Early Federal Republic Research Articles

Compensation for National Socialist Persecution as a Catalyst for a Paradigm Shift - A Contribution to the History of Psychiatry in the Early Federal Republic of Germany

After WW II, Holocaust survivors often faced negative assessments by German psychiatrists when claiming compensation for psychological damage, a fact that was met with criticism. This study examines how as a result the prevailing doctrine on trauma sequelae underwent a transformation. Academic contributions in German language from 1946 to 1969 are analyzed for their para-digmatic views on the etiology of mental disorders after war and Nazi persecution. Only a new generation of psychiatrists was able to develop more adequate psychotraumatological concepts by using anthropological and occasionally psychoanalytic theoretical elements. At the same time this also questioned the medically oriented concept of illness in psychiatry. Less the persistence of anti-Semitic sentiments but rather internal scientific reasons such as an unevidenced dogmatism obstructed the the advancement of science.

IX. Die Juristische Fakultät der Universität Heidelberg im ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt – Forschungen und Berichte aus dem öffentlichen Recht

Summary This article aims to shed light on how the resumption of research and teaching in public law at the Faculty of Law in Heidelberg developed after the collapse of National Socialist rule. In particular, the personnel, research and teaching are examined. Thus, the history of Heidelberg University will be further elaborated in a specific field of research. Furthermore, the article provides another small building block for an overall picture of post-war history at the 16 law faculties in the early Federal Republic. The end of National Socialist rule did not lead to a “Stunde Null”; rather, university operations were resumed with remarkable speed within the existing institutional structures. After the horrors of the Second World War, the Heidelberg law faculty set out to reconnect with the Weimar era. On the other hand, the emerging new legal system created points of contact for future-oriented research and teaching.

„Ich habe keine Lust, mich Heiligabend mit diesen Spießern rumzuärgern!“

Abstract This paper puts forward the thesis that the social image of the early federal republic of Germany displayed in Loriot’s œuvre is mainly characterized by this society’s inability to understand each other or it’s own traditions and art. Loriot’s work thus provides a skeptical point of view towards the process of modernization Germany has passed through from the 19th to the 20th century.

Democratic Illusions: The Protestant Campaign for Conscientious Objection in the Early Federal Republic of Germany

AbstractDuring the early-Cold-War controversy over West German rearmament, the Protestant Church emerged as a center of activism for the right of conscientious objection to military service, departing from decades of precedent. This article uses the dramatic about-face of the Protestant Church to throw new light on how West Germans reimagined democratic politics after Nazism. Building on recent challenges to paradigms of postwar liberalization, it argues that illusory narratives of the Nazi past played a key role in West Germany's transition to democracy. Protestant activists for the right of conscientious objection drew on an imagined legacy of anti-Nazi resistance to reframe the idea of “conscience,” long associated with patriotic loyalties, as a uniquely Protestant contribution to democratic culture. In doing so, they came to identify their church as a pillar of West German democracy, even as they ensconced tendentious accounts of the Nazi past in postwar law and politics.

Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957

Selling the Economic Miracle: Economic Reconstruction and Politics in West Germany, 1949–1957

The Quest for Equal Rights: The Women’s Movement in Germany and its Care-based Argumentation

Abstract Building upon the Three-Level Model of the Public Sphere, we (a) analyse how women’s associations in Germany, both during the Wilhelmine era and in the days of the early Federal Republic of Germany, interlinked women’s care work with demands for equality, and (b) examine the public responses to women’s associations’ use of care as the basis for their argumentation. To accomplish these goals, we discuss the results of a standardised content analysis of three feminist magazines from these two eras (Centralblatt, Welt der Frau, and Informationen für die Frau) and supplement the results with a historical-hermeneutic analysis of selected articles, an approach that provides contextualised and detailed insights. Furthermore, we analyse the corresponding discourse in mass media and politics by focusing on major legislative changes and presenting the results of our hermeneutic analysis of selected articles from two periodicals with a strong focus on socio-political issues (Die Hilfe and Der Spiegel).

Volker R. Berghahn. Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany.

