post-Nazi Germany Research Articles

Crucified Boy in Russian War Propaganda

The very first thing I heard when starting my studies in 1993 at the protestant Theological University in Kampen, the Netherlands, was about Theology after Auschwitz (Theologie nach Auschwitz): how it helped confront the legacy of violence and change mindsets in post-Nazi Germany. Coming from the Soviet Union, I immediately began to hope that a similar theological reflection on the Soviet past might start soon. As no such reflection emerged during the following twenty years, I gradually came to understand that I myself had to start a project to contribute to a systematical re-orientation in the post-Soviet countries. Thus, such had become my task and my calling. In 2016 I launched a project called ‘Theology after Gulag’, which name I have changed to ‘Theology after Gulag, Bucha, and beyond’ since Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Post-Nazi Germany’s Democracy: From a Comparative-Historical Perspective

Post-Nazi Germany’s Democracy: From a Comparative-Historical Perspective

Afterwards-Forgetting, Remembering, Transmitting. Extreme Trauma and Culture in Post-National-Socialist Germany.

Facing the rupture the Shoah marks in the history of humanity and in the life of survivors and their relatives, this article approaches long-term psychosocial consequences-after Auschwitz. The dimensions of "forgetting" in post-Nazi Germany are brought into focus by the remembering and passing on of extreme traumatic experiences of persecution. To gain insights into these processes, this article differentiates between traumatization and extreme traumatization. Survivors remember and pass on their experiences of persecution, especially through non-verbal communication and in the form of unconsciously shaped "scenes." This Scenic Memory of the Shoah is conveyed in relationships with descendants, to fellow human beings, to the environment and thus also in experiences of anti-Semitism in Germany today. The fact that extreme traumatization is expressed precisely in scenes of coexistence also means that it must be understood as an embedded factor in society, in culture-in forgetting and remembering "afterwards."

Lions and Lambs. Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany.

Lions and Lambs. Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany.

Neo-liberal Governmentality in post-Nazi Germany’s Ordoliberal Political Economy Discourse (1948 –1962)

Neo-liberal Governmentality in post-Nazi Germany’s Ordoliberal Political Economy Discourse (1948 –1962)

Federal Republic of Germany – Second German Democratic State

The article describes the main stages of modern Germany’s experience in building of the parliamentary democracy. The author defines the historical progress of the German state on the wayto the formation of democratic foundations that created the basis of modern society. Three German constitutions of 1871, 1919 and 1949 were considered, they formed the basis for the development of apostwar federal state. Particular attention is focused on the transformation of the three western occupation zones of Germany into the Federal Republic of Germany and the development of the BasicLaw, which was initially regarded as temporary constitution. The author also drew attention to external factors that significantly influenced the transformation of post-Nazi Germany and theformation of the Basic Law. The historical retrospective of the formation of the second German democratic state is presented in a broad international context.

Noah Benezra Strote. Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany.

N<scp>oah</scp> B<scp>enezra</scp> S<scp>trote</scp>. <i>Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany</i>.

Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany. By Noah Benezra Strote.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv+358. $40.00.

<i>Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany</i>. By Noah Benezra Strote.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv+358. $40.00.

Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany by Noah Benezra Strote

Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany by Noah Benezra Strote

CHILD SURVIVORS: STOLEN CHILDHOOD-SCENIC MEMORY OF THE SHOAH IN JEWISH CHILD OR ADOLESCENT SURVIVORS OF NAZI PERSECUTION.

Even today, there is inadequate awareness and recognition of Child Survivors whose psychic development was most seriously and lastingly marked and impaired by Nazi persecution. Based on their research the authors describe the delayed psychosocial consequences of the persecution of Child Survivors and postulate a fourth sequence of the traumatic process in old age. The authors discuss their involvement in the Child Survivors Conferences held in Berlin in 2014, and they describe micro-processes in the "scenic memory of the Shoah" related both to trauma transmission itself and to central conflicts in German-Jewish relations in post-Nazi Germany. Case vignettes illustrate the Child Survivors' scenic memory of the Shoah.

