Recent German History Research Articles

Koselleck, la memoria y la historia. Sobre la dificultad de entender el tiempo presente

El ensayo analiza la relación de Koselleck con las categorías sociopolíticas ligadas a la nueva temporalidad de los últimos decenios, particularmente la memoria negativa. Koselleck fue un teórico reconocido de la modernidad y es una referencia para muchos intérpretes y críticos de nuevo cronotopo que sigue a la crisis de la modernidad. Sin embargo, él mismo se encuentra incómodo en el nuevo cronotopo. Confrontando a Koselleck con algunos de esos intérpretes -el presentismo de Hartog, la teoría de la compensación, el lento presente de Gumbrecht y política de la memoria de Assmann–, el ensayo repasa sus trabajos finales sobre la memoria y se pone de manifiesto cómo la oposición que mantuvo entre memoria e historia le colocaba en una actitud crítica respecto al presente. Irónicamente, su valentía al enfrentarse al pasado alemán le hace más difícil acercarse a las nuevas culturas de la memoria, y le enreda en nuevas paradojas. Con ello, también, le limitan a la hora de interpretar y comprender este nuevo cronotopo.

The Unexpected Arrivals: Soviet Jews in West Berlin 1974–75

In 1974 the unanticipated appearance in West Berlin of more than five hundred Soviet Jews created local, national, and international repercussions. These migrants, having obtained permission to leave the USSR and arriving either from Israel or directly from the refugee facilities in Vienna and Rome, had not only asserted their freedom to choose their destination but had also selected a somewhat startling new homeland where they intended to apply for immediate citizenship. Because of recent German history the governments of West Berlin and West Germany, although unprepared either to welcome or expel them, devised stopgap measures that encouraged further Soviet Jewish arrivals and compounded the difficulties of their reception.

Deutsche Opfer Des Kalten Krieges Und Des DDR-Regimes Auf Dem Kleinen Bildschirm. Analyse Der Neusten Erzähltrends in Den Filmen Der UFA Fiction

The recent history boom in many societies is observed also among German film makers. UFA Fiction Film, established after the unification of several small companies, plays the key role concentrating on most recent German history, above all the Second World War and lives of ordinary people in the Third Reich. This contributes to the resurgence of victim narratives that have been reappearing at least since 1995. But UFA has also recently been offering films that depict Germans as Cold War victims, e.g. Die Frau vom Checkpoint Charlie, Deutschland 83 and Der gleiche Himmel.

The Contemporary Self in German History

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the selfbecameimportant for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions.

Quo Vadis, Germany? Landmarks of Recent German History

Quo Vadis, Germany? Landmarks of Recent German History

“We Can Handle This”—How the Refugee and Migration Crisis is Changing the German Political Landscape

The refugee and migrant crisis has been one of the most important and divisive political issues in recent German history. First of all, it is restructuring Germany's political and economic landscap...

