German History Research Articles

Influence of Fedor Dostoevsky on Anna Seghers’ Novel “Dead Stay Young”

This article examines the literary connections between Anna Seghers’ “The Dead Stay Young” and Fedor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” It is established that Dostoevsky’s works provoke both positive and negative characters in Seghers’ narrative to engage in profound reflections, thereby reshaping their worldview. Similarities are identified between the characters Ernst von Liven and Ivan Karamazov, including their education, disdain for humanity, demonic traits, and the promotion of the idea of moral permissiveness. The evolution of Ivan’s story unfolds within the context of his family’s history, while Liven’s narrative is set against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism in early 20th-century Germany. Whereas the Russian character is marked by constant reflection on fundamental existential questions, the German protagonist exhibits a demeanor of self-satisfaction and a pursuit of personal gain. Ivan is capable of internal moral judgment, while Liven is devoid of remorse. The character from the Russian classic is ambivalent, whereas Seghers’ character is unequivocally negative. Seghers aligns with Dostoevsky’s idea that individuals must face consequences for their wrongdoings. She engages with Dostoevsky’s traditions concerning moral issues, which are reflected on both character and thematic levels in her novel, while simultaneously maintaining her unique artistic approach as a critic of Nazi ideology and its adherents.

The Elusive Borders of Regional Feeling: Re-Imagining the Federalist Map in Early West Germany

While a rich body of work on nations and national borderlands has demonstrated how the ideal of the nation state resulted in ever greater (and often violent) demands for geographic fixity, this article shows how territorial visions of regional communities permitted a tremendous level of flexibility and were able to hold highly divergent geographic imaginings in suspension. The article seeks to demonstrate this by looking at a unique moment in post-war West German history when spatial planers, parliamentary committees, regionalists and an army of experts sought to determine the boundaries of regional belonging in preparation for a planned redrawing of the West German federal map. Many believed that a viable federalist democracy required stronger federal states rooted in a sense of regional community. The states created by the Allies were initially seen as temporary, and Article 29 of the new constitution required that states be redrawn by considering boundaries of regional belonging. The intense efforts of experts, politicians, and regionalists, however, ultimately failed and revealed widely diverging ideas about which territories corresponded to a common sense of regional community. Conflicting historic state borders, the historic force of physical geographies, confession, orientation to urban centres, a profusion of dialect borders, and regional cultural practices all shaped geographic visions of region, but simultaneously underpinned widely-variant cognitive maps. While the failure to redraw the West German map resulted in this episode of history largely being forgotten, I argue that it speaks volumes about how forms of community beyond and beneath the nation state have been imagined in territorial space.

Addressing diversity: An analysis of German curricula for history

AbstractThis article analyses the extent to which German history curricula address aspects of diversity. The curricula are analysed in terms of whether they include diagnostic phases to identify students' individual interests. It also examines whether the historical experiences of minorities and the agency of subaltern groups are addressed. The extent to which the curricula abandon a Eurocentric perspective and integrate global historical aspects will also be considered. Methodologically, the curricula of two main school types in all German states were analysed by means of a qualitative content analysis. The focus was on curricula for lower and upper secondary schools. The results show that diversity is usually addressed only from the perspective of established narratives. A national and Eurocentric history continues to dominate the curricula. Only a few curricula explicitly address the diagnosis of students' performance and ideas. Finally, the paper discusses the evolving nature of curricula, influenced by societal needs and growing sensitivity to social diversity. It highlights the need for future research on diversity in teacher education and the practicality of implementing complex concepts such as postcolonial thought in the classroom. More empirical research is needed on current curricula and the teaching of history in different regions and types of school.

David Kahn, in remembrance: an INS special forum

ABSTRACT David Kahn was one of America’s leading experts on the history of cryptology, the art and science of breaking the communications codes, ciphers, and secret writing of hostile nations and terrorist organizations – a vital intelligence tradecraft for anticipating potentially dangerous operations of foreign adversaries. As both a journalist and a professional historian, he pursued scholarly interests in cryptology as well as modern German history. His most well-known book, entitled The Codebreakers, influenced the field of cryptology and attracted many young readers to this intelligence profession. Kahn wrote many other studies on the topic and founded the journal Cryptologia. He received an array of honors for his work, including induction into the National Security Agency’s Cryptologic Hall of Fame. In addition, Kahn was a popular social fixture at prestigious clubs in New York City and a member of several boards of editors devoted to Intelligence Studies, including this journal.

