Soviet Zone Research Articles

“The name of Catel must strictly be erased everywhere”

By using several case studies, the article shows how the attitudes of paediatricians and state actors towards the involvement of the former Professor of Paediatrics at Leipzig University, Werner Catel, in National Socialist “child euthanasia” in the Soviet Zone of Occupation / German Democratic Republic changed over the decades. These interactions were shaped by very different motives, in particular by political opportunism, by moral convictions, and by the loyalty towards colleagues. On the one hand, the attitude of the state actors was strongly influenced by the GDR’s self-understanding as an anti-fascist state as opposed to the Federal Republic, and, on the other hand, by pragmatic considerations and overarching political decisions. These case studies are situated in the context of the current historiography of medicine, and, more broadly, the contemporary entangled history of both German post-war states and the emergence of commemorative cultures in East and West.

THE AUTHOR AND HIS CORPSE: GERMAN CLASSICAL CULTURE IN THE NATIONAL CINEMA OF OCCUPIED GERMANY

ABSTRACTThe status of German high culture and that of German national identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way, setting the German national project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke, among others, described as a ‘Kulturnation’. With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946, Meinecke sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, thereby challenging the Allied occupiers’ disparagement of Germany as barbarous and foolish. By examining two films, Georg Klaren's 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Karl‐Heinz Stroux's 1949 filming of Goethe's Werther, produced in the Tri‐Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic, this article casts new light on this dilemma of cultural self‐definition through the popular medium of cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. The article examines the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and looks at the role they fulfil in a project to recuperate German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.

Burying the Alliance: Interment, Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences. Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.

Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949 ed. by Wilfried Lehrke

Reviewed by: Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949 ed. by Wilfried Lehrke W. Daniel Wilson Wilfried Lehrke, ed., Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949. Schriftenreihe des Freundeskreises Goethe-National-museum e.V., Band 7.1. Jena: Quartus, 2014. 216 pp. Hardly ever has there been such a spectacularly schizophrenic book, good and bad in equal measure. The title is not only convoluted but wrong. The NFG was founded in 1953, so it makes no appearance in the book. Only when one notices, on the back of the title page, that this is the first volume of two does it dawn that there will be a second volume covering 1950–53: the book contains no introduction or explanatory notes. Tiny font, typos, and many stray hard hyphens do not help either. The indices are a disaster: for example, in the “Sachregister,” under the letter G, almost none of the twenty-six entries are in the correct alphabetical order (it begins with “Goethehaus” and ends with “Gesellschaft zum Studium der Kultur der Sowjetunion”). Apparently, the odd document was taken out or added after the index was already completed, because the numbering is faulty. The book appeared only a few days before the controversial November 2014 conference “Hans Wahl im Kontext: Weimarer Kultureliten im Nationalsozialismus” (the proceedings were published in the October 2015 issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society), and one has the feeling that it was rushed into print for that occasion; the Freundeskreis that published it has been one of the leading defenders of Hans Wahl, director of the Goethe-Nationalmuseum from 1920 and the Goethe- und Schiller-Archive from 1928 until his death on February 18, 1949. But for the reader interested in the immediate postwar period in Weimar—and indeed in Germany—Lehrke provides 1,141 of the most fascinating documents. A large number are previously unpublished and come mainly from the Goethe and Schiller Archive or the Thuringian State Archives in Weimar and from hard-to-obtain newspaper articles. The events documented in the book begin with the American bombing raid on Weimar—which harbored armaments works—on February 9, 1945, and end not long after the politically contested celebrations of Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday in August 1949. It was a turbulent time. The American troops made a relatively good impression in Weimar, but soon the rumors were confirmed that they would be withdrawing so that Thüringen could be in the Soviet zone, according to the secret agreement made at the Conference of Yalta. Within days of Weimar’s surrender on April 10, Hans Wahl breaks the Goethe Society rules in order to bestow lifetime membership on the American commander Major William M. Brown, who in civilian life was a German professor at Columbia University. And Wahl uses this connection to go hunting for Goethe’s and Schiller’s coffins in Jena, where Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel sent them to keep them from falling into profane American hands (the order to destroy them to prevent that from happening was not carried out). The authorities and cultural institutions in Weimar faced a [End Page 288] daily struggle against shortages of food, building materials (particularly roofing), and labor, all of which were strictly rationed. After the Soviet troops occupy Weimar on July 3, it initially looks as if the transition will be reasonably smooth. Above all, the Soviets are keen to capitalize on the classical heritage, and they give permission for Goethe’s house—which had been hit by a bomb in February—to be reopened after the building is repaired and its contents are recovered from storage. The accompanying rhetoric, with its one-sided focus on the protosocialist humanism of German classicism, is ratcheted up, and soon the ideological strictures tighten. Hans Wahl manages to rationalize his NSDAP membership to the Soviets, with the help of allies who claim, among other astonishing things, that Wahl was “mit seinem ganzen Denken...

