Violence In Germany Research Articles

Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, and Christiane Wienand, editors. Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts .

Journal Article Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, and Christiane Wienand, editors. Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts. Get access Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner and Christiane Wienand, editors. Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Pp. xi, 294. $112.00. The American Historical Review, Volume 121, Issue 5, December 2016, Page 1795, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.5.1795 Published: 05 December 2016

Refugees welcome? A dataset on anti-refugee violence in Germany

The recent rise of xenophobic attacks against refugees in Germany has sparked both political and scholarly debates on the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of right-wing violence. Thus far, a lack of systematic data collection and data processing has inhibited quantitative analysis to help explain this current social phenomenon. This paper presents a georeferenced event dataset on anti-refugee violence and social unrest in Germany in 2014 and 2015 that is based on information collected by two civil society organizations, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and PRO ASYL, who publicize their data in an online chronicle. We webscraped this information to create a scientifically usable dataset that includes information on 1 645 events of four different types of right-wing violence and social unrest: xenophobic demonstrations, assault, arson attacks, and miscellaneous attacks against refugee housing (such as swastika graffiti). After discussing how the dataset was constructed, we offer a descriptive analysis of patterns of right-wing violence and unrest in Germany in 2014 and 2015. This article concludes by outlining preliminary ideas on how the dataset can be used in future research of various disciplines in the social sciences.

Teen Dating Violence in Germany: Prevalence, risk factors and impairments

Background The attention for Teen Dating Violence (TDV) as a special and early form of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has grown internationally. High prevalences and serious effects demonstrate long lasting implications on later life of affected teenagers. TDV is considered a severe public health issue. Prevention is possible, effective and is considered to be a primary prevention of IPV. Because of research gaps in Germany, a survey was designed to answer questions about:

Right-Wing Violence in Germany: Assessing the Objectives, Personalities and Terror Trail of the National Socialist Underground and the State's Response to It

In the last five years the forces of organised right-wing extremism have made electoral advances across many states in contemporary Europe. Germany has not been immune and the extreme right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany won its first seat in the European Parliament since 1989. The recent successes of the extreme right pose issues for European society about tolerance and immigration policy, but this scene has also been associated with an upsurge in racially motivated political violence and acts of right-wing terrorism. Much of this violence is perpetrated by small neo-Nazi styled groups. This paper looks at the most notorious and recent of such groups to emerge in Germany, the National Socialist Underground. The paper explores the origins and personalities behind this terror cell, provides derails of its criminal activities and murder spree, and questions why it took so long for the authorities to identify the NSU.

Women's perceptions of how pregnancy influences the context of intimate partner violence in Germany

Intimate partner violence during pregnancy is receiving increased attention because of its high prevalence and health effects. Still, little is known about women's perceptions on how their pregnancy influences the context in which intimate partner violence occurs. We conducted 19 in-depth interviews with women who had experienced intimate partner violence around the time of pregnancy. Women clearly perceived pregnancy as a turning point, because it created new expectations and a feeling of being overwhelmed. This led to violence by reducing women's acceptance of their partner's unemployment, alcohol abuse and lack of relationship commitment, or by increasing women's vulnerability because they felt too young to raise a child alone. Pregnancy also led to violence by bringing back childhood memories or by taking attention away from their partners. Understanding how pregnancy influences the context in which intimate partner violence occurs is important to provide abused, pregnant women with the services they need.

Pogroms and Riots: German Press Responses to Anti-Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia (1881-1882) (review)