Casting Shadows: Anke Feuchtenberger's Comics and Graphic Narration

50 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 cover feature international comics “Lillienwald”(Forest of lilies), from wehwehwehsuperträne.de (Mamiverlag, 2009) WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 51 Pathos und Peinlichkeit. Pathos and pain. Aus dem Land, wo die Sprechblasen Schatten werfen. From the country where speech bubbles cast shadows. I n an interview published in European Comic Art, East German –born comics artist Anke Feuchtenberger revealed the dictums of her artistic production.1 The first, “Pathos und Peinlichkeit,” engages the aesthetic content of her art. Dark, expressive, and innately corporeal, Feuchtenberger’s panels reveal the fundamentals of human nature: emotiveness, passion, pain, and sex. Feuchtenberger’s second aphorism, on the other hand, “aus dem Land, wo die Sprechblasen Schatten werfen,” provides insight into the context from which her art emerges. Connecting notions of national identity and national history, it situates her comics in a tradition of specifically German comic art. She also draws connections to more recent German history, referencing both the country in which she currently works, united Germany, and the socialist state in which she was trained, the German Democratic Republic (gdr), where the comics medium was dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Trained under the doctrines of socialist realism, engaged in traditional printmaking techniques less favored by West German art academies, and working without an established comics canon, Feuchtenberger pushed German comics into a new realm, redefining the medium in cultural, political, and aesthetic terms. Born in an East Berlin house in 1963 to a graphic designer father and an art teacher mother, Feuchtenberger was heavily influenced by the art she encountered as a child. She began studying the fine arts at the age of fifteen in evening classes at the Berlin Academy of the Arts. After four years, she accepted a two-year photography internship, and in 1983 she entered the graphic design program at the Academy for Visual Arts, Berlin-Weißensee. There she and other students (Henning Wagenbreth, Detlef Beck, and Holger Fickelscherer) formed the oppositional group PGH Glühende Zukunft.2 Looking to the American underground comix scene as a model, Feuchtenberger and the group fostered a new avant-garde comics movement in Germany that broadened the aesthetics of the medium, changed public opinion about the legitimacy of comics, and developed an independent comics scene that continues to be influential today. The first phase of Feuchtenberger’s professional artistic production is her most overtly political. Spanning from her graduation in 1988 until after German unification in 1991, it is characterized by the artist’s work with the Independent Women’s Association and her activism in the East German Women’s Movement. After the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the women of East Germany rallied to influence the course of the revolution. While popular sentiment called for the unification of Germany, many intellectuals and activists sought governmental reform rather than complete abolition of the state. These activists did not see the Federal Republic as the “better Germany” and criticized West Germany’s excessive consumerism. They also recognized, however , that the GDR was in need of fundamental change. Committed to developing democracy, these East German activists also shared a dedication to socialism that had developed over the forty years of the GDR and sought to maintain its achievements.3 Consequently, a movement committed to a “third way” aimed to reform the GDR to re-create the nation as an autonomous, democratic state rather than dismantling it as history actually unfolded.4 Feuchtenberger worked in collaboration with the activists of the Independent Women’s Association to produce posters advocating Casting Shadows Anke Feuchtenberger’s Comics and Graphic Narration by Elizabeth Nijdam 52 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 for the rights of women and children and encouraging citizens to vote in East Germany’s first democratic elections in 1990. Her work during this period is optimistic in its expression of utopian ideas about the future of women and women’s rights. Featuring strong central and often naked female figures, Feuchtenberger’s early posters express the political movement ’s excitement about the role of women in determining the future of Germany. By the election in March 1990, however, the illusion of political reform was shattered by a vote in favor of unification...

Entrepreneurial role models, fear of failure, and institutional approval of entrepreneurship: a tale of two regions

Abstract Studies on the influence of entrepreneurial role models (peers) on the decision to start a firm argue that entrepreneurial role models in the local environment (1) provide opportunities to learn about entrepreneurial tasks and capabilities, and (2) signal that entrepreneurship is a favorable career option thereby reducing uncertainty that potential entrepreneurs face. However, these studies remain silent about the role of institutional context for these mechanisms. Applying an extended sender–receiver model, we hypothesize that observing entrepreneurs reduces fear of failure in others in environments where approval of entrepreneurship is high, while this effect is significantly weaker in low-approval environments. Taking advantage of the natural experiment from recent German history and using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Project, we find considerable support for our hypotheses.

Between Psychiatry and Popular Fantasy: Trauma, Ghosts and Revenants in the "New German Domestic Novel"

‘It doesn’t end. Never will it end. It is with this bleak view of recent German history as an ‘infinite loop’ that Gunter Grass concludes and reopens his novella Crabwalk , thereby seemingly providing authoritative expression to a leitmotif of the ‘new German domestic novel’: that of the inability to end, the eternal return of the past. Yet the majority of critics and the public understood the intention of most of these authors as an attempt to re-engage emotionally, within the private sphere, with the German past through the memory of – real or fictitious – relatives who became victims of the Second World War in various ways, and thus, at least ‘partially reconciled’ with this past, to be able to shape the present and future of the united Germany. However, it appears that the attempt has left them with the conundrum of the magician’s apprentice: they cannot rid themselves of the ‘ghosts’ that they, literally, called up.

