Postwar West Germany Research Articles

“I Had a Dark Skin Color, That Was a Problem”: Race and Racism in the Child Welfare System in Postwar West Germany

“I Had a Dark Skin Color, That Was a Problem”: Race and Racism in the Child Welfare System in Postwar West Germany

Gesetz und Evangelium im Nachkriegsprotestantismus by David Scherf

Reviewed by: Gesetz und Evangelium im Nachkriegsprotestantismus by David Scherf Matthew L. Becker Gesetz und Evangelium im Nachkriegsprotestantismus. Religion in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 5. By David Scherf. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 285 pp. This doctoral dissertation, accepted at the University of Osnabrück, examines the transformation of the distinction between law and gospel in the work of three post-WWII West German Protestant theologians: Ernst Wolf (1902-1971), Helmut Thielicke (1908–1986), and Carl Heinz Ratschow (1911–1999). The author, [End Page 245] a Lutheran pastor in Bavaria, provides brief biographical sketches, summarizes key works, surveys the secondary literature, and offers theological analysis and a concluding assessment. While the introduction describes the cultural crisis in German Protestantism after the First World War and gives an overview of three key theological movements in the Weimar era (dialectical theology, religious socialism, and neo-Lutheran confessional theology), the first chapter only offers an incomplete description of the contrasting views on law and gospel by Werner Elert, Karl Barth, and Paul Althaus. As important as that Auseinandersetzung was for later developments, it should have received fuller analysis. More context was needed, as well as better sources. Why Scherf used post-1945 writings from Althaus but not from Elert is unclear. A strength of the chapter is how it identifies important if subtle differences between Elert's and Althaus' positions on the revelation of law. The Barthian-Erlangen debate over law and gospel was partially continued by the three central figures in Scherf's study, but also transformed by them in the changed cultural and political situation of postwar West Germany. These three middle chapters provide insightful perspectives on figures lesser known today and whose ideas are worthy of further engagement. The starting point for Wolf's social ethics coincides with the first thesis of the Barmen Declaration, which focuses solely on the incarnate word. Wolf, who had been Barth's student, replaces the latter's notion of "law" (Gesetz) with "command" (Gebot). Wolf moves from "the new human being" in Christ to the content of the divine command that summons the disciple of Christ to faithful obedience in the world. Christ's command is the form of the gospel, and the gospel, which is all about the assurance of divine grace, is the content of the command (99). According to Wolf, the basic unity of command and gospel within the one word of God has consequences for the political existence of the Christian. Such a view begins and ends with the one lordship of Jesus Christ. It rejects Elert's and Althaus' understandings of "two kingdoms," "the orders [End Page 246] of creation," and "natural law," and it reframes the Creator's orderings and social structures along the lines of Bonhoeffer's "mandates" and the command/summons to exercise Christian love in society. In contrast to Wolf, Thielicke defended the sharp antithesis between law and gospel, whose impact on the Christian life abides unto death, but he took more seriously the problem of secularization in post-war West Germany than did his Doktorvater Althaus. Thielicke transformed the law-gospel dialectic to speak more clearly to the challenges of Christian faith and ethical behavior in that postwar liberal democracy. Nevertheless, like Elert and Althaus, Thielicke stressed that the word of God is not a singular, uniform message since it addresses us in this twofold form. While both the law and the gospel give knowledge of the self, the law discloses that the human being is alienated from God and under God's judgment (123). Every divine command always implies that I ought not to be what I am. Thus, the divine command cannot be the content of the gospel. Rather, over against the law and command of God, the gospel discloses that I am reconciled with God and it actually creates this new reality. Against Barthian-Wolfian social ethics, Thielicke insisted that the distinction between law and gospel and the related distinction between the two kingdoms are crucial since they each seek to maintain the gracious promise of solo-Christo and sola-fide, while also opening up important ethical implications for the Christian life. Ratschow, who studied under Friedrich Brunstädt and who edited...

THE DISPLACED PERSONS ERA IN THE PERCEPTION OF THE CHILD AND THE SCIENTIST

Review: Larissa Zaleska Onyshkevych. Bombs, Borders, and Two Right Shoes. World War II Through the Eyes of a Refugee Child. Lviv: Litopys publ., 2018. 258 p. It is proved that the book of memoirs by Larysa Zaleska Onyshkevych is a valuable source on the history of Displaced Persons and refugees from Ukraine in post war West Germany. We can learn from its pages how refugee children lived, what they felt, what they dreamed about, what they were afraid of during the DP era, what factors influenced the formation of their worldview and civic position.

Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel by David Feldman

Reviewed by: Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel ed. by David Feldman Kathy M. Newman Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel. Edited by David Feldman. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 352 pages. $39.68 (paper). In the 1880s, a British émigré to Ireland named Captain Charles Boycott became the target of a widespread community campaign to have him shunned. Captain Boycott was a British military drop-out who had migrated to Ireland and was working as a rent collector for Lord Erne in County Mayo. Captain Boycott ran afoul of an activist group called the Land League when he refused to lower rents and then evicted 11 of Lord Erne's tenants. The Land League subsequently urged Boycott's employees to go on strike and to shun him from the community. Shun him they did, so much so that Captain Boycott could not get his mail delivered or find anyone to sit next to him at church. It got so bad that Boycott had to appeal to the British government for laborers to save his crops. The story of Boycott's shunning spread to America, and Boycott's name would forever be yoked to the tactic that had been used against him. [End Page 430] David Feldman, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and the editor of this collection, reminds us of the shunning of Captain Boycott in his introductory essay. He uses the story to show that boycotts have long been "expressive" as well as "instrumental." Boycotting is a strategic tactic, but it is also a highly emotional one, often rooted in the withdrawal of various forms of patronage from the intended target with the larger goal of hurting that target's reputation and possibly even trying to destroy the target altogether. This collection shows that the history of the boycott is surprisingly long—extending as far back as the eighteenth century. In Michael L. Miller's essay, titled, "In Defense of the Nation: Protectionism and Boycotts in the Habsburg Lands, 1844–1914," we learn about the theories of the nineteenth century economist Friedrich List, a proponent of trade protectionism, whose influence was evident in a series of "buy national" campaigns in nineteenth century Europe, such as the "each to his own" campaign in Czechoslovakia and the "buy only from Germans" campaign in Germany. Many of these "buy national" campaigns had an antisemitic component as Jews were often excluded as members of the nation. In a series of detailed and fascinating essays we also learn about the anti-Jewish boycotts staged in early twentieth century Poland (Grzegorz Krzywiec, "The Enemy Within: The Anti-Jewish Boycott and Polish Right-Wing Politics in the Early Twentieth Century"), Zionist boycotts against Palestinians between World War I and World War II (Hizky Shoham, "Zionist 'Buy National' Campaigns in Interwar Palestine"), Nazi sponsored antisemitic boycotts in Germany (Christoph Kreutzmüller, "Picketing Jewish-Owned Businesses in Nazi Germany: A Boycott?"), and boycotts staged by the radical-left in postwar West Germany, including boycotts against the newly formed state of Israel (Alexander Sedlmaier, "Boycott Campaigns of the Radical Left in Cold-War West Germany"). When we think about boycotts we are most likely to think about those organized by the powerless to put pressure on the [End Page 431] powerful so they will be persuaded to change their actions and policies. As many civil rights scholars have shown, for example, civil rights boycotts were effective in isolating local business elites from purely racist elites, thus leading to positive changes in corporate and civic policies on discrimination. In this collection we see the story of a few such boycotts, including the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott of 1953, considered by many to be a failure because the settlement that ended the boycott did not result in the complete integration of the Baton Rouge buses. However, Derek Charles Catsam argues that the Baton Rouge boycott was an important precursor to the successful and ultimately iconic Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 in his essay, "The Onward March of a People Who Desire to Be Totally Free." In another example, Lori A. Flores argues...

Between Consequential Memory and Destruction: Karl Jaspers, Jean Améry, and the Intellectual History of Postwar West Germany

Abstract This article reconstructs two “modes of memory” in postwar West Germany and explores an underappreciated historical trajectory. These two modes offer radically different ideas about why Germany should remember its past. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Karl Jaspers called on Germany’s citizens to remember the atrocities of the Nazi past so they could open a new chapter in the nation’s history. Twenty years later, at the zenith of the economic miracle, Jean Améry made a similar demand. His, however, was not a constructive call for responsibility and improvement, like Jaspers’s call, but one of anger and resentment. Juxtaposing these two calls for memory shows that, against every intuition, the immediate postwar period, defined by unprecedented human loss and physical devastation, was also a moment of energy and hope, while the height of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was also one of melancholy and discontent.

