Modern German History Research Articles

David Kahn, in remembrance: an INS special forum

ABSTRACT David Kahn was one of America’s leading experts on the history of cryptology, the art and science of breaking the communications codes, ciphers, and secret writing of hostile nations and terrorist organizations – a vital intelligence tradecraft for anticipating potentially dangerous operations of foreign adversaries. As both a journalist and a professional historian, he pursued scholarly interests in cryptology as well as modern German history. His most well-known book, entitled The Codebreakers, influenced the field of cryptology and attracted many young readers to this intelligence profession. Kahn wrote many other studies on the topic and founded the journal Cryptologia. He received an array of honors for his work, including induction into the National Security Agency’s Cryptologic Hall of Fame. In addition, Kahn was a popular social fixture at prestigious clubs in New York City and a member of several boards of editors devoted to Intelligence Studies, including this journal.

Linguistic representation of the concept BERLIN WALL in German eonyms

The article is devoted to the study of linguistic representation of the concept BERLIN WALL in modern German. The main goal of the article is to identify and describe eonyms (key words of the epoch) that preserve the historical memory of the Berlin Wall in modern German. The material of the study was eonyms selected from the rating lists of the linguistic action of the German Language Society (Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache e. V.) «Word of the Year» for the period from 1978 to 2020, verbalizing the concept BERLIN WALL. The application of comparative-historical and descriptive methods made it possible to identify eonyms representing the result of linguistic reflection of the most important political phenomenon in modern German history. The article provides a linguocultural analysis of the selected eonyms in synchronic and diachronic aspects. The author describes the influence of the BERLIN WALL concept on the perception of East and West German citizens of each other, analyses the linguistic reflection of changes in political and social life in Germany in the critical era after German reunification. The description of the socio-historical contexts of the emergence of eonyms as representatives of the BERLIN WALL concept allows us to characterise the existing linguistic stereotypes in the German language. The analysis highlights the eonyms and their derivatives, which appear with certain cyclicity, linking historical events with each other and characterising the dynamic development of society and language. The unfolding of the meanings projected in the eonyms allows us to identify the most significant historical events reflected in the concept of BERLIN WALL, to interpret the differences in communicative behaviour between the inhabitants of East and West Germany.

Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)

Technology in Modern German History: 1800 to the Present by Karsten Uhl (review)

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.

Listening to Human Rights: Class Conflict in Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie

Abstract In what began as a piece against the Nazi concentration camps, the composer Hanns Eisler and his collaborator, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, created the eleven-movement, twelve-tone Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50 (1935–1958) to communicate political ideas. They soon expanded it to articulate what they saw as the very roots of fascism: militarism and capitalism. To explain the problems of class conflict in Europe, Eisler and Brecht focused on two groups that were central to Marxist–Leninist ideology: peasants and industrial workers. In two movements, the Peasant Cantata (Bauernkantate) and Workers Cantata (Arbeiterkantate), they portrayed long-standing injustices that peasants and industrial workers endured in the twentieth century. Eisler thus viewed the Deutsche Sinfonie, his largest and most ambitious work, as a way of explaining the arc of modern German history—from the late nineteenth century through to the 1940s—and how the Nazis came to power. The article further argues that the Deutsche Sinfonie can be analysed in relation to the discourse on human rights, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum, Micheline Ishay and other human rights theorists and historians, as a contribution to what Mark Philip Bradley calls the ‘global human rights imagination’. The article explains the vital role that the Peasant Cantata and Workers Cantata had in the overall conception of the work and how human rights issues were at the core of that musical idea. To place the Deutsche Sinfonie in historical and cultural context, this interdisciplinary analysis integrates methodologies of both cultural history and musicology.

Jason Philip Coy, The Devil’s Art. Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany. (Studies in Early Modern German History.) Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press 2020

Article Jason Philip Coy, The Devil’s Art. Divination and Discipline in Early Modern Germany. (Studies in Early Modern German History.) Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press 2020 was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 313, issue 3).

