Early Federal Republic Research Articles

Friedrich Burgdorfer (1860-1967). Eine diskursbiographische Studie zur deutschen Demographie im 20. Jahrhundert

Bio-political debates about the size, age, quality and productivity of the German population persisted throughout the twentieth century. Depending on specific historical circumstances they may have varied in their intensity and emphases, but—as the controversial claims by the former German federal banker Thilo Sarrazin about the deleterious effects of Arab and Turkish migration and birth rates attest—such debates are not a matter of the past. Indeed, Sarrazin's shrill alarmism evokes the memory of demographical debates of the early twentieth century in which the population statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer played a prominent role. Thomas Bryant's study of Burgdörfer is therefore a timely contribution to the growing scholarship on German bio-politics. He develops what he calls a ‘discourse-biographical’ (diskursbiographisch) approach to his subject-matter, which explores Burgdörfer's life-history in relation to shifting German bio-political debates during the Weimar Republic, Nazism and the early Federal Republic. Burgdörfer emerges in Bryant's story not as a more or less passive articulator of widely accepted patterns of demographic discourse, but as an agent who had a profound influence on changing paradigms in the area. This is somewhat different from Thomas Etzemüller's study of twentieth-century demographic doomsday visions, which argues that people such as Burgdörfer elaborated on well-established discursive matrices that allowed for the construction of similar catastrophic scenarios in different national contexts (Etzemüller, Der ewigwährende Untergang. Der apokalyptische Bevölkerungsdiskurs im 20. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007).

Speicherung und Transformation nationalsozialistischer Gewalt - Thesen zum praxeologischen Archiv der Waffen-SS

Abstract The essay is an enquiry into the storage and transformation of national socialist violence as well as an analysis of the transfer and the modification of the self-perception of the SS into the early Federal Republic of Germany. The central focus of the essay is placed on the photography collections of two former members of the Waffen SS, an SS general and a common soldier. During the 1950's, both were organized in the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (HIAG) (aid organization based on mutuality). The HIAG offered a framework for the transfer of social practices and social interaction from the national socialist into the democratic society. The essay describes the praxeological archive of the Waffen SS and stresses its importance for the social cohesion of the HIAG.

Sprachratgeber und Stillehren in Deutschland (1923-1967): Ein Vergleich der Sprachund Stilauffassung in vier politischen Systemen by Claudia Law

I I44 Reviews In literature,visuality can be found inboth description and narration. Its functions reach fromdescribing the characters' vision to symbolic and structural uses such as leitmotifs,symbols, and the incorporation of visual media. By comparing visual aspects of threenarrative textswith theircinematic interpre tations, Sandra Poppe investigates the relationship between the uses and functions of visuality in literature and film as well as questions of intermediality and of the theoryof description. The lastpart ofMarcel Proust's A la recherchedu temps perdu, Le tempsretrouve,and the eponymous filmby Raoul Ruiz, Franz Kafka's Der Pro cessand Orson Welles's Le proces/Ilprocesso, and Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness along with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux arewell-chosen examples: not only do they represent a broad spectrum ofmodern culture, but they have also widely been acknowledged for the complexity of theirvisual descriptions and for the importance of visuality forsemantic and structural aspects. In the first,theoretical part, the study establishes forms bywhich visuality ispre sented in literary textsand in cinema, focusing on the relationship between narrative and descriptive elements. The second, analytical part compares different represen tations of visuality in the six examples. Poppe finds 'pure' description, a focus on the actual description of characters and places, mainly in theworks of Proust and Ruiz. Welles, she claims, uses visual aspects to connect his highly political cinematic interpretation ofDer Process to its literary model. InCoppola's free transformation of Conrad's novella, themetaphoric use of visual leitmotifs and of colours gives the two works a similarmeaning, even though they are set indifferent times and superficially tell ratherdifferentstories.Visuality in its many variations and functions,Poppe con cludes, is a common and prominent feature in all texts examined, 'a bridge between themedia' and even 'theaesthetic core of each individual work of art' (p. 32I). The study provides a thorough exploration of the concept of visuality and itsdif ferent forms and functions in literature and cinema. In the chapter on 'Visualitat in der Literatur' in particular, Poppe reaches beyond obvious aspects of visual repre sentation inwriting by exploring structural and semantic functions of visuality. Yet the study's strength-its thoroughness-also runs the riskof being itsweakness. The many details and the sometimes over-complicated language, along with thedifficulty of describing visual phenomena entirely through language, are occasionally indanger of obscuring the general sense. None the less, this is a valuable and broad study that enriches thediscussion of visuality as a feature of comparative interpretation. ABERYSTWYTHUNIVERSITY KARINAVONLINDEINER-STRASKY Sprachratgeber und Stillehren inDeutschland (I923-I967): Ein Vergleich der Sprach und Stilauffassung in vier politischen Systemen. By CLAUDIA LAW. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2007. XV+272 pp. E88. ISBN 978-3-II-OI8363-4. The best German is thatused by Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Luther. 'Schreibe, wie du sprichst', use verbs to refer to actions, rather than nouns, never use the pas sive, and keep your sentences syntactically simple. Avoid foreignwords. These are the main grammatical and stylistic recommendations thatwe read over and over again in style guides and prescriptive grammars from their very beginnings, which-for German-can be placed in the seventeenth century and which we can still find in any modern publication advising readers on the ills of language decline and the benefits of speaking and writing properly. Claudia Law's Manchester dissertation unearths very similar pieces of advice in her corpus of twentieth-century works. Her aim is to examine whether perceptions of good and bad language as shown inprescriptive works aimed at a lay audience-are affected by thepolitical system inwhich they are MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 I I45 published. Twentieth-century Germany proves an interesting testing ground with its rapidly changing political history, and Law defines fourperiods significant toher study: the Weimar Republic (I9I9-33), theThird Reich (I933-45), the early Federal Republic (FRG: 1949-67) and the young GDR (I949-1965). For each period she selects four pieces which were well-known and successful publications at the time. Her analysis is fundamentally divided into their treatmentof Sprache and their treat ment ofStil, and these sections are furthersubdivided intokey socio-political factors: with regard toSprache we find sections on the perceptions of language, namely the perception of language history...