Rescreening Erich Kästner after the Wall: Film Adaptations in the Berlin Republic

In the early 1950s, four films based on stories by Erich Kästner were released in quick succession: Das doppelte Lottchen (1950), Pünktchen und Anton (1953), Das fliegende Klassenzimmer (1954), and Emil und die Detektive (1954). Since unification all four have been re-adapted in live-action versions for the cinema. This article examines the post-1990 films’ attempts at ‘modernization’, the way they establish continuity with the earlier adaptations, and the ways in which they negotiate recent German history and contemporary society. The films offer a dual perspective at a time of national change: they look to the uncharted future, but they also refer to texts and films from earlier transitional periods. The article suggests that despite the films’ engagement with the contemporary context, they unwittingly reinforce some of the more conservative aspects of Kästner's original narratives, ultimately offering an affirmative and future-oriented narrative in which the past can be recuperated.

1968 in West Germany: the anti-authoritarian revolt

Politics and culture were inextricably linked in the West German “1968,” not only because young avant-gardes drew as much from radical artistic traditions as from political ones, but because in a range of areas – from literature and publishing to music performance and production, to the visual arts to the underground press – the revolt was as much a matter of cultural production as of political organization. Recovering lost traditions from the revolutionary past while drawing on the ideas, texts, and tactics of the global present, activists forged transnational connections while imagining themselves into various forms of global community. Understanding the West German revolt not just in terms of key events, but in terms of underlying principles, this essay sheds new light on a key episode in recent German history while laying out the terms of a broader conversation about “1968” in which scholars of different national cases or disciplines can take part.

LaissezFair: A Case for Greening the Business German Curriculum

AbstractAn effective way to teach about sustainability and environmentally conscious practices in German language, literature, and culture programs is within the context of a business German course. In this article we first situate educational sustainability in the US, leading into an examination of why the context of German business can be particularly productive for teaching sustainability along with aspects of recent and current German history and culture. We then present a unit focused on “green” business, starting with a general introduction to the topic and migrating into the specific area of Öko‐Mode: organic, fair‐trade clothing. The “green business unit” described here culminates in a business case as classroom task, featuring a small German eco‐fashion company called LaissezFair. The unit further engages students through the use of a variety of media for comprehension and introspection and critical reflection of their behavior as environmentally conscious consumers in our globalized society.

Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture Jill E. Twark Generational Shifts in Contemporary German Culture. Edited by Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. Pp. 326. Hardcover $75. ISBN 978-1571134332. This edited volume, containing thirteen chapters examining differences in representations of German culture and history from one generation to the next in the post–World War II era, is both informative and a pleasure to read. Camden House is known for publishing books with high standards of scholarship that are accessible to diverse readers, and this anthology does not disappoint. Laurel Cohen-Pfister and Susanne Vees-Gulani invited a group of both younger and more seasoned scholars to write on generational views of German history as found in autobiographies, novels, and documentary and feature films. The chapters are organized under four main headings: “Victim Legacies and Perpetrator Postmemory,” “1968 and German Terrorism,” “East German Pasts,” and “Globalized Identities.” While the first three headings are self-explanatory, “Globalized Identities” refers not only to immigrants and their descendants in Germany who have produced texts or films centering on identity construction, but also to young eastern and western Germans in unified Germany who “shared the task of negotiating the rapid geo-political, economic, and technological transformations” that took place in the 1990s as well as a “desire to transcend cultural, local, and national identifications” (270). Each chapter treats one or more significant cultural discourses either perpetuated or emerging after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They add to the existing scholarship that assesses generational perspectives from Germany, and trace the discussion forward in works published as recently as 2008. Each contribution is furthermore fully accessible to English speakers, as all German quotes have been translated by the individual contributors into English. This volume’s greatest strengths lie in the straightforward organization of each article, the breadth of the featured primary and secondary sources, and the new insights provided by each contributor, as well as the lucid ways these individual insights tie into the overarching topic of generational views of recent German history. Each contributor begins his or her chapter by summarizing pertinent scholarship on generations and how members of each generation pass along memories of lived experience or engage in postmemory/affiliative memory work, and then embeds analyses of individual artworks in this larger context. The central arguments of most contributors hinge on the ways the latest postwar/third generation of German and immigrant authors and filmmakers opens up and expands the discourse surrounding Germany’s dark and controversial past, providing generally more variegated and sometimes provocative views of their parents’ and grandparents’ histories. Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister’s helpful introduction not only draws on seminal German discussions of the roles of generations in perpetuating and breaking with past culture, beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche and moving to Heinz Bude, [End Page 459] Rainer Lepsius, Karl Mannheim, Sigrid Weigel, Aleida Assmann, and Jörg Magenau, among others, but it also includes references to US historians like Mark Roseman and David Kertzer. Roseman laid the foundation for the current anthology with his 1995 collection Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generational Formation in Germany 1770–1968, which features historical and political topics. Vees-Gulani and Cohen-Pfister’s volume, by contrast, focuses on literary, autobiographical, and filmic responses, working well in tandem with Roseman’s to make a strong case for why generational perspectives remain important as a basis for understanding German history and its past and present culture. For the most part, second- and third-generation postwar artworks are compared cross-sectionally. For example, Friederike Eigler analyzes the multigenerational novels Landnahme by Christoph Hein and Die Unvollendeten by Reinhard Jirgl, both authors belonging to the second postwar generation, juxtaposing them with the multigenerational novels Gunnar-Lennefsen-Expedition by Kathrin Schmidt and Himmelskörper by Tanja Dückers, who belong to the third generation. Erin McGlothlin, by contrast, embeds her comparison of earlier and later works by the German-Jewish author Maxim Biller in the context of postwar Väterliteratur, second-generation postmemory literature, and German-Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust. Katharina Gerstenberger and Svea Bräunert provide insights into gender differences among generational responses...

Beyond the National Narrative: Implications of Reunification for Recent German History

This essay addresses the interpretative implications of German unification. It first suggests that the explanatory challenge is to trace the precise interaction between the international framework of détente and the internal dynamics of the democratic awakening. It then posits that part of the history of the years 1990–2010 in Germany, sometimes referred to as the ‘Berlin Republic’, can be understood as working out the consequences of unification; but a growing part is also composed of other issues such as globalization, immigration and educational reform. And it finally argues that the resumption of the national narrative is a backward-looking perspective that blocks the recognition of more recent problem areas that cannot be dealt with by telling a success story about the Federal Republic, but require an engagement with issues of postmodern modernity.

The Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel)

Stephan Schaffrath, in his paper Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), discusses how Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (Die negotiates the treacherous terrains that lie between positivism and nihilistic relativism by means of a truth-finding methodology. Schaffrath proposes that truth-finding methodology applies approximative, and therefore architectonic, approaches to conventional concepts of narration and history. Grass's novel breaks down and reassembles playfully the conventions of narration and history, not to negate or devalue them, but to reappraise them by means of an approximative truth-finding methodology, an approach that corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the architectonic. An architectonic historical narrative is achieved here by re-creating consciously recent German history instead of a conventional historical narration that claims a certain degree of objectivity. Grass shows us that the genre of the novel can indeed convey history in a fictitious format (an otherwise standard recognition in the humanities today), yet be a useful and insightful medium to those who wish to learn about history in the sense of a factual genre. Grass achieves this by educating his readers about the fine line between fact and fiction as he interweaves a most intricate epistemological commentary into the narrative of his narrator. Stephan Schaffrath, Methodology of Architectonic Truth-Finding in Grass's The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) page 2 of 12 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9.4 (2007):