Focusing on the role of journalists from the Third Reich to the early Federal Republic, Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany examines not a new topic, even though it may be the case that “there is no similar study in the English language” (3). In Germany, a lot of publications have covered this topic over the years, even if previous research is perhaps not as exhaustive as some believe. Volker R. Berghahn has, of course, access to the existing literature and refers to it extensively. In order to justify his work, the author also makes use of some previously unknown sources, such as private letters and diaries, which offer some additional insights but do not throw an entirely new light on the issues he discusses. The study revolves around the basic question of whether a kind of “inner emigration” took place...

Closed venereology wards in postwar Hamburg.

A number of research results on closed venereology facilities in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SOZ) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have been presented in recent years. However, little is known about similar facilities in the Western Occupation Zones (WOZ) and in the early Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). We have researched the records of the State Archive in Hamburg. Subsequently, the analysed sources were evaluated using the historically critical method. Three closed venereology wards existed in Hamburg. Compulsory commitments were conducted according to a three-stage procedure. In the immediate postwar period, the wards had barred windows and the doors were locked. Everyday life in the wards was initially determined by the postwar situation - poor facilities, poor hygiene, overcrowding. In the early 1950s, the number of beds was drastically reduced. The function of the wards consisted of isolation and medical care for the compulsorily committed persons. Medical care was in accordance with professional medical standards. Closed venereology wards in Hamburg followed the tradition established during the period of the Weimar Republic. This becomes apparent both in terms of the legal framework and in terms of the structure and functions of the wards. Thus, they clearly differ from the closed venereology facilities in the SOZ and in the GDR. These facilities were established in the tradition of Soviet prophylactics institutions. The wards in Hamburg served as isolation and treatment centres, the facilities in the SOZ and in the GDR also had a disciplinary function.

Charm and risk of self historization – the contemporary history of medical associations and the present boom of commissioned research in Germany

For more than ten years, “coming to terms with the past” became a kind of leitmotif for public and private institutions and organizations in Germany. More and more ministries of the federal government, branches of public administration and private associations are keen to shed light on their respective past between 1933 and 1945. Even the continuities of personnel and organizational structures between the Nazi era and the early Federal Republic are no longer a taboo. Suppression and ignorance seem to have been replaced by critical self-historicization - this also applies to professions and professional organizations such as medical associations. This essay sheds light on the historical context of these recent developments and offers some critical considerations regarding the manifestation, causes and consequences of the current boom of commissioned research.

The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Reviewed by: The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Charles Lansing The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present. By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 399. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1108497497. In this fascinating and original account, Gavriel Rosenfeld sets himself the difficult task of writing the history of something that never existed—the Fourth Reich that would have followed Hitler's Third Reich. Even though a Fourth Reich was never created, the idea of it emerged during the Nazi dictatorship and survived its collapse, evolving and gaining traction throughout the postwar era, both in the two Germanies and also the larger West. Rosenfeld examines the idea's origins and evolution in the discourse of intellectuals, politicians, and artists and by doing so forces us to reconsider long-accepted truths about West Germany's "success story" and the dynamics of West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The specter of a Fourth Reich was taken seriously by postwar contemporaries, as Rosenfeld convincingly shows, and efforts to realize it might have succeeded had circumstances been slightly different, as he plausibly argues. The result of such careful historical analysis and sensible counterfactual interpretation is a persuasive illumination of the complexity of the postwar era in western Germany, highlighting the fragility and contingent nature of many of the political, social, and cultural developments that eventually resulted in a democratic West German state and society. At the same time, the discourse on the Fourth Reich was an important part of the early West German confrontations with the Nazi past and later, as the idea became aestheticized and universalized, became a significant element of global trends in remembrance. In the first part of the book, Rosenfeld chronicles the emergence of the idea of the Fourth Reich within Nazi Germany—as a reaction to the Nazi dictatorship—and its evolution over the course of the Federal Republic of Germany's first decade. [End Page 195] It was the anti-Nazi resistance, according to Rosenfeld, that first began using the term, consciously building upon various historical precedents. For German émigrés such as Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein or right-wing anti-Nazis like Otto Strasser, thoughts about a Fourth Reich were a useful vehicle to criticize the current state and to imagine an ideal society that, they hoped, would eventually follow Nazism's collapse. But it was not just Germans who were talking about a Fourth Reich; following the outbreak of World War II, American and British intellectuals and policy makers, for example, began to use the term as they considered a potential postwar era. As the war neared its end, however, the idea of a Fourth Reich shifted, in the mind of the Allies, from a mutable progressive vision of the post-Nazi world to, increasingly, the specter of a resurrected Nazi state. And such fears were not at all unreasonable or unfounded, Rosenfeld argues, although scholars in past decades have either ignored manifestations of resurgent Nazism in the early Federal Republic or dismissed them as insignificant given that they didn't succeed, Rosenfeld examines episodes such as the Werewolf movement and the suppression of the "Deutsche Revolution" to argue that the possibility of serious attempts to reestablish a Nazi state in the form of a Fourth Reich was significantly more realistic than we acknowledge today. That men such as Artur Axmann or Klaus Barbie failed to resurrect some kind of Nazi state was, the author argues, thanks largely to Allied interventions that suppressed the threats and enabled a postwar society and polity to take root. The founding of the Federal Republic neither extinguished efforts to restore Nazism in Germany nor lessened Allied fears of such threats, and careful Allied supervision of German developments remained crucial to ensuring that political, social, and economic developments did not lead to re-Nazification. The second part of the book focuses on the continued specter of a Fourth Reich in West Germany from the 1960s to the twenty-first century, analyzing the ways in which the idea of a Fourth Reich disentangled itself from its historic German context...

