Future Of Germany Research Articles

Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, by Dekel Peretz

Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, by Dekel Peretz

Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine by Dekel Peretz (review)

Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine by Dekel Peretz (review)

Zur Zukunft des Wirtschaftsstandorts Deutschland: sortierende Bemerkungen

Abstract This article served as the keynote speech at the opening of the conference ‘On the Future of Germany as a Business Location’, hosted by Wirtschaftsdienst and the German Economic Institute. The standards and indices used to assess the competitiveness of industrial locations evolve over time, leading to potential variations in results and policy implications. Current policies face the dual challenge of navigating both change and competition among locations. Therefore, industrial policy should increasingly prioritise the capacity for transformation and the availability of necessary input factors to establish a foundation for successful transformation and maintain competitiveness.

MUSLIM MIGRANTS IN GERMANY: A STUDY OF THILO’S SARRAZZIN’S BOOK “DEUTSCHLAND SCHAFFT SICH AB

This study explores the seventh chapter of Thilo Sarazzin’s 2010 book "Deutschland schafft sich ab," which reflects his negative stance on immigration and perceptions of immigrants' resistance to integration in Germany. The chapter titled “Zuwanderung und Integration" (Immigration and Integration) with the subtitle, "mehr erwarten, weniger anbieten" (expect more, offer less), addresses critical threats to Germany's future, such as declining birth rates and challenges with integration, especially concerning migrants from Muslim-majority nations. The book's sensitive topics triggered widespread controversy and media attention, contributing significantly to societal debates on migration and integration in Germany

The impact of local protests on political elite communication: evidence from Fridays for Future in Germany

ABSTRACT The Climate Strike Movement (or Fridays for Future) is one of the most prominent transnational protest movements nowadays. In this paper, I examine the reactions of politicians to this movement to answer the research question: To what extent have German Members of Parliament (MPs) been responsive to local environmentalist street protests by focusing their attention on the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policy? To this end, I apply dictionary-based quantitative text-analytical tools to study German MPs’ political communication through 292,949 Facebook posts and 43,644 parliamentary debates between September 2017 and February 2020. Focussing on the effect of the first global climate strike in March 2019 and leveraging varying protest frequencies between the electoral districts, I show that MPs are responsive to protest events in their districts. More local street protest events in an electoral district led to more attention to the Climate Strike Movement and Environmental Policies by political representatives associated with that district. Comparing different discursive arenas, I show how politicians adjust their communication according to the arena’s audience, with protests affecting the political attention to environmental policies more in parliamentary debates than on social media.

The reform of the Bundeswehr and the future of Germany’s peacekeeping activities

The reform of the Bunderwehr has been in the focus of attention of Russian and foreign research since the unification of the country^ when Germany started speaking about its responsibility for peace and political stability. Germany’s army had to not only rearm and optimize military personnel, but also to conceptualize its new role in the world and extend its global representation for the purpose of conflict settlement. However, over the last years, the consideration of problems of the Bundeswehr reforming and development has become especially important due to the fact that the Bundeswehr faces new challenges and threats, including those of a non-military nature. The reforms of Germany’s army, which have been covered in the recent documents aimed at the substantiation of the increased use of the Bundeswehr abroad, reflect the political leaders’ aspiration to make it a more effective instrument of protection against hybrid threats and prevention of conflicts affecting Germany’s security. The purpose of the article is to analyze the reform of the Bundeswehr and their influence on Germany’s peacekeeping activities. The study is based on discourse-analysis and the analysis of the main documents, determining the directions of modernization of Germany’s army, and the documents, regulating peacekeeping activities, official reports of the Ministry of Defense, official reports of the Ministry of Defense, and mass media materials about the state and the problems of the armed forces. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the fact that it considers the reform of the Bundeswehr in its close correlation with its peacekeeping profile as the main sphere of using Germany’s army. Based on the analysis of the recent documents, regulating its activities, the author comes to the conclusion that its reforming is aimed at the expansion of peacekeeping activities, while peace-enforcement operations are considered as a last-ditch measure.   