The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller (review)

Reviewed by: The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller Jerry Z. Muller Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000343 In 1977, five years before his death, Gershom Scholem published a memoir of his youth, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (published in English translation in 1980 as From Berlin to Jerusalem). Though it was not his focus, he touched upon the history of his family: his bourgeois parents, the printer Arthur and his wife Betty, and his three brothers. Reinhold, the eldest, became a German nationalist; the next in age, Erich, was a liberal; Werner was a radical leftist who for a few years was a Communist member of the Reichstag; and then there was Gershom himself—Gerhard until he Hebraicized his name—a committed Zionist from his youth. It no doubt occurred to more than one historian of German Jewry that the Scholems seemed to present a real-life counterpart to the fictional family depicted by Sholem Aleichem in Tevye and His Daughters, in which each child followed a different [End Page 457] and characteristic path of eastern European Jewry. Reconstructing the history of the Scholem family thus offers the possibility of portraying the various paths taken by the children of the turn-of-the-century German Jewish middle class. Jay Howard Geller has now taken up that challenge. His book has two aims. The first is to reconstruct the history of the family from its arrival in Berlin in the early nineteenth century through its dissolution through emigration and destruction during the Third Reich, with a coda surveying the later fate of the brothers and their families. The second is to use the history of the Scholem family to exemplify larger patterns—social, educational, religious, and political—in the history of the Berlin Jewish middle class (entrepreneurial and professional, below the level of the titled and the rich, but above that of the working class). The book largely succeeds in both, though there is a certain tension between the two aims—with the family drama sometimes diluted by historical generalizations. The background political narrative of each period, together with the story of the Scholem family, makes the book accessible to those without a background in modern German history, while even those familiar with German Jewish history will gain additional insights and information. Geller's reconstruction is grounded in assiduous research in archives and obscure published works, from high school yearbooks to government statistical reports. His most important source is the Gershom Scholem archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. From very early on in his life, Scholem had a sense of himself as a world historical figure—which he indeed became—and preserved not only his diaries, but also his massive correspondence. A three-volume selection of that correspondence was published in German between 1994–1999, with a one volume selection in English in 2002. Scholem published his correspondence with Walter Benjamin in 1980; an English translation appeared in 1992. In 1999 selections from Scholem's correspondence with his mother, Betty, were published. Since then, his extensive correspondence with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno has also been published. And yet this published correspondence represents only a fraction of the material in the Scholem archive: Scholem was a key node in the international Republic of Letters in the twentieth century, and his papers are a gold mine for the intellectual history of the era. Geller draws on the published as well as unpublished correspondence, primarily that of Scholem with the other members of his family. He also draws on existing biographical studies of Gershom and of Werner. The Scholem family at the center of the book had its origins in Glogau in Silesia. Its founder, Marcus Scholem, moved to Berlin in the early nineteenth century, where his son Siegfried founded a printing business. Siegfried's son, Arthur (Gershom's father), started a printing business of his own, which he ran with help from his wife, Betty—a common pattern among central European Jewish business families. Their...

Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp.