From Nazism to Socialism in Anna Seghers’s “Der Mann und sein Name”

This article analyzes Anna Seghers’s 1952 novella “Der Mann und sein Name,” the first major fictional work that Seghers published about post-Nazi Germany and the construction of the German Democratic Republic. Using archival materials, it examines the ambiguous and controversial reaction of early readers and critics to the novella, as well as Seghers’s responses to criticisms. The article treats the protagonist’s development as a process of outward and inward conversion that ultimately brings the individual psyche into alignment with the outside world, and it argues that this process was paradigmatic not only for the early GDR but for postwar Germany in general.

GARETH PRITCHARD. Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945.

In 1945, all of Germany was divided and occupied by the Allied victors, except for a small enclave bordering Czechoslovakia that, due to a misunderstanding about the precise boundaries of the occupation zones, remained free of Allied occupation and was not incorporated into the Soviet zone until June/July 1945. Comprised of 500,000 inhabitants, the western Erzgebirge became what contemporaries called “no man's land” (Niemandsland). In his very readable and deeply researched study, Gareth Pritchard offers the first up-to-date history of this territory in English. The history of Niemandsland, he argues convincingly, can function as a kind of control study for the possible evolution of post-Nazi Germany without Allied influence. One of the important contributions of Pritchard's book is to redirect our attention to the antifascist committees, which emerged all over Germany in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Nazism. While these committees were quickly suppressed in occupied Germany by the Allied victors, they effectively seized power in Niemandsland and ruled during its brief period of autonomy. As such, their history points to potential “paths not taken” in postwar Germany.

Russia's Historical Memory: Strict-Security or Hybrid?

Russia's Historical Memory:Strict-Security or Hybrid? Sergey Toymentsev (bio) Николай Копосов . Память строгого режима: История и политика в России. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2011. 320 с. ISBN: 978-5-86793-851-2. Nikolay Koposov's A Strict-Security Memory: History and Poli tics in Russia is an interdisciplinary study of post-Soviet collective memory explored from a variety of methodological perspectives: opinion polls, historiography, legal studies, political science, and memory studies per se. Viewed as one of the long-term effects of the cultural politics of Soviet totalitarianism, the historical consciousness of contemporary Russians is presented in its evolutionary transformation as well as compared to other cases of posttotalitarian collective memory, such as those of post-Nazi Germany and post-Soviet Eastern Europe. As the book's title pointedly suggests, Russian collective memory has always been an indispensable part of the state propaganda, as if it were vigilantly guarded in a strict-security prison. Besides being an invaluable contribution to the newly emergent field of memory studies, Koposov also makes a strong political argument for the liberation of Russian cultural memory out of the shackles of political manipulation and thus publicly positions himself as a purveyor of democratic values. And yet, despite Koposov's argument that the historical memory in contemporary Russia develops under the government's "strict security" control, in this review I hope to show that the contradictory data he presents point to a rather different logic of the collective memory dynamic, which is less monolithic and more hybrid. The book consists of six chapters, each dealing with a certain stage of the evolution of national collective memory and historiography. Chapter 1 generally introduces historical memory research as an international phenomenon that recently gained academic significance as the ex-ploration of collective memory in posttotalitarian societies. Chapter 2 traces the development of Soviet memory politics and historical consciousness from the 1920s to the 1980s. Chapter 3 delves into the dynamic of collective memory during perestroika. Chapter 4 examines yet another turn in Russian memory politics under Putin's regime. Chapter 5 explores the professional aspects of historical science and education in Russian academia as well as their fundamental role in establishing a democratic civil society. Chapter 6 provides a detailed analysis of the "Presidential Commission to Counteract Attempts to Falsify History to [End Page 336] the Detriment of Russia's Interests" created in 2009. Given the circular pattern of the book's composition (it opens and ends with the discussion of the current debates over how the Soviet past should be remembered), Koposov's study effectively demonstrates the urgent political relevance of historical memory research to the so-called memory wars as well as the state's legal attempts to authorize a more agreeable version of history. Even though the author states that the primary focus of his investigation is the historical consciousness of contemporary Russians from the 1980s to the present (P. 12), one-third of the book is dedicated to a preliminary overview of cultural memory practices worldwide as well as the specific nature of national memory politics in Soviet times. According to Koposov, the rise of both memory studies and general interest in the past coincides with the collapse of the "grand narratives" of the future (as well as the cognitive shift from "common" names of universalism to "proper" names of ethnic particularism), which resulted in the proliferation of fragmented subaltern memories where history is largely criminalized and victimized. In this regard, the Holocaust memory as the memory of the century and "civil religion" (P. 56) has become the dominant paradigm of cultural memory in liberal democracies. In his brief excursions into posttotalitarian memory debates in Germany, France, Belgium, and postcommunist Eastern Europe, Koposov points out that cultural memory could still be the object of political manipulation, as was the case with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's legal endeavors to criminalize the denial of the Holodomor of 1932-33 as the Soviet genocide against the Ukrainian nation. Unlike cultural memory in liberal democracies characterized as the memory of victims rather than of perpetrators, Soviet political memory served primarily for the legitimation of the totalitarian regime via systematic institutional control and mythologization of one particular vision of history, which was nevertheless repeatedly modified according to shifting ideological emphases introduced...

