Twentieth-Century Germany Research Articles

‘I Hid for Days in the Basement’: Moments of ‘Jewish’ Discovery in Pre-Holocaust Germany and Austria

What happens when someone ignorant of their Jewish heritage uncovers the truth in dramatic circumstances? This article focuses on and advocates for further analysis of an unstudied discrete phenomenon: ‘the moment of discovery’ in early twentieth century Germany and Austria. The article's four empirical sections analyse various facets of this moment: the clues which pointed towards the Jewish ancestral secret, missed by many non-Jewish ‘Jews’; the reaction of antisemites to becoming the object of their own hatred complex; the deep despair felt during the moment of discovery; the mitigatory actions which could ameliorate the latter; and the minority who reacted positively to the news. Collectively, the piece displays the terror associated with being ‘Jewish’ at the time, the extent to which non-Jewish ‘Jews’ were truly separated from the Jewish community and, crucially, the radicalisation of moments of discovery under Nazism, when they became more devastating than ever.

Pre-Modern Institutions and Later Support for Autocrats in Democratic Elections

Abstract A history of local inclusive institutions is correlated with higher levels of democracy today. However, it is unclear whether this reflects the effect of historical institutions on democracy or a prior common cause. Using a geographic natural experiment, this letter demonstrates that historical experience with inclusive institutions is related to less support for autocratic parties in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. This suggests that electoral support for political parties that seek to subvert democracy can be influenced by pre-modern institutions even when they were destroyed prior to the introduction of democracy.

The Parallel Lives of Liddy Bacroff: Transgender (Pre)History and the Tyranny of the Archive in Twentieth-Century Germany

Abstract Pursued by authorities throughout the 1930s, Heinrich Habitz left behind a significant paper trail of official documentation, arrest warrants and imprisonment records. As Germany slipped further under National Socialist oppression, Habitz’s status as a homosexual man who sold sex marked him as a target of police repression. Even after the end of the war, the Hamburg Prosecutor’s Office attempted to locate and again prosecute him under the infamous §175 ‘sodomy law’. By rights, the study of Habitz should provide insights into the continuities of anti-queer repression between authoritarianism and democracy, but for one key point: ‘Heinrich Habitz’ existed only as a paper identity in official bureaucracy, and the ‘man’ authorities repeatedly persecuted was, in fact, a self-identified woman named ‘Liddy Bacroff’. Through a series of semi-autobiographical writings, alongside official paperwork, Liddy Bacroff presents the value of but also the difficulties facing the (re)construction of queer and, in particular, transgender (pre)histories. In this instance, the historian is not just faced with the problem of how this life, and others like it, should be represented in historiographical terms. We are left also with the question of how this victim of National Socialist barbarity should (or rather, can) be remembered: as the paper identity that provided a succession of carceral authorities with the justification to persecute and ultimately murder a cisgender gay man, or as the lived experience of a woman whose unique self-understanding allowed her to carve out her place in a society that otherwise relegated her to its margins.

Interview With Christian Wachter

Christian Wachter is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Digital History working group at Bielefeld University. He received his Ph.D. for his thesis on hypertext as a medium for digital historiography in 2021. In a current research project, he conducts digitally-assisted discourse analysis, examining political discourse in early twentieth-century Germany.

The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany

Bettina Hitzer, Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden and Privatdozentin at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written what may fairly be called a definitive history of cancer in twentieth-century Germany. The special merit and value of Hitzer’s book is, as she puts it, the analysis of ‘three modes of the disease’s relation to emotions [...] the genesis of scientific, and above all medical and psychological concepts of what emotions are [...] the shifts in different types of knowledge about emotions and cancer [...] and the role that emotions played in clinical, preventive, palliative, and private approaches towards cancer and those diagnosed with it’ (p. 359). The coverage of the topic is exhaustive, indeed complete. While sometimes involved—given the many complexities of the history and the author’s analysis of it—the writing is clear. The translation is also quite satisfactory, apart from the occasional choice of informality (‘Sure, these concepts’, p. 4) or odd usage (‘clipped the plausibility’, p. 37; ‘impressing testament’, p. 105; ‘Allied bomb raid’, p. 288). The author’s choice of a thematic organization by chapter in the place of an overall chronological approach is, with a couple of exceptions noted below, very effectively deployed and realized.