West German historiography of the German Empire as an example of the implementation of historical policy

Analysis of the historiography of a particular historical period or problem allows one to say a lot not only about the topic of research, but also about the academic and political situation in which the works were prepared and published. For example, the tradition of studying the political history of Germany during the imperial period that emerged in Germany. The natural choice of topics on which most works concentrate (constitutional history, biography, history of political parties, parliamentarism, problems of authoritarianism and the theory of modernization) almost always concern the history of the German Empire, both by the majority, namely representatives of the Bielefeld school of social history and by their opponents, from the point of view of the collapse of the Empire in 1918. In the imperial period, there are tendencies, institutions, drivers that can be identified, the presence or absence of which predetermined the collapse of the Empire, made it natural and inevitable. The theory of the Sonderwegthese of German history initially interprets the “German case” as completely separate, standing apart from other states, both “progressive” Western and “backward” Eastern. This peculiarity and predetermination of the end, responsibility for which in various works is assigned to different, but always “conservative” forces, i.e. the monarchy, Wilhelm’s personal regime, the Junkers, Prussia, the Bundesrat, Catholics, etc., form the idea of the empire as anti-democratic in its nature, the tasks of which are hostile to the national and liberal movements, progressive at their core. This perception of their own past, which had a decisive influence on the historical consciousness of the Germans, became one of the factors of their deep understanding of the Anglo-American civilization as a standard one, and of their own history as something that must be overcome and not be repeated.

Georgia“S European Choice: 1918-1919 Publications Of The ,,Republic Of Georgia” Newspaper For The Relations Between The First Democratic Republic Of Georgia And Germany

Georgian-German relations hold particular relevance today, especially considering Germany's position as a prominent member of the Big Seven and traditional Europe. While Germany's history includes aspirations for hegemony during the First and Second World Wars, Georgia maintained a largely positive attitude toward Germany, particularly during the period of our interest. We must contemplate what might have changed for our country if the German side had emerged victorious. Could it have spared us from the events of February 25, 1921? Was Germany a colonizer cloaked in charming European attire? An examination of these factors, we believe, is both intriguing and vital. The Georgian press meticulously monitored ongoing developments in Germany, as well as Germany's political stance toward our nation. It conveyed its sentiments and devoted considerable space to several relevant events. It's worth noting that the Georgian intelligentsia held a deep appreciation for German culture, diligently reporting to the German press, and closely tracking its global political involvement. In our study, we aim to address these pivotal questions. By employing thematic analysis of articles published in the government newspaper "Republic of Georgia" from 1918 to 1919 and reviewing the relevant literature on this topic, we seek to shed light on this important historical perspective.

Acts of Providence: The religious latency surrounding and shaping Marbury v. Madison and the Status-Denkschrift

Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended that “like the Bible, [the Constitution] ought to be read again and again.” Gustav Heinemann portrayed the Grundgesetz as a “great offering,” whose words must become flesh. Nevertheless, does this have any bearing on constitutional adjudication? Although presidents didn’t – and more and more don’t – shy about handling their respective constitutions as bibles, have justices and constitutional scholars proceeded otherwise? Common wisdom may answer yes, they did. The aim of my study is to show that this not quite the case. I pursue it in reference to two, leading liberal democratic constitutional courts, the US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court. This happens in three parts: (1) I will engage with court architecture, understood as a testimony to each institution’s articulation for self-justification and self-empowerment; (2) the semantic consecration of constitutional adjudication especially vis-à-vis politics, as it took place in the struggles over what was implied by the innovations pushed forward in the contexts of Marbury v. Madison, on the one hand, and of the German Constitutional Court’s Status-Denkschrift, on the other; (3) and legal-methodological debates on the relationship between the Christian Bible and constitutional provisions that run in parallel and connection to these two landmark events. My findings point out that, in face of how disruptive the differentiation between law and politics was and is, constitutional actors in 19th century United States and 20th century Germany frequently, if not invariably, relied upon religious resources to embed their positions.

‘Sattelzeit’: the invention of ‘premodern history’ in the 1970s

ABSTRACT In her historicisation of the concept of the ‘Sattelzeit,’ Julia Angster argues that the term does not represent a meaningful definition of a specific historical epoch. Instead, it serves as source material for analysing the notions of West German historians during the 1970s. Although their conception of the ‘Sattelzeit’ built on the work of R. Koselleck, it simplifies his concept by transforming an analytical tool of conceptual history into a starting point for social history. It enabled the conception of the Western world, understood as the epitome of ‘modernity’, as a counterpart to a non-modern other. This, in turn, was influenced by modernisation theories developed by US sociology in the 1950s, ultimately aimed at guiding US policies in the ‘development’ of the ‘Third World’. Modernity thus became a political goal and a result of economic development, to be perceived in the European past as well as in the present of the ‘developing world’. In the 1970s, this understanding of ‘modernity’ was crucial for West German historiography and politics, both trying to inscribe themselves into the modern world of the West.