Renaming the past in post-Nazi Germany: insights into the politics of street naming in Mannheim and Potsdam

The critical turn in the study of toponymy has drawn attention to the politics of place-naming practices and to how place names are embedded into systems of meaning and partake in social and ideological discourses. A measure of historical revision, the commemorative renaming of streets in the context of regime change is a common strategy employed to signify the break with the past. This article juxtaposes patterns of renaming the past in two German cities from 1945 through 1950 as an aspect of the democratic reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany. The moderate pattern applied in Mannheim represented a restorative approach and signified continuity with the pre-1933 Weimar Republic. The radical pattern applied in communist-controlled Potsdam represented the future-oriented approach of socialist transformation. At one level, the investigation explores patterns of commemorative renaming of streets in two German provincial cities after the collapse of Nazi Germany. At another, the juxtaposition of two patterns of renaming the past in post-Nazi Germany offers insights into large-scale renaming of streets as a ritual of revolution that, involving different interests and priorities introduces major political shifts and the ideological reorientation of society they entail into urban namescapes.

Australian Trials of Trauma:

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for the field of trauma studies to expand beyond its European and North American origins. It is especially important, as the insights of trauma theory are extended to a wider range of geopolitical sites and conflicts and into resistant fields such as law, that critics attend to the ways in which the discourse of trauma travels, how it is used or resisted in specific national or local contexts, and with what cultural and political effects. To explore these issues, I offer a case study of Australian responses to the Stolen Generations in human rights, law, and literature—fields in which trauma theory has significant purchase. The term “Stolen Generations” refers to children of mixed descent who were removed from their Indigenous mothers and communities with the aim of assimilating them into white Australian culture. Children were sent to institutions run by churches or government missions, where they received limited education and were trained as domestics or station hands. Removal typically curtailed the children’s relations with Indigenous family and culture, since they were prevented from speaking their language and participating in cultural tradi-tions. Many children faced difficulties integrating into white Australian society; they and their mothers often experienced lifelong feelings of loss.In the 1990s, the Stolen Generations became something of a litmus test for how Australia would respond to its postcolonial legacy of violence, trauma, and injustice. As Dominick LaCapra has observed, for nations such as postapartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany—and, I would add, post-settler Australia—“the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression is how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims.”