Reviewed by: The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction by Jay Howard Geller Jerry Z. Muller Jay Howard Geller. The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie from Emancipation to Destruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 348 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000343 In 1977, five years before his death, Gershom Scholem published a memoir of his youth, Von Berlin nach Jerusalem (published in English translation in 1980 as From Berlin to Jerusalem). Though it was not his focus, he touched upon the history of his family: his bourgeois parents, the printer Arthur and his wife Betty, and his three brothers. Reinhold, the eldest, became a German nationalist; the next in age, Erich, was a liberal; Werner was a radical leftist who for a few years was a Communist member of the Reichstag; and then there was Gershom himself—Gerhard until he Hebraicized his name—a committed Zionist from his youth. It no doubt occurred to more than one historian of German Jewry that the Scholems seemed to present a real-life counterpart to the fictional family depicted by Sholem Aleichem in Tevye and His Daughters, in which each child followed a different [End Page 457] and characteristic path of eastern European Jewry. Reconstructing the history of the Scholem family thus offers the possibility of portraying the various paths taken by the children of the turn-of-the-century German Jewish middle class. Jay Howard Geller has now taken up that challenge. His book has two aims. The first is to reconstruct the history of the family from its arrival in Berlin in the early nineteenth century through its dissolution through emigration and destruction during the Third Reich, with a coda surveying the later fate of the brothers and their families. The second is to use the history of the Scholem family to exemplify larger patterns—social, educational, religious, and political—in the history of the Berlin Jewish middle class (entrepreneurial and professional, below the level of the titled and the rich, but above that of the working class). The book largely succeeds in both, though there is a certain tension between the two aims—with the family drama sometimes diluted by historical generalizations. The background political narrative of each period, together with the story of the Scholem family, makes the book accessible to those without a background in modern German history, while even those familiar with German Jewish history will gain additional insights and information. Geller's reconstruction is grounded in assiduous research in archives and obscure published works, from high school yearbooks to government statistical reports. His most important source is the Gershom Scholem archive at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. From very early on in his life, Scholem had a sense of himself as a world historical figure—which he indeed became—and preserved not only his diaries, but also his massive correspondence. A three-volume selection of that correspondence was published in German between 1994–1999, with a one volume selection in English in 2002. Scholem published his correspondence with Walter Benjamin in 1980; an English translation appeared in 1992. In 1999 selections from Scholem's correspondence with his mother, Betty, were published. Since then, his extensive correspondence with Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno has also been published. And yet this published correspondence represents only a fraction of the material in the Scholem archive: Scholem was a key node in the international Republic of Letters in the twentieth century, and his papers are a gold mine for the intellectual history of the era. Geller draws on the published as well as unpublished correspondence, primarily that of Scholem with the other members of his family. He also draws on existing biographical studies of Gershom and of Werner. The Scholem family at the center of the book had its origins in Glogau in Silesia. Its founder, Marcus Scholem, moved to Berlin in the early nineteenth century, where his son Siegfried founded a printing business. Siegfried's son, Arthur (Gershom's father), started a printing business of his own, which he ran with help from his wife, Betty—a common pattern among central European Jewish business families. Their...

Die Schöne Heimat? Depictions of Germany in a Popular Photobook from the Second Empire to the Federal Republic

AbstractWhile existing studies of twentieth-century German photobooks have understandably sought out volumes by the most iconic photographers, with the most innovative typography, or with the most radical political messages, no photobook series better documents the continuities and ruptures of modern German history than the conventional and highly commercial Blauen Bücher, published by Karl Robert Langewiesche starting in 1907. Die Schöne Heimat, first published in 1915, was the series’ best-selling title. By 1971, and the 619,000th copy, Germany had changed fundamentally, yet the book was still recognizable as the one dedicated to “those who have defended their homeland and ours” during World War I. The article explores the remarkable longevity of this popular but problematic publication.

Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society

The Federal Republic is the most enduring political formation in modern German history. In just a few years, by 2023, it will have lasted as long as the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period taken together. Over the last few decades, an entire series of mostly German language books have synthesized its history into a coherent though occasionally somewhat predictable narrative. Employing paradigms such as modernization, Westernization, liberalization or Americanization, historians have traced the gradual evolution of the Federal Republic from the unconditional military, political and moral collapse of the Third Reich to an at least seemingly well-functioning, prosperous and multicultural democratic state. After the collapse of state socialism in 1989, the Federal Republic managed to absorb the former East Germany, whose history then often featured as a negative counterpoint to West German success. And since historians have gained access to East German files up to 1989, the history of the GDR became its own growth industry.

Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918–1965

The study of grassroots religious life in modern German history is flourishing. The long-hegemonic ‘milieu’ model, which emphasized social structures and institutions, often to the neglect of lay religious cultures and experiences, has begun to yield to studies foregrounding everyday life, vernacular ritual and belief, gender, sexuality and lived faith. Michael E. O’Sullivan’s wonderful study of early-twentieth-century German Catholic miracles, Disruptive Power, keeps social structures, clerical and lay leadership and institutions in view while also illuminating forms of popular piety and their political impact both within the Catholic community and at regional and national levels. Robert Orsi, whose revelatory scholarship on American Catholics accents the intimate coexistence (or ‘braidedness’, to use Orsi’s metaphor) of religion and modern life, is an important conceptual resource for O’Sullivan. Orsi’s perspective refuses to relegate the religious to its own sphere, isolated from the totality of human behaviour and thought and set apart in time. For all of its centuries-old symbolism—rapturous, bleeding bodies and heaven-turned gazes—the religiosity O’Sullivan uncovers was a resolutely modern one that, as he has written elsewhere, created ‘new meanings out of old traditions’ (‘From Catholic Milieu to Lived Religion,’ History Compass, 2009).