Remember, Avert, Prevent: Franz Ludwig Berthold Kihn--A Typology of "Euthanasia"

The current debate on assisted suicide provides the occasion for calling to mind the role of Berthold Kihn as a psychiatrist under National Socialism. With a historical presentation of a typology of euthanasia, the Academic Psychiatry of Erlangen together with the Medical Ethics would like to sensitize discussions on assisted suicide by drawing attention to the start and end of Kihn's scientific career. Relevant archive material, primary and secondary literature were analyzed and evaluated. As Assistant and Senior Physician at the Psychiatric and Neurological Hospital of the University of Erlangen, Kihn lectured on "the elimination of the inferiors". As Director of the Psychiatric and Neurological Hospital of Jena University, Kihn selected psychiatric patients to be murdered under the "T4 action". Kihn participated in drafting a "Euthanasia Law". Despite his involvement in the murder of mentally ill, Kihn returned to Erlangen as a "Soviet Zone refugee", where a Denazification Court considered him a "hanger-on". Kihn was reintegrated in the academic faculty of the Friedrich-Alexander-University and headed a private clinic. On 21.01.1963, the State's Attorney Nuremberg-Fuerth dropped the criminal procedure against Kihn--officially due to a lack of proof of punishable guilt. An appropriate medical historical contextualization can represent an important condition for an adequate medical ethical debate on physician-assisted suicide and the involvement of psychiatrists. FINAL COMMENT: The analysis of Kihn's patterns of thought and argumentation can help sensitize those involved in debates on physician-assisted suicide and highlights the critical role of psychiatry as a discipline in this context.

L'epurazione in Germania (1945-1950)

The article discusses the early years after World War II in defeated Germany, focusing not so much on the punishment of Nazi criminals and on issues related to the trial held by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the subsequent criminal proceedings, as on the more general process of denazification of the country. The essay presents the main acquisitions of the mainly German-speaking historiography, to provide the Italian public with information on a subject that remains largely inaccessible in Italy.After a brief part on criminal justice, the article examines the denazification in the four occupation zones into which Germany was divided after the war. In the first three zones, the US -especially -, British and French - with some caveats - started a purge campaign that would allow them to remove National-socialism from wide areas of Germany’s administration and society; but this campaign soon ran aground due to material difficulties and to changes in the international political scenery. The denazification was progressively mitigated and most of the Germans were classified as mere Nazi-sympathizers, who went largely absolved. In the Soviet zone apparently the purge had a greater success, but even in this area the denazification process was inconsistent and, as in the West zones, it was tied to the international and internal politics.

Sports Policy, the Press and the Origins of the Cold War in Occupied Germany, 1945–51

This article, which is based on original archival and press research, examines the origins of the Cold War from the perspective of sport in the post-war occupied zones of Germany. Both the western Allies and Soviet communist victors claimed that they wished to use sport to help establish ‘democracy’ in Germany. However, their conceptions of ‘democracy’ were diametrically opposed and each side used the sporting press to caricature and criticise the other. In the Soviet zone, sports reporting portrayed the West as elitist, professional in their ‘Taylorist’ methods and nationalist in outlook. Reversing their former hostility to the Olympic movement, the Soviet-controlled German sports press argued that only socialist sport could deliver true amateur ‘Olympic’ sport by democratising athletics for the masses. The occupying Allied powers made up of Britain, France and the United States were united in their rejection of unproven claims of Soviet superiority and denounced the ‘undemocratic’ controls imposed by the Soviets across Eastern Europe. The holding of the Olympic Games in London in the summer of 1948 as Cold War tensions increased provides a focus for these divergent views, throwing new light on the political role of the reporting of sport and of the sporting press in post-war Germany.