The two lives of neurologist Helmut J. Bauer (1914-2008): Renowned MS specialist and National Socialist.

In 2008, the internationally renowned neurologist and university professor Helmut Johannes Bauer died at the age of 93 years. In the numerous obituaries and tributes to him, the years between 1933 and 1945 are either omitted or simplified; the Nazi past of Helmut Bauer has hardly been explored. Based on original documents dating from the Third Reich and the early Federal Republic of Germany as well as relevant secondary writings, Bauer's life before 1945 was traced to gain knowledge of his exact activities and tasks during the Second World War. Bauer was actively involved in Nazi crimes. He was a member of the so-called Künsberg special command of the SS and also worked in a prominent position at the Institute for Microbiology as well as for the Foreign Department of the Reich Physicians' Chamber. After World War II, Bauer underwent denazification and, like many others, was able to pursue his further medical career undisturbed, building on the contacts he had already made during the Nazi period.

Public Health in a Radioactive Age: Environmental Pollution, Popular Therapies, and Narratives of Danger in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1970

AbstractIn the 1950s and 1960s, West German citizens found themselves living in a “radioactive age.” The public learned that radiation exposure pervaded postwar society, not only from atomic testing but also from medical treatment, workplace exposures, and radium consumer goods. By 1970, West Germans—ranging from farmers and housewives, to physicians, scientists, and bureaucrats—had recast nuclear radiation from a technological wonder or health aid into a public health hazard. This article illustrates that anxieties about uncontrollable technology, ineffective institutions, disingenuous political leaders, and volatile citizens persisted from the 1950s to the 1970s, coexisting with optimism and progress, without truly subsiding in the 1960s, as historians often suggest. Further, it advocates taking those fears seriously, showing that they played a critical—and lasting—role in shaping public policy and state-society relations in the early Federal Republic.

Belonging in Black and White: Race, Photography, and the Allure of Heimat in West German Gay Magazines from the 1950s

Physique photography played an important role in conditioning erotic subjectivity for gay male readers of West Germany’s 1950s homophile magazines. To date, scholars of the period have focused on the content of these magazines and their role in the emergence of the postwar gay scene (Whisnant) but have yet to carefully consider the medium itself as a critical component in the creation of same-sex subjectivities. By focusing on layout techniques such as juxtaposition, this article examines the ways in which the magazine Der Weg zu Freundschaft und Toleranz created erotically suggestive narratives between photos that circumvented increasingly strict censorship laws in the early Federal Republic while at the same time conflating the gay male viewing subject with whiteness in alignment with dominant discourses of Heimat and national belonging.

