Beer Hall Research Articles

Injury potential of one-litre beer steins.

Injuries resulting from blows with beer steins are a frequent occurrence during annual autumn fairs or at beer halls in South Germany and Austria. The majority of these cases are tried in court and thus being assessed by a forensic medicine expert. The article at hand gives a short overview on the injury potential of one-litre beer steins and explains the key variables to consider when analyzing beer stein injuries. On the basis of representative cases, which were assessed by specialists from the Institute of Legal Medicine of the Munich University over the last 5years, the main biomechanical aspects and resulting injuries of one-litre beer stein assaults are discussed. Several severe and potentially life-threatening injuries have been observed after an assault with a one-litre beer stein. There is a discrepancy between the mechanical stability of brand new and used steins and the corresponding injuries, which can be explained by a decrease in impact tolerance of the steins with their use. In general, a blow with a one-litre glass or stonework beer stein to the head can cause severe and even life-threatening blunt as well as sharp trauma injuries.

Art at the Time of Turmoil: Max Beckmann.

Weimar Republic is the name applied to Germany as it emerged from World War I. The 1918 armistice amounted to Germany's defeat. The German emperor Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the Weimar Republic was proclaimed on November 9, 1918. A series of violent crises followed, and for a few years the country veered from one political extreme to another. On the one hand, a very short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic was declared in Munich in 1921; on the other hand, there was the unsuccessful so-called Beer Hall Putsch led by Hitler in 1923. In the background, there was economic collapse and extreme hyperinflation between 1920 and 1923. In 1920, the Nazi party emerged. Later, the Social Democrats managed to stabilize the politics somewhat. The economy also improved following the 1924 Dawes Plan, which involved American finance. Another financial rescue measure, the Young Plan, was negotiated in 1929 but the Wall Street Crash derailed it, profoundly affecting Germany. Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and the Nazis very quickly dismantled the Weimar democracy (1, 2). The relatively stable period from 1924 to 1929 is regarded as the golden era of the Weimar culture. There was a momentary flourishing of literature, cinema, theatre, music, and philosophy. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) developed phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who was influenced by Husserl, published his influential Being and Time in 1927, elaborating existentialism (3, 4). The Frankfurt School of Philosophy, founded in 1923 and influential to this day, originally centered around the Institute for …