Reviewed by: Pogroms and Riots: German Press Responses to Anti-Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia (1881-1882) Christhard Hoffmann Pogroms and Riots: German Press Responses to Anti-Jewish Violence in Germ any and Russia (1881-1882), by Sonja Weinberg. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010. 243 pp. When modern antisemitism emerged in Germany during the late 1870s, its proponents were eager to distance the new movement from traditional Judeophobia. Coined by the journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879, the neologism "antisemitism" signalled a new, supposedly objective and scientific approach to the "Jewish question" that apparently had nothing in common with the religious anti-Judaism and the irrational, emotional, and violent Jew-hatred of pre-modern times. To be sure, this form of self presentation served first and foremost as a rhetorical strategy to legitimize the renewed exclusion of Jews in a society that was influenced by modern ideas of civic equality, national homogeneity and public order and that looked upon religious strife and sectarian violence as unwelcome remnants of an uncivilized [End Page 179] past. In actual fact, the formation of modern antisemitism in Germany was accompanied by new eruptions of violence against Jews: in the summer of 1881, anti-Jewish riots broke out in many towns and villages of Pomerania and West-Prussia; and following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881, a wave of pogroms swept through southwestern Imperial Russia. How were these outbreaks of violent Jew-hatred viewed in the contemporary German press? Did the press condemn or endorse the anti-Jewish violence in Germany and Russia, and was there a difference in the treatment of the German as against the Russian cases of violence? These are the main questions in Sonja Weinberg's book, which is based on her dissertation at University College London, supervised by the late Professor John D. Klier. In her analysis, Weinberg focuses on four German newspapers: three conservative (the protestant-conservative Kreuzzeitung, the semi-official Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Catholic Germania) as well as the liberal German-Jewish paper, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (AZJ). This is a somewhat peculiar combination of sources. With its close relationship to the topic, the Jewish AZJ does not really fit in, while other political voices (liberal, socialist, or antisemitic) that were crucial to the Conservatives in defining their position are not represented at all. It is a selective and rather limited picture of German press responses that Weinberg presents. Still, her focus on the Conservatives is fruitful. Feeling somewhat marginalized in the first years of the new Empire, which they felt were unduly dominated by economic, political and cultural Liberalism, many Conservatives welcomed Bismarck's turning away from the Liberals in 1878 and sympathized with the antiliberal thrust of the emerging antisemitic movement. In the conservative world-view of both Protestants and Catholics, emancipated Jewry epitomized the essence and ills of modern society. Antisemitism was therefore a major ideological component in the conservative attempt to roll back liberal ideas in the early 1880s. So when the antisemitic agitation turned violent in 1881 and public order had to be restored by the police or even the military, the Conservative papers faced a major challenge: How could they reconcile their support of antisemitism with basic Christian and Conservative values? Weinberg's study shows that the three conservative papers used various methods of what might be termed calculated ambivalence, that is, condemning antisemitic violence and justifying it at the same time. One way of sending such a dual message can be seen in the Norddeutsche, which was closely associated with Bismarck and therefore had to exercise diplomatic restraint. The paper kept a "conspicuously [End Page 180] low profile" in covering the anti-Jewish riots in Germany, but presented the Russian pogroms in a way that held the Jews responsible for the hatred against them and showed empathy for the Russian peasants. The other two papers also pursued a "double-bind strategy" in their coverage of the antisemitic events. They distanced themselves from the violence "whilst indirectly endorsing it as the understandable response of a people mistreated by the Jews" (114). These findings are important and well documented. They confirm what previous studies have shown...

Prevention of homicidal violence in schools in Germany: The Berlin Leaking Project and the Networks Against School Shootings Project (NETWASS)

Since 1999, Germany has experienced at least twelve serious cases of targeted school violence. This article describes two projects designed to fill the gap between universal prevention and emergency response in preventing severe forms of school violence in Germany. The Berlin Leaking Project examined the viability of preventive efforts based on early identification of leaking behavior that often precedes targeted school attacks. Leaking refers to any behavior or communication that indicates a student is preparing to carry out a violent attack. This would include explicit or implied threats of violence, apparent fascination with prior acts of violence such as Columbine, and any evidence of planning or preparation to carry out an attack. The NETWASS project will test a training program and intervention strategy based on those findings, examining the usefulness of a threat assessment approach to prevent violence by training teachers to recognize leaking behavior by students. This approach is extended by training teachers on a larger scale to identify leaking and then having a school-based team evaluate the student and initiate appropriate interventions, such as mental health services, and in some cases, law enforcement action.

The Diffusion of Ethnic Violence in Germany: The Role of Social Similarity

In this article we develop and test an encompassing theoretical framework for explaining the geographical and temporal spread of extreme right violence. This framework combines structural factors related to ethnic competition, social disintegration, and political opportunity structures, which make certain localities more prone to exhibit ethnic violence, with diffusion variables that determine the degree to which ethnic violence diffuses across time and across localities. We employ an event history analysis of instances of racist violence in 444 German counties for the time period 1990-1995. In line with previous research we demonstrate that political opportunities, ethnic competition and social disorganization, media coverage, and the severity of previous violence are significant explanatory factors in the evolution of xenophobic violence. We further find that geographical distance does not affect the diffusion of ethnic violence when controlling for social similarity, which strongly raises the probability of diffusion across localities. This indicates that the effect of geographical distance that is found in many diffusion studies may actually be caused not by geographical proximity as such, but by the fact that proximate areas tend to be socially similar.

