenne's conversation manual in both its textual tradition and its historical setting of Hanseatic-Russian trade. In the relatively short second chapter (87-103), Ilga Brizna compares the manual's Low German and Russian personal common names. The third chapter (105-237) comprises three separate studies: Christa Prowatke on the conversation manual's Low German vowel spellings (105-47); Christa Kopplow on the function and form of its Low German clauses (149-92); and Reinhold Tippe on the formation of its Low German complex substantive stems (193-237). In a completely unrelated appendix (239-52), Kira Kalnina discusses the phonological form and semantic sphere of Middle Low German loanwords in Lettish. A bibliography (253-67) follows the appendix. I have never understood the notion, shared by the author-collective of this volume, that the history of Low German is an integral part of the history of High German. To put it simple-mindedly and tautologically, the history of Low German is the history of Low German and the history of High German is the history of High German. [B. J. Koekkoek, State University of New York at Buffalo.] Understanding the lexicon: Meaning, sense and world knowledge in lexical semantics. Ed. by Werner Hüllen and Rainer Schulze. (Linguistische Arbeiten, 210.) Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1988. Pp. viii, 445. DM 158.00. This collection of 'thirty-three papers read at a symposium on problems of lexical semantics at the University of Essen from November 19 to 21, 1987 ... provides readers,' the editors believe , 'with a representative sample of current investigations into the field' (1). The list of contributors (444-5) suggests, however, some limits on representation. Though all the papers but ...

Throughout most of the twentieth century, international responses to refugee movements have been motivated by the political self-interest of states as well as by humanitarian interests. In the Nansen era, because refugees were seen as an irritant in interstate relations and as conflicting with the formation and consolidation of new states, governments established an international framework for regularizing the status and control of stateless people in Europe. In the post–World War II era, East–West ideological rivalry and geopolitical considerations provided a sufficient basis in self-interest for Western governments to fund and assist the emerging international refugee regime. The Cold War is finally over, and much has been said about the emergence of a new world order. Refugee movements played a key role both in bringing down the Berlin Wall, the most sinister symbol of the old era, and in ushering in the post–Cold War period by precipitating UN-approved intervention in the internal affairs of Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

The German education system has long been admired and, at times, envied by the rest of Europe, but the history of German educational development is a turbulent one. Concentrating on the post-war German scene, this timely book examines the interrelationship of educational and social developments in Germany from 1810 to the present day.Providing new insights into German history and challenging traditionally-held opinions about Germany, education and society, the author questions, for example, whether Germany's rapid industrial growth and economic success in the late nineteenth century were based upon its academic development, or the country's much less acclaimed training in crafts and vocational subjects. The rise of a new academic elite and its possible contribution both to the collapse of Germany's first democratic government and to the emergence of National Socialism are examined, as are the stagnation of the educational system in West Germany, which led to the student unrest of 1968, and the modern system introduced in East Germany under Soviet influence, which failed to be implemented in an open and democratic fashion.In considering the opportunities offered by re-unification and the effects of emerging reform movements, the author argues that Germany now seems to have reached a new impasse with overcrowded, under-resourced universities, a socially divisive school system and uncertainty as to how to meet the challenges of the next century. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume will make it essential reading for all those interested in German history and politics, comparative education and sociology and a core text for students.

There has been a long tradition in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic of receiving refugees. There were Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, Hungarians and Poles fleeing revolts in 1848-9, and those of Turkish descent and usually from the Balkans. Concurrent with this trend is the history of refugees and immigrants leaving Turkey, such as many Armenians, Greeks and Jews leaving at the turn of the century, and after 1923 and the Treaty of Lausanne. Little is currently published on the topic. This article defines a refugee; provides an overview of the refugee problems of the 1980's due to Bulgarian, Kurdish, and Turkish refugees; and the legal and political aspects. As a country of origin, there is discussion of the political and economic aspects of Turkish asylum seekers in Europe. The potential refugee flows to and from Turkey are also examined. I) For this study, refugees are victims of political violence and are persecuted for political or religious beliefs, ethnic or racial background, or war. In Turkey, there are national refugees, international refugees outside the Convention, and UNHCR Convention refugees. During the 1980's all 3 groups were arriving: from eastern Europe, Iranian Kurds, Iraqis, and ethnic Turks from Bulgaria and Afghanistan. The Turkish restricted acceptance of the 1951 Convention on Refugees creates serious humanitarian and security consequences for refugees other than those from eastern Europe and of Turkish ethnicity. Political considerations play an important role in treatment where security threats outweigh humanitarian need. The case is given for Kurdish refugees. II) Asylum seekers from Turkey in Western Europe was determined between 1986-90 to be 185,000 from applications. These figures have risen steadily due to the political instability and military activity of areas bordering Iraq and Syria, the Emergency Region. In addition there are economic and employment problems, and there has been a suspension of human rights. Europe in return has tightened legislation and procedures to differentiate economically motivated refugees from authentic political asylum seekers. Further research is needed to investigate refugee problems. Further refugees may come due to the promotion of a Black Sea Cooperation Region and easier crossings of borders to the former Soviet Republics. Ethnic Turks in Moldavia or Romania or Bulgaria may leave due to unrest. Factors affecting asylum seekers are improvements in Turkey's human rights record, repeal of bans of the Kurdish language, completion of the South Eastern Development Project, and the European government policy on asylum.