Radical Conservative Thought in the Intellectual Constellation of the Early Federal Republic

Radical Conservative Thought in the Intellectual Constellation of the Early Federal Republic Constantin Goschler (bio) In recent years, the history of West Germany after 1945 generally has been told as a success story. Even ardent destroyers of historical master narratives like Konrad Jarausch have chosen book titles like Die Umkehr—meaning “the change” or “reversal”—to describe this period of German history. Such authors have tended to describe the ongoing rise of a liberal civil society in West Germany out of the ashes of the Third Reich. Such optimistic accounts are found not only among historians but also among groups pursuing more directly political objectives in their use of history. In the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the case of West Germany was repeatedly cited as a model for how to overcome a ruthless dictatorship through a combination of military defeat, economic reconstruction, and political re-education (Herf, “Condi Rice”). One even heard calls for an Iraqi Adenauer—while the Iraqi Hitler had long since been identified. As we all know, nothing comparable to the current civil war in Iraq took place in Germany after 1945. The German guerrilla campaign that the SS launched in 1944 under the mythological name “Werewolf” remained a myth. To be sure, top-ranking Nazis took pains to stage their defeat as a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung, and young soldiers who had grown up in the Third Reich continued fighting fanatically for an imaginary final victory (Endsieg)1—among them the later German Nobel Prize winner and author of The Tin Drum, Günther Grass, who recently confessed to having been a seventeen-year-old member of the Waffen SS. For the majority of Germans, however, survival, not suicide, had become the main priority—and the German population adapted quickly to the new situation. Nonetheless, it is worth asking exactly how the mental transformations that followed [End Page 1] the German military defeat occurred and what these transformations meant in the long run for the intellectual life of the Federal Republic. In order to understand Germany’s post-1945 transformation, it is necessary to examine the role played by radical conservative intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger. This is especially true with respect to shifts in our historical perspective that have occurred during the past few decades. For many years, mutually incompatible accounts of a “new beginning after 1945” on the one hand and of a “restoration after 1945” on the other hand tended to clash unproductively. More recently, historians have started to look at the 1950s as a more ambiguous period. This fresh perspective has led to interpretations of the 1950s as an age of “modernization under conservative auspices” (Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, Die doppelte Staats-gründung). Apparently, radical conservative intellectuals played an important role in the emergence of what might be called “the German way to modernity” after 1945, figuring both as subjects and as objects of this process (Schildt, Zwischen Abendland, Konservatismus, Moderne Zeiten, “Ende der Ideologien”; Laak, “Trotz und Nachurteil,” “Nach dem Sturm,” Gespräche; Lenk, Deutscher Konservativismus). When one examines debates about Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger’s role in the Federal Republic after 1945, it becomes obvious that writing about these thinkers has rarely been a purely scholarly endeavor. On the contrary, political interests have always played a large role. The main motivating factor has been fear about the possibility of reactionary political developments in West Germany. Justifiably or not, some authors have worried about the nefarious influence notorious right-wing thinkers like Schmitt, Jünger, and Heidegger might exert on West German intellectual life (Grebing, Konservatismus). Such an approach is based on the assumptions that these thinkers’ radical conservative ideas could once again become dangerous and that the West German liberal and democratic order is fundamentally unstable. Other authors have sought to discredit German postwar conservatism as a whole by pointing to the allegedly intimate connections between mainstream conservatives and the lunatic fringe represented by Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger (Leggewie, Der Geist). Our interest in Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger should not, however, be based on a desire to uncover the dirty little secrets of contemporary German conservatism (Hacke, Philosophie). Instead, we...