ELITE POLITICS AND THE EMERGENCE OF BOKO HARAM INSURGENCY IN NIGERIA

Abstract. This study examines the role of elite politics in the emergence of Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. It argues that the struggle between political elites of northern and southern extractions over the control of state power has intensified national conflicts and insurgency in the country. Political elites are no longer divided by ideology but by economics of state power. Elite politics of who gets what, when, and how and the struggle for state power led to the formation of the sect and fuels the incessant attacks and insecurity in Nigeria. The study adopts a methodology involving re-description of history based on documentary research. It establishes that elite politics accounts for the emergence and escalation of Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. Accordingly, the study recommends that good and inclusive governance be employed as a panacea for harmonizing the fractured Nigerian state and overcoming insurgency in Nigeria. Keywords: elite politics, Boko Haram, state power, terrorism, political elite, good governance 1. Introduction Political elite is undoubtedly a crucial determinant of the history and identity of a given society. It is also a vital force in politics and violence. Boko Haram was seen as an Islamic sect pursuing religious issues. Its attacks has not just added a new phenomenon to Africa's numerous conflicts but created a new dimension to such conflicts. Terrorism is not just an African phenomenon but a global one. It seems that the intensification of the global circuits of capital is linked to the rising tide of terrorism. Terrorism refers to principally, but not exclusively, carried out by organized and unorganized non-state actors, as well as the state, designed to instil fear on victims in order to achieve political, economic, social and even religious ends (Mbah 2007:110). Essentially, terrorism can be placed contextually throughout history by various sects to achieve objectives through the use of violence (Aly 2011). Since 1997, Africa has witnessed a significant increase in the number and level of intensity of terrorist incidents. According to the incidents database of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, between 1997 and 2007 Africa recorded an estimated 522 acts of terrorism, resulting in 8,477 injuries, and 2,614 fatalities. Records show that 73% of these terrorist incidents were domestic while only about 27% were transnational, qualifying Africa as a continent perpetually at war against itself. Despite the high frequency of domestic terrorism in Africa, the many terrorism cleanup initiatives on the continent primarily concern transnational terrorism, especially since the epochal events of 9/11 (Agbiboa 2013). In modern times, manifestation of international terrorism can be seen or distinguished essentially by political and social circumstances within the international environment. Boko Haram exhibits similar tactics and motivation. There was an initial differentiation between Boko Haram, which was regarded as a kind of domestic terror group excluding it from the international network with Al-Qaeda. In this way, the emergence of terror groups in the countries of Africa was linked with economic deprivation and poverty. Thus, the political discourses in Nigeria were based on poor governance, economic deprivation, and elite corruption. However, religion acts as the ideological force, legitimizes and unifies the group and aims to achieve one of the three primary religious goals: establishment of a religiously pure state, establish religious governments or destruction of earth (Aly 2011). In spite of its marginality in global affairs, Nigeria appears to have been drawn into this spiral of terrorism. Boko Haram is predominant in the northeastern part of Nigeria, particularly in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States. It has in the last half a decade ago become the most dangerous insurgent group in Nigeria. They are known to destructively attack innocent citizens, government institutions, security formations, telecommunications masts, banks, religious organizations, educational institutions, media houses, beer halls, markets and local communities with a kind of guerrilla warfare (Mbah and Nwangwu 2014; Mohammed 2014). …

Fishing in deep waters: sex workers with disabilities in Harare, Zimbabwe

The sex work industry has survived for over a century and remains the most profitable business in the world. Women with disabilities have also joined the trade, though little is known about them. A research was done on them whose main objective was to understand the experiences of prostitutes with disabilities in Zimbabwe, with clients being recruited in Chitungwiza and Harare. A total of 17 people with different disabilities were purposively sampled for the study. Sex workers with disabilities have used different skills in the recruitment of clients. While some have recruited their clients in the street and beer halls, others have permanent clients. Women with disabilities who are in the sex industry face a number of challenges. Women with disabilities have no alternative but to soldier on in an effort to gain a living from the industry. The motivations for joining the sex industry are also diverse with others joining the industry to gain sexual gratification.

Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination

Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination

Blalock, Stephanie. “Go to Pfaff’s”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon [review

STEPHANIE BLALOCK,Go to Pfaff's: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon.Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014. Online at The Vault at Pfaff's (pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu). 100 pp.The past several years have seen a flourishing of interest in the history of bohemianism, and especially in Walt Whitman's relationship to it. Daniel Cottom's International Bohemia: Scenes of Nineteenth-Century Life (2013), Justin Martin's Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians (2014), Joanna Levin's Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (2009), and Levin's and Edward Whitley's collection Whitman Among the Bohemians (2014) are just some of the recent publications on the topic. Something about that brief stint in Whitman's life-he was immersed in New York for less than two years, in 1859 to 1860-is appealing to us in the twenty-first century. The circle of New York artists and writers was one of the first groups of Americans to embrace liberal social and sexual values that resemble our own-women were full participants in American bohemianism, free love abounded, and the social circle seemed to have presented a relatively safe space for Whitman to have explored his attraction to other men. The bohemians gathered almost nightly at Pfaff's beer cellar for bonhomie even as their nation was becoming increasingly politically divided, and that image might offer a tantalizing alternative to contemporary Americans, who cope with national turbulence mostly through digital surrogates for the kind of community the bohemians enjoyed.Stephanie Blalock's book, Go to Pfaff's: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon contributes to the body of scholarship on by fleshing out the specifics of Charles Ignatius Pfaff and the beer hall that served as the bohemians' home base. Blalock, who holds a PhD in English as well as an MLS and is currently working as a digital humanities librarian, brings a librarian's skills to this impressively researched, brief book. Pfaff's cellar has until now been a murky setting for much of the scholarship on antebellum bohe- mianism, but Blalock has filled in that background with rich detail. Drawing on a stunning array of sources, including immigration and census records, auction listings, and numerous historical newspapers, Blalock presents the story of a German immigrant who worked as a waiter in Switzerland before immigrating to New York and establishing his own beer hall with the help of his wife before her early death. The rotund, hairy, jolly Pfaff waited on his customers in those early years with his toddler son tucked under one arm, and sometime in the late 1850s hit it off with the local art crowd. The likeliest account of Pfaff's relationship with the bohemians-Blalock is always careful to show us her research and make the tentativeness of her conclusions clear-is that Henry Clapp, Jr., the editor of The New York Saturday Press, took a liking to Pfaff's because it reminded him of the bohemian halls he had frequented in France before importing the term bohemianism to the United States. Clapp brought his bohemian followers with him to Pfaff's, and he and Pfaff enjoyed a mutually beneficial arrangement in which Clapp advertised the beer hall in his newspaper and Pfaff extended courtesies and generous lines of credit to Clapp and the other bohemians. …