Psychoanalysis, Experiential History, and Empathy

This article focuses on the intersection of psychoanalysis and history by examining the work of the German historian and psychoanalyst by training, Thomas Kohut. The way in which history shapes the psyche and the importance of seeing psychological experience in its wider social, cultural, and historical context are emphasized. The notions of experiential history and empathy are explored, particularly as they relate to Kohut’s understanding modern German history and the perpetration of the Holocaust. His detailed examination of the German generation of perpetrators and enablers is elaborated, and his analysis of the culture that shaped them is considered.

Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany by Laura Kounine

Reviewed by: Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany by Laura Kounine Kathryn A. Edwards Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany. By Laura Kounine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 279. Cloth $78.00. ISBN 978-0198799085. Laura Kounine's Imagining the Witch uses case studies from the Duchy of Württemberg to analyze the relationships between emotions, gender, and selfhood in early modern Europe. Challenging the work of David Sabean and Thomas Robisheaux, among others, who see early modern Germany identity as primarily communal with little awareness of individuality, Kounine argues that the people involved in the seventeenth-century witch trials had clear and diverse senses of self that contributed to complex emotional experiences. Supported by research into 250 different witchcraft cases, documents relating to which are held at the Stuttgart Hauptstaatsarchiv (and she provides a valuable chart of those cases in the appendix), Kounine combines breadth and precision, ensuring her book will become required reading for anyone studying the early modern witch trials and emotions, selfhood, and individuality more generally for early modern and modern German history. As is to be expected from someone who has worked extensively with the ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions and the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Kounine well understands the classic approaches to the history of emotions found in work by Peter and Carol Stearns, Barbara Rosenwein, William Reddy, and Monique Sheer. Rather than building on these methods, she proposes a different technique that, drawing on the Listening Guide (14–16), involves four stages of analysis and four different readings of a text that reveal the various layers of meaning, and the various human relationships, that inform self-narratives. For Kounine, this allows the scholar to ask how witches individually organize their subjective experience. While this technique could work for many records, it is particularly effective for Württemberg's witch trials. As a "ritual of conflict," witch trials by their very nature highlight tensions in communal identities and the individual testimonies and, when read carefully, demonstrate the autonomy that the accused, accusers, witnesses, and even judges could have. By dividing her book into a series of case studies of well-documented seventeenth-century trials, Kounine demonstrates how witches articulated the concepts of Sinn (mind, sense, understanding) and Gewissen (conscience, personal knowledge) to express personal senses of responsibility and varied emotional states. In the process, she convincingly argues in both chapters 2 and 3 that early modern Germans had an embodied sense of subjectivity: they conceived of "the individual as divided between an inner and outer self" (76), and the importance of conscience in Lutheran piety reinforced and [End Page 587] reflected these ideas. As such, Kounine provides rich and useful descriptions of the fluidity in personhood and emotions in early modern Württemberg. Kounine is well aware that, for anyone interested in the early modern witch trials, emotions, selfhood, and gender must play a central role in analysis. As with her treatment of individuality and identity, she is both indebted to and willing to challenge leaders in the field, in this case, Diane Purkiss and Lyndal Roper. Her summary of their conclusions is fair and her revisions are convincing. Using her method of close reading rather than psychoanalysis, Kounine immediately notes how the existence of male witches complicates claims about witch trials and how the emotions found in them were tied to fears of the female body and its transformations (menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause). Rather than seeing, for example, men who are "inconstant" as feminized, Kounine shows how such emotional states and concomitant actions fit into a more complex concept of manhood. Throughout Imagining the Witch, she provides dramatic examples of both men and women expressing passion, love, confusion, sorrow, and confidence. In the process, she is clear that, while a binary approach may have been prevalent in more theoretical texts and "church ideals," in the actual trials the "gendering of witchcraft was more fluid than many historians have claimed" (69, 120). One of the reasons for this was the fluidity and individuality of the emotional world of accused...