Goethe’s Writings as a Minister of State in Saxe-Weimar and Eisenach

Goethe’s Writings as a Minister of State in Saxe-Weimar and Eisenach W. Daniel Wilson Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Amtliche Schriften. Teil I, Geheimes Consilium und andere bis zur Italienreise unternommene Aufgabengebiete. Ed. Reinhard Kluge. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998. 917 pp., 9 ill. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed. Friedmar Apel et al. Frankfurter Ausgabe 26.) Teil II, Aufgabengebiete seit der Rückkehr aus Italien. Ed. Irmtraut und Gerhard Schmid. FA 27. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999. 1238 pp., 15 ill. Kommentar zu den Amtlichen Schriften. Vol. 1. Ed. Reinhard Kluge. FA 26K. Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2011. 667 pp., 11 ill. Kommentar zu den Amtlichen Schriften. Vol. 2. Ed. Gerhard und Irmtraut Schmid. FA 27K. Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2011. 1425 pp., 9 ill. Register und Verzeichnisse. Ed. Reinhard Kluge, Gerhard Schmid, and Irmtraut Schmid. FA 26/27R (CD-ROM). Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2011. 355 pp. Goethe’s writings as a minister of state in Saxe-Weimar and Eisenach have not enjoyed a happy publication history. The comprehensive Weimar Edition of Goethe’s works published a selection of them in the last volume of the works section (WA 4.53:231–321), enough only to give a taste of how important they could be for understanding Goethe’s poetic works, his character, and his personal development. Various other official writings dribbled into print over the years until after the Second World War, when Thüringen authorities in the Soviet Zone—taking up an idea of the historian Hans Tümmler—decided to inaugurate a complete edition to commemorate Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday in 1949, coinciding with the founding of the GDR.1 The first volume appeared slightly late, in 1950, edited by the director of the Thuringian State Archive in Weimar (Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, at that time Landeshauptarchiv Weimar), Willy Flach. This volume contained writings from Goethe’s first decade in Weimar, when he was most intensively involved in administration as a member of the four-person Geheimes Consilium. The volume took its title from the kind of documents it contained: Amtliche Schriften (AS). In other words, only documents that Goethe himself had written or even corrected—even if he had corrected only one letter of one word—were included, along with some contextual documents. Also, the edition related only to Goethe’s work in the Consilium, not in the numerous commissions and other bodies (an edition [End Page 261] of these works was planned but never carried out). Ignorance of this fact has led Germanists to make unfounded accusations, such as when Albrecht Schöne, in his celebrated FA Faust commentary, chastised Flach’s GDR edition for not including a particular document—though that piece was from Goethe’s activity in the roads commission, not the Consilium.2 Most lamentably, Flach’s first volume did not include a commentary; without the necessary contextualization, the documents were opaque and attracted little attention. Despite these limitations, Flach’s volume gave a taste of how intensively Goethe was involved in the administration of the small duchy, from diplomacy right down to such trivialities as soldiers’ uniforms. His position kept him from completing any major works between 1776 and 1786 and contributed to his “escape” to Italy. Flach defected to West Germany and then committed suicide in 1958—his death became a political football in the Cold War, with the FRG and the GDR each blaming the other for it. His successor as editor was Helma Dahl, who had worked with Flach since 1948. Instead of writing the commentary for volume 1, she began work on the texts and commentary of what became volumes 2 and 3, covering the period after Goethe’s return from Italy in 1788. These volumes, which appeared in 1968, 1970 (the two parts of volume 2), and 1972 (volume 3), with an index volume for the entire edition (1987), were criticized by Hans Tümmler and others: Dahl—as one can still hear in Weimar—supposedly wanted to make a name for herself by publishing new documents instead of writing the commentary for volume 1 and, more importantly, had departed from Flach’s “ascetic...

Between Individual Justice and Mass Claims Proceedings: Property Restitution for Victims of Nazi Persecution in Post-Reunification Germany

German history of the twentieth century offers a rich resource of precedent for property restitution and compensation programs. The Federal Republic of Germany instituted different mass claims proceedings shaped to “reverse” or mitigate violations of property rights that took place as part of (a) the persecutions by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, (b) the Land Reform (Bodenreform) during the Soviet occupation of East German territories from 1945 to 1949, and (c) the nationalization activities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1990. Except for cases under the Land Reform in the Soviet zone, restitution preceded compensation as the main means of redress. All reparation schemes involved specific compensation arrangements including elaborate property evaluation systems.

Dislocation, Trauma and Selective Memory: Austria 1945–50. Recollections of Jewish Displaced Persons

During the years 1933 to 1945, European Jews were persecuted, expelled, displaced and murdered. Many surviving Jews were either liberated from the concentration camps or they arrived later in the western zones of the Allies. Eastern Europe was then still not a safe place for the Jewish population. Upper Austria, Salzburg and parts of Vienna formed the US occupation zone in Austria. More than 200,000 Jews passed through this territory between 1945 and 1951 and stayed there for varying lengths of time. In the large Soviet zone of Austria no Jewish DP camps were established. The essay tries to analyse two types of ‘archives’: 1) the personal memories of Jewish displaced persons in Austria, who are seen as a kind of ‘memory archive’, and 2) the ‘archive’ that consists of documents and records found in US Army files, police reports, the files of Austrian regional and local authorities, newspapers and other sources. The results of this small survey are characterised by contradictory statements and recollections, by divergent landscapes of memory.