The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War

In late 1922, following the assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of the ultra-nationalist terror organization Consul, the communist Reichstag delegate Paul Fröhlich published his book Wider den weißen Mord (Against the White Terror), with which he wished to contribute to the ongoing debate about the nature of counter-revolutionary violence in post-war Central Europe.1 Three years after the bloody suppression of the so-called Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, the crushing of the Munich Soviet republic by German and Austrian Freikorps, and the fall of the communist Béla Kun regime in Hungary, Fröhlich's book aimed to explain the endurance of paramilitary violence and nationalist terror in the defeated states of Central Europe. Following the failure of communist uprisings in Central Europe, this wave of ultra-nationalist violence claimed tens of thousands of lives, including those of prominent politicians and public intellectuals such as Walther Rathenau, Matthias Erzberger, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Austrian novelist Hugo Bettauer, the Hungarian journalist Béla Bacsó, and the editor of the Hungarian Social Democratic daily Népszava, Béla Somogyi.2

Progroms and Riots: The German Conservative and the Jewish Press and Collective Anti-Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia, 1881-1882

Progroms and Riots: The German Conservative and the Jewish Press and Collective Anti-Jewish Violence in Germany and Russia, 1881-1882

Much More Than a Phantom Menace! Assessing the Character, Level and Threat of Neo-Nazi Violence in Germany, 1977–2003

Acts of politically motivated violence and terrorism have troubled many European states since the end of the 1960s. A general consensus holds that the most serious dangers and levels of politically motivated violent crime in the last three decades emanated from the left of the political spectrum, while those from the right were often downplayed or underestimated. Why and to what extent did and does far right violence constitute any significant danger? Can such violence be classified and who are the perpetrators? This article sheds light on such questions and focuses specifically on events in Germany where the violence stems largely from an array of small and explicitly neo-Nazi organizations. The article makes a clear distinction between the violent (and under-researched) offences of the self-styled neo-Nazi groups and the activities (which have been well documented) of the larger right-wing extremist political parties, namely Republikaner, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and Deutsche Volksunion (DVU). Neo-Nazi inspired violence came to typify a particularly offensive and alarming feature of German society in the years immediately following unification in 1990, but it was far from new. This article explores militant neo-Nazism and seeks to provide an assessment of this most extreme variant of right-wing extremism since it emerged in its current form in the late 1970s until the end of 2003. In doing so, it accounts briefly for the origins of militant neo-Nazism and its key personalities before turning to chart the neo-Nazi propensity towards violence and even flirtations on occasions with terrorist-style activities. It explores the targets of neo-Nazism and its motivations before giving consideration to how the state has responded to this menace.

Kazakhstan's Kin State Diaspora: Settlement Planning and the Oralman Dilemma

the former soviet republics, now independent states, of Central Asia are some of the most fertile environments in the world for research into the trans-state dimensions of ethnicity.1 Having only r...

Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right‐Wing Violence in Germany

This article explores the link between violence and public discourse. It suggests that media attention to radical right violence and public reactions to violence affect the clustering of targets and the temporal and spatial distribution of violence. The notion of “discursive opportunities” is introduced, and the article argues that it can serve to link political opportunity structure and framing perspectives on collective action. Using a cross‐sectional and time‐series design to model event counts in states in Germany, this study finds that differential public visibility, resonance, and legitimacy of right‐wing violence significantly affected the rate of violence against different target groups.

Xenophobia and violence in Germany 1990 to 2000

This article presents findings on the following themes: the spread of xenophobic attitudes in Europe; the change of xenophobic attitudes over time in Germany; xenophobic, rightwing extremist and anti‐Semitic crime in the 1990s; biographical backgrounds of xenophobic suspects; level of education and the fear of unemployment; the family risk factor — the lack of reliable and adequate nonviolent care; the saliency of prejudices and the readiness to carry out violent acts; the coincidence of economic fear and immigration. The findings lead to following conclusions: (1) Problems in family socialization can generate stronger prejudices and propensity to violence. (2) There is a cultural factor: the cognitive dissonance caused by the settlement of strangers is higher in smaller towns and villages than in urban areas. (3) More important, however, is the factor of disappointed economic aspirations, especially in East Germany. Xenophobic attitudes cumulate among groups who, because of their low qualifications, fear competition with immigrants for jobs, housing and welfare benefits and perceive government aid to the latter as ‘'unjust preferential treatment.’’