Pina Bausch (review)

Reviewed by: Pina Bausch Thomas Riccio Pina Bausch. By Royd Climenhaga. Routledge Performance Practitioners. New York: Routledge, 2009; pp. 146. $30.95 paper. Pina Bausch, by Royd Climenhaga, is a brief, readable introduction to the life, work, and influence of this passionate and enigmatic choreographer. The book is part of the Routledge Performance Practitioners [End Page 692] series, which presents introductory profiles of influential contemporary dance and theatre artists. Writing with the student in mind, Climenhaga does a fine job of putting Bausch's work into historical perspective and artistic context: her personal, social, and cultural influences and artistic inspirations are appropriately interwoven with commentary and analysis, as befits an artist whose work explored the blurring of boundaries. Pina Bausch (1940-2009), who worked in the small industrial city of Wuppertal, Germany, remains the most controversial, innovative, and influential choreographer of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her single greatest legacy is Tanztheater, a postmodern approach to performance expression that interweaves the intellectual elements of theatre—dramaturgy, text, character, and social awareness—with the more abstracted, raw, and immediate bodily expression of dance. Bausch began her studies in Germany at age 14 under the direction of Kurt Jooss, who had been one of the most renowned teachers and choreographers of the pre-Hitler period. Although she drew on the emotive work of German expressionists and the social consciousness of Brecht, Climenhaga shows that it was her studies in New York City in 1961 at age 21 that defined her work as a dancer and choreographer. The vibrant and churning tumult of American modern dance, new theatre practice, Happenings, and experimentation in music and the visual arts was a catalyst, becoming the foundation of her postmodern dance-theatre vision. Like her expressionist predecessors, Bausch rejected that which concealed, made pretty, or anesthetized behavior and bodily presentation. She passionately interrogated the limiting conventions of performative expressions and expectations that she inherited. In her visually striking and emotionally evocative dance works, she transcended established technique and jettisoned that which did not reveal the raw-bone immediacy of life itself: "To understand what I am saying, you have to believe that dance is something other than technique . . . when you create a new work, the point of departure must be contemporary life—not existing forms of dance" (50). Her process-oriented work was shaped by the moment and by the people with whom she worked. Climenhaga describes her choreography as a confluence of intellect, emotion, striking visual metaphors, and evocative staging that unearthed the deep social structures lurking beneath the modern psyche. She condemned many of life's injustices, especially those suffered by women, a central theme of her work. Shaped in no small part by the shadow of post-Nazi Germany, Bausch questioned accepted social and gender constructions and defended women from what she saw as an aggressive, often destructive German patriarchy. Bausch did not stage stories, but rather experiences—at once immediate, personal, and universal. In so doing, she expanded the vocabulary of performance expressiveness that has informed and deepened modern theatre and dance. As documented by Climenhaga, contemporary choreographers, designers, actors, directors, and writers alike have been shaped by how Bausch defined the authenticity of the theatrical moment. In this way, her work took Brecht a step further, with the event enacted on the bodies of her performers potently yet ambiguously wavering between the theatrical and the real. The Wooster Group, Bill T. Jones, Rude Mechs, Theatre de Complicité, and Anne Bogart's SITI Company are just a few who have imported Bausch's principle of dance construction to theatrical development as means of exploring new performance work and open dramaturgical structure. Climenhaga, a scholar and physical-performance creator working with the Human Company in New York City, did not work with Bausch, but his practical experience lends an immediacy and insight to his study of her work. The scholarship here is not exhaustive; instead, the book is presented in outline form as befits the student-friendly, introductory objectives of the series. The author serves as a guide, connecting fragmentary material and thus reflecting Bausch's methodology as a process of adaptation—taking bits here and chunks there to mold...

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials": Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis

"Another Play on Salem Witch Trials":Lion Feuchtwanger, Communists, and Nazis Waltraud Maierhofer (bio) The Crucible (1953), by pre-eminent American playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005), has become widely acknowledged as a timeless play about the hunt for "witches" and other supposed evildoers, and about mass hysteria. According to a popular introduction to this work, the inspiration for Arthur Miller's play was The Devil in Massachusetts (1949), a historical study, albeit not without fictional elements, about the Salem witch trials by Marion Starkey.1 It is a little-known fact that the German-Jewish émigré writer Lion Feuchtwanger (7 July 1884, Munich–21 December 1958, Los Angeles) published a play about the Salem trials before Arthur Miller did. It was published in German under the title Wahn oder Der Teufel in Boston (Mania or The Devil in Boston) in 1948 in Los Angeles.2 A first sketch is dated 22 October 1945.3 Feuchtwanger began writing the play in the final months of 1946 and finished it in late 1947. I. The Devil in Boston The play premiered in Germany in March 1949, in the "Kleines Theater im Zoo" in Frankfurt am Main, directed by Fred Schroer. Feuchtwanger wrote a short statement about his play for the program, "Zu meinem Stück" (About My Play).4 The premiered version was slightly revised from the first American edition in German, and subsequent performances (Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1949; Nürnberg, 1949) and book editions followed.5 Several stages of typescript translations in English are extant in the Feuchtwanger Archive at the University of Southern California, the first [End Page 355] dated August 1947. The titles vary slightly from Delusion to Boston to Devil in Boston, which appears to have met Feuchtwanger's final approval, and a corrected copy is marked "Copyright 1948").6 Feuchtwanger wanted to have the play performed in the United States in English, but was not immediately successful.7 The American-language premiere did not take place until February 1952 at the Circle Theatre in Hollywood (directed by Benjamin Zemach), where it remained in the repertoire for only half a year.8 Another staging, of a Yiddish translation by N[athaniel] Buchwald, took place the next year in New York by the Yiddish Theater Ensemble, in Barbiyon Plaza. Morris Carnovsky directed and performed in this production.9 Arthur Miller's Crucible (1953) premiered on Broadway on 22 January 1953 and was published that same year. Initially, it was not as sweepingly successful as it later became. Feuchtwanger's drama had its New York premiere in February 1953. The audience, including the critics, did not know of its earlier publication in German and its staging on the West Coast, leading one critic to label it as "Another Play On Salem Witches."10 Reviews of the New York performance immediately compared the two: Vernon Rice pointed out that Feuchtwanger's play had fewer dramatic high points, while his simpler plot and setting fared favorably with John Chapman. It is not important for the following argument whether the two writers knew about each other's plays and whether one might have influenced the other,11 although it remains a valid question. Both draw attention to the mechanisms and dynamics of suspicion, denunciation, persecution, and extermination. Their approaches are very different in that Miller shows trial scenes onstage, while Feuchtwanger has them reported. Both fictionalize one of the "bewitched" girls and main plaintiffs, and incorporate love interests in her characterization, but these choices result in decisive plot differences. However, my goal is not to compare the two plays, but rather to examine the specific perspective of a stateless immigrant on this "American" topic, which the German-Jewish writer here applies to postwar, post-Nazi Germany. Even Feuchtwanger scholarship tends to bypass this play. For example, a recent study on the reception of Feuchtwanger's works in Germany since 1945 only briefly touches on the play, stating as evident that it represented the author's reaction to the beginning of the McCarthy era and intended to draw parallels between persecutions of "witches" and leftists.12 Only [End Page 356] one short comparison with Miller's Crucible has been undertaken, in which Robert...

Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader Gesa E. Kirsch (bio) Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines: A Reader edited by Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, 487 pp., $23.95 paper. Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines is an exciting, important, and well-edited collection of essays. The range of disciplines included—history, medicine, biology, music, math, law, film, anthropology, Africana Studies, as well as language, literature, and English education—is broad and alerts us to the fact that what the editors have documented in this book constitutes an important intellectual movement, perhaps best described as "engaged, autobiographical scholarship." The book is a pleasure to read; the selections are gracefully written and provide good models for how to incorporate autobiographical elements into scholarship, models that become especially important as writing in this new genre becomes more common. Writers in this volume do not shy away from tackling difficult and at times painful experiences—living with an adopted son who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; being the victim of sexual violence and incest; studying a subject (horror films) in which female bodies are endlessly assaulted, mutilated, maimed; being pregnant during medical school, that is, negotiating the divide between a private, joyful experience and a medical, potentially dangerous condition; and being involved in research on a potential carrier of Huntington's disease. The essays resulting from this blend of autobiographical reflection and academic inquiry are richer, more profound, and much more enjoyable to read than ordinary academic prose. [End Page 245] The book lends itself to selective reading, as each essay is unique in tone, style, and content. The first essay I chose to read is by Deborah Lefkowitz, an American Jewish filmmaker married to a German man who explores in her essay, and in her documentary film, Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany, what it is like to live in post-Nazi Germany, practice one's faith, and engage in serious conversations with Jewish and non-Jewish Germans about the past and present. This essay highlighted for me that the autobiographical is not simply personal but also shaped by history, religion, culture, country of birth, immigrant status, and many other factors. Exploring questions of identity further, we hear from Carla Peterson who takes us on a journey of her unusual childhood as an African American girl growing up in Switzerland. She takes the occasion of meeting James Baldwin to reflect on her own intellectual development—starting with her education in the French classics to her interest in African American women's writing and to her most recent project, an archival mapping of her family's impressive contributions to New York City's African American intellectual community. Throughout this journey, Peterson (and her readers) come to richer understanding of the intersections of race, gender, heritage, identity, and culture. Other fascinating selections in this volume include Peter Hamlin's delightful essay on composing music and cooking, two processes that showcase the art of improvisation; Bonnie TuSmith's powerful call for the importance of teaching ethnic literature because it can help students understand their heritage, identify with an intellectual tradition, and envision a different future; and David Bleich's reflection on his relationship with his mother who taught him how to "find and use the right word" (42) first in Yiddish, then in English, while simultaneously alerting him to the deception and disguise inherent in much of academic discourse. Autobiographical Writing contains 26 essays from fifteen different disciplines, a foreword by Ruth Behar (a leading scholar in both anthropology and the art of engaged autobiographical scholarship), and a helpful selected bibliography. Freedman and Frey did a fine job selecting essays, some especially written for this volume, some previously published in journals, and others excerpted from book-length classics like Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights; Appiah's In My Father's House; and Ruddick's Maternal Thinking. Of these sources, I found the original essays and reprinted articles more satisfying than the book excerpts because the editors' (helpful) explanations of internal textual references and framing arguments continued to draw my attention to the fact that I was missing aspects of the larger context. My other reservation...

Times Of Trouble: Past And Present, Problems And Possible Solutions

Various analogies have been used to describe post Communist Russia, from post-Nazi Germany to China in the wake of the collapse of the Manchu dynsasty. The most appropriate comparison, in the view of the author, is with the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war. Various structural similarities are described, including levels of criminality, alcoholism and disease. The election of President Putin is seen as a desire for stability in the face of growing disorder and the creation of necessary conditions for economic growth.

Political Tendencies and Parties in Germany

To the observer who has experienced the transformation of Germany from imperial to republican regimes and the struggles for and against the establishment of democracy after the First World War, the most striking feature of the political scene in present-day West Germany–the Bundesrepublik–is the nearly complete absence of social or political mass movements. Whereas German society from 1918 to 1933 was virtually seething with political and social schemes, creeds, sects, and parties, post-Nazi Germany seems quiet and sober. The labour unions have become even less concerned with fundamental changes in the social order than they were in the days of the Weimar Republic. The youth movement seems dead. There is no mass movement of former Nazis or of neo-Fascists. Even the Communists are no longer a strong force.Voting in all kinds of elections is very heavy, but organized membership in political parties is low. There seems to be a widespread reluctance among the older people to join any kind of organized political group or to commit themselves to any kind of “cause.” Most Germans, having burnt their fingers once or twice, seem to refrain from active participation in public life as much as possible. This does not mean that the channels through which a common will, a political consensus, is formed have ceased to function. Political parties, though fewer in number than in the Weimar era, do exist; trade unions and organizations of farmers, artisans, business men, and industrialists exert their influence along with numerous and varied “lobby” organizations (refugees and expellees, victims of nazism, veterans' organizations, war invalids' associations, and so on); and last though not least the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical (Protestant) churches raise their voices and take a stand on all important issues of public life. But none of these influential groups seems to aim at radical changes in the political or economic order. Nor is any large and powerful group opposed to the democratic system of government which was formed under the authority of the American, British, and French occupation regimes.