Bettina Hitzer, The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany. (Emotions in History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

Bettina Hitzer, The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany. (Emotions in History.) Oxford, Oxford University Press 2022

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945

The Polish Catholic Church under German Occupation: The Reichsgau Wartheland, 1939–1945

New Histories of Law and Rights in Twentieth-Century Germany

On 1 March 2022, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock accused the Russian President Vladimir Putin's government of waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), she drew explicit links to the Nazi war of aggression in order to legitimise sanctions against Russia as she stressed the UN's mission to work for peace enshrined in the UN charter. Twelve months earlier, in February 2021, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz sentenced a forty-four-year-old Syrian citizen to four and a half years’ imprisonment. Based on the ‘shared values of humanity’, the verdict made headlines as the court explicitly cited the universal jurisdiction principle enshrined in the Völkerstrafgesetzbuch (VStGB) that had been enacted in 2002 to bring German law into accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.1 Since 2002, German courts have adopted these international law principles and legal norms in a series of legal actions against foreigners to prosecute crimes against humanity.

German Health Narratives between Life Reform and Medical Enlightenment, 1890–1930

This article traces the emergence of the health narrative as a new genre of bodily knowledge in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. Health narratives were life stories told by or about an individual, either real or fictional, who made conscious choices about how to conduct their bodily existence. Pioneered by lay health seekers known as life reformers, health narratives were co-opted by physicians hoping to reinvent medical enlightenment for the twentieth century. In addition to surveying the variety of forms that health narratives took in adult and children’s literature, the article explores the paradoxes and contradictions that ensued around voice, agency, embodiment, and selfhood as these narratives spread from life reform to medical contexts.

Philology and Responsibility: The Weisse Rose Pamphlets and Classical Quotations

This paper examines the use of classical quotations in the third pamphlet of the Weiße Rose. Looking in detail at their references to Cicero’s On Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, I show their careful selective citational practices and situate those in turn within some of the developments and priorities of the reception of antiquity in early twentieth century Germany. Finally, I use the case of the evaluations of the pamphlets that were commissioned from the classicist Richard Harder shortly before the arrest of the Weiße Rose members to raise questions about philological reading and responsibility.

Wilhelm Reich and Sexology from Below.

