War Germany Research Articles

From state terror to international conflict. A place of memory: Katyn as a foreign policy tool of Putin’s Russia

This text discusses the transformations of the Katyn memorial site near Smolensk in western Russia, where, in 1940, the mass murder of more than 4,000 Polish military officers who were prisoners of war occurred. After the Soviet Union’s admission of guilt in 1990, it seemed for two decades that Katyn could also serve as a place for mutual reconciliation between post-communist Poland and post-Soviet Russia. However, in the period of increasing tension between Russia and Poland after 2010, the monument in Katyn became an object of Russian–Polish confrontation. The author concludes that the Katyn memorial complex today illustrates the tendency to patriotize and detraumatize Soviet crimes, whereby the positive events of the Soviet era – especially the victory over Germany in World War II – are ‘Russified’ and newly politically traumatized in parallel with the trivialization and marginalization of murder and crimes against human rights. The new form of memory in Katyn reflects an increasingly firmly dictated line from above that combines Russian nationalism, Orthodox faith, and a sentimental view of the period of Communist rule.

СПОРТ У МІЖВОЄННІЙ ЛАТВІЇ (1918–1940): ОГЛЯД ЛАТВІЙСЬКОЇ ІСТОРІОГРАФІЇ

The revolution in the Russian Empire and the defeat of Germany in the First World War opened a window of opportunity for the people of Latvia. For the first time in its history, the country was able to appear on the political map of the world. However, this became possible only through the armed liberation struggle (1918–1920). Victory in the War of Independence, like that of neighboring Lithuania and Estonia, marked an era of independence that lasted until the Soviet occupation in 1940. In cultural and social aspects, these more than two decades of freedom became a real national renaissance. The revival was understood as a multifaceted process affecting all spheres of Latvian life, with culture, education, and science as a priority. Sport was not an exception in it either, on the contrary, it was an important element of the general mosaic. He played a great consolidating, upbringing and ideological role in the life of Latvia. This is characteristic of both periods of the interwar history of the Latvian state – «democratic» or «parliamentary» (1920–1934) and especially «authoritarian» during the «May 15 Latvia» or «Ulmanis era» (1934–1940). The article presents the first attempt in Ukrainian historical science to analyze the achievements of Latvian historiography on this issue. Attention is paid to studies created at different historical stages, by representatives of different scientific and ideological conjunctures. This publication claims the role of a structural segment of a further comprehensive study of the history of interwar Latvia, with an emphasis on various spheres of the country’s political, military and cultural life in that era. At the same time, such research is embedded in the general architecture of more global historical Baltic studies in Ukraine.

Ставропольский медицинский институт – фронту

Introduction. An important role in achieving the victory of the Soviet people over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War was played by training institutions that the Red Army badly needed - military, engineering, medical. One of the higher educational institutions that trained doctors for the front and rear in the south of the country was the Stavropol State Medical Institute. However, information about his activities in a number of areas during this period of time was largely fragmentary. Materials and methods. The study is based on the analysis of documents and materials from the funds of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the State Archive of the Stavropol Territory, the archive and museum of the Stavropol State Medical University, the analysis of regional printed publications during the Great Patriotic War, as well as the results of previous scientific works on this issue. Based on a combination of information from various sources, the activities of the medical institute and its employees in providing assistance to the front both before the occupation of Stavropol and after its liberation from German troops are comprehensively considered. Analysis. The analysis showed that, along with the main task of training highly qualified medical workers by the university, its employees actively provided other assistance to the front. Results. In the course of the study, it was found that the specialists of the clinical departments of the university took an active part in the work of the evacuation hospitals of the city and the region, on the territory of which the largest hospital base of the Soviet troops was deployed. Research staff of the institute, among whom there were a large number of prominent scientists, participated in the development of military medical topics. Employees and students of the university were engaged in social, educational and propaganda activities, provided financial assistance to the front.

Exploring the Impact of the War between Russia and Ukraine on Germany's Energy Policy

The Russo-Ukrainian War brought dramatic changes to the Current international system. The biggest challenge to Europe is the Energy Crisis because of the sanctions on Russian energy. These years many scholars have criticized neoliberalism and interdependence in government policy, and the war again accelerates that. This article is researching the impact of the energy crisis during the war in Germany. This research is helpful in understanding that the government needs to rethink neoliberalism as a guiding methodology and ideology. Based on the method of case study, this research found that it was necessary to develop realism’s interdependence in this scenario. 1) The only Channel during tensions is the role of the central government. 2) The Invisible Hierarchy lies in a nation’s policy decision. 3) Military forces are a vital part of world politics indirectly. As an extension of current realist theory, economic interdependence should be considered as a part of broader national security interests. Thus, Germany should reconsider its energy policy.