Hans Rothfels — An Intellectual Biography in the Age of Extremes

Hans Rothfels was one of the most influential historians in the early Federal Republic of Germany. Recently, a controversy has been sparked off among German historians about his political attitude towards National Socialism. The article argues that the focus of this debate is too narrow and that an examination of Rothfels’ intellectual biography can give an insight into more general historical problems and contexts: long-term intellectual continuities and transformations of German historiography, the determinants of scholarlyscientific production, and the intellectual functions of historiographical operations and interpretations. Covering the whole career of Rothfels from the 1920s through to the 1960s, the article first analyses the way in which Rothfels’ histororiography was shaped by the social and institutional conditions of his academic work. In a second step, it shows that, at its core, his historiography was a way of reflecting about contemporary events and developments. In the different stages of his academic life, Rothfels developed distinct interpretations of German history that were an attempt to give meaning to situations he had observed or lived through himself. Finally, the text examines how important biographical experiences and perceptions influenced the scholarly production of the historian.

Physik und Politik in der frühen Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Max Born, Werner Heisenberg und Pascual Jordan als politische Grenzgänger

AbstractPhysics and Politics in the Early Federal Republic of Germany. Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan between Scientific and Political Discourse. – Contrasting the historiography of two major developments in 20th century German history, the creation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and the dispute on the nuclear armament of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1957, the question is raised to which extent the scientific culture was able to bridge political disagreement within the German physicists' community. A twofold story of the private and public exchange between Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan among others on the scientists' position to nuclear armament on the one hand and the writing of the history of quantum mechanics on the other hand displays different types of relating scientific work and moral responsibility. Neither politics nor science went on unaltered after the disputes between physics and politics in the early Federal Republic of Germany.

Was Roland a Nazi?: <em>Victims, Perpetrators, and Silences during the Restoration of Civic Identity in Postwar Bremen</em>

Drawing on newspaper articles, contemporary architectural writings, diaries and archival records, this essay examines National Socialism's afterlife in the early Federal Republic in a local context. Focusing on debates that shaped the postwar reconstruction of Bremen's historic market square and its monuments, it shows how complicated the recovery of local history proved to be. The interplay of silence on issues of guilt, narratives of victimization and stories of reconstruction explains why postwar efforts to reestablish a historically grounded sense of Heimat furthered the acceptance of the Federal Republic but retained a tentative, provisional feel a decade after the war's end.

More Disagreement Over Human Dignity: Federal Constitutional Court's Most Recent Benetton Advertising Decision

Article 1 is the Basic Law's crown. The concept of human dignity is this crown's jewel: an interest so precious that the state must affirmatively protect and foster its inviolability. This uniquely important status is evident from human dignity's prominence in the constitution, the early Federal Republic's pressing need to repudiate the Third Reich, the many judicial and scholarly exegeses of Article 1, and human dignity's unique claim to absolute protection. The success of the German legal construct of human dignity also is apparent from its influence on the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights. That document likewise begins with a provision nearly identical to the Basic Law's Article 1.

