West German Society Research Articles

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

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

‘The Chronicle Must Tell How It Once Was’: Commercial Sex and Pimping in the Chronicle of Hamburg’s Postwar Vice Police

Abstract To ‘pass on a bit of recent history’, members of Hamburg’s vice police, or Sitte, gradually assembled a six-volume chronicle covering the period 1945 to 1982. The authors documented promotions, retirements, joint trips and work parties, but they also recorded the work of the department, illustrated through case notes and commentary on pimping, prostitution, pornography, drug use, paedophilia and incest. This article examines the treatment and depiction of commercial sex and pimping from the 1950s into the early 1980s. Central here is an investigation of the portrayals of ‘pimp’ violence towards women who sold sex, viewed alongside allusions to and evidence of police violence. A further focus is the presentation of and relationship with women who sold sex in Hamburg, with particular reference to police commentary regarding their race, sexuality and gender identity. The article also explores descriptions in the chronicle of so-called ‘transvestite’ prostitution. The authors of the chronicle repeatedly allude to sexual liberalization in West German society at large. Their entries are crafted with a reader in mind as they relate the actions of officers and subjects to changing views on sexuality. This article thus also analyses police engagement with processes of sexual liberalization and the implications for the role of the vice police in West Germany.

A West German Civil Movement in the 1970s: Opposition to the kooperative Schule in Nordrhein-Westfalen

Abstract This study examines the popular petition of 1978 against the introduction of the kooperative Schule in Nordrhein-Westfalen. As a result of this campaign, reforms initiated by the SPD were halted. The reforms had been directed at the eventual introduction of a comprehensive school system, which would have replaced Germany’s traditional three-track school system. Previous studies have usually presented the popular petition as either a reactionary movement against the reform or a victory for conservatives, including the CDU. However, the opposition movement represented a wide range of public opinion, with supporters of the SPD also participating in the movement. Furthermore, when the introduction of the kooperative Schule was abandoned, no positive impact was seen on the CDU’s election results. The event marked a change in the political culture of West Germany, as a sign of a new trend. With greater democratization and modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, civil society became more politically active. Such a pattern promoted the political participation of the public in West German society. In addition, the change was linked to the development of Western civil movements characterized by autonomy and non-partisanship.

Selected Formal and Casual Correspondence between sociologists P.A. Sorokin and L. von Wiese (1950–1966). Transl. from Eng. and publication by N.A. Golovin

The postwar correspondence between P.A. Sorokin, head of the Harvard Centre for the Study of Creative Altruism, and L. von Wiese, President of the German Society for Sociology and publisher of a respected sociological journal from 1950 to 1966, describes their cooperation on issues of general sociology and in the search for practical ways of humanizing the postwar world. It covers notable events in P.A. Sorokin's scientific biography: his conflict with T. Parsons, L. von Wiese's role in its alleviation, Sorokin's creative plans and their implementation, the work of the Research Center for the Study of Creative Altruism, and evidence of recognition of Sorokin's work in West German society. This publication was prepared with support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project №20-011-00451, CGES Saint Petersburg and Bielefeld Universities, Grant №1 from 05.02.2021, on permission from The Pitirim Sorokin Foundation, the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv, BAarch B 320/39) and the Pitirim A. Sorokin Collection, University Archives & Special