Book Review: Between Containment and Rollback. The United States and the Cold War in Germany by Christian F. Ostermann

Book Review: <i>Between Containment and Rollback. The United States and the Cold War in Germany</i> by Christian F. Ostermann

Memoirs of the Foreign Legion

Maurice Magnus was 39 years old when he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to join the fight against Germany in World War I. Magnus was an American expatriot living in Rome—a theatrical agent, tutor, newspaper correspondent, writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. He soon discovered his error—the Legion he found consisted largely of German exiles, prison-avoiding felons, and contemptuous French officers. Magnus spent about six weeks training in North Africa before a transfer to southern France provided the opportunity to desert and flee back to Italy. The Memoirs recounts his brief disenchanted tenure as a Legionnaire. After his military service his various enterprises had little success, and in 1920 a run of bad checks caused him to skip from Italy to Malta. Traced there eventually by the authorities, he faced extradition for charges of fraud and in desperation committed suicide. His acquaintances Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence prepared his Memoirs of the Foreign Legion for publication, hoping to clear the debts he left behind, and Lawrence wrote a long unflattering introduction. In the present volume the Memoirs is printed first, so readers have an unprejudiced experience of the text with Lawrence’s essay following for additional context. Magnus’s narrative contains offensive language. Some passages in his manuscript describing homosexual incidents that were excised by the original publisher are restored in this edition.

Germany (Deutschland)

This article provides a brief overview of hip hop’s development in Germany. First, it explains how rap music and hip hop culture arrived in a divided Cold War Germany in the 1980s. It then traces the music genre’s evolution into one of Germany’s most popular and commercially successful music genres since the country’s reunification in 1990. The contribution affirms that rap music and hip hop culture in Germany continues to reflect, revise and respond to larger social justice issues in German society, such as struggles for racial, ethnic, gender and sexual equality. The author argues that hip hop culture in Germany is a rich, multi-faceted and diverse phenomenon which has been shaped by, responds to, and remains embedded in larger geopolitical and transnational dynamics in Europe and beyond.

Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany

"Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany." Journal of History, 57(3), pp. 514–515

Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany

Samuel Clowes Huneke, <i>States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany</i>

Stressors related to the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the Ukraine crisis, and their impact on stress symptoms in Germany: analysis of cross-sectional survey data

BackgroundClimate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Ukraine crisis are considered unprecedented global stressors, potentially associated with serious health consequences. However, simultaneous effects of these stressors are not yet understood, making it difficult to evaluate their relative contribution to the population burden and potential future manifestations in clinically significant psychiatric disorders. This study aimed at disentangling the relative contribution of the three stressor groups on current sub-clinical stress symptoms.MethodsA cross-sectional, representative survey study was conducted two months after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in Germany. Proportional quota sampling was applied for age, gender, income, and regional characteristics. Data were recruited by means of an online survey. 3094 data sets (1560 females) were included. Age ranged from 18–89 (M: 50.4 years; SD: 17.2). The Subclinical Stress Questionnaire (SSQ-25) served as main outcome measure. In collaboration with a professional media agency, 20 items were generated to capture salient population stressors. A three-factor exploratory structural equation model confirmed the appropriateness of this scale.Results(1) Differences in subjective rankings revealed that stressors related to the Ukraine crisis were rated as most worrying, followed by climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic (Generalized-Linear-Model: Epsilon = .97; F(1.94, 6001.14) = 1026.12, p < .001; ηp2 = .25). (2) In a linear regression model (R2 = .39), Covid-19 pandemic stressors were the only meaningful predictors for current ill-health (standardized β = .48). Ukraine crisis did not predict stress symptom profiles in the present sample. (3) Older and male individuals report less and/or less severe stress symptoms, although effect sizes were small (range: η2 .11—.21). An older age also reduced the impact of Covid-19 stressors.ConclusionsResearchers from the health sciences must consider overlapping effects from population stressors. Although the Ukraine crisis and climate change mark salient stressors, including economic threats, the Covid-19 pandemic still has a profound effect on ill-health and must be considered as a relevant factor in future manifestations of psychiatric and associated health consequences.