Leucotomy in the early Federal Republic of Germany

Leucotomy was introduced in 1936 in Europe as atherapy for mental illness. With the end of World WarII leucotomy was also introduced in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Leucotomy was applied in cases of, for example schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders or even some psychopathic disorders. The operations were carried out in neurosurgical departments outside psychiatric hospitals or patients were also transferred to those which had been established in psychiatric and neurological clinics. Based on published conference reports, retrospective case reports, dissertations as well as representative samples from medical files, the use of leucotomy in West Germany until the early 1950s is presented. It becomes obvious that the introduction of leucotomy in West German post-war psychiatry was encouraged by American psychiatry and neurosurgery.

Communism as an “Asian” Threat in the Cold War Anti Communism of the Early Federal Republic of Germany

Communism as an “Asian” Threat in the Cold War Anti Communism of the Early Federal Republic of Germany

GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Ed. by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker (review)

Reviewed by: GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence Ed. by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker Kristen Dolan GIs in Germany: The Social, Economic, Cultural, and Political History of the American Military Presence. Edited by Thomas W. Maulucci, Jr. and Detlef Junker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 365. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-0521851336. Scholars examining the American advance into Germany during the latter stages of World War II frequently mention the non-fraternization order through which military leaders sought to prohibit US troops from close contact with local residents. After years of bitter conflict, the fact that authorities issued this order is in many ways less telling than the decision to rescind it in the fall of 1945. Thomas W. Maulucci and Detlef Junker’s thought-provoking and very readable volume describes this revocation as one step toward a broader range of formal and informal interactions between Americans and Germans in the wake of the war. As Maulucci emphasizes in his introduction, the resulting encounters were shaped by both policy from above and initiatives from below. Profoundly influenced by Cold War considerations as well as local circumstances, the overarching tenor of these interactions changed over time. The book explores developments related to the US military presence in Germany not only from multiple perspectives but also over the course of several crucial postwar decades. Indeed, because the volume moves beyond the more heavily scrutinized periods of Military Government and High Commission for Occupied Germany, it is able to “deal with an American military that is no longer an occupier per se but instead one element in a complex relationship between two sovereign states” (2–4). Taken together, the fifteen well-researched essays succeed remarkably in illuminating much of the complexity to which Maulucci refers. The contributions begin by probing key aspects of the broader framework within which these German-American relations developed. Bruno Thoß, for example, deftly locates West German deliberations regarding the Bundeswehr within rearmament debates in the early Federal Republic, NATO disagreements about defense strategy, and the overarching concern that Washington would redeploy a sizeable portion of American forces. Hubert Zimmermann offers an astute take on how political and economic factors played into the decisions by successive US administrations to maintain troop strength in Europe despite strong domestic pressure for reductions. The essays then explore the many implications following from the US decision to bring the spouses and children of service members to Germany. Thomas Leuerer perceptively notes that, while largely intended to curb troop behavior, American families’ presence fundamentally transformed the character of the occupation. Military communities helped stabilize the new Federal Republic by symbolizing the degree of “U.S. commitment to the common defense of the West” (133). Yet as he also explains, the resulting housing areas, or “Little Americas,” periodically generated substantial concern for nearby communities—such [End Page 218] as in 1972 when “a large group of American teenagers, the children of military personnel, fought a street battle with local police in Wiesbaden” (132). In one of several essays investigating frictions that derived from the American military presence in Germany, Gerhard Fürmetz charts “the public order crisis caused by GIs” until the late 1950s (196). Constraints placed on the German police by the Allies, he argues, not only prevented them from addressing GI delinquency but also impeded “their efforts to regain authority in a shattered postwar society” (211). Jennifer V. Evans draws on courts-martial cases in Berlin from 1945 to 1948, in particular those involving allegations of violence between American soldiers and German women, to illustrate the extent to which “the American military government found itself having to deal with its own forces in its struggle to contain the disorder that followed Germany’s political and social collapse” (232). Focusing on the 1970s, Alexander Vazansky notes that “much of the attention given to the social problems in the army by the government and the national press” moved to Germany from Vietnam (273). While the racial tensions and drug-abuse problems described meticulously by Vazansky persisted at the end of the decade, he cites the example of General Michael S...