The Executioner’s Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg. Translated by Joel F. Harrington. Studies in Early Modern German History. Edited by H. C. Erik Midelfort.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. lxiv+172. $55.00 (cloth); $24.50 (paper and e-book).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Executioner’s Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg. Translated by Joel F. Harrington. Studies in Early Modern German History. Edited by H. C. Erik Midelfort.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. lxiv+172. $55.00 (cloth); $24.50 (paper and e-book).Laura StokesLaura StokesStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 90, Number 3September 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/698805 Views: 109Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Authoritarianism in Modern Germany History

Why study the history of modern German-speaking Central Europe? If pressed to answer this question fifty years ago, a Germanist would likely have said something to the effect that one studies modern German history to trace the “German” origins of Nazism, with the broader aim of understanding authoritarianism. While the problem of authoritarianism clearly remains relevant to this day, the nation-state-centered approach to understanding it has waned, especially in light of the recent shift toward transnational and global history. The following essay focuses on the issue of authoritarianism, asking whether the study of German history is still relevant to authoritarianism. It begins with a review of two conventional approaches to understanding authoritarianism in modern German history, and then thinks about it in a different way through G. W. F. Hegel in an effort to demonstrate the vibrancy of German intellectual history for exploring significant and global issues such as authoritarianism.

Looking Back on theSonderweg

Central European Historyhas opened its pages again and again to the controversial debate about the so-called GermanSonderweg. With that in mind, and on the occasion of this important journal's fiftieth anniversary, the following essay presents some very selective and personal thoughts on this topic. Although discussed and promoted much less frequently now than in previous decades, and although there are understandable reasons why it has left the center stage of scholarly debate, the approach to modern German history signified by this problematic concept has not been disproven or become obsolete. But, confronted by severe criticism, it has been—and can be—rethought and revised.

German Zeitgeschichte: Konturen eines Forschungsfeldes

This book is both a typical and an idiosyncratic representative of German contemporary historiography. As a Festschrift, it is dedicated to the work of Konrad Jarausch, a leading scholar of modern German history with an impressive and influential transatlantic academic biography. As a bilingual collection of essays, it offers a wide range of inquiries into the political, social, economic and cultural ‘German Zeitgeschichte’—understood as the history of Germany since (roughly) World War I as well as an academic discipline. Perhaps unexpectedly, in their introduction the editors offer less of a programmatic statement on what precisely encompasses German Zeitgeschichte. Refreshingly, they avoid engaging in the ‘occasionally quite “German” exercises in self-questioning and determining their legitimacy’ and instead offer a pointed reflection on the state of the art from a—somewhat— German point of view. As Martin Sabrow elaborates in his contribution, academic contemporary history today is intricately tied to the dynamics of collective remembrance, public discourses on history and memory, popular representations and, above all, it is challenged by an overwhelming multitude of (new) media outlets. If there is anything special about the contemporary history of Germany, it is related to the unremitting relevance of Auschwitz as ‘Zivilisationsbruch’ and reflected in a largely post-heroic and post-nationalist understanding of history as a critical social science. The ‘virulence’ with which German and non-German scholars perceive the nexus between the ‘historical shadows’ of the Nazi past and contemporary Germany, as it last surfaced during the refugee crisis of 2015/16, can count as the central marker of German Zeitgeschichte (pp. 9–10). For the foreseeable future and regardless of where one stands on a specific subject related to current German affairs, the legacies of National Socialism endow the field with a distinct, truly public and often explosive relevance.

Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History

Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History

Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History. Edited by Lutz Raphael

<i>Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History</i>. Edited by Lutz Raphael

David M. Luebke, Hometown Religion. Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia. (Studies in Early Modern German History.) Charlottesville, Va. 2016

David M. Luebke, Hometown Religion. Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia. (Studies in Early Modern German History.) Charlottesville, Va. 2016