A Short History of the Weimar Republic by Colin Storer (review)

Reviewed by: A Short History of the Weimar Republic by Colin Storer Brendan Fay A Short History of the Weimar Republic. By Colin Storer. New York: I. B. Taurus, 2013. Pp. vii + 237. Paper £12.99. ISBN 978-1780761763 In this concise and highly readable new book, Colin Storer sets himself the task of offering readers in one volume a short history of Weimar Germany and some of the key debates that have emerged out of recent historiography—no mean feat given the tens of thousands of books that have and continue to appear on Weimar and its contested legacy. But if there is a unifying theme that runs through these pages, it is Storer’s effort to overturn elements of the “doom and gloom” orthodox historiography that so often viewed Weimar “as little more than a precursor to Hitler” (1). Rather, Storer highlights the real promise and achievements of the period characteristic of more recent scholarship. By situating his study in a comparative international framework, Storer is able to show that Germany was hardly alone in the challenges it faced, and the Republic far more durable than historians have given it credit for being. Following a succinct survey of German history from the Thirty Years’ War to the end of World War I, the core of the book is organized around four chapters devoted, in turn, to domestic politics, the economy, foreign policy, and Weimar culture. This core is bookended by chapters that examine the years of crisis that both inaugurated and ended the Republic’s short fourteen-year existence. In chapter two, as in much of the rest of the book, Storer adopts a narrative mode, recounting key political episodes of interwar German history from the Kapp and Beer Hall Putsches to the Dawes and Young Plans. Storer does an admirable job of addressing continuities with the Kaiserreich and registering the shattering effect that World War I had—and, in some cases, did not have—on Weimar politics and culture. While the political parties of the moderate Left, Right, and Center were, in the main, carried over from the imperial period, the Russian Revolution and defeat in war created new radical parties on the extremes that did much to disrupt and ultimately destroy the consensus and stability so crucial to Weimar democracy. Here, as throughout the book, Storer is careful to show that Weimar was not a doomed society and avoids looking at 1920s developments with foreknowledge of [End Page 434] what was to come. The much-maligned Article 48, for example—which granted the Chancellor emergency powers and was pivotal in the Nazis consolidation of power after 1933—fulfilled its intended role during Weimar’s early years of crisis and instability. As Storer emphasizes, it was invoked under Friedrich Ebert no less than sixty-three times to great effect during the Ruhr crisis. Storer is likewise critical of an older historiography that underlined Germans’ lack of interest in politics or resigned commitment to the Republic in the form of the Vernunftrepublikaner. Indeed, the 60–80 percent voter turnout over the course of the period would be the envy of many modern liberal democracies, and the political violence of the kind visited upon ministers Walter Rathenau and Matthias Erzberger in Weimar’s early years provoked both outrage among most Germans and shows of support for the fledgling Republic. In chapters three and four, devoted to Weimar economic and foreign policy respectively, Storer likewise steers a nuanced course that neither dismisses the real crises that plagued interwar German society nor suggests the Republic’s collapse as a foregone conclusion. Inflation was not unique to Germany after the war. Britain, Italy, France, and other victorious powers experienced similarly painful, if less severe, episodes of economic instability. By 1924, with the introduction of the Rentenmark, the government was in the end able to weather the storm and stabilize the currency. To be sure, fractious divisions lingered over how best to throw off the shackles of the hated Versailles Treaty; however, the government’s inability to overcome these challenges was not a simple matter of German intransigence. The Allied victors remained sharply divided themselves; and the vacillating foreign policy of successive Weimar...