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.

DANIEL F. HARRINGTON. Berlin on the Brink: The Blockade, the Airlift, and the Early Cold War.

At the end of World War II Allied bombers and the Soviet Red Army pummeled Berlin into submission. The capital of Prussia and the Third Reich lay in ruins, and the four-power occupation of the city seemed to have finished off the German problem once and for all. In the summer of 1948, Berlin almost caused another European war, this time through no fault of the Germans. Responding to American, British, and French proposals to create a West German state and introduce a new currency, the Soviet occupation authorities blockaded all land routes to West Berlin. Daniel F. Harrington has written a superb narrative of the evolution of the Berlin crisis. Harrington points out that at the end of the war the Western Allies did not seek definitive guarantees of access into Berlin because all sides assumed that they would continue their wartime cooperation. After all, preventing any more German aggression was the Allies' main goal. Harrington contends that without a common enemy the wartime alliance inevitably fell apart, and that the anomalous position of Western troops in Berlin—smack dab in the middle of the Soviet zone—was bound to become an issue. After losing twenty five million people in World War II, the Soviets cared little about the well-being of the Germans. British and American policymakers slowly realized that economic cooperation with the Soviets was impossible and formed a bizonal economic entity in early 1947. The French, who like the Soviets were reluctant to help German reconstruction or promote German political unity, finally concluded that a healthy German economy was essential for France's own recovery. In 1948, the Marshall Plan was extended to western Germany and the plans for a West German state were developed. Stalin decided that if the Western Allies were going their own way in their zones, he would consolidate his. Stalin hoped that the blockade would stop the formation of a West German state, and if not, he would take Berlin. It was one of the few cards Stalin had to play.

Coming to Terms with a Violent Past

Miriam Dobson, Khrushev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returneess, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin. 264 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0801447570. $45.00. Bettina Greiner, Verdrangter Terror: Geschichte und Wahrnehmung sowjetischer Speziallager in Deutschland (Terror Displaced: The History and Perception of Soviet Special Camps in Germany). 525 pp. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010. ISBN-13 978-3868542172. 35.00 [euro]. As recent case studies on the topic of transitional justice have demonstrated, recovery from the experience of mass violence and political terror and coming to terms with the associated past always constitute lengthy and painful processes, often including contradictions as well. (1) Contributing to this developing field of research, the works of Miriam Dobson and Bettina Greiner focus on the history and public perception of the Stalinist camps and their inmates in the USSR and in the Soviet zone of occupation that later became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Both works seek to understand individual perceptions of the camp experience and various attempts of state, societies, and individuals to come to terms with a past characterized by terror and totalitarian dictatorship. After Stalin's death in 1953, hundreds of thousands of Gulag prisoners were released by amnesty. Between 1953 and 1960, the population of the Gulag fell dramatically from 2.5 million to 0.5 million. This exodus included not only victims of the Stalinist purges but also ordinary criminals. In her impressive monograph, Dobson explores the massive departure of prisoners from the Gulag and popular reactions to this process among those to whom the prisoners returned. Presenting the Gulag releases as an event that affected all of society, the book fruitfully combines three different aspects of the problem: the reform policies of Khrushchev and other political leaders; ordinary peoples' perceptions of de-Stalinization and Gulag release; and returnees' perceptions and experiences of life in the postcamp world. Her work accords with a general shift of interest in recent research on the Gulag, which concentrates on the post-Stalinist era and the dilemmas of de-Stalinization. (2) Dobson skillfully combines the different perspectives in her book and shows us the big picture of politics and society coping with the results of Stalinist terror. She thus offers insights into everyday life, social and political tensions, and patterns of exclusion and inclusion in the USSR after Stalin. While Dobson focuses on processes within the USSR, Bettina Greiner investigates the history of Soviet special camps located on the territory of the Soviet zone of occupation and the GDR in the years from 1945 to 1950. Research on the special camps developed in Germany only in the 1990s, when for the first time the Russian archives opened their collections to foreign researchers. By the end of that decade, some primary research and an edition of documents about the special camps had appeared. (3) Greiner's monograph represents a continuation of this trend. In numerical terms, these camps were much smaller than those located in the USSR itself. According to official Soviet accounts, around 160,000 civilian men and women were imprisoned in ten camps, among them prominent resistance fighters like Ulrich Freiherr von Sell (a participant in the plot on Hitler's life of 20 July 1944) and Horst von Einsiedel (a member of the Kreisau Circle, mostly conservative Germans who had opposed Nazism). Most of the prisoners were Germans, while another 35,000 or so were Soviet citizens. Mortality in these camps was extremely high, reaching 35 percent; nearly 43,000 prisoners died from hunger and disease during their prison terms. In her case study, Greiner focuses specifically on Sachsenhausen, which had more than 60,000 prisoners and was thus the biggest special camp in the Soviet zone of occupation. The camp inmates can be divided into two groups. …

Influence of personal and environmental factors on mental health in a sample of Austrian survivors of World War II with regard to PTSD: is it resilience?