Compassionate Comics

The 2015 publication of Nick Sousanis’s graphic dissertation, Unflattening, opened doors for artist-scholars who challenge conventional research methodologies by producing graphic dissertations, graphic research, and comics-based publications in academic, scientific, and medical journals. Unflattening came out one year after I began a PhD program in cultural studies at the University of California, Davis, with a proposed graphic dissertation of my own. In this essay, I will discuss how my intended project, a graphic narrative about my maternal grandmother and her experiences of the Second World War in Germany, became a graphic memoir—an intersectional feminist Bildungsroman that explores themes of transgenerational memory, displacement, and childhood sexual abuse. As an astute scholar in my cohort put it, “You’ve found a new way of ‘doing’ psychology and history.” How is the very particular kind of subjectivity, a seeing from the ground up, or from a “snail’s eye view,” engendered by the comics form, useful for contemporary decolonial scholarship? In addition to writing about my graphic memoir, Queen of Snails (forthcoming by Graphic Mundi, an imprint of Penn State University Press in 2022), I will interview Kay Sohini, a PhD candidate at Stonybrook, about Unbelonging, her graphic dissertation in progress, Helen Blejerman (Lulu La Sensationelle, Presque Lune Editions, 2014), and Sarah Lightman (Book of Sarah, Myriad Press and Penn State University Press, 2021). How has the process of creating their graphic narratives changed their approaches to research? What have they learned by employing drawing and writing in crafting works that include autobiographical elements? How might some of these processes be useful to scholars seeking to unpack intersectional issues of transgenerational trauma, misogyny, and racism?

States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany

States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany

The Issue of the Establishment and Activities of the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea (March 1917 – December 1918) in Contemporary Ukrainian Historiography

The article highlights the issues of formation and activity of the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea (March 1917 – December 1918) in modern Ukrainian historiography. It is noted that in the writings of modern Ukrainian historians, the material and technical base in the Black Sea, which existed as of 1917, was characterized, the prerequisites for the construction of the Ukrainian military fleet were revealed, the processes of the struggle for its creation during the days of the Ukrainian Central Rada (UCR) and the Hetmanate of P. Skoropadskyi were highlighted. In particular historical, geographical, ethnic, political, material and technical components for the creation of this military structure were investigated. The works of modern Ukrainian scientists were considered, in which they emphasize a complex of mistakes on the part of the leaders of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the government in the field of naval construction, their inconsistent defense of Ukrainian national interests regarding the Black Sea Fleet, which significantly affected the activity of Ukrainian forces in Crimea and Sevastopol and disorientated their further state-building activities. It was stated that during the existence of the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi, the government immediately took a course to join Crimea to Ukraine. Despite the indignation of the Germans, a complete economic blockade of the Crimean Peninsula was announced. The leadership of the Ukrainian State did everything to return the Black Sea Fleet under its jurisdiction, and it finally succeeded, but only after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the beginning of the anti-Hetman uprising on November 14, 1918, the abdication of power by P. Skoropadskyi a month later, and the eventual capture of Black Sea Fleet by the Entente countries.The author also focuses on the wishes of many Ukrainian researchers of this period to the power structures of modern Ukraine, especially in the current conditions of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, taking into account the positive and negative experience of the state and military construction of Ukrainian state entities in 1917–1921.

Social Media Addiction and Fear of War in Germany

Individuals with an excessive use of social media may be frequently exposed to stimuli, such as (fake) news or images of violence, which might lead to a higher fear of war. Therefore, the objective of this study is to examine the association between a social media addiction and fear of war (conventional war and nuclear war) in Germany. Data were taken from a nationally representative survey with n = 3091 participants (18 to 74 years; data collection in mid-March 2022). Social media addiction was quantified using the validated Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale. Moreover, established items were used to quantify a fear of war. Medium differences (in terms of Cohen’s d) were identified regarding the fear of war between individuals without a social media addiction and individuals with a social media addiction. Adjusting for several covariates, the regressions revealed that individuals with a social media addiction had a higher fear of war compared to individuals without a social media addiction (fear of a conventional war: β = 0.44, p &lt; 0.01; fear of a nuclear war: β = 0.61, p &lt; 0.001). In conclusion, our study demonstrated an association between a social media addiction and fear of war.

‘There is No Icebreaker like a Tiny Child’: Reuniting British Military Families in Cold War Germany

Family reunion had a deeply practical and symbolic significance in post-war Europe. Through the case study of British military families living in Germany, this article examines both official discourse and families’ own experiences of reunion and life overseas in the first decades of the Cold War, through the three national but also international visions of the family: as emblems of familial and domestic stability, as ‘unofficial ambassadors’ promoting European unity and as friendly faces of Western democracy. In all cases, the article shows the ways that official messages were embraced, subverted or ignored by families, highlighting the value of exploring context-specific agency. Military families seemingly lived in a world of limited choices, but a range of life narratives show how they came to see aspects of their family life as resolutely theirs.