Ghosts and Miracles: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris in Postwar West Germany

AbstractStarting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

Nazi Crimes Before West German Courts

Abstract Fritz Bauer was one of the main figures of post-war West Germany who fought to bring Nazi perpetrators to trial before German courts at a time when the prevailing general climate and mentality was one of impunity and a need to make a ‘clean break’. This article investigates whether Bauer’s ideas can be set in relation to today’s notions of international criminal justice. Looking for this connection seems an obvious and necessary endeavour, since Bauer’s work focused on prosecuting Nazi crimes, which were dealt with initially by the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, the first international criminal tribunal in history. However, this connection has rarely been studied. By taking the example of Bauer’s views on criminal responsibility of the staff at Auschwitz, expressed in relation to the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-1965), this article demonstrates that his ideas stood out from common legal opinions in West Germany at the time. It also shows elements in his thinking corresponding to the concept of joint criminal enterprise in today’s international criminal law. The article will also argue that although Bauer’s far-reaching understanding of criminal liability made its way into legal practice only to a limited extent, this must be seen within the historical context of West German jurisprudence concerning Nazi crimes in the 1960s, the period in which Bauer worked.

Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989

Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989

Нотатка про гуманітарну науку та освіту

The article “The Note on the Humanities and Education” by the german social philosopher Theodor Adorno, a representative of the critical theory of society, was published in 1962. In this philosophical-educational work Theodor Adorno continued the preliminary theme of his critical consideration of the unity of the elements of the culture of the industrial-mass society, which contribute to establishment in social life of industrial-mass ideology as completely dominant. In his philosophical-educational works Theodor Adorno also carried out a critical attack on the school and university education of post-war West Germany. According to the philosopher, this education remains traditionally unchanged, which makes it impossible for any serious anti-ideological transformation in its system. Such changes because of updated educational process could have contributed to the upbringing of a young citizen, a conscious and active participant in democratic transformations in the post-totalitarian society. However, according to Theodor Adorno, the educational process in the unreformed university remains controlled primarily of the agents of the scholarly consciousness, which in no way contributes to the anti-ideological upbringing of students. In this work Theodore Adorno noted the special significance of the humanities, which in German are translated as “sciences about the spirit”, which traditionally present in German university education. In his opinion, the humanities, as the sciences about the spirit, because of the prevalence in the educational process of the “dictates of the scientific ideal” lost the presence in itself of a factor of the individual human spirit. Theodor Adorno called of the signs of the presence of such a phenomenon in university education: the absolute priority of scientific research among humanities study, the lack of personal pedagogical work of a university teacher with a student of humanities, the tendency of struggle of the agent of the reified scientific consciousness against any different knowledge, the unity of the social and theoretical conformism of the agent of that conceptual consciousness. As in his other philosophical works, Theodore Adorno proposed to perceive of personal activity of a human, what is due to the strength of his individual spirit, the natural factor that is capable of conducting a continuous personal struggle with negative phenomena in education, which ideologically influence to the educational process at the university and in education in general.

Democracy and Retribution: Transitional Justice and Regime Support in Postwar West Germany

How harshly should perpetrators of past abuses be punished, to reinforce the legitimacy of a new democracy? Drawing on sociopsychological theories, we hypothesize that prodemocratic mass attitudes are favored by the perception that defendants in transitional justice trials have been punished in a way that is morally proportional to their offenses. This perception is shaped by the social categorization of defendants and the opinions about the certainty of their guilt that predominate in the mass public. When defendants are largely seen as co-ethnics and their guilt is contested, like in the West German case, prodemocratic attitudes are likely to be strengthened by lighter punishments and undermined by harsher sanctions. The analysis of subnational variation in patterns of punishment in postwar West Germany confirms this hypothesis and shows that these attitudinal effects persist in the medium term. Our findings have implications for research on transitional justice and democratization.

The Weimar Republic's “Press Parliament”

Journalists, not state officials, hosted the Reich government's main press conferences in the Weimar Republic era. International/unique, the setup evolved from World War briefings run by Imperial Germany's military censorship. In the 1918 November Revolution, newspaper correspondents turned the tables on the authorities to organize the Berlin Press Conference. For the next 14 years, the capital press corps' daily noon meeting with spokesmen or cabinet ministers emerged as the young democracy's key political news hub. It was often called a “press parliament” to emphasize its institutional character in the ambivalent, conflict-rich but productive relationship with a new Reich press department and ministries. The paper explores the conference's institutionalization based on participant accounts and previous works. The paper studies self-organization, government responses, culture, conflicts, confidentiality issues, and the de-institutionalization by the National Socialist regime in 1933. Postwar West Germany restored the Weimar-era model, which is still followed a century after its invention.