„Inkorporierung“ und „Normalisierung“ einer Protestbewegung am Beispiel der westdeutschen Umweltproteste in den 1980er Jahren

Social or protest movements are mostly analysed in their early stages and when they reach their highest visibility by direct action. The article is devoted to the decay of (successful) social movements. In addition to the well known concept of institutionalisation it presents two categories in order to guide the description, i.e. incorporation and normalisation. Incorporation pictures the integration of the movement's actors or goals in existing political, social and institutional structures whereas normalisation considers the integration of the movement's values into predominant value systems. Both categories are meant to elucidate a double-sided process, including the movement's protagonists as well as the society as a whole, transforming both. These processes are exemplified by one of the most important social movements of recent contemporary German history, namely environmentalism during the 1980s. The focus is on the anti-nuclear movement, the debate on Waldsterben (= Forest Death) and on the Oko-Institut (ecological think tank and consulting agency).

Psychiatry in Germany

Germany has an approximate area of 357 000 km2. Its population is 82.526 million. The life expectancy at birth is 75.6 years for men and 81.6 years for women (World Health Organization, 2005). The proportion of gross domestic product allocated to the health budget is 10.8%. The per capita total expenditure on health is $2820 (international dollars here and below) and the per capita government expenditure on health is $2113 (World Health Organization, 2005). A major factor in recent German history was reunification, which had a pronounced effect on the German healthcare system.

Unsere Welt in unseren Namen

Proper names have their history, but they are also a mirror of history. This is especially clear in relation to brandnames. Therefore, they stand in the focus of observation. For example, this can be gathered from the 'Rügener Badejunge” (bathing boy) who appeared on the Camembert chees of recent German history. Invented in Stolp (today's Poland), produced on the Island of Rügen and later the leading brand in die GDR (German Democratic Republic), suspended after the reunification of Germany, and after a renaissance, a renowned brand. The skin cream 'Nivea' had to be renamed 'Skin Cream Containing Fat' in 1943. Lifestyle products such as Kombucha are typical of the present day. The use of food supplements is however, controversial. Other types of names also stand in the context of the times. This becomes especially clear in giving first names. This was marked for its individualization and internationalization by Karlheinz Hengst. In this way, the son of a married couple who were artists, was given the name Liam (the Irish shortform for 'William') and Taj (Sanskrit for 'The wisdom of God'). In addition, in the style of giving first names, one can observe the principle of 'dosed discrepancy' (Jürgen Gerhards): Phonetically similar sounding names are prefered (Christian, Christopher, Christoph, Chris). Greetings an congratulations are transmitted in special columns of daily newspapers. Pet names used in these are of significance, which, in part, are derived from the animal world (Maus, Bär). Such notices ar especially frequent on St. Valentine's Day (14 February). Names used in jokes on the entertainment pages have changed. The traditional figure of jokes 'Fritz' has become rare. Names of the middle generation are more frequent. This essay is dedicated to Karlheinz Hengst, the first Professor of Onomastics in Germany (Leipzig). He also occupied himself in his works with the tendencies in giving modern first names.