Do liberal teachers produce violent and xenophobic students? An empirical study of German ninth graders and their teachers

A study of 96 teachers and 598 of their students from East and West Berlin is reported, testing a hypothesis that emerged in media coverage of right-wing youth violence in Germany, namely that liberal teachers are 'producing’ right-wing youth, primarily due to their permissive teaching style. LISREL models show that neither do left teachers, in general, have violent and/or right-wing students, nor do permissive teachers have such students. It was, however, found that teachers who emphasize a universalistic and humanistic political value conviction, but at the same time favor an authoritarian teaching style, do indeed have more violent, right-wing extremist students.

Human Rights Monitoring in Germany: A Rejoinder

Human Rights Monitoring in Germany: A Rejoinder Maryellen Fullerton (bio) Manfred Wiegandt concludes his critique of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki’s 1995 Report “Germany for Germans”: Xenophobia and Racist Violence of Germany 1 by proffering six guidelines for future investigations into human rights abuses. His guidelines are eminently sensible and, indeed, already inform the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki fact-finding missions. Our disagreements with his critique lie not with the principles he states, but with Wiegandt’s conclusion that these principles were ignored in Human Rights Watch/Helsinki’s 1995 Report on violence directed against foreigners in Germany. Wiegandt’s first criticism is that the 1995 Report unfairly compared racist violence in Germany with the genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The very sentences he quotes 2 refute his point. They expressly refer to Germany as one of numerous Western European countries that are experiencing violent attacks on people who look foreign. They also acknowledge that more serious violence—of genocidal proportion—is occurring elsewhere, but they do not suggest it is taking place in Germany. We chose to refer to the situations in Western Europe and those in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia for separate but related reasons. We referred to Western Europe because the press in many countries gives greater coverage to incidents of racist violence that occur in Germany than they do to similar attacks occurring in other Western European nations. This results in an impression that violence against foreigners is a peculiarly [End Page 843] German problem. This impression is distinctly untrue, and we believe it is important to emphasize that fact by commenting on the broader Western European experience. We referred to the genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to set the context for human rights investigations of outbreaks of violence against foreigners. The violent xenophobia that Germany and other Western European countries have experienced in the last decade is extremely troubling. Left unchecked, this violence can lead to disastrous consequences for both the broader society and the individual victims. We do not suggest that Germany or any other Western European country will become another version of Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that toleration of ethnic violence deforms societies and sometimes does result in genocide. A reference to societies experiencing genocide is neither out of place in a report on violent xenophobia nor a slight to the victims of genocide in those societies. Wiegandt also criticizes the 1995 Report for praising governmental law enforcement and intelligence agencies that have devoted additional resources to combat racist violence in Germany. Although overzealous law enforcement/intelligence agents may lead to serious abuses of a suspect/defendant’s rights, and therefore are always a concern, thus far in the 1990s the increased use of these arms of the state to prosecute perpetrators of racist violence has not had this consequence in Germany. In fact, as Wiegandt himself notes, the lack of zealousness has been the concern: “the German federal and state governments . . . had partly given the fatal impression of silently tolerating, ignoring or, at least, belittling the degree of violence against foreigners in the country.” 3 It seems fair to give credit to the federal and state governments in Germany when they take actions to grapple with the problem and to attempt to change the “fatal impression” of tolerance of this type of violence. Our decision not to add a footnote comparing and contrasting German law enforcement and legislative responses to the Baader-Meinhof gang with current responses to right-wing violence reflects the intended thrust of this particular Report: an investigation into the governmental response to attacks on foreigners, not a more general overview of civil rights and civil liberties issues concerning law enforcement in Germany. Wiegandt implies that the lack of more extensive discussion of several relevant, though tangential, points stems from a deficient fact-finding approach rather than from an editorial decision about the scope of the 1995 Report. He would improve the situation by having human rights organizations involve knowledgeable local activists as authors rather than foreigners [End Page 844] who visit, interview, and then write reports that might be influenced by foreign legal training and experience...