EMatsheni: The central beer hall as social and municipal infrastructure in twentieth century Pietermaritzburg

Southern African cities have quietly developed by plugging new civic infrastructure that supported their operations into the urban environment, often with ad hoc decisions eliciting public outcry. Occasionally, legislative imperatives led to active protest, particularly the implementation of early versions of Group Area legislation. In the early twentieth century, the Pietermaritzburg corporation was torn between the need to accommodate Africans within the city for labour purposes and simultaneously, the need to follow legislations which restricted exactly this. Accommodating labour was the key component of the Durban System allowing for the control of African beer consumption while providing vital municipal revenue. The requisite buildings thus formed a vital part of city infrastructure. The original central beer hall was located close to the city hall and other important centres of civic society. It was marked for closure in the early 1930s, and reconstructed in a part of the city populated largely by mixed race and Indian people who protested vociferously at its development. This article discusses the public consultation process and the formation of the beer hall as a core of African-centred development on the periphery of the city. It concludes by commenting on the structures in contemporary Pietermaritzburg and their potential for future, meaningful development.

Articulating Regional and Ethnic Dissent? Bulawayo's Politicians and their Campaigns to Legalise Shebeens: 1980–2012

Public policy in relation to alcohol consumption is still a contested terrain in southern African cities characterised by a heavy-drinking culture that tends to manifest itself in the form of shebeens. Many such cities have well-known histories of colonial regulation that aimed to control alcohol production and consumption around African townships. This article analyses another socio-political trajectory that has been unfolding in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, which is known for its widespread shebeen operations. Since independence in 1980, politicians and a range of civic/residents' associations in the city have campaigned for the legalisation of shebeens. In particular, shebeens have been defended as necessary to address lack of economic opportunity in the city, as institutions that should be celebrated because of their supportive role during the nationalist era, as offering alternative, more respectable, drinking venues than beer halls for the middle class, and as part of an urban African tradition that should be celebrated in independent Zimbabwe. Some of these leaders have also argued that Matabeleland Province in which Bulawayo is located, which is dominated by the Ndebele-speaking people and other minorities, is being marginalised and sidelined in the allocation of financial resources for development because of ethnic bias and regionalism. This article, based on archival, newspaper and interview sources, argues that these unique campaigns by Bulawayo's politicians are embedded in the intricate politics of regionalism and ethnicity. The shebeen campaigns mask the articulation of broader dissent against both central and local government authorities, who remain opposed to shebeen operations.

Obljetnice Minhenskog puča u dnevnom tisku Nezavisne Države Hrvatske

Obljetnice Minhenskog puča u dnevnom tisku Nezavisne Države Hrvatske

O11.5 Risks For Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), HIV, and Pregnancy Among Women Working in Entertainment Establishments in Cambodia

BackgroundSince the 1990s, Cambodia successfully reduced HIV and STI prevalence among female sex workers. In 2008, brothels were outlawed, and non-brothel Entertainment Establishments (EEs) increased. Some women working in EEs...