FEATURES OF ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF GENERAL EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE HISTORICAL EXAMPLE OF GERMAN ARCHITECTURE

Throughout his life, a person goes through a long and thorny path, forming skills, and discovering consciousness. With the temporary human need for education in educational institutions, however, it should be noted that people have knowledge and awareness and education in educational institutions, at the expense of individual education. In this article, we analyzed how the social aspect influenced the architectural planning methods of comprehensive schools in 19th-century Germany. The main reason for the emergence of international school standards was the new initiatives in the design of school buildings that began in the 19th century. In the article, we determined the theoretical model of school buildings, taking into account the features of each period.

Гуманитарные и социальные науки: теоретико-познавательные основания

Scientific natural science, which had been established in European culture since the mid-17th century, began to transmit samples of scientific knowledge into the field of studying social reality. Until the 19th century, the only mental form of reflecting this reality was “primary history,” as Hegel defined it, i.e. tradition of historiography coming from Herodotus. This tradition received its design, oriented towards the field of scientific rationality, from the German historian Leopold von Ranke: to show “how it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). Its social function is the formation of national historical memory. But methodological reflection at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries revealed, as it seemed to it, two radical differences between “primary history” and other “sciences of culture” from natural science. In this regard, the categories of “values” and “understanding” were emphasized. The presence of these categories in the foundations of any science determines its specification as a humanitarian science. The first attempts to transfer certain aspects of the disciplinary matrices of natural science to the sphere of social science are associated with the names of Kant and Marx. Both attempts were unsuccessful. But, unlike Kant’s, the “materialist understanding of history” found its supporters and successors. Its main error is the unlawful direct transfer of the semantic content of the category “matter”, as it developed in natural science (the relationships of things), to the relationships between people endowed with consciousness. The addressee of social sciences are cultural forms, the existence of which has an objective status of existence, but relative to the individual consciousness of acting people. These are, for example, social institutions. The humanities deal with meanings, the existence of which is determined by systems of social communications.

Anna Katharina Emmerich and the Impacts of Catholic Romanticism in 19th-Century Germany

Anna Katharina Emmerich and the Impacts of Catholic Romanticism in 19th-Century Germany

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Stripping the Veil. Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth-Century Germany. (Studies in German History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Stripping the Veil. Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth-Century Germany. (Studies in German History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

The loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene in the context of the hypothesised Central European convergence area

Summary One of the salient morphosyntactic features of the hypothesised Central European convergence area is allegedly a simple three-tense verb system (i. e. past, present, and future) without any formal and semantic distinction between the different past tense forms. The simplification of the originally more complex past tense system has been claimed to be contact-induced, which is mirrored in the loss of synthetic past tense forms in the linguistic history of German and Slavic. The article verifies the hypothesis according to which the loss of the preterit (i. e. a synthetic past tense form) in Upper German caused the disappearance of synthetic past tense forms, i. e. the aorist and the imperfect, in Slavic, more specifically Slovene. First, the process of the loss of the aorist and the imperfect in three medieval Slovene texts is presented, viz. the Freising Fragments (c. 972–1039), the Klagenfurt/Celovec or Rateče Manuscript (2nd half of the 14th century), and the Castelmonte/Stara Gora Manuscript (end of the 15th century). Second, the use of the preterit and the perfect in the Early New High German text Ain newes lied von den kraynneriſchen bauren (c. 1515) from the South Bavarian-Austrian speech territory, more precisely Lower Styria, is analysed. The historical linguistic analysis of the cited Slovene and German linguistic material (the latter originating from the Slovene linguistic area as well) shows that in medieval Slovene the aorist (and most probably the imperfect, too) was lost no later than by the end of the 15th century, while the formal and semantic distinction between the preterit on one hand and the perfect on the other is still preserved in Early New High German documented in the “Slovene-speaking lands” in the second decade of the 16th century. From these facts one cannot but conclude that the loss of synthetic past tense forms in Slovene could not have been influenced by (the demonstrably later) loss of the preterit in South Bavarian-Austrian German dialects, which were historically (and in some regions still are) in geographical and, consequently, sociolinguistic contact with Slovene.

Reinhart Koselleck’s Personal Sluices of Memory and Sediments of Experience

The article analyses selected aspects of the biography of Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), a German historian and theoretician of history. In particular, it brings to the fore significant traces of the Second World War experiences of the author of Kritik und Krise. Further, it looks at their influence on Koselleck’s critical approach to the concept of collective memory and on the anti-utopian thrust of his historical theory.

Distance Education During a Paper Shortage

This article examines letters and study guides sent by philosophical faculties of Nazi universities to soldiers enrolled in correspondence courses during World War II. These educational media were produced during a severe paper shortage brought about by autarky and the wartime Nazi economy. I consider the conditions surrounding paper production and soldiers’ learning materials to depict how the media circulating between universities and the front demonstrate evidence of material scarcity and economic exploitation. The brevity of the messages indicates that these media had been adapted to the material economy of the war and a scarcity of time. As I show, knowledge of the humanities was brought to the front via these media; at the same time, knowledge of an ideology was created that integrates the extraction of resources from a war of conquest into a version of German history—resources that were also required to maintain distance learning itself. The article contributes most directly to studies on the media and material practices of academic teaching and to the history of science and scholarship in the Nazi era. It also builds on recent studies on how the work of the sciences and humanities are reliant on supplies of natural resources.

