German History Research Articles

L’approche diachronique en analyse du discours contrastive

Starting from the observation that diachronic approaches are rare in discourse analysis and that synchronicity poses the problem of neglecting both the historicity of discourse production and inter-discourse, the author presents a methodological reflection on what distinguishes “geographical” and diachronic approaches in Contrastive Discourse Analysis. This reflection is illustrated by some of the results of a contrastive analysis of the treatment of National Socialism and the World War II in German history textbooks between 1955 and 2016.

History of proximal femur fractures in the German literature.

German-speaking surgeons have left a deep imprint on the history of diagnostics and treatment of proximal femur fractures. Some of the studies published in German have fell into oblivion, others are cited until today, although sometimes quite inaccurately. The cause of such inaccuracies are citations from secondary sources due to unavailability of the original or inability to read it because of a language barrier. In the current literature, globally predominated by English articles, the "German history" of treatment of proximal femur fractures remains undervalued. The aim of the present article is to point out its contribution. Literature search was performed in original publications and historical sources. The German-speaking surgeons have considerably contributed to the development of the treatment of proximal femur fractures. The analyzed period between 1847 and 1970 may be divided into three basic periods. In the first period (1847-1896), the German-speaking surgeons (Langenbeck, Trendelenburg, König, Heine, Dolinger)were the first worldwide to start treating the fractures of proximal femur operatively. In the second period (1897-1935),mainly in the 1930s,the initiative in Europe was taken over by surgeons publishing studies in Franceand in Belgium. Overseas, American surgeons were coming to the forefront. In Germany, onlyPauwels developed the first biomechanical classification of femoral neck fractures. In the third period (1936-1970), mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, implants were designed (Pohl, Künstcher), based on close collaboration betweenGermanengineers and surgeons, that served as a model for a dynamic hip screw and a proximal femoral nail, which are currently the implants of choice in the treatment of trochanteric fractures. The historical contribution ofGerman-speaking surgeons to understanding the issue of proximal femur fractures and their operative treatment is far more significant than presented in the historical studies published in English.

The Sermon as Discursive Frame for the Nazi Past: Preaching about the German History Exhibition Neue Anfänge nach 1945?

Abstract When the history exhibition Neue Anfänge nach 1945? about the transition from National Socialism to democracy toured Lutheran churches in northern Germany in the 2010s, preachers were invited to address it in their Sunday sermons. Like the speeches regularly given by civic dignitaries at German history museums, the sermons drew on democratic traditions of speaking about National Socialism. They also drew on Lutheran discursive traditions: Bible exegesis, homiletics, theology. This article considers how preachers combine a professional knowledge of what should be said about National Socialism with their pastoral role. The German family emerges as a key—but limiting—trope in discussion of the Nazi past in the church setting.

The Call to Political Geography

This essay offers a capsule memoir of a part-time Germanist. It recounts the author’s experience of coming of age in the 1990s when it was salad days for All Things German in North America and the sheen of Weimar shone. This decade was followed by the years of the global war on terror and eventually the global financial crisis, when German studies seemed to lose the plot and many historians of German quietly exited the subfield. The essay concludes with a reflection on political geography as a way to engage with German history and the German contribution to the world of ideas. German history is dense with suggestive answers to the evergreen questions of what a state should be and what kind of world it should exist in.

New Perspectives in German Studies: A View from the Margins

This article calls for studying German history and culture from the margins, an approach that highlights unexpected mutual influences and entanglements between German and non-German cultures in Europe and beyond and that challenges essentialist understandings of German identity. Moreover, by looking at peripheries of German culture, scholars can break out of the straitjacket of national narratives and rediscover the transnational dimensions inherent in German history. Bukovina, a multiethnic former province of the Habsburg Empire that now spans the border between Ukraine and Romania, is one such place. The article sketches how the German concept of Kultur was first used to legitimize the Habsburg Empire in Bukovina and was later absorbed into a new language of rights in a postimperial age.

