German History Society Research Articles

Rescreening Erich Kästner after the Wall: Film Adaptations in the Berlin Republic

In the early 1950s, four films based on stories by Erich Kästner were released in quick succession: Das doppelte Lottchen (1950), Pünktchen und Anton (1953), Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (1954), and Emil und die Detektive (1954). Since unification all four have been re-adapted in live-action versions for the cinema. This article examines the post-1990 films’ attempts at ‘modernization’, the way they establish continuity with the earlier adaptations, and the ways in which they negotiate recent German history and contemporary society. The films offer a dual perspective at a time of national change: they look to the uncharted future, but they also refer to texts and films from earlier transitional periods. The article suggests that despite the films’ engagement with the contemporary context, they unwittingly reinforce some of the more conservative aspects of Kästner's original narratives, ultimately offering an affirmative and future-oriented narrative in which the past can be recuperated.

German History Society Conference 2010

German History Society Conference 2010

German History Society Essay Prize

German History Society Essay Prize

Twenty-Five Years--Where is German History Now?

As our two founding editors write in this issue, at its inception, German History fulfilled a dual purpose. First, it arose from the need to find a ‘home’ for a growing body of scholarship on German history produced and debated in the United Kingdom, not least under the aegis of the German History Society. Second, the journal was set up with a certain sense of mission, designed to showcase an innovative brand of German history writing, which was at variance, to some extent at least, with that predominantly published in the American-based Central European History. Since then, much has changed. The field has moved on, and with it, both our constituency and our sense of mission have changed—not beyond recognition, and not in one uniform direction, yet nevertheless in interesting ways, on which we felt it might be worth reflecting here for a few moments. The first obvious change is that the historiography of Germany has become more international and transnational. It would be difficult these days to identify a uniquely British view of any major problem or epoch within German history, let alone of the entire span. In part, this is a consequence of a heightened mobility among scholars.

The German History Society Essay Prize

The German History Society Essay Prize Get access German History, Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2008, Page 284, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghn006 Published: 01 April 2008

Notes and News: The German History Society Essay Prize

Notes and News: The German History Society Essay Prize Get access German History, Volume 25, Issue 2, April 2007, Page 239, https://doi.org/10.1177/0266355407077018 Published: 01 April 2007

The German History Society: Essay Prize

The German History Society: Essay Prize

How German Is It?

How German Is It? Alan Kramer and John Horne understand by Sonderweg something quite spe- cific: ‘the Wehler interpretation of German history,’ one refuted by David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley in 1980. Now ‘things have moved on.’ Since they agree with Blackbourn and Eley on all counts, for me to open my discussion with a question about the Sonderweg looks like an attempt to tar them with the Wehler brush, part them from his vanquishers, and ‘reduce’ their book to a con- tribution to a moribund debate. I understand ‘Sonderweg’ differently. To me, it refers to the inner motors pushing modern German history in a direction unhappily different from the ‘West’ (a collectivity coterminous with the Allies in the world wars). Identifying and examining these motors have produced a great variety of Sonderweg inter- pretations, by many distinguished historians, in political, intellectual, and (espe- cially in the syntheses of Ralf Dahrendorf in 1965 and Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1972) social history, and not a few challenges to each. Having myself done battle with the Sonderweg, I believed the stake had been driven into its heart. One of the great merits of German Atrocities is that it has forced me, and I suspect others as well, to think again. Thus the question with which my review opened, ‘Is it too soon to retire the Sonderweg?’, was directed first of all against myself. Their book was a vigor- ous reminder that the ‘German Problem,’ to which all those investigations into Germany’s domestic history that we now label ‘Sonderweg’ had sought a solu- tion, was from the outset (and long before the Holocaust became central to our understanding of the German twentieth century) posed by German behaviour in the international arena. Had the European experience between 1914 and 1945 been no more bloody than the years between 1871 and 1914, such ques- tions as whether Germany’s Junkers had been unnaturally preserved in an aspic of high tariffs, or whether its middle class was unpolitical and allergic to con- flict, to name only two, would hardly have exercised our attention. Germany’s domestic idiosyncrasies, such as they were, would not have carried the freight of explanation that made their investigation so exigent. The war changed that. And, as Horne and Kramer reveal so convincingly, it was the atrocities that for many gave this catastrophe its meaning and shaped its memory—on both sides. Like Barbara Tuchman, who also perceived that ‘Belgium … became to many the “supreme issue” of the war’ (Guns of August, p. 359), Horne and Kramer endorse the Entente’s explanation when they move beyond the contingent frictions of battle (‘proximate causes’, which my review acknowledged they German History Vol. 24 No. 1 10.1191/0266355406gh369xx © 2006 The German History Society