One of sexologist Wilhelm Reich's most ambitious and enduring theories claims that sexuality and sexual repression play a central role in the production and reproduction of class structures and hierarchies. From 1927-1933, Reich combined his sexological work with his communist political convictions in a movement that became known as sex-pol. Reich developed some of his most provocative and potentially emancipatory theories through this empirical work with members of working-class communities. Though they often remain anonymous in his writings, the traces of their voices remain audible throughout. In this paper, I employ a Gramscian method, developed by post-colonial scholars, to read for the trace of proletarian voices in Reich's archive. I argue that these subjects helped to theorize the role of sex in producing and reproducing class oppression. Reading for the trace of proletarian voices in the archive expands our understanding of how working-class subjects in early twentieth-century Germany and Austria helped to produce concrete sexological knowledge from below.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Edward Timke From Advertising & Society Quarterly’s inception 22 years ago, the journal has closely examined debates about advertising’s role in society, culture, history, and the economy, including how much (or how little) diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) concerns have been taken into account by the advertising industry and corporate America in general. It is not surprising, then, that much of this issue’s content examines DEI issues in advertising from various vantage points. From Emily Contois’ (University of Tulsa) examination of hard seltzer advertising’s attempts to be gender inclusive, to Shu-Chuan Chu’s (DePaul University) in-depth assessment of diversity and multicultural issues in scholarly journals focused on advertising, readers will encounter original research asking important questions about power and privilege in advertising as well as the enterprise of advertising research. Further, despite what the advertising industry has self-professed, this issue’s roundtable presses viewers to think carefully about how inclusive and equitable the industry has become in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning of 2020.1 Additionally, the latest Author Meets Critics installment encourages us to untangle the long, troubled history of large, powerful organizations and individuals exploiting aspirational desires and regulatory loopholes to push dangerous products and ideas on historically marginalized groups of people.2 Several articles underscore the need to contextualize our understanding of advertising today through the application of historical methods. Keith Wailoo (Princeton University), in our Author Meets Critics discussion, explains how various legal cases involving tobacco in the 1990s made decades of internal documents available to the public through large digital archives. Without these lawsuits, such significant historical documents likely would have never seen the light of day for researchers to examine carefully. Rachael Huener’s (Macalester College) original article on miniature advertisements found on small, highly collectible stamps in early twentieth century Germany showcases the ways in which companies and advertisers have used new technologies and creative techniques to draw attention to various products, places, and ideas.3 Jason Chambers (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) shares how he gives his students an opportunity to conduct historical research about major advertising campaigns. By requiring students to package a wealth of information into infographics—digital charts that summarize research through compact visuals—Chambers has found a way to get students excited about and appreciative of historical perspectives on classic ad campaigns. The journal’s third Advertising in Popular Culture discussion assembled scholars with expertise and interest in clandestine modes of persuasion and selling, such as stealth marketing and native advertising.4 In analyzing the 2009 dark comedy The Joneses, starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore, the group explored the ethics of hidden persuasion, as the titular characters take advantage of personal relationships and apply peer pressure to sell products. It delivers a cautionary tale as their neighbors try to “keep up” with the Joneses’ undisclosed marketing and end up in ruin. The issue includes two Key Concepts articles. In the first, Jacqueline Lambiase (Texas Christian University) and Carolyn Bronstein (DePaul University) explain the concept of objectification; a major scholarly and public criticism of advertising over the last half century. Drawing from the significant work of sociologist Erving Goffman and feminist, activist, speaker, and writer Jean Kilbourne, Lambiase and Bronstein show the relevance and dangers of exploiting and depersonalizing people’s bodies through advertisements today. In the second Key Concepts article, I discuss how the theory of technological determinism reveals debates about the power of technology in everyday life. Today, people may blame many of our social, cultural, and political ills on new technological tools, such as smartphones and social media applications. However, if new technologies dictate social and cultural life, critics remind us that people created those technologies in the first place, which, in theory, means that people have the power to regulate and control them. In other words, we are not beholden to manipulative algorithms or addictive advertising-based technologies if we find ways to not let them control us, which might be easier said than done. People need to be knowledgeable about technology’s impacts, who controls technology (and for what purposes), and how they can resist and utilize technology...

Taking Nativism to the Streets

In this article, I give an overview on nativist street protests in Germany from the early nineteenth century to the present from an historical perspective. In a preliminary remark, I will reflect on some recent developments in Germany, where nativist protest campaigns against immigration took place in the streets when voters were turning towards the populist radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In the first section, I will outline an older tradition of anti-immigration protest in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, which is closely connected to modern antisemitism. In sections two and three, I will retrace how, from the late 1960s onward, the far right in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) discovered concerns about immigration in the German population, addressed them in protest campaigns and developed narratives to integrate such sentiments into a broader right-wing extremist ideology, itself deeply rooted in antisemitism. Studying nativism and the radical right from an actor-oriented perspective, I will focus on traditionalist movements, including the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and neo-Nazi groups.

The Moment of Worldwide Renewal: Hillel Zeitlin and the Theosophical Activity in Warsaw 1917–1924

Abstract This article examines the idiosyncratic conduct of the philosopher, journalist and mystic, Hillel Zeitlin (1871–1942). Both Zeitlin's writings and activities are unique or even strange when viewed against the backdrop of the Jewish streets of Warsaw during those years, even when considering other “neo-Hasidic” projects. He published poem-prayers and a personal-mystical diary, founded journals, called for religious and spiritual awakening and tried to start mystical study and prayer groups. Zeitlin's work had a messianic fervor that was lacking in the activity of other Jewish figures. Despite an expansion of scholarly interest in Zeitlin's writings and activities, no satisfactory explanation of his behavior has yet been proposed. This article contextualizes Zeitlin's writing and activities in light of those of various spiritual and esoteric movements that flourished in early twentieth century Poland, Russia and Germany, in particular, those of the Theosophical Societies in Warsaw. He was aware and deeply sympathetic to the various movements of spiritual awakening, and these affected his work profoundly.