МЕДИЧНЕ ОБСЛУГОВУВАННЯ УКРАЇНСЬКИХ ПЕРЕМІЩЕНИХ ОСІБ ПОВОЄННОЇ ЗАХІДНОЇ НІМЕЧЧИНИ

In this article the state of health of displaced Ukrainians of postwar West Germany are clarified. The factors that influenced the health status of displaced Ukrainians are clarified: the general depletion of the body as a result of the Holodomor of 1932 – 1933 in Ukraine; stay in the 1930s in Stalin's concentration camps in Siberia and the Far East; chronic malnutrition and lack of vitamins, unsatisfactory living conditions, satisfaction of sexual needs without precautionary measures, stay in Nazi concentration camps during the World War ІІ; chronic malnutrition, uncomfortable housing conditions in the camps of displaced persons and psychological stress during their stay in post-war West Germany. The diseases that the Ukrainians were afflicted with, in particular tuberculosis, syphilis, poliomyelitis, rickets, and gastroenterological diseases were identified. In addition, рrofessor Ivan Bazilevich named the new specific disease «morbus DP» (illness of «displaced persons»), which was characterized not only by bodily ills due to lack of nutrition and vitamins, poor living conditions in displaced people camps, but also by a number of psychos-nevrologic symptoms. The level of medical care for displaced Ukrainians of post-war West Germany are analyzed. Most of the work was done by therapists in the displaced people camps, who were approached on various issues. Ukrainian doctors-dermatovenerologists not only treated, but also scientifically proved new opportunities in healing patients from sexually transmitted diseases. Among Ukrainian surgeons, it should be noted the head of the surgical department of the camp hospital in Regensburg, рrofessor Boris Andrievsky. He undertook to operate at first glance hopelessly ill patients; in difficult cases, he was looking for experts in Germany for a consultation, he got scarce medicines, often for my own money. The displaced Ukrainians made their contribution to the research of oncological diseases: Zinoviy Shtokal'ko in 1950 at the University of Munich received a doctor's degree, defending his thesis on the biochemistry of carcinogenesis, that is the emergence and development of a malignant tumor from a normal cell. Appeared displaced Ukrainians and the services of dentists due to tooth extraction, sealing, installation of bridges and prosthetics. Authoritative Ukrainian physician obstetrician-gynecologist in West Germany was Sofia Parfanovich. The sources contain references to the activities of otolaryngologists, oculists, helminthologists and neuropathologists. The sports medicine as a branch of medical science in post-war West Germany was not developed are clarified.

A sentimental reeducation: Postwar West Germany's intimate geographies

Can a population or community be “taught” to feel and act differently through an externally imposed politico-cultural paradigm? What kinds of unexpected feelings (at odds with behavioral norms and expectations of the educator/observer) emerge from the collision of different political histories and cultural orientations? This paper examines American and West German social theories concerned with democratizing West Germany in the context of the Cold War and in the wake of initial US-Allied attempts at “reeducation” in the postwar period. Based on an analysis of Theodor W. Adorno's radio broadcasts and writings on the possibility of an “education to autonomy” after Auschwitz, this paper explores how West Germans came to “feel differently” through the gradual and contradictory negotiation of a democratic “habitus”, ultimately demonstrating the agonistic and ambivalent processes constitutive of substantial democracy.

Minority Rights, Honor, and Hate Speech Law in Post-Holocaust West Germany

This article examines the political and cultural dynamics surrounding postwar West Germany’s passage of its 1960 hate speech law, which remained in effect for 50 years. It uses the case to question and rethink the dominant narrative of human rights history as the progressive triumph of human rights since World War II. Instead, it argues for the centrality of identity politics and a distinctive German political culture in shaping the law. While the development of Germany’s formal law on hate speech is consistent with a progressive narrative, a different story emerges when, as this article does, one shifts the focus downward and outward, from lawmakers and the formal law to the extra-legal political and social context and to the reactions of ordinary citizens. Here, the article finds a great irony: Jews, the very minority group which Germany’s new hate speech law was most intended to protect, fought successfully to remove strong human rights language from the final bill, while, at the same time, championing an old and seemingly outdated legal tool, defamation law. Political culture and the historical struggles of liberal, assimilationist German Jews trying to balance a particuliarist group identity with the universalistic claims of equal citizenship in the nation state, explain this irony.