Max Weber and the ‘Prussian “Geist”’

In ‘Wahlrecht und Demokratie in Deutschland’ (1917) Max Weber suddenly shifted from discussing voting rights in a democratic Germany to identifying four generals who he claimed embodied the genuine 'Prussian “Geist”': Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Boyen, and Moltke. The first three were actively involved in making the reforms to the Prussian military during the early decades of the nineteenth century, but Helmuth Moltke was heavily involved in military matters and political issues from 1864 until his death in 1891. Hence, he made major impressions on the young Max Weber during the first three decades of Weber's life. In this essay, I argue that Weber considered Moltke an 'ideal type' of leader: a modest man who possessed a sense of judgment and who acted according to the ‘ethics of responsibility’. In contrast, another German general, Erich Ludendorff, embodied those traits that Weber warned against in his later lecture Politik als Beruf: vanity, the lack of judgment, and the lack of any sense of responsibility. By contrasting Moltke with Ludendorff we not only get a sense of what Max Weber meant by the genuine 'Prussian “Geist”', but we also get an idea of Max Weber's notion of the true political leader. There is no question that to understand what Weber meant by 'Prussian “Geist”' would mean investigating a full range of topics, including his opinions on the agrarian question, his view of Bismarck and his successors, and many more. However, by focusing on his opinions of Moltke and Ludendorff, we get a good sense of why Weber believed the 'Prussian “Geist”' was so important for Germany's future.

ПРОВЕДЕННЯ ПОЛІТИКИ ДЕНАЦИФІКАЦІЇ НІМЕЧЧИНИ В АМЕРИКАНСЬКІЙ ЗОНІ ОКУПАЦІЇ (1945-1949 РР.)

As a result of the analysis of the documents of the American Military Administration, agreements, signed at the official governmental level by the representatives of the Allies, personal documents, articles of the German newspaper “Die Zeit” and sociological researches carried out by the scientific institutions, the authors of the article outline the main mechanisms, procedures, institutions for the implementation of the denazification and identify its advantages and disadvantages during the American occupation in 1945-1949. Denazification implemented in the American occupation zone did not remain ineffective. This process also had a shocking effect for the civilians, for it meant “social degradation and humiliation in the eyes of society”. If there was no internal purification of the former criminals, all reinterpreted individuals were now forced to outbrave “political moderation and restraint” and to accept new conditions. With the adoption of democracy “from above” during the transitional justice, there can be no unequivocal answer to the question whether the national socialist dictatorship in Germany could be regarded as successful. The United States of America quickly realized that the future of Germany would depend on both the announced denazification and the economic recovery. The American government approved the adoption of the Basic Law (Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany). In any case, the American policy toward Germany consistently advocated German unity and the integration of a prosperous and strong state, provided that it would become a constituent of a capitalist and democratic international system as a responsible party.

The potential and usefulness of demand response to provide electricity system services

The expansion of fluctuating renewable electricity sources creates new challenges for grid operators. One often suggested solution is demand-side response (DR): the adaptation of electricity consumption to generation. Here, we investigate what role DR could play to support system stability through fully remote-controlled (by the grid operator) shifts of individual processes in households and in the commercial and industrial sectors, testing the case of a high-renewables future in Germany. The grid operator is constrained by consumer acceptance of service interruptions, both in size and shift duration, and by technical boundaries. We find that DR has a large potential and is suited for short-term services such as spinning reserve or primary control and for damping residual load gradients. However, its potential is low for longer-term services like secondary/tertiary control or for satisfying residual load during low sun/wind times in a high-renewables future. We find that the potential for DR is not limited by the magnitude of shiftable capacity but by the maximum shift duration and the patterns of switching between positive and negative power demand, which makes DR useful for fast and short-term services but less useful for longer shifts.

Gentz und Stein. Zum Verhältnis zweier Antipoden auf dem Wiener Kongress

Summary Gentz and Stein. The Relationship of Two Opposites at the Congress of Vienna Of nearly the same age, but of different social and regional origin, Friedrich Gentz and Baron Karl vom Stein first met in the late 1790 s when they were both in Prussian service and had similar political convictions. But it was a difficult relationship from the very beginning because of their fundamentally different ways of life and social conduct. When they met again in Vienna they were both now in the service of non-Prussian states: Gentz, the Austrian „Secretary of Europe“, was a key figure at the Congress, whereas Stein, the adviser of the Russian Emperor, had a rather modest role. Furthermore, they had quite opposite convictions as far as the future of Germany and Europe was concerned. They met very rarely and incidentally at one of the numberless social gatherings convened by other representatives, but refused to discuss their political opinions and viewpoints in any real dialogue. The liberal positions Stein fough...

Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings by David G. John (review)

Reviewed by: Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings by David G. John Chunjie Zhang Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings. By David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. 344 + 16 images. Cloth $45.50. ISBN 978-1442643338. David John’s book focuses on a forgotten chapter in the theater history of the German Democratic Republic—Fritz Bennewitz’s stagings of Goethe’s Faust, a case with significant historical depths and intercultural dimensions. John uses unpublished archival materials in textual, audio, and visual form to describe seven stagings: four in the GDR and three others respectively in the United States (English), India (Hindi), and the Philippines (Tagalog). John interprets the three GDR stagings as Bennewitz’s [End Page 165] theatrical commentary on the sociohistorical development of the GDR from the 1960s to the 1980s. Disappointed by the reality at home, Bennewitz gradually transitioned from a GDR-loyalist to an international pioneer of theater. John’s book has four parts. In the first part, John delineates a biography of Bennewitz (1926–1995) enriched by three interviews with Bennewitz’s former collaborators and colleagues. John emphasizes Bennewitz’s productive career nationally and internationally: Bennewitz directed more than one hundred plays and operas in Weimar, codirected plays with visiting directors from India, and visited twenty-five countries from 1961 to 1994, mostly while the GDR regime was still in place. John’s view is that the mutual trust between Bennewitz and the SED and his loyalty to the regime allowed for the dramatist’s global experiences. Yet, at the same time, Bennewitz was aware of the delicacy of travel and was always cautious with politics. John shows that, though Bennewitz never explicitly articulated them, he had increasing doubts and felt embitterment toward the GDR regime. This dissatisfaction led to his activities abroad where he channeled his political views. An admirer of Brecht, Bennewitz, on the one hand, followed Marxist aesthetic principles but, on the other, did not overstate class struggle and thus enabled actors and especially actors with different cultural backgrounds to fully articulate themselves. Part 2 of the book deals with four stagings of Faust in the GDR in 1965/67, 1975, 1981/82, and 1995. John sees the first staging as a milestone for the GDR stage because the production confirmed the success and the promising future of state socialism without overtly sacrificing artistic quality. In this staging, Bennewitz shortened the length, toned down the mystical and spiritual elements in Goethe’s original, and changed some scenes. Most conspicuously, Bennewitz revived Faust after his death and gave him the drama’s last few lines. Faust’s declaration of “Das Unzulängliche, Hier wird’s Ereignis / Das Unbeschreibliche, Hier ist’s getan” is clearly a eulogy to the GDR’s achievements and is meant to express a sincere hope for a promising socialist future. In Bennewitz’s second staging in 1975, the socialist panegyric disappeared and many more video and audio effects were introduced. The final scene does not feature Faust’s reincarnated proclamation. Instead Faust reopens his eyes while speaking the famous line, “Genieß ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick,” but then he is greatly amazed at what he sees before closing his eyes again and falling back dead. John interprets this scene as an expression of Bennewitz’s irony and the disappointment he felt toward the GDR regime. Despite the frustrating reality of GDR everyday life, Bennewitz directed a third staging of Faust in 1981/82. John points out that the irony is even stronger in this staging as the final scene is not played out but only read by a choir. The faintest hope for the success of socialism had clearly vanished and an underlying pessimism subtly surfaced. The fourth staging in Germany after the reunification in 1995 was also Bennewitz’s last staging of Faust in his lifetime. Remarkably, he truncated the famous exclamation “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” [End Page 166] and expressed an unprecedented pessimism about the future of Germany. This staging was not a success. Part 3 of the book focuses on the three international stagings of Faust. After the 1975 staging in Weimar, John observes, Bennewitz turned his...