Representing the German Nation: History and Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany by Mary Fulbrook, Martin Swales

522 Reviews White organizes his presentation in the chronological order of the period described by the novels. Thus Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) precedes Wilhelm Raabe (Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse) and Max Kretzer (Meister Timpe) in the discussion of nineteenth-century developments, the shifting relationship between nobility and bourgeoisie, and the social decline of the traditional Mittelstand. Fontane is pre? sented as a lover of the historically obsolescent, which makes him a precise observer of ambiguous social values in EffiBriest, of social mobility in Die Poggenpuhls, and of the parvenu in Fraujenny Treibel. Heinrich Mann's Der Untertanis discussed forits depiction of local circumstances rather than its satire on imperial attitudes, Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz for its documentation of the life of an urban underclass as opposed to the 'ambiguities and sophistications' of the text. The First World War is represented by Remarque and Arnold Zweig; the Nazi period by Grass, Seghers, and B611(in that order); the early Federal Republic by Koeppen and Walser; the GDR by Uwe Johnson (Mutmafiungen uberjakob) and Christa Wolf (Der geteilteHimmel). Each novel is assessed for its depiction of socio-historical reality,and yet the information with which White evokes a sense ofthat reality forhis reader comes primarily fromthe novels themselves. With the pre-1945 texts the focus of interest tends to be on social relations and historical developments; after 1945 the focus is rather on social attitudes. This way of proceeding invites more questions about the relation between the evaluation of historical data and the interpretation ofnarrative fictionthan it answers. By what criteria should the reliability of realist fiction as socio-historical evidence be judged? How do narrative stance and composition affectthe depiction of the social world? How do novels evoke a sense of a past social order for the time in which they are written? How should our assessment of a text be affected by our sense of the author's purpose in writing it? What do our answers to these questions show us about the activity of novel-writing as a social phenomenon in its own right? The One-Eyed Man occasionally touches on questions ofhow the literary text may be said to mediate historical experience or helps to mould the awareness of events and situations for a contemporary readership, but it does not explore them. For this reason the book it? self appears somewhat one-eyed. Nevertheless, it provides students with some useful starting points for discussion of historical representation in the German novel which can easily be supplemented from the standard secondary literature. St John's College, Cambridge David Midgley Representingthe German Nation: History and Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany. Ed. by Mary Fulbrook and Martin Swales. Manchester: Manchester Uni? versity Press. 2000. v+199 pp. ?47-5?- ISBN 0-7190-5939-9 (hbk). Visual symbols of Germany tend towards the monumental. The Brandenburg Gate, Christo's wrapped Reichstag, and Matschinsky-Denninghoff's steel sculptures are hugely effective. But what ideas can mere books convey? The written records ofthe twenties and thirties evoke 'cities of nomads' and 'streets without memory', but did these localities swirl to the dusky voice of Marlene Dietrich, the topless dancing of Josephine Baker, and the bitter-sweet syncopation of Kurt Weill, or did they tremble under the rhythmic tramp ofjackboots? The eight contributors to this volume draw on many sources to illustrate and probe successive interpretations of Germany's identity. Their material ranges from the film to the fairy tale, from politicians' speeches to the (slightly) more fanciful world of fiction and music. Even when exploring written records at their most literary, the authors focus on non- and extra-literary realms, mindful that the signs, symbols, and conventions of the text bear referential links to an external world whose non-literary MLRy 98.2, 2003 523 properties endorse its reality. The present volume is predicated on the view that his? tory can be falsified in a way in which literature cannot, ifonly because 'nothing exists outside the text'. It was argued a century ago, by Georg Simmel and others, that reality was too fleeting and fractured a medium for the notion of continuity, so dear to earlier historians , to be maintained. Could it be that the...

The perception and conservation of nature in the Third Reich

This article asks whether nature conservation was modernized in the Third Reich-whether the clear deficiencies left by the Weimar Republic were remedied and whether the National Socialist regime took up the task of making nature conservation areas more accessible to the general public, an aim which was important in terms of international comparisons. It comes to the conclusion that the idea of promoting a quasi-democratic, even tourist access to nature played no role at all in determining these policies. However, the decree of the 1935 Reich Nature Conservation Law which handed over the responsibility for nature conservation from the Lander governments to the Reich and gave it a right of participation and veto in altering landscapes was definitely a modernization, unmatched (to a certain extent) even by the policies of the early Federal Republic. However, because the motives for this and other measures were primarily grounded in power politics and only served nature conservation secondarily, the improved accountability for nature conservation was, for the most part, paper work and was scarcely able to influence the way in which nature was treated by both industry and agriculture.