“I Like to Get Around”

This article examines the previously unstudied history of Chicago’s nineteenth-century music saloons, tracing their development from transplanted German beer halls to Americanized entertainment resorts to commercial dance halls. Drawing on evidence from scattered newspaper sources, the article documents women’s ubiquitous presence in music saloons as waiters, performers, prostitutes, and patrons and then interprets what their presence reveals about the public role of women in nineteenth century American cities. The women in music saloons asserted considerable social freedom, articulated a public identity that emphasized sexual expressiveness, and helped create a morally ambiguous environment that defied the prevailing Victorian distinctions between respectable and disreputable. In doing so, they helped define what it meant to be a modern city girl. The article also examines the affect that municipal regulation had upon the operation of Chicago’s music saloons. City officials restricted the presence of music and women but only periodically enforced the restrictions. The sporadic enforcement never removed women or music for long but nonetheless structured the social and cultural environment of the city’s music saloons.

Turning Tricks, Turning the Tables: Plotting the Brasserie à femmes in Tabarant's Virus d'amour

This article examines the space of the brasserie à femmes, a female-staffed beer hall and house of clandestine prostitution where the servers sell stories as a supplement to beer and sex, in Adolphe Tabarant's forgotten naturalist novel Virus d'amour (1886). Simultaneously fueling novelistic and sexual desire in fin-de-siècle Paris's aimless bachelors, the brasserie prostitute turns the Balzacian arriviste plot on its head by appropriating the art of writerly tease—by knowing how to (in the words of Huysmans) "make them wait." Inscribing her client into narrative and thus positioning herself as author, the fille de brasserie troubles her own textual inscription, complicating authorial mastery of both the prostitute and the city.

Gender relations and masculinity in northern Chile mining areas: ethnography in schoperías

This paper deals with an ethnography aimed at describing and ­understanding the gendered organization of schoperia life and masculinity in northern Chile. Schoperias are characterized physically and socially and the effects these ­premises have on gender relations and masculinity assigned to them by waitresses and clients are studied. Schoperias are beer halls, mainly for men, ­served by women, located in cities near copper mines in Chile. They are strongly ­gendered and classed places. Schoperias are reference scenarios for men and their performance; they are premises that privilege masculine socialization and heterosexual ­hegemonic masculine performance. Paradoxically, they are at the same time unique places where male friendship and complicity take place, allowing homosociability and the expression of a certain type of affection and feelings among men.

Evaluation of a peer network-based sexual risk reduction intervention for men in beer halls in Zimbabwe: results from a randomized controlled trial.

While much emphasis has been placed on involving men in AIDS prevention in sub-Saharan Africa, there remain few rigorously evaluated interventions in this area. A particularly appealing point of intervention is the sexual risk behavior associated with men’s alcohol consumption. This article reports the outcomes of The Sahwira HIV Prevention Program, a male-focused, peer-based intervention promoting the idea that men can assist their friends in avoiding high-risk sexual encounters associated with alcohol drinking. The intervention was evaluated in a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) implemented in 24 beer halls in Harare, Zimbabwe. A cadre of 413 male beer hall patrons (~20% of the patronage) was trained to assist their male peers within their friendship networks. Activities included one-on-one interactions, small group discussions, and educational events centering on the theme of men helping their male friends avoid risk. Venues were randomized into 12 control versus 12 intervention beer halls with little cross-contamination between study arms. The penetration and impact of the intervention were assessed by pre- and post-intervention cross-sectional surveys of the beer hall patronage. The intervention was implemented with a high degree of fidelity to the protocol, with exposure to the intervention activities significantly higher among intervention patrons compared to control. While we found generally declining levels of risk behavior in both study arms from baseline to post-intervention, we found no evidence of an impact of the intervention on our primary outcome measure: episodes of unprotected sex with non-wife partners in the preceding 6 months (median 5.4 episodes for men at intervention beer halls vs. 5.1 among controls, P = 0.98). There was also no evidence that the intervention reduced other risks for HIV. It remains an imperative to find ways to productively engage men in AIDS prevention, especially in those venues where male bonding, alcohol consumption, and sexual risk behavior are intertwined.

“Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit” The German Beer Hall as Place of Cultural Performance

“Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit” The German Beer Hall as Place of Cultural Performance

Derek Hastings . Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism . New York : Oxford University Press . 2010 . Pp. xv, 290. $29.95.

In this book, Derek Hastings tries to uncover one of darkest aspects of the Catholic public sphere in Germany during the early 1920s by studying Rechtskatholizismus (right-wing Catholicism) and Völkischkatholizismus (National Catholicism) within the Nazi party (NSDAP) during its formative year in the Catholic city of Munich. Despite admirable efforts, his findings are not quite convincing. Hastings's methodological approach originates from the history of ideas and intellectual history. His main contribution is to demonstrate how believing Catholics and their ideals played a central role in the development and activity of the NSDAP before the famous Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 that changed drastically the nature of the party. In contrast to many scholars who argue that the NSDAP stemmed from semi-secretive mystical clubs such as the völkisch, anti-Catholic Thule Society, Hastings stresses that the Catholic orientation of the early NSDAP was central to the party's ability to establish broader appeal and a strong political foothold in Catholic Munich and its surroundings. By doing so, Hastings re-examines the immediate roots of Nazism in terms of the party's survival during its vulnerable infancy. In addition and on a much broader lever, Hastings, together with scholars such as Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Michael Burleigh, Richard Steigmann-Gall, and Doris Bergen, tries to extend our understanding of Third Reich religious identity and Nazism as political religion (pp. 8, 182). I am not sure he has fulfilled his aim.

Beyond Sugar Daddies: Intergenerational Sex and AIDS in Urban Zimbabwe

In a survey of 1,313 men reporting on 2,465 partnerships recruited at beer halls in Harare, Zimbabwe, 2.5% met a definition of "sugar daddy": men with a non-marital partner at least 10 years younger and under 20years old, and exchanged cash or goods for sex. Men engaging in intergenerational sex with a teenage woman had similar HIV prevalence, incomes, and condom use as men in other partnerships. Most men (62.3%) had partners 5 or more years younger, with wider age gaps in longer-term relationships. Condom use was less common within married and steady partnerships compared to casual and more common with younger women. The most common form of intergenerational sex, with the widest age gap and lowest condom use, occurs within marriages and steady partnerships. Such "conventional" intergenerational sex may play the pivotal role in sustaining a generalized epidemic across generations and present the most difficult challenge to prevention.

Purposeful naming: The case of beer halls named during both the colonial Rhodesia era and present day Zimbabwe

This article examines the reasons behind names given to beer halls from their inception in colonial Rhodesia to present day Zimbabwe. To achieve this goal, it analyses names of beer halls, beer outlets built in the former townships of colonial Rhodesia (now called high-density suburbs), and those built at growth points, a feature that emerged with Zimbabwe’s political independence. While it was fashionable in colonial Rhodesia to assume western names for people, landmarks and objects including the Anglicisation of the indigenous ones, the beer halls that were built in independent Zimbabwe have also been given indigenous names. The article concludes that the names given to beer halls in colonial Rhodesia, as those in independent Zimbabwe, are purposeful and informative since they entice imbibers. They also function as cautionary statements because they warn the same imbibers and would be drinkers. Both the old and new names seem to have a common feature between them, which is to expose the evils of commercialised beer. KEYWORDS : Naming, colonial Rhodesia, beer hall, Zimbabwe, indigenous, imbibers.

"My Dear Comrade Frederickus": Walt Whitman and Fred Gray

Offers detailed biographical information (and two photographs) of Whitman’s close friend, Fred Gray, and examines the nature of what Whitman called the “Fred Gray Association,” “a circle of New York comrades,” some of them “highly literate and upwardly mobile,” who frequented Pfaff’s beer hall and had “ties to the nearby New York Hospital”; traces Whitman’s continuing associations with Gray and his associates throughout the poet’s life.