The German History Society

The German History Society

A German Way of War?

DISCUSSION A German Way of War? German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial. By John Horne and Alan Kramer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2001. xv + 608 pp. US $40.00 (hardback). Is it too soon to retire the Sonderweg? We may have forgotten how much that dark narrative of German history is owed, not just to Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914, but to the crimes of its troops, beginning on August 5, there and in France. Villages were looted and razed, hostages used as human shields, civilians shot, bayoneted, and confined to buildings which were then set alight. Children, including seven babies in Les Rivages, were among the 6,500 victims. Especially during the first three weeks, such violence was ‘endemic throughout the German army’ (p. 76), involving about half of its 300 regiments on the Western Front. The ‘proximate cause’ of these outrages was anxiety during the great gamble of the Western invasion (p. 42). Pillaging was ‘the natural consequence of armies outstripping their supply trains’ (p. 119); rage, fuelled by alcohol, the not unnatural consequence of meeting unexpectedly stiff Belgian resistance. But underlying these obvious explanations lay the German army’s belief that its progress was being sabotaged by civilian snipers (francs-tireurs); that their wounded were being mutilated by innocent-looking maidens and children; that they were confronted, in short, with the same kind of Volkskrieg that had beset them in France in 1870–71. The belief was false, sparked in most cases by panic at friendly fire. But along a front of more than 500 kilometres hysteria spread from foot soldiers to command: ‘a massive case of collective self-suggestion, probably unparalleled in a modern army. A million men were swept by a delusion %’ (p. 77). Within two weeks it encom- passed the home front as well. It was this astonishing ‘myth complex’ that stimulated a young Marc Bloch to embark upon his investigations into the history of rumour, irrationality, and mentalite´s. It stimulated German officers to issue orders which underwrote the initially spontaneous ‘reprisals’ with an official policy of exemplary massacre. The documentation of these atrocities is only the beginning of what, in lesser hands, could easily have become three books. The authors’ hearts are less in German History Vol. 22 No. 1 GH: german history 10.1191/0266355404gh302xx  2004 The German History Society GH$$$$302P

The German History Society 2003 Annual General Meeting Report from the Chair

The German History Society 2003 Annual General Meeting Report from the Chair

Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Civic and Ethnic Traditions Conference sponsored by the German History Society and the German Historical Institute, London, Europe: 24-5 April 2003 at the GHIL

Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Civic and Ethnic Traditions Conference sponsored by the German History Society and the German Historical Institute, London, Europe: 24-5 April 2003 at the GHIL

German History Society

German History Society

The German History Society

The German History Society

The German History Society

The German History Society

Dissertation Abstract

Journal Article The German History Society Get access German History, Volume 17, Issue 3, July 1999, Pages 400–401, https://doi.org/10.1191/026635599674032102 Published: 01 July 1999

The German History Society

The German History Society

The German History Society: Report from the chair 1994

The German History Society: Report from the chair 1994

Papers Delivered at the Annual Conference of the German History Society, on the Topic 'Unification and Reunification in German History': Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval Germany

Papers Delivered at the Annual Conference of the German History Society, on the Topic 'Unification and Reunification in German History': Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval Germany

Papers Delivered at the Annual Conference of the German History Society, on the Topic 'Unification and Reunification in German History': Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval Germany

Papers Delivered at the Annual Conference of the German History Society, on the Topic 'Unification and Reunification in German History': Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval Germany