Il corpo come spazio e la pratica della scrittura: Die Weiber (1987) di Wolfgang Hilbig

The article aims to demonstrate the concept of Zwischenraum behind Wolfgang Hilbig’s short story Die Weiber (1987). The setting is to be identified with the social space of the DDR, structured not only through the panoptic control of the Stasi, but also according to rigid ideological norms that polarize the cultural field and produce a spatial gap, as understood by Henri Lefebvre. The search for an interstitial space, capable of problematizing reality, is expressed metaphorically through the women’s disappearance: the correspondence between the polarized social space of the DDR and the gender division allows the centrality of the body and the interval of desire to emerge, in order to rhizomatically reconfigure the existing. In Die Weiber, this search is channeled through writing: according to Michel de Certeau, such practice can generate and appropriate new social space – a space in which, in Hilbig’s view, the culturally repressed can be revealed and the relationship with the deliberately forgotten German history can be re-established.

Il corpo come spazio e la pratica della scrittura: Die Weiber (1987) di Wolfgang Hilbig

The article aims to demonstrate the concept of Zwischenraum behind Wolfgang Hilbig’s short story Die Weiber (1987). The setting is to be identified with the social space of the DDR, structured not only through the panoptic control of the Stasi, but also according to rigid ideological norms that polarize the cultural field and produce a spatial gap, as understood by Henri Lefebvre. The search for an interstitial space, capable of problematizing reality, is expressed metaphorically through the women’s disappearance: the correspondence between the polarized social space of the DDR and the gender division allows the centrality of the body and the interval of desire to emerge, in order to rhizomatically reconfigure the existing. In Die Weiber, this search is channeled through writing: according to Michel de Certeau, such practice can generate and appropriate new social space – a space in which, in Hilbig’s view, the culturally repressed can be revealed and the relationship with the deliberately forgotten German history can be re-established.

The failures of political prophecy: Ernst Kantorowicz’s wartime lectures

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a series of lectures Ernst Kantorowicz offered to the Army Specialized Training Program in 1943 in order to reconsider the development of his intellectual biography. These “wartime lectures” constitute Kantorowicz’s only sustained discussion of modern German history and his only intellectual engagement with Nazism. Introducing these lectures thus presents an opportunity to re-examine the relationship between Kantorowicz’s early and mature works through his assessment of Nazi Germany. For Kantorowicz, Nazism was the violent result of a German commitment to political prophecy. At the core of Kantorowicz’s lectures was a criticism of political theology and its role in modern history. In making this criticism, Kantorowicz simultaneously distanced himself from the prophetic register of his earlier writings. Moreover, recovering Kantorowicz’s concern with modern political theology is also important in foregrounding the intellectual genealogy of The King’s Two Bodies, a work often separated from its more telling subtitle: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Together, this paper argues that the most significant changes in Kantorowicz’s writings can be traced to the intellectual circumstances of the Second World War.

Pogranicze w ogniu (1992–1993) von Andrzej Konic, eine historische Fernsehserie als Kulturtext oder als Versuch, den „heiligen Krieg“ in der polnisch-deutschen Geschichte der Jahre 1917–1939 zu rekonstruieren

This article attempts to present the television series as a distinctive text which can persuasively and therefore effectively appeal to contemporary viewers, providing them with an insight into the events of a predefined period of Polish and German history, arousing certain emotions and thoughts or, in a general sense, even making them reflect on the history of both nations. With its attractive storyline based on, among other things, the dramaturgy of the presented events, this type of series can be perceived, to some extent, to be part of contemporary historical narration.

Hans Jonas's Gnostic Myth: An Existentialist Worldview Between Romanticism and Christianity

abstract: The essay examines the historical role of an important yet largely forgotten work, namely, Hans Jonas's 1934 Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, Part 1: Mythological Gnosticism , the major project of his early philosophical career. The essay suggests that this early work should be understood not only as a preliminary stage of a debate that will reach fruition later, but as it addresses some of the fundamental problems in nineteenth-century German thought, namely the problem of dualism. More specifically, the essay suggests seeing Jonas's early work as part of the history of German thought as it depicts a transition from German Romanticism to Existentialism, making innovative use of two of the most salient terms of nineteenth-century German philosophy, the "symbol" and the "myth."