The Pitfalls of International Human Rights Monitoring: Some Critical Remarks on the 1995 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Report on Xenophobia in Germany

The Pitfalls of International Human Rights Monitoring: Some Critical Remarks on the 1995 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Report on Xenophobia in Germany Manfred H. Wiegandt (bio) The euphoria of the opening of the iron curtain in Germany in 1989 and the unification one year later of a country that had been divided since the end of World War II was just abating when the ugly face of xenophobia started to reappear in the country. Pictures of skinheads lashing out at “foreigners,” of shelters for asylum seekers beleaguered by neo-Nazis, and of burned down dwellings housing Turks did the rounds in the international media. Increasingly hostile attitudes and behavior towards foreigners, which occurred amidst a public debate on how to curb the influx of hundreds of [End Page 833] thousands of asylum seekers into Germany, alerted many observers who were concerned about the situation of foreigners in Germany. One of the human rights groups that reacted to the dramatic increase of violence against foreigners was Helsinki Watch, now called Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. In October 1992, Human Rights Watch/Helsinki issued its first report on xenophobic violence in Germany (1992 Report). 1 In April 1995, it released a more elaborate follow-up report on the subject (1995 Report). 2 One may suggest that the international reaction to Human Rights Watch/Helsinki’s allegations of a wave of violent xenophobia in Germany both alerted the public to problems in Germany and put pressure on the German federal and state governments to make changes after they had partly given the fatal impression of silently tolerating, ignoring or, at least, belittling the degree of violence against foreigners in the country. However, despite the beneficial effect of evaluations by Human Rights Watch/Helsinki and other groups, 3 the 1995 Report by Human Rights Watch/Helsinki gives rise to a critique of its approach to human rights monitoring—a critique that may, to some extent, be valid for other human rights groups that pursue a similar approach. There are some fundamental problems with the 1995 Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Report itself. In addition, one might voice some objections to the principles that Human Rights Watch/Helsinki voiced in its dealing with Germany, in particular its “hate speech” policy. The first critique concerns the introductory section of the 1995 Report. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki mentions that Germany has experienced widespread beatings and even killings of foreigners. 4 The 1995 Report states that “[i]t is clear that racist attacks and killings are not unique to Germany. Genocide has been committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Many violent attacks against foreigners have occurred in France, England, Sweden, and other Western European democracies in the early 1990s.” 5 It might be just sloppy language that seems to insinuate that the xenophobic attacks in Germany fall under the same category as the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. However, it is unwise to start a serious human rights [End Page 834] investigation with an overdramatization of the situation. Strong words are warranted to attract the attention of the public to the serious human rights violations that have occurred in Germany, particularly because initially the authorities, as the 1992 Report concluded, 6 did not take the violations seriously. However, a comparison between the events in Germany and the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia is so out of proportion as to cast doubt on the lack of bias in the whole 1995 Report. The advantage of nongovernmental human rights organizations (human rights NGOs) is that they do not have to feel confined by “diplomatic” usages. Unlike intergovernmental human rights organizations, NGOs are able to speak out and arouse immediate international attention to a specific problem. However, this relative flexibility, which makes human rights NGOs a valuable supplement to “official” and often very inert international human rights organizations, should not be compromised for cheap showmanship. If NGOs in the human rights field were to act like the international media then they could spotlight some situations, but, in doing this they might not be taken seriously by the governments of the countries they were evaluating. It is this type of behavior that could give governments a valid reason not...

Immigration, Asylum, and Anti-Foreigner Violence in Germany

In the early 1990s, Germany went through a difficult debate about changes in its generous asylum laws. Much more dramatic, however, were the increases in the number of violent attacks against foreigners (and also some Germans), mainly by alienated young males. The paper discusses both, the asylum migration and the ethnocentric violence, and also possible connections between the two. In the first part, we present a typology of the perpetrators and various theories which try to explain the new violence, such as: Nazi revival, modernization theory, a theory of civilizational crisis, political culture and dominance culture, and hegemonic masculinity/masculinity crisis. In the second part, we discuss the problems of mass migration and asylum applications, and in particular the debate about it. This debate has contributed indirectly to the violence, although it is not its root cause: through open racism, through scapegoating, and also through a polarization between the two major political camps. In this polarization, different ideological traditions have led to the denial of new dimensions of social reality: the reality of multiculturalism as well as the necessity of limiting and regulating migration. In the final section, we offer a number of suggestions as how to deal with both immigration and violence against foreigners.

How to become a perpetrator in two hours: A case study of juvenile political violence in Germany1

How to become a perpetrator in two hours: A case study of juvenile political violence in Germany¹

Development, patterns and causes of violence against foreigners in Germany: Social and biographical characteristics of perpetrators and the process of escalation

Acts of violence against foreigners have increased dramatically since 1991 in Germany. The author underlines the wave‐like process of escalation and tries to identify triggering and amplifying factors (police reaction, political deficits, public opinion). He analyses police data concerning biographical and socio‐demographic characteristics of the perpetrators and discusses some of the prominent scientific interpretations (disintegration, individualisation, right‐wing activities) concerning the recent waves of right‐wing and xenophobic violence in Germany.