Domestic Constraints on West German Ostpolitik: The Role of the Expellee Organizations in the Adenauer Era

TheOstpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to isolate the GDR and its satellite allies and to avoid granting unilateral concessions to the Soviet bloc. Although such Staatsräson considerations were very significant for the Federal Republic's policymakers, they do not tell the whole story. Movement on Eastern policy was also significantly hindered by domestic factors, the most important of which was the influence of the Vertriebenenverbände—the pressure organizations purporting to represent the millions of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The role of these organizations has typically received passing reference in general studies of Ostpolitik, but the specialized literature on the topic has remained weak.

Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic

“Morethan any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.

Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective

Previous articleNext article No AccessSymposium on Heidegger and NazismWork and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German PerspectiveJürgen Habermas and John McCumberJürgen Habermas Search for more articles by this author and John McCumber Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 15, Number 2Winter, 1989 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448492 Views: 41Total views on this site Citations: 21Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1989 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Chris Peers The deconstructed ethics of Martin Heidegger, or, the university sous rature, Educational Philosophy and Theory 53, no.55 (Mar 2020): 492–504.https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1741347Nicholas Low, Sophie Sturup Being and planning, world formation and authenticity in Heideggerian analysis, Planning Theory 17, no.33 (Apr 2017): 313–331.https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095217704234Sven-Erik Rose Piotr Rawicz’s Le Sang du ciel , Heidegger, and the Holocaust as Ontological Experience, Comparative Literature 70, no.22 (Jun 2018): 194–217.https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-6817409Leah Tomkins, Peter Simpson Caring Leadership: A Heideggerian Perspective, Organization Studies 36, no.88 (Aug 2015): 1013–1031.https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840615580008Robert J. Shepherd Why Heidegger did not travel: Existential angst, authenticity, and tourist experiences, Annals of Tourism Research 52 (May 2015): 60–71.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2015.02.018 Karilemla Heidegger's contrasting notion of worldview in the early, middle, and later writings., The Humanistic Psychologist 43, no.33 (Jan 2015): 250–266.https://doi.org/10.1080/08873267.2015.1047020Steven Hodge Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, (Jun 2015): 15–29.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19806-4_2Steven Hodge Heidegger’s Life and Early Philosophy, (Jun 2015): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19806-4_1Bo Allesøe Christensen Why do we care about post‐humanism? a critical note, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 96, no.11 (Nov 2016): 23–35.https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12033Chad Murphy Hybrid Identity and the Return of the Repressed, KulturPoetik 13, no.22 (Sep 2013): 236–252.https://doi.org/10.13109/kult.2013.13.2.236DANIEL MORAT NO INNER REMIGRATION: MARTIN HEIDEGGER, ERNST JÜNGER, AND THE EARLY FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY, Modern Intellectual History 9, no.33 (Nov 2012): 661–679.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244312000248Sabrina P. Ramet The Relationship between Martin Heidegger’s Nazism and his Interest in the Pre-Socratics, Religion Compass 6, no.99 (Sep 2012): 426–440.https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12003Carleton B. Christensen The Problem of das Man —A Simmelian Solution, Inquiry 55, no.33 (Jun 2012): 262–288.https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2012.678605Wojciech Małecki What do thermonuclear bombs have to do with intercultural hermeneutics? (Or on the superiority of Dickens over Heidegger), Human Affairs 21, no.44 (Jan 2011).https://doi.org/10.2478/s13374-011-0039-zLouiza Odysseos Constituting community: Heidegger, mimesis and critical belonging, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no.11 (Apr 2009): 37–61.https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230902738528Martin Woessner Ethics, architecture and Heidegger, City 7, no.11 (Jul 2010): 23–44.https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810302226Honglim Ryu Ethics of Ambiguity and Irony: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, Human Studies 24, no.1-21-2 (Mar 2001): 5–28.https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010769718790Mark Bevir Derrida and the Heidegger controversy: Global friendship against racism, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 3, no.11 (Mar 2000): 121–138.https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230008403305Norman K. Swazo L'affaire Heidegger, Human Studies 16, no.44 (Oct 1993): 359–380.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01323023Bernard P. Dauenhauer Renovating the Problem of Politics, (Jan 1991): 3–17.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3564-1_1Wayne Cristaudo Heidegger's political judgment: Nazism and after, Australian Journal of Political Science 25, no.22 (Sep 2007): 289–308.https://doi.org/10.1080/00323269008402124