A Queer Wall in the Head: Using Oral Histories to Map Gay Desire Across Cold War Germany

This article uses oral histories to examine divergences in how gay men from East and West Germany remembered the sexuality of their youths. Finding that East German men recalled their sexual exploits in far more detail than did West German men, the article argues that this divergence is the result of a complex interlacing of factors. Ultimately, the article contends that these factors reveal a queer wall in the head that continues to delimit how gay German men understand their actions, their pasts, and their identities.

Situating the Bauhaus in Cold War Germany

Situating the Bauhaus in Cold War Germany

A “Stretchier” Kind of Witnessing

The article compiles the events marking the precarity of disabled peoples’ lives during the Second World War in Germany through an examination of the transition of Nazi psychiatric killing centers into memorials during the long twentieth century. As Judith Butler points out in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, recognizing the conditions of vulnerability calls us to a responsibility to alter abuse, suffering, and violence; yet it may also be true that “the apprehension of precariousness leads to a heightening of violence, [as] an insight into the physical vulnerability of some set of others […] and incites the desire to destroy them” (2). Such is the case with the medical mass murder of 300,000+ psychiatric patients in Nazi Germany as this preliminary medical mass murder made possible the post-1941 Holocaust genocide of 5.4 million Jewish people in death camp gas chambers. Thus, the article attempts to answer some critical questions by using Nazi medical mass murder as its historical foundation: How does one witness a violent mass tragedy when no witnesses survived? What meaning can be derived from the memorialization of disability history in our own contemporary moment? What do these public acts of recognition mean to disabled people as a group and/or disability scholars as part of the preservation of disability history? Why do these medical mass killings that pre-date and lead to the Holocaust still sit primarily unrecognized and forgotten? Finally, what do today’s memorialization practices tell us about contemporary attitudes toward disability as this largely unaffiliated subpopulation lives in the aftermath of this murderous history? When and how do disabled lives become grievable? How might we devise an alternative model to Holocaust studies’ pivotal reliance on direct witnesses that are not available in the Aktion T4 psychiatric killings?

Cold war liberalism in West Germany: Richard Löwenthal and ‘Western civilization’

ABSTRACT Richard Löwenthal’s response to the challenges of ‘1968’ was more complex than that of most of his liberal colleagues. He did not simply remain beholden to the interpretative patterns of a German ‘special path’ (Sonderweg). He also, and increasingly so, drew on the conceptual framework of ‘Western civilization’ to make sense of and cope with the socio-cultural transformations of his times. What many like-minded intellectuals perceived solely as a ‘deviation from the West’, he also viewed as a ‘crisis of the West’. This article argues that this transnationally ‘Western’ stance was part and parcel of Löwenthal’s intellectual profile as ‘cold war liberal’. This was a relatively rare species in Cold War Germany, and Löwenthal was rather exceptional in his sustained engagement with the topic of ‘Western civilization’. Compared with luminaries such as Carl Joachim Friedrich, Ernst Fraenkel or Karl Loewenstein, Richard Löwenthal may be lesser known in English-speaking scholarship, but he makes for a particularly instructive case when discussing ‘cold war liberalism’ in West Germany. With its focus on the spatialization of political thought, and ‘the West’ as a spatial imaginary, this article also seeks to contribute to the growing discussion of how to ‘spatialize’ intellectual history.

Political Party Affinity and Fear of Conventional and Nuclear War in Germany

Aim: to clarify the association between political party affinity and fear of conventional and nuclear war in Germany. Methods: data were used from a nationally representative online survey (in terms of age bracket, sex and state; n = 3091 individuals; mid-March 2022). Multiple linear regressions were used to investigate the association between political party affinity and fear of conventional and nuclear war in Germany, adjusting for several covariates. Results: while, for example, individuals who had an affinity with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany reported the highest frequency of severe fear of a conventional war (58.0%), individuals who had an affinity with the Left Party (Die Linken, left-wing) reported a somewhat lower frequency of severe fear (48.2%) and individuals who had an affinity with the Alternative for Germany (AFD, right-wing) reported the lowest frequency (43.7%). Regressions showed that—compared to individuals who had an affinity with the SPD—individuals who had an affinity with the Free Democratic Party (FDP, liberal) and particularly individuals who had an affinity with the Alternative for Germany (AFD) reported a markedly lower fear of war (both fear of a conventional war and fear of a nuclear war). Conclusion: our study showed some interesting associations between political party affinity and fear of war in Germany. This knowledge may assist in characterising individuals at risk for higher levels of fear of war.