Cinematic Ciphers: Postdamer Platz, Berlin

In November 1993, more than fifty years after patrons of the popularCafé Josty on the famed Potsdamer Platz in Berlin came to enjoy agood cup of coffee and a piece of cake, or smoke a rare fine cigarbefore the bombs would raze the café to the ground, a hydraulic excavator’sbucket stopped in mid-air and miraculously saved five whiteporcelain cups with the initials CJ engraved upon each one in red.The delicate cups had rested under no more than ten feet of loose soiland rubble near the place where the café’s basement had been. Thebombs that fell on the Potsdamer Platz between 1943 and May 1945and a scoop by an excavator bucket bookend a series of perilous situationsthe cups survived. The East German regime sent tanks acrossthe square during the uprising in June of 1953, and the wall separatingBerlin was built right through the middle of it in August of 1961.After lying dormant and overgrown with weeds for many of its subsequentthirty years, the Potsdamer Platz was finally all but leveled; theWeinhaus Huth was the only building that escaped the dynamite andwrecker ball. The swing of the wrecking ball made room for the mostcontroversial construction project in recent German history: the citywithin-a-city Daimler-Benz would build on the Potsdamer Platz.

Engendering Cultural Memory in Selected Post-Wende Literary Texts of the 1990s

Memory and two seemingly incompatible phenomena, aptly capture the state of memory in contemporary Germany. The decade since German unification has seen a greatly increased public interest in issues of memory and commemoration, motivated by the reexamination of the history of the two Germanies and of the history of National Socialism from the perspective of post-unification Germany. Prominent examples are the ongoing debates about the urban reconstruction of the formerly divided city of Berlin, and specifically the decade-long controversy about design and construction of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. This preoccupation with the past occurs within a political context in which a unified Germany, made up of a population more diverse than ever before, seeks to fashion a new national identity, a project which requires the negotiation of national symbols, traditions, and memories (Hobsbawm). The memory boom is thus both a symptom of and a response to a memory crisis, that is, a lack of societal consensus about what constitute shared traditions in unified Germany.1 Within this larger context of a memory boom in contemporary Germany, I look at the role of literary discourse and gendered notions of individual versus public forms of memory. Feminist insights in the genderedness of the public/private opposition are by now widely accepted; yet most of the oft-quoted theorists of memory (e.g., Benjamin, Halbwachs, Nora, Jan and Aleida Assmann, among others) have not given much consideration to the ways their concepts of personal and collective memory are inflected in different ways by gender. These seemingly gender-neutral theories of memory contrast with numerous case studies in the area of literary and studies which look at the role of gender and memory in particular contexts (Alphen, Hirsch, Remmler, Weigel, among others). Drawing on these case studies in my analysis of contemporary literary texts, this article looks at intersections of gender and memory within the context of the unified Germany in the 1990s. Within this particular context, I examine a common assertion among scholars from various disciplines, namely that it is the role of literature to work against cultural amnesiathe flip-side of memory-that is manifest especially at times of historical change.2 Memory published in the last decade in Germany include oral and histories, autobiographical and literary texts, and a hybrid genre that undercuts clear distinctions between real and fictional realms. These texts often comment on the processes of memory and the ways memory is rooted in the power of imagination and interpretation. To the extent they reflect on the processes of reconstructing and making sense of the past, these texts can be also considered metahistorical narratives, to use Linda Hutcheon's term (1990). This article looks at two recent examples of this hybrid genre both of which were widely discussed in the German media: Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (PB, 1999) and Martin Walser's Ein springender Brunnen (SB, 1998). The considerable public attention these texts received results from the fact that two highly visible and at times controversial authors reflect on the German past at a time when the memory of the new, unified German nation is being renegotiated. In markedly different ways, both authors revisit the period of National Socialism and, in Maron's case, East German Socialism as well, via family and childhood narratives. I therefore submit that these texts are symptomatic for two diverging literary representations of recent German history and for two diverging approaches to issues of gender, identity and memory. The way this nexus of gender, identity and memory plays out in these two texts is informed (but not solely determined) by the authors' positionality Differences do not only include the authors' gender but also their generational affiliation (Maron was born in 1941, Walser in 1928), the geopolitical context (Maron grew up in East Germany, Walser in West Germany), and their families' situation in Nazi-Germany: Walser's parents were neither actively involved in the persecution of Jews and others nor in anti-Nazi resistance. …