Postwar West Research Articles

The Perils of Privacy and Passivity: Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany

Abstract This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany By Jennifer M.Kapczynski and CarolineKita (Eds.), University of Michigan Press. 2022. pp. 268. $75.00 (hardcover), $59.95 (e‐book)

Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)

Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture by Lynette Widder (review)

Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Caroline A. Kita, editors. The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany

Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Caroline A. Kita, editors. <i>The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany</i>

Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany Emily Richmond Pollock.

<i>Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany</i> Emily Richmond Pollock.

Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989. By Peter C. Caldwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+226. $90.00.

<i>Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989</i>. By Peter C. Caldwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+226. $90.00.

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

P<scp>eter</scp> C. C<scp>aldwell</scp>. <i>Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989</i>.

Peter C. Caldwell (2019), Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949-1989, Oxford: Oxford University Press, £69.00, pp. 240, hbk.

Peter C. Caldwell (2019), Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949-1989, Oxford: Oxford University Press, £69.00, pp. 240, hbk. - Volume 50 Issue 4

“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

Influential Storytelling at its Finest: Why the Postwar West Took Notice of Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story

Tokyo Story (1953) came to fame in 1958, when Yasujiro Ozu’s postwar film about a fragmenting family won the Sutherland prize at the London Film Festival – or so cinematic scholarship suggests. There is, however, a much more complex tale to be told. In fact, director Ozu’s shomingeki-genre film was being discussed and promoted internationally long before what is considered that watershed moment.

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.

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

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.

Politics, Sexuality and the Unconscious: an Interview with Dagmar Herzog

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work and research interests focus on the history of gender and sexuality, religion and secularization in twentieth-cen- tury Europe, Nazism and the Holocaust, social memory in post-1945 Germany, and theoretical and methodolo- gical issues regarding social and cultural history. She is the author of many books, articles and collections, inclu- ding Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011); Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (2008); Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre- Revolutionary Baden (1996); “What Incredible Yearnings Human Beings Have,” Contemporary European History 22/2 (May 2013); “Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures,” American Historical Review 114 (December 2009); and “Sexuality in the Postwar West,” Journal of Modern History 78 (March 2006). She is currently completing a book entitled Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

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.

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.

An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture, by Anna M. Parkinson

An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture, by Anna M. Parkinson

Historical Perspectives on Precarious Work: The Cases of Egypt and India under British Imperialism

&lt;p&gt;The concept of precarious work is used by social scientists to describe work that is “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009: 2). This paper argues that such work can take a variety of forms, beyond those seen in the transition from the stable post-WWII era to the neo-liberal era in the West. Egypt and India offer instructive case studies. Industrialisation (or lack thereof) in Egypt and India has been thoroughly documented by others. The purpose of this paper is to argue that these developments can be seen as the emergence of precarious, industrial working arrangements. This framework is useful for demonstrating that precarious work has come along with industrial development in a range of countries during different time periods. In this light, the stable employment arrangements characteristic of the post-war West were an anomaly. The global economic and social history of industrialisation is characterised by precarious working arrangements, as seen in colonial-era Egypt and India.&lt;/p&gt;

Mid-century Modern Jazz: Music and Design in the Postwar Home

AbstractThis article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse asIdeal Homein the UK andPlayboyin the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.