Dürer nyitott ajtós címere és a korai híradások apai őseiről

Albrecht Dürer’s name first appeared in Jacob Wimpfeling’s book on German history, printed in 1505, in which the Alsatian author praised the then famous artist. In his book on the work of Martin Schongauer, printed in Nuremberg in 1515, the humanist Christoph Scheurl mentioned that Dürer’s father was born in Cula, near the town of Várad in Hungary. He was therefore the first, albeit with an incorrect town name, to make this biographical information public. Joachim Camerarius also mentioned in the preface to his book on the artist’s symmetry, published posthumously in 1532, that Dürer’s paternal lineage was from Pannonia. The only surviving manuscript is the calligrapher Johann Neudorfer’s biography of Dürer, in which the artist’s father’s biography is in agreement with his family records. This knowledge also reached the Hungarian humanist János zsámboky (Sambucus), who compiled a Latin and Greek epigram in praise of Dürer, mentioning the Pannonian origins of the artist’s ancestors. This information was published in Adam Melchior’s book on the life of German scholars, published in 1615, in the section about Dürer. The artist’s own notes were published by Joachim von Sandrart in 1675.From then on, this publication became the basis for biographies of Dürer. The present essay will now look at the reception of these family records in Hungary, with its pitfalls, especially the village of Ajtós and the Dürer name, as well as the related open-door coat of arms and the portrait of the artist’s father.

Female education and social change

Does access to education facilitate the emergence of a human capital elite from which social activists, and thus, social change can emerge? Assembling a city-level panel of the political, intellectual, and economic elite throughout German history, we find that the opening of schools providing secondary education for women increased their representation among the human capital elite. These elites challenged the status quo and developed critical ideas that resonated in cities with higher human capital, connecting women to form a social movement. We find no evidence of other city-specific indicators of economic and gender-specific cultural change affecting our results. Differential returns to education are also unrelated to the increasing representation of women among the human capital elite, as the opening of gender-specific schools has no impact on the opposite gender.

Grammatical Innovations in German in Multilingual Namibia: The Expanded Use of Linking Elements and Gehen ‘Go’ as a Future Auxiliary

In this paper, we provide an overview of the history and sociolinguistic setting of Germans and German in Namibia, which serves as a backdrop for our discussion of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German. German has been actively used in Namibia since the 1880s, having been brought to the country through colonization, and it remains linguistically vital today. Via a questionnaire study, we investigate the expanded use of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German, namely, i) linking elements and ii) gehen as a future auxiliary. We explore various factors that could have contributed to the emergence of these innovations in order to better understand the dynamics of German in multilingual Namibia.*

H. Glenn Penny, German History Unbound. From 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2022

H. Glenn Penny, German History Unbound. From 1750 to the Present. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2022

Introduction: sacralisation in early modern Europe

ABSTRACT Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that they advanced which are most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world.

German Lessons: Comparative Constitutionalism, States’ Rights, and Federalist Imaginaries in Interwar India

AbstractThis article reveals the hold that German history and constitutionalism had on Indian federalists in the interwar period. A range of federalists from Indian princely states and British provinces, eager to see India become a federation rather than a unitary state fashioned on the English model, looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons. They saw in German history and constitutionalism a federal solution to the so-called “Indian problem,” wherein the rights of the states would be primary over those of individuals or groups. This German-inspired federal tradition, I argue, departed not only from political pluralism and association-based federalism, but also from the nationalist vision of placing individual rights over state rights. This article presents an alternative genealogy of comparative constitutional thought in India, and examines a post-national worldview that sidestepped the nation-states. By bringing a comparative approach to bear on political and constitutional histories, it escapes the national insularity that often characterizes such histories in colonial India, and places them in the comparative and global context of the interwar circulation of federalist ideas. German-inspired federal ideas of the period offer a counterpoint to corralling futuristic visions of India, and its founding, on the twin axes of anticolonial nationalism and popular sovereignty to the exclusion of state-centric ideas articulated by the princely states.