Between Victim and Perpetrator Imaginary: The Implicated Subject in Works by Rachel Seiffert and Cate Shortland

The future of Germany’s murderous past is now being reconsidered by a new generation of artists who have to navigate an increasing distance to the Third Reich and its remaining witnesses. Thus it is not surprising that recent postmemory work registers shifts, both with respect to mnemonic perspective and representational strategy. This article considers “Lore,” a story published in the trilogy The Dark Room (2001) by the British-German author Rachel Seiffert, and its cinematic adaptation by the Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (2012) as two examples of such shifts. The mnemonic perspective of both works offers a productive tension. On the one hand they present the emotionally charged perspective of children of Nazi perpetrators, yet on the other hand they employ representational modes that are bare, impassive and minimalist. What are we to make of material that invites identification with protagonists born into a perpetrator legacy, particularly when these historical witnesses are aesthetically reconceived as ‘innocent children’? Seiffert’s and Shortland’s reconfiguration of the historical witness raises the question of whether the victim/perpetrator imaginary can be a constructive lens through which to understand historical agency and its legacies across multiple generations. This article argues that recent re-conceptualizations of historical subject positions, such as the ‘implicated subject’ (Michael Rothberg), offer a more nuanced exploration of historical agency. In different ways and to different degrees, both Seiffert’s and Shortland’s work engage with contradictions of historical subject positions by probing and acknowledging inadvertent, yet persistent, implications in legacies of historical violence.

Attack of the Cyberzombies: Media, Reconstruction, and the Future of Germany’s Architectural Past

While in Frankfurt a few weeks ago, I visited the site of the Dom/Römer project, a series of 35 buildings that are under construction in the historical center of Frankfurt am Main. While most of the buildings are going to be modern interpretations of the houses that once stood on the small parcels in Frankfurt’s city center, fifteen of the buildings will be historical reconstructions of historical buildings. As I approached the building site, I walked along a fence that had been covered with a vinyl picture of an artist’s rendition of the finished project. Scrawled across the picture was a graffito: “Bitte richtig alt. Kein Zombie!” The term “zombie” has been a battle cry for anti-reconstructionists from all over Germany as they watch historical reconstruction projects fill the empty spaces in their destroyed historical city centers. In this paper, I will investigate the current discourse that has conflated architecture with necromancy in German city planning. Are these reconstructions the signs of a crisis in Modernism, a sweeping wave of uncritical nostalgia, or dangerous returns to evil ideologies of the past? Using Walter Benjamin’s Kunstwerk essay, I will explore the role of historical reconstruction as medial architecture, buildings that function more like film than the so-called “authentic” architecture that is preferred by the current generation of Denkmalpfleger. What happens when a destroyed Bauwerk reaches the age of its technological reproducibility? These “zombie” buildings, I will argue, reveal mythical underpinnings in the projects of Modernism and the religious practices inherent in the concept of authenticity historical monuments.

Capacity payments to secure electricity supply? On the future of Germany’s power market design

Although the objectives of the Energiewende (energy transition) are broadly accepted in Germany, the practical ways of achieving them remain highly contentious. In particular, the question of whether and how security of supply can be guaranteed over the course of this profound transformation of the energy system is currently the subject of controversy in the scientific and public debate. Recently, calls for additional payments to power plant operators for providing generation capacity have grown increasingly loud. But the introduction of capacity payments of this sort could have far-reaching consequences for the future organisation of Germany’s electricity supply. Therefore, the political decision on this issue - which is scheduled for this year - should not be made without a sound scientific analysis. Basically, measures aimed at guaranteeing security of supply must address the possible causes of capacity shortages as broadly as possible. When designing such measures, besides security of supply, additional objectives such as cost-effectiveness and the environmental and social acceptability of electricity supply should also be taken into account. Capacity payments only partially meet these requirements. Moreover, once introduced, they are difficult to adapt, or revise even, to suit changing framework conditions. This is particularly problematic in view of the current lack of clear evidence for future security of supply problems. Therefore, introducing capacity payments at this point in time would not appear to be constructive. It would make more sense to introduce instead a mix of measures which would strengthen the electricity market, create conditions for feeding in electricity from renewable energy sources as and when required, and set incentives for the expansion of grid capacity, storage systems and demand side management. Should security of supply still appear uncertain under these changed framework conditions, the introduction of a strategic reserve, which would be held by the regulatory authority or the transmission system operator, is recommended - not, however, the creation of an entirely new, additional market segment in the form of a capacity market.