Bringing the Local State Back into Development: The Local Developmental Statee and the Promotion of Sustainable Economic Development and Growth from the Bottom-Up

After having banned all discussion of the ‘developmental state’ concept during the high period of global neoliberalism (1980-2008), the Great Recession that began in 2008 forced the international development community to begin to urgently reassess the concept in order to deal with the mounting economic, social and political crises (see Crespi, Fernandez-Arias and Stein 2014; Salazar-Xirinachs, Nubler and Kozul-Wright, 2014; UNCTAD, 2016a). Most attention in this revival of interest in the developmental state has followed the line that began with Johnson’s (1982) pioneering work on Japan, through to the seminal work on South Korea by Amsden (1989) and Chang (1994) and on Taiwan by Wade (1990), which is to say that it has overwhelmingly emphasized the role of (suitably redesigned) national-level developmental state institutions. This approach is misleading, however, because a great part of the historic success attributed to the ‘developmental state’ model was actually brought about thanks to the intervention of sub-national state institutions – that is, thanks to what we now call the ‘local developmental state’ (Bateman 2000, 2001, 2005, 2010: 166-2010, 2015, 2016; Bateman and Chang, 2012; UNCTAD, 2016b: 117-119). This revised understanding highlights the ‘bottom-up’ institutional push provided for structural transformation and industrial development imparted by sub-national governments. Important examples of such ‘local developmental state’-type pro-activity include experiences from post-war West Germany, northern Italy, the Basque country of Spain and Japan, followed by many East Asian states from the 1950s onwards (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), and also by several Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico). Finally there is China, which provides perhaps the most impressive example of the ‘local developmental state’ in action (see Thun, 2006: Ou, 2013), and might even constitute a ‘Beijing/Shanghai consensus’ model to replace the failed ‘top-down’ market-driven ‘Washington consensus’ neoliberal model of development. This paper assesses the historical experience, core capabilities and potential transferability of the local developmental state model. In the context of the ongoing intellectual and material collapse of the global neoliberal model, but especially in view of the failure of low productivity market-driven individual entrepreneurship and self-employment projects to act as the source of value and development progress (Bateman, 2010; Nightingale and Coad, 2014; Naude, 2016), the argument is made that the local developmental state model should become a key foundation of local-level policy efforts and the judicious promotion of the ‘right type’ of high productivity enterprise development projects, in both the developed and developing countries, required to bring about a sustainable and equitable development trajectory ‘from the bottom-up’.

Переміщені українці повоєнної Західної Німеччини та формування культурної пам’яті

Переміщені українці повоєнної Західної Німеччини та формування культурної пам’яті

Hannah Arendt Translates Culture: Men in Dark Times

This article takes up Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times (1968) as a strategic document aimed at restoring for an international audience a German-language tradition of thought that was unavailable in postwar West Germany because of cultural politics. In so doing, she not only exemplifies her version of Existenzphilosophie , but also claims German-Jewish thought as central to the German traditions.

“Color Him Black”: Erotic Representations and the Politics of Race in West German Homosexual Magazines, 1949–1974

This piece analyzes the tensions between racial liberalism and erotic representations in West German homosexual-oriented magazines between 1949 and 1974. Relying primarily on publications such as Der Kreis, Die Insel/Der Weg, Amigo, and Du & Ich, this paper argues that as white West German homosexual men made a case for the end of legal discrimination and for social acceptance, they often constructed their arguments and identity as a persecuted minority in relation to the struggles and imagined experiences of colonized men and racial minorities. At the same time, however, many homosexual men still maintained a set of assumptions about racial difference that exoticized and essentialized men of color, assumptions that are particularly apparent in the erotic representations (both visual and literary) of men of color that appeared in these magazines. I further argue that, although historians of homosexuality in West Germany have traditionally viewed 1969 as a break, due to the radical changes in gay life that followed the 1969 reform of the anti-sodomy statute, the tensions between racial liberalism and exoticization continued well into the 1970s and in a remarkably similar published format. The contradictions within these magazines add to the growing literature on both homosexuality and race in postwar West Germany. Through the close examination of a medium that was crucial to the formation of homosexual communities and the development reformist politics, we can more fully understand the complexities and tensions on which minority politics were built in the wake of fascism.

Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe by Joy H. Calico (review)

Arnold A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe. By Joy H. Calico. (California Studies in 20thCentury' Music, no. 17.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. [xv, 254 p. ISBN 9780520281868 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520957701 (e-book), $60.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Ten years ago, in the context of an essay about the collaborative cantata A Jewish Chronicle (1961) and Holocaust commemoration in the postwar Germanys, Joy Calico raised intriguing questions about Arnold reputation in Europe during that and why his A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), a clear predecessor to A Jewish Chronicle, was entirely omitted from critical commentary about the latter work (Jiidische Chronik: The Third Space of Commemoration between East and West Germany, The Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 95-122). Calico clearly felt that the constellation of interrelated yet imperfectly understood issues that clouded the West German reception of A Survivor from Warsaw in this period (ibid., p. 108) deserved further attention; the present volume makes great strides toward a deeper definition and understanding of those very issues within and well beyond West and East Germany. Although A Survivor forms the heart of this book, it is by no means a study of the composition itself; readers are offered a succinct, though sufficient, analysis, and are referred elsewhere (especially to David M. Schiller, Joe R. Argentino, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski) for more in-depth examinations of the and text. Instead, in a rather refreshing departure from traditional Schoenberg studies, Calico uses examples of A Survivor's performance and reception history as a lens through which to explore the larger ideas of cultural mobility and remigration (specifically, symbolic or noncorporeal remigration) during the first half of the Cold War. She traces the life of the work through six meticulously researched and documented microhistories, each telling the story of the work's premiere in a particular context. Beginning with the West German premiere in August 1950 (a substantial revision of Calico's earlier publication on the same topic, Schoenberg's Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar West Germany, The Journal oj Musicology 26, no. 1 [Winter 2009]: 17-43), Calico proceeds chronologically: Austria (April 1951); Norway (March 1954); East Germany (April 1958); Poland (September 1958); and Czechoslovakia (February 1963). Taken together, these histories reveal surprising threads of similarity and difference that go beyond the typically accepted East-West dichotomy during the immediate postwar era. Each setting harbored its own complications and its own reactions to the work, but in every case, A Survivor rubbed up against common anxieties about Jews, culpability for the Holocaust, lingering antiSemitism, remigration, antifascism, and modernism. Why choose A Survivor for this type of study? Precisely because of how its aesthetic and topical multivalence lent it to a wide range of interpretations, and because of how perfectly suited the work was to provoke every potential anxiety. Calico's introduction begins with her contention that A Survivor, which runs only seven minutes, seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis' prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music (p. 1). Although Calico's book focuses on the European reaction, A Survivor was distinctly American: Schoenberg had, of course, been living in the U.S. since 1933 (as an American citizen since 1941); the work was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and premiered by the Albuquerque Symphony; and the Sprechstimme narration, notated but essentially spoken-told from the perspective of a survivor of Treblinka (presumably) after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising-is predominantly in English, likely in a gesture toward intelligibility. …

Honor among Peers? A Comparative History of Honor Practices in Postwar Britain and West Germany

The first-ever medals for military bravery awarded in the Federal Republic were placed on the chests of four German soldiers in July 2009. These noncombatant soldiers were being honored for running to help injured Afghans and military colleagues after suicide bombers had blown up a nearby patrol car in October 2008. The decision by Germany’s political leaders to honor these soldiers was unexceptional from an international perspective; soldiers from other nations fighting in Afghanistan had been awarded similar honors much more liberally. Indeed, special Operational Honors Lists have been created every six months to honor hundreds of members of the British Armed Forces involved in the conflict. Yet, while awards for gallantry shown in Afghanistan have attracted almost no critical discussion in Britain ðin spite of much critical discussion of the decision to go to war thereÞ, the new bravery award provoked much debate in Germany. One reason for the unease was that unlike other political honors, which rewarded long, often routine service, this honor was given to young men for showing a remarkable physical bravery and “overcoming of their fear.” Would the rewarding of heroism on the battlefield with an award reminiscent of the Iron Cross, wondered particularly leftist politicians, not threaten the identity of a modern nation that had painfully freed itself from archaic notions of honor? After all, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, was not the land that needs heroes an unhappy one? We might wonder whether this nation’s soul-searching reminded its citizens that however prosperous and comfortable they might feel, they dare not feel or glorify certain emotions and actions that had once signified national greatness. Similarly, were such concerns about honoring national, and particularly military, service unique toGermany or shared by other European nations with less