BackgroundWar-related traumata in childhood and young-adulthood may have long-lasting negative effects on mental health. The focus of recent research has shifted to examine positive adaption despite traumatic experiences, i.e. resilience. We investigated personal and environmental factors associated with resilience in a sample of elderly Austrians (N = 293) who reported traumatic experiences in early life during World War II and subsequent occupation (1945–1955).MethodsAfter reviewing different concepts of resilience, we analysed our data in a 3-phased approach: Following previous research approaches, we first investigated correlates of PTSD and non-PTSD. Secondly, we compared a PTSD positive sample (sub-threshold and full PTSD, n = 42) with a matched control sample regarding correlates of resilience and psychometrically assessed resilience (CD-RISC). Thirdly, we examined factors of resilience, discriminating between psychologically healthy participants who were exposed to a specific environmental stressor (having lived in the Soviet zone of occupation during 1945–1955) from those who were not.ResultsA smaller number of life-time traumata (OR = 0.73) and a medium level of education (OR = 2.46) were associated with better outcome. Matched PTSD and non-PTSD participants differed in psychometrically assessed resilience mainly in aspects that were directly related to symptoms of PTSD. Psychologically healthy participants with an environmental stressor in the past were characterized by a challenge-oriented and humorous attitude towards stress.ConclusionsOur results show no clear picture of factors constituting resilience. Instead, most aspects of resilience rather appeared to be concomitants or consequences of PTSD and non-PTSD. However, special attention should be placed on a challenge-oriented and humorous attitude towards stress in future definitions of resilience.

Wiederaufbau: Das Deutsches Museum, 1945–1970 (review)

Reviewed by: Wiederaufbau: Das Deutsches Museum, 1945–1970 Peter J. T. Morris (bio) Wiederaufbau: Das Deutsches Museum, 1945–1970. By Otto Mayr. Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2003. Pp. 216. Due to its gradual Nazification on one hand and the impact of air raids in July and December 1944 on the other, the Deutsches Museum—the science and industry museum on the Isar River in Munich—was both physically and morally damaged by the end of the Third Reich. Because it fell within the American zone, the discontinuity with the past was less than it otherwise would have been—only thirty members of staff were forced to leave out of a surviving workforce of 150. Had it been in the Soviet zone, for example, the institution would have been completely transformed. Nevertheless, the leadership faced a massive task to bring the museum back to its former glory. This volume by former museum director Otto Mayr is a relatively short account of the twenty-five years up to 1970 when the reconstruction was finally completed. One major problem was the kind of museum that had to be rebuilt in the new Federal Republic of Germany. The physical reconstruction was daunting enough, but it was simple compared to the development of a new role in the politics and culture of postwar Germany. The original conception of the museum was very much the personal creation of industrialist Oskar von Miller. He founded the museum in 1903 at the height of the Wilhelmine empire and he enjoyed close links with the Bavarian royal family, dethroned in 1918. Furthermore, unlike the Science Museum in London or the Smithsonian in Washington, the Deutsches Museum was not a national body, despite its name. It was a Bavarian institution, controlled by the Bavarian Ministry of Culture. Thus it was a cultural legacy of empire, only without the backing of an imperial state. Mayr’s story of the museum’s reconstruction in both its physical and moral aspects shows how a modern German institution was created out of the Nazi wreckage of a Wilhelmine ideal. This is very much a high-level account, divided chronologically by the terms of office of the different directors. Hence it is largely concerned with the management of the museum, its internal politics, and the long-term planning of exhibitions. It is the institutional history of an organization [End Page 939] rather than a sociological account of a community. There is no comparison with museums elsewhere, perhaps on the assumption that the experience of the Deutsches Museum was unique. This is unfortunate, as there are parallels to be drawn with the much-delayed building of the Centre Block at the Science Museum or with the creation of the Museum of History and Technology in Washington. And surely the management of the Deutsches Museum must have looked over their shoulders at developments at their rivals as they sought to rebuild their museum. Although there is material about the permanent galleries and exhibitions in the context of the overall reconstruction, this book lacks the sustained treatment of exhibitions one finds in the 2010 volume edited by Elisabeth Vaupel and Stefan Wolff on the Deutsches Museum in the Third Reich. Nor is there much on the role played in the post-war museum by leading scientists or large German companies. However there is good coverage of the museum’s relations with its neighboring universities, the University of Munich and the Technische Hochschule. But these criticisms should not be allowed to obscure that this is an excellent book. Otto Mayr has both the personal experience of leading the museum and a unique empathy with his predecessors, which allow him to give an insightful account of the rebirth of a world-class institution. This book will be of great value to historians of museums, students of museology, and scholars working on the postwar reconstruction of West German institutions. Peter J. T. Morris Peter J. T. Morris is Keeper of Research Projects at the Science Museum, London. Copyright © 2012 The Society for the History of Technology