World Literary Histories as Rewritings of World Historiography

ABSTRACT This essay approaches the question of rewriting world civilization through a sub-set of civilizational history, namely the historiography of world literature. I will use the changing conceptions of world literature to track a change of emphasis on what matters in world civilization. My presentation is in three parts: a discussion of the nature of history, of literature, and of world literature; a comparison of two nineteenth-century German histories of world literature; and a comparison of two twenty-first century histories of world literature.

Kant’s approach to alterity and women

Accusing Kant of ‘sexism’ conceals what the real issues are: Kant was primarily making comments about women in his attempt to do popular philosophy and empirical science. Being an amateur at the empirical sciences, he actually was engaged in promoting gender norms for women especially. He was also concerned about international males conforming to the gender norms of working and self-governance. In addition, Kant engaged in the activity of gender policing and stereotyping women. His comments on women scholars and his treatment of Maria von Herbert illustrate these behaviors. When one assesses Kant’s distinctions between males and females it illustrates that he wants women to conform to gender roles, but this does not mean women cannot as rational human beings conform their actions to the moral law. What it does mean is that they probably will not conform their actions to the moral law, since conforming to the gender role of a woman in 18th century Germany was not conducive to self-governance. We can conclude anecdotally from Kant’s experience with Maria von Herbert that one’s dignity does not reside in gender norm conformity, nor in being under moral laws, but rather in working outside the home and acquiring a meaningful identity.

Overcoming the Past in German Scientific Discourse

Even now German society is painfully aware of its past. For German historians and cultural scientists, the problem of overcoming the past is an important topic for discussion. The purpose of this research article is to explore the genesis of the phenomenon of overcoming the past in post-war Germany. To investigate the phenomenon and the development of the concept, the article analyzes the approaches of German historians to the study of this problem from the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany to this day. The research is based on the principles of memory studies to reflect on the problem of guilt and collective responsibility of the Germans for the Nazi era. In 1949–1990 the German society acknowledged Nazi crimes and established memorials. Political disputes on the reassessment of national socialism attracted public attention and transformed memory politics in the country. The author also applies a comparative historical method to determine how this went in two German states, Germany and the GDR. The results of the study show that after the unification of Germany, the concept of overcoming the past has changed and the problem of overcoming the past has got a new dimension in German scientific discourse. As the study has shown, at present not only overcoming the period of National Socialism but also rethinking the SED regime is a significant problem of public historical consciousness and the culture of memory in Germany. This double problem is widely discussed in the media and is finding its way into the collective consciousness and identity of the German people. The article describes and analyzes the specificities of the process of transformation. Scientific discussion of the differences between the understanding of the concept of overcoming the past and its practical applications described in the paper is another finding of the study.

Political and Unpolitical Germany: Max Weber and Thomas Mann

Abstract This paper presents a comparison of Max Weber and Thomas Mann from a historical perspective. It does not seek to override the obvious differences between them, but it suggests that these differences reflect on the remarkable diversity and plurality of a common context: Germany seen as a community of Kultur. Furthermore, very different views of the world could still lead to significant coincidence. This is particularly true of their views on politics, where both men emerged as robust democrats. Yet they also upheld a large “unpolitical” space, a position which was symptomatic of their class, the Bildungsbürgertum, but which was ordinarily a source of political weakness in that class in early 20th century Germany. The comparison is asymmetric however. While a wide range of Weber’s texts can be drawn upon, in Mann’s case Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen stands out as a focal point. This leads to a revaluation of that text. It was a central component in Mann’s intellectual formation; not an aberration which can be set aside.