Sound in the Papers: Musical Hermeneutics in the Age of the Feuilleton

AbstractThis article examines the intersection of feuilleton writing and musicology in early twentieth-century Germany. Starting from the contemporary concern that music lacked the capacity to expr...

Nazi Science, wartime collections, and an American museum: An object itinerary of theAnthropologie Symbol

AbstractA number of recent works have explored the value of scholarly efforts to “unpack” museum collections and examine the constitutive networks and histories of objects. The interrogations of collections through methods such as object biographies and itineraries imparts important knowledge about the institutions, disciplines, and individuals who made museum collections, contribute to deeper understandings of the roles of objects in creating meaning in and of the world, and suggest implications for future practice and policies. This article examines the object itinerary of a cultural property item of negative heritage: a three-dimensional painted plaster work of craft-art originally designed to symbolize the scientific practice of anthropology in early twentieth-century Germany and later associated with wartime collecting during World War II, the history of American archaeology, and the modern repatriation movement in museums.

Dromen van een staat voor het volk

Abstract Dreaming of a state for the people. The German idea of a people’s state in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) The idea of a people’s state was central to nineteenth-century German political thought from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the beginning of the First World War. However, it has not as yet been studied either systematically or thoroughly. This article explores the concept of the people’s state in German political texts, arguing that the people’s state has a double meaning: it could either be a state for the people, such as a republic, or a state with one supposedly homogenous population. The two notions are intertwined, and this could explain how the people’s state became a central idea in ideologies as diverse as socialism, liberalism, and nationalism, as well as anti-Semitism and national-socialism. The development of the idea of a people’s state in the nineteenth century is crucial for a better understanding of political thinking in twentieth-century Germany.

The Last Dwelling before the Last: Siegfried Kracauer’s Critical Contribution to the Modernist Housing Debate in Weimar Germany

Abstract In early twentieth-century Germany a population explosion in its big cities created a housing crisis. A widespread and heavily medialized debate prompted a search for solutions and triggered a rhetoric of the last dwelling. From large communal estates to subsistence-level dwellings, a new type of housing was propagated in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, films, guidebooks, and advertisements. Siegfried Kracauer, architect, journalist, and author, also became engaged in this debate, willfully reinterpreting New Objectivity’s aesthetics of things (Dingästhetik) both in architectural critiques for the Frankfurter Zeitung and in his novel Ginster. This article analyzes Kracauer’s critical contribution to the modernist housing debate in the Weimar Republic.

Kara L. Ritzheimer, ‘Trash’, Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Kara L. Ritzheimer, <i>‘Trash’, Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany</i>

The scientist and the advertisement: Reklamegutachten in imperial Germany.

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, the integration of product-evaluating certificates and reports (Gutachten) into advertisements triggered repeated condemnations of "advertisement-Gutachten" (Reklamegutachten), and scientists and science administrators introduced various restrictions to prevent the appearance of such documents. At the same time, the provision of Gutachten to private individuals and firms seemed crucial to the success of many private and public laboratories. Some chemical and other professionals, moreover, argued that the authoring and use of Reklamegutachten could represent a "scientific" and, therefore, ethical practice. By examining the contested history of the advertisement-Gutachten, this article reveals how a previously tolerated knowledge service lost its legitimacy in a particular place and period of time, and highlights the challenges of eliminating this practice or restoring its legitimacy afterward. The article also explores how professional scientists' approaches to maintaining a reputation for integrity in the face of commercial and competitive pressures related to the better-known efforts of professionals in other fields, particularly the medical. I emphasize that, in determining whether a Gutachten qualified as scientific, the nature and transparency of the underlying research process was only one of the criteria that were considered, and often not the most significant yardstick. At the same time, however, ideas about the personal and professional/institutional integrity of providers of Gutachten were inextricably connected with assessments of the honesty and objectivity of their research.