Sexual violence by occupational forces during and after World War II: influence of experiencing and witnessing of sexual violence on current mental health in a sample of elderly Austrians

Wartime rape is an atrocity with long-lasting impacts not only on victims but whole societies. In this brief report, we present data on experience and witness of sexual violence during World War II (WWII) and subsequent time of occupation and on indicators of mental health in a sample of elderly Austrians. Interviews of 298 elderly Austrians from a larger epidemiological study on WWII traumatization were analyzed for the impact of experience and witness of sexual violence during the wartime committed by occupational forces. Interviews comprised a biographical/historical section and psychological measures (BSI, TLEQ, PCL-C). Participants were recruited in all nine provinces of Austria with respect to former zones of occupation (Western Allied/Soviet). Twelve persons reported direct experience of sexual violence, 33 persons witnessed such atrocities. One third of the victims and 18.2% of the witnesses reported post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD full/subthreshold). Sexual violence occurred more often in the former Soviet zone. Victims and witnesses displayed higher odds of post-traumatic symptoms and symptoms of depression and phobic fear than non-victims. Furthermore, witnesses displayed higher levels of aggression compared to victims and non-witnesses. Our results corroborate previous findings that wartime rape has long-lasting effects over decades on current mental health and post-traumatic distress in victims and witnesses. We recommend integration of psychotraumatological knowledge on consequences of sexual violence on mental health into geriatric care and the education of dedicated personnel.

'Out of the Huts Emerged a Settled People': Community-Building in West German Refugee Camps

Between 1944 and 1958, the western zones of Germany had to absorb over nine million refugees who had fled or been expelled from their homes east of the Oder-Neise rivers or had left the Soviet zone. Owing to these large numbers and the catastrophic housing conditions, many had to spend varying periods of time in camps. This article looks at refugee camps for German refugees in three West German Lander to examine the extent to which community-building can be seen to have taken place between 1945 and 1960. The development of the refugee camp phenomenon is traced, from the initial policies to ensure a quick turn-around, to the transformation of many camps into Wohnlager, providing facilities for everyday living, social events and employment. Perceptions of outsiders are analysed and found to show that they were rarely able to recognize instances of community growth. This may be largely explained by political considerations and concern over the social effects of living in a refugee camp environment. Finally, the article turns to Camp Poxdorf/Hagenau in Mid-Franconia to demonstrate how a refugee settlement with a thriving social life was able to emerge from an unremarkable hut camp. The conclusion places the refugee camps in the wider context of the postwar history of the FRG, arguing that fears surrounding ‘asocials’ in camps reflected wider fears about society, but, like the rest of the population, refugee camp residents were working towards achieving a state of normality. Camp communities can be seen to have aided integration by providing an environment where the residents could get used to their situation and look to the future.

Heine und die Nachwelt: Geschichte seiner Wirkung in den deutschsprachigen Ländern. Texte und Kontexte, Analysen und Kommentare, vol. II: 1907-1956 ed. by Dietmar Goltschnigg, Hartmut Steinecke