Linguistic representation of the concept BERLIN WALL in German eonyms

The article is devoted to the study of linguistic representation of the concept BERLIN WALL in modern German. The main goal of the article is to identify and describe eonyms (key words of the epoch) that preserve the historical memory of the Berlin Wall in modern German. The material of the study was eonyms selected from the rating lists of the linguistic action of the German Language Society (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache e. V.) «Word of the Year» for the period from 1978 to 2020, verbalizing the concept BERLIN WALL. The application of comparative-historical and descriptive methods made it possible to identify eonyms representing the result of linguistic reflection of the most important political phenomenon in modern German history. The article provides a linguocultural analysis of the selected eonyms in synchronic and diachronic aspects. The author describes the influence of the BERLIN WALL concept on the perception of East and West German citizens of each other, analyses the linguistic reflection of changes in political and social life in Germany in the critical era after German reunification. The description of the socio-historical contexts of the emergence of eonyms as representatives of the BERLIN WALL concept allows us to characterise the existing linguistic stereotypes in the German language. The analysis highlights the eonyms and their derivatives, which appear with certain cyclicity, linking historical events with each other and characterising the dynamic development of society and language. The unfolding of the meanings projected in the eonyms allows us to identify the most significant historical events reflected in the concept of BERLIN WALL, to interpret the differences in communicative behaviour between the inhabitants of East and West Germany.

It’s All in the Backfill: Scrap Heaps, Explosives, and Nausea. Stirring the Soil of a Former WWII Military Base

ABSTRACT Within an archaeology of the contemporary, sites and material remains of the Second World War have in recent years been set more prominently on the agenda of European heritage archaeology. This article presents observations made during archaeological site monitoring of the conversion and remediation of a former WWII military base in Germany. In the course of the project, the sensitivity of the site and its find material against the backdrop of the German history of World War II had to be constantly assessed. Archaeological methods and practices had to be adapted to the specific requirements of the site. Conflicting agendas of various actors and stakeholders involved had to be evaluated, as well as the risks posed by the site’s contamination with unexploded ordnance. Indeed, the backdirt itself, just like the find material it contained, turned out to be a contested and hazardous entity.

CONSTRUCTION, DEMOLITION, EXTIRPATION? THE PALAST DER REPUBLIK AND THE CONFLICTING DESIRES OF GERMAN UNIFICATION

ABSTRACTOpened in 1976, East Berlin's Palast der Republik stood until its demolition in 2003 among and against the other buildings on Berlin's Museumsinsel. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the construction and demolition of the GDR's prestige construction and its storied location, now the site of the Stadtschloss and Humboldt Forum. This narrative analysis acknowledges recent vigorous debates concerning Germany's colonial history but focuses in particular on the East German past. In examining the iconoclastic impulse and the corresponding resistance to extirpation in the period since unification, the article questions the social power of the buildings at that site, their political symbolism and what the acts of demolition and reconstruction tell us about political desires and especially about Germany's unsteady handling of history since unification. Had the Palast remained, it is suggested, its awkward presence (whether as renovated structure or as ruin) might have better served the future as a reminder of uncomfortable pasts, a historical monument and a catalyst for ongoing, necessarily difficult discussions about history and heritage rather than an attempt to side‐step East German history.

Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)

Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)

The Contribution of the History of Concepts to the Critical Understanding of the State

The paper develops the problems of critical understanding of the phenomenon of the state. The author comprehends the contribution of the German history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) and the British Conceptual History to the critical understanding of the emergence of the state as a concept and social phenomenon in Modern times. Representatives of these lines of thought trace the appearance of the English State and the French État to the 17th century, the German Staat to the second half of the 18th century. Russian followers of these traditions explore the historical and ideological context of the emergence of the state in the 15th– 18th centuries. The researchers emphasize that in Germany the concept of the state is formed two centuries later than that in France, but it immediately becomes political and subordinates the rest of the meanings of the word, creating a theoretical basis for the development of state studies and public law, while the French état and English state in the meaning of the state have long been used in relation to non-state political and even nonpolitical phenomena. An important contribution of the history of concepts was the search for the ideological and social foundations of modern state legal terms and models — state sovereignty, citizenship, legal and social state, endowed with meaning primarily in the continental tradition. The author continues the study of the problems of critical understanding of the state, which began in the article «Critical Concepts of the State and their Significance for Russian Jurisprudence: Introduction to the Problem» (Lex russica. 2020;6:122-138).