Verkannte Propheten? Zur 'Expertenkultur' (west-)deutscher Werbekommunikatoren bis zur Rezession 1966/67

This is less a book about the history of advertising in modern Germany, a subject which has recently garnered some attention from cultural historians and those working on the history of consumerism, but rather a collective biography of the admen who pioneered and built the country’s advertising industry. Basing his work on an impressive sample of nearly four hundred independent advertisers and advertising executives in corporations, Hirt tells the story of a somewhat unsuccessful, or at least incomplete, professionalization process between the late Imperial era and the early Federal Republic. The heart of this study, in many ways, is the admen’s complicated relationship with the National Socialist regime, with its regulatory attempts to rein in the advertising market, and with the promise of social recognition some hoped this would entail. Lacking standardized professional requirements, German advertisers, Hirt argues, continuously saw themselves on the defensive against widespread critiques of commercial advertising. In this, they were part of a broader story of Germany’s sometimes uneasy embrace of commercial consumer culture from the late nineteenth century.

Sociology in Place of Socialism: On West German Cultural Radio

This article delves into the relationship between cultural radio and the Cold War. After 1945, culural radio took on a central role in the intellectual self-understanding of the early Federal Republic. From the very beginning, there was much less censorship than with political editorial departments. Thus, it was possible for cultrual radio to offer an intellectual forum in which socialism was not simply dismissed due to the official anticommunist political doctrine. This article shows the ways in which the East-West conflict was present in the cultrual departments of radio broadcasters. It argues that socialism appeared less as an ideological restraint or taboo, but rather as a productive challenge, which in the end was part of the modernization of West Germany's intellectual self-understanding. Two prominent examples buttress this argument: the free space that cultrual radio conquered in a kind of leftist integration with the West, and the rapid advancement of sociological discourse.

Beethoven, Bayreuth and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany

This article takes the reception of the opening concert of the 1951 Bayreuth festival – a performance of Beethoven's IX symphony under Wilhelm Furtwängler - as a prism through which to examine the political culture of the early Federal Republic. It examines the main traditions of Beethoven reception in the first half of the twentieth century, and in Bayreuth in particular, stressing that the discourse surrounding the event was rooted in critical traditions overwhelmingly associated with the nationalist right in German politics. Secondly, it examines the place of Furtwängler in the reception of the concert, arguing that he can best be seen as the representative of a residual Wilhelminenationalism distinct from the Third Reich but also capable of surviving inside it, which made the brief transition into the Federal Republic before fading in the 1950s. This provides the key to what gave the concert its significance for contemporaries. Finally, it contrasts this concert with another, equally illuminating, but entirely forgotten one given at the same festival two years later, when the former modernist exile Paul Hindemith conducted the same symphony. The reception of this concert underlines that the early 1950s were a period in which not only the residual traces of Wilhelmine nationalism lingered, but also one through which more immediate memories of the conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s resonatedprofoundly . The events surrounding this concert also demonstrate that the liberalising impulses associated withthe late 1950s were manifesting themselves earlier and in the unlikeliest of places.

Discursive and Biographical Construction of Political Enemies: Communists in the early Federal Republic of Germany

This article, based on empirical findings of a research project, chronicles those people who were sanctioned by political criminal law in the 50s and 60s of the last century. This example of West German Communists shows that they were not only seen to be public enemies from the political and legal point of view, but were also seen as such through discursive processes of interpretation. The central questions of this article are: 1. What effects did these processes of stigmatisation and exclusion have on the lives of the persons involved?; and 2. What were the consequences for political culture? Political culture is defined here as figuration (Norbert ELIAS). It is constitutive for a figuration, that it is an interdependent net in which different actors generate politics of definition and knowledge. At the same time, this article puts forward a methodological suggestion for discussion—an alliance of sociological biographical research with perspectives derived from discourse analysis. This would lead to an approach that could be described as political analysis based on cultural-historical perspectives and the sociology of knowledge. This approach would allow for a triangulated interpretation of political processes. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1102271