276 Reviews formed a unified whole, he fulfilled the role of a living symbol of a single person inwhom the totality of knowledge might be embodied. In doing so he sustained the universalizing claims of Bildung postulated in Weimar Classicism. The book is excellently documented and written in a refreshingly supple and jargon-free style. It is beautifully produced to the high standard that one expects from de Gruyter; and it is not only a landmark inHumboldt research, but a major contribution to nineteenth-century cultural history. Trinity College Dublin Andrew Cusack Heine und die Nachwelt: Geschichte seinerWirkung inden deutschsprachigen Lan dern. Texte und Kontexte, Analysen und Kommentare, vol. 11:1907-1956. Ed. byDietmar Goltschnigg and Hartmut Steinecke. Berlin: Schmidt. 2008. 733 PP. 79. ISBN 978-3-503-07992-6. The volume covering the second fifty-yearperiod of theGerman-language recep tion of Heine has exactly the format of its predecessor (reviewed inMLR, 104 (2007), 1178-80), with 124 annotated texts introduced by 184 pages of annotated introduction. Itbegins in thewake of the fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of 1906 with ongoing arguments about erecting amonument despite the emigration of the Loreley Fountain toNew York. The anti-Semitic drumbeat accompanies this dispute and becomes shriller during and after the First World War. Into this period fall thedisorienting and long influential assaults on Heine byKarl Kraus, the Jewish polemicist who applied an extensive repertoire of anti-Semitic tropes to a campaign of deriding the popularity ofHeine's early poetry with the general public and his alleged responsibility for the deterioration of journalistic discourse. The account is consistently critical because it is in the hands of Dietmar Goltschnigg, whose meticulous studyDie Fackel inswunde Herz: Kraus uber Heine. Bine 'Erledigung'? (Vienna: Passagen-Verlag, 2000, reviewed in MLR, 97 (2002), 1025-26) is themost systematic defiance ofKraus's sacred-cow status in thismatter, which nevertheless still finds its ingenious defenders, most recently Paul Reitter, The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and JewishSelf-Fashioning inFin-de-Siecle Europe (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 2008). To this discourse accrued amodernist disdain forHeine as a poet that continued into the second half of the century. All of this invective,whether anti-Semitic or aesthetic, is a testimony toHeine's endurance in German culture; no one would beat a dead horse so tirelessly. This endurance presented some problems to the Nazi purpose of extirpating Heine from the consciousness of theGermans. These efforts,described indetail by Steinecke, aremarked by some of the farcical moments often characteristic ofNazi cultural policy, such as the proposals tomake theHeine Lieder of Schubert, Schu mann, and others performable bywriting new texts to them,while others thought this impractical and accepted that the great German music would just have to be sacrificed to the greater cause. Rational discourse about Heine had, of course, gone into exile,where therewas, tobe sure,more assertion and declarations of solidarity MLR, 105.1, 2010 277 than analysis and criticism, as well as some tension between those who claimed him for Jewishness or Zionism and those who associated him with theMarxist cause. Steinecke exposes some long-lived canards as unfounded in evidence, such as that the Loreley poem appeared inNazi songbooks as author unknown' or that his works were included in the book-burnings. Steinecke then reviews theweak status and sometimes stillhostile views ofHeine in both theAdenauer restoration and among Swiss critics, as well as the vigorous instrumentalization of him in the Soviet Zone and the German Democratic Re public. This, too, was not without its farcical moments, such as the decision not to publish the papers of the elaborately prepared anniversary conference of 1956 because the organizer, Wolfgang Harich, had been arrested forhis stance towards the suppression of theHungarian uprising. There ismuch of potential interest in this precise and informative study;we may expect this to continue to be the case in the third volume now in preparation, which will bring the story close to our own time. Yale University Jeffrey L. Sammons Mythologische Subtexte in Theodor Fontanes 'Effi Briesf. By Holger Ehrhardt. (Medien ? Literaturen ? Sprachen inAnglistik/Amerikanistik, Germanistik und Romanistik, 6) Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2008. 305 pp. 48.10; ?31.30. ISBN 978-3-631-56612-1. The...