Visions of Philhellenism in the Poetry of Wilhelm von Humboldt: Between Historical Analysis and Idealized Modernity

Wilhelm von Humboldt is one of Germany‘s most prominent graecophiles. His poems — despite their artistic mediocrity — reveal Humboldt’s reflections on the course of history, as well as the connection between the idea of Bildung and his visions for the German nation. His lyric poetry can be seen as belonging to the tradition of an idealistic view of history found also in works by Schiller and Herder. Based on Winckelmann’s image of classical Greece, Humboldt develops a distinct, political view of history, combining his fascination for ‘Hellas’, a critique of ancient Rome and modern France, and ideas about the national future of Germany.

The Crisis of the Psyche and the Future of Germany: The Encounter with Freud in the Weimar Republic

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

Vansittartism Revisited: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and the Threat of World War (The Ida Herz Lecture)

This essay examines the ramifications of the debate about Vansittart’s indictment of Germany in his wartime pamphlet, Black Record, among the German exiles in the United States. The issue of Vansittartism emerged as a particularly incendiary factor in the longstanding and deep rift between Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. The influence of Vansittartism on Thomas Mann also led to the failure of the Californian exiles to speak in one voice regarding the future of Germany, as they struggled to draft a political manifesto in support of a similar statement coming from German exiles and captured generals in Stalin’s Russia.

Berlin/Wall: Hare's Eyes on Two Walls of the World

The theatre audience currently has a thirst for hearing the political narratives of the playwrights. As media has lost its reliability all over the world, the fans of theatre have preferred watching more political plays than TV bulletins today. As one of the leading voices of the political theatre of the world, David Hare knows what expectations the audience has and what responsibilities political drama has. He handles the results of a lot of national and international political decisions over societies and individuals in his plays. In Berlin/ Wall, which are two separate monologue readings, the British playwright portrays new life conditions of ordinary people of different communities via his own empirical observations and interviews after the two walls which were erected by world politics. This work primarily examines the sociological views and political narratives of David Hare about the present and future of Germany, Israel and Palestine among the traces of two walls.

Ernst Troeltsch and Contemporary Discourses of Secularization

AbstractThis essay analyses Ernst Troeltsch’s writings on Protestantism and modernity in light of recent scholarship on the category of the secular. In his historical work on the relationship of Protestantism to the rise of the modern world, the essay argues, Troeltsch was not engaged primarily in a narrative of secularization; nor does he promote what current scholars call an ideology of secularism. Instead, Troeltsch was exploring how religion (and Protestantism in particular) changes in different cultural contexts, and was intervening in debates in his own society about the political structure, cultural ethos, and future of Germany. The essay therefore cautions against the hasty projection of concepts like secularism and secularization as theorized today back onto the works of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Troeltsch. The political and cultural concerns that animate Troeltsch’s work can be better captured by a more subtle understanding of the multiple meanings of abstract categories (such as Verweltlichung, Diesseitigkeit, and Säkularisation) in their own intellectual-historical contexts.

Udział polskiej dyplomacji w międzynarodowej debacie nad problemem niemieckim po zakończeniu drugiej wojny światowej

The end of the Second World War resulted in the need to make arrangements concerning the future of Germany. The victorious states were to accomplish this. The decisions of the big four powers were made arbitrarily, and German representatives were not allowed to discuss the future of their country. Many important decisions were made between 1945 and 1947, but it was also a period of growing conflict within the anti-Nazi coalition. 1947 saw the real end of their cooperation, and the German issue became a bargaining chip in the Cold War.The representatives from Poland, which suffered great losses during the war, did not want to assume the role of just an observer, but wanted to actively participate in shaping the future of Europe. This happened on numerous layers, the most vital being the activities of Polish diplomatic posts, official appearances of Polish diplomacy on the international scene and bilateral cooperation with other countries which, like Poland, were interested in solving the German issue.