The Greek Expansion to the Black Sea

The study of the Greek presence on the shores of the Black Sea goes back to the 19th century, but serious, con tinuous research dates largely to the latter half of the 20th century. Most research, along the portion of the coast cor responding to the former Soviet zone of influence, has been conducted and published by eastern European scholars. Accordingly, a rich scholarly tradition about the subject has developed but mostly in languages not easily accessible to western scholars. This tradition parallels western scholar ship in that it emphasizes above all the study of the relevant ancient sources and the correlation of their historical narra tives with archaeological data, when and where available or relevant. In addition, just as in the west, catalogues of objects and the description of architectural features dominate ar chaeological reports and monographs. Until the early 1990s, little direct contact was possible between scholars of the two areas (Grammenos and Petropoulos [1221]), reflecting the political divisions of contemporary Europe. Eastern Euro pean scholars gained knowledge of the western tradition of classical studies mainly through the?often incomplete? collections of research institute libraries. Several congresses and symposia regularly took place in the Soviet Union and its allied states to which few western scholars had direct access.1 This situation dramatically changed following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. Until recently, little extensive research has been conducted along the Turkish portion of the shore, so that knowledge of the subject there remains patchy, and its argumentation still depends to a great extent on the analysis of classical sources. Today, central and eastern European scholars publish regularly in western periodicals; twojournals, both published by Brill,2 cater in part to the study of the classical history and archaeology of the Black Sea. Monographs on Black Sea studies are also being made available in western languages by European publishers.3 Several congresses, both small4 and large,5 have gathered together considerable numbers of schol ars from both east and west, so that contacts and exchanges are now regular and substantial. In addition, several research projects on which scholars from Black Sea countries and the west collaborate are active in the Black Sea area.6 One recent collection of essays examines the chora of several Greek set tlements on the Black Sea coast with a view of encouraging comparative approaches to the problem.7 Despite this abundant recent activity, little work is available to western scholars unfamiliar with the languages of eastern Europe, apart from summaries published as reviews of field work or as chapters in thematic works.8 The book edited by Grammenos and Petropoulos aims to fill this gap by providing extensive coverage of a large number of the ancient Greek settlements on the shores of the Black Sea; it constitutes, as its title clearly indicates, the second installment of a wider project.9 Its coverage is not exhaustive, but this would not be possible. It contains 34 mostly lengthy articles covering a wide range of subjects: half deal with specific urban sites and/or their chora; the rest present regional themes: aspects of Greek culture in a Black Sea context, Greek influence on local cultures and the diffusion of Greek material in the Black Sea hinterland, and local cultures and sites. This book should be approached together with the 2003 publication;10 it adds considerable depth to the earlier collection of reports (which covers the major ancient Greek towns along the coast to the exclusion of almost everything else). In contrast, Hellenic Colo nization in Euxeinos Pontos by Petropoulos constitutes a study devoted to a narrow theme: the nature of the earliest Greek settlement on the northern shore of the Black Sea.

Review: A Failed Empire

A FAILED EMPIRE The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev Vladislav M. Zubok Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007. 467Pp1 US$39.95 cl°th (ISBN 978-0-8078-3098-7)During the Cold War, analyses of the period were necessarily one-sided. There was an abundance of material from the American side but little from the Soviet Union. Censorship was tight and the Soviet archives were closed. All this has now changed, allowing historians to investigate the Soviet perspective on the east- we st conflict in a far more informed way. Vladislav Zubok has been prominent amongst those reassessing Soviet foreign policy through the newly available primary sources. He co-wrote a highly influential book on the Stalin and Khrushchev periods that was published in 1996, and this latest monograph extends the story to the end of the Cold War and provides an excellent overview of the whole period.Zubok places himself somewhere within the post-revisionist spectrum regarding Cold War historiography. Within this framework, he argues - as in his previous book - that the Soviet leadership acted according to a so-called paradigm. In practice, this does not seem very far distant from the idea that the USSR acted in line with realist theory and sought to maximize its power, but a crucial difference is that its actions were underpinned by a commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Indeed, one of the themes of this book is the importance of Marxism- Leninism to all Soviet leaders. Ideology was not used simply to legitimize Soviet behaviour - as many in the west believed at the time - since Soviet leaders actually believed it and sought to act according to those beliefs. Even Gorbachev, who was the first Soviet leader to break from the revolutionary imperialist paradigm, kept Lenin's works on his desk and reportedly reread them for clues and inspiration (296). A second theme running through this book is Zubok' s unMarxist - but nonetheless accurate - claim that every leader in the Kremlin, through the power of his own personality, made a real difference to policy.Zubok argues that there was little hope of avoiding the Cold War with Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. He was determined to control central and eastern Europe and, despite certain hints after the war, was never willing to give up the Soviet zone of East Germany. Stalin's reading of Marxism- Leninism meant that he always expected communism to triumph over capitalism, but not before a major between the two social systems. In his later years, became an obsession with Stalin, and Khrushchev later said that there were real fears at the time that the US would invade the USSR (86). After Stalin's death in 1953, however, the party quickly abandoned the idea of the inevitability of war and sought some kind of modus vivendi with the west.Stalin's successor, Niki ta Khrushchev, became associated with the subsequent thaw, but he does not come across terribly well in this book. He was a highly unpredictable personality and too often willing to take terrible risks with international peace and security. At the Vienna summit in 19 61, Zubok describes how Khrushchev acted with shocking boorishness towards John Kennedy, believing him to be a weak president who could be bullied (140). Such misperceptions led not only to increased east- west tensions but also to the humiliation of being forced to build the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent mass migration from East Germany, and of withdrawing Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba under threat from Washington a year later. It was to Khrushchev's credit that he was not prepared to go to to defend these positions, but his behaviour alienated all sections of the party and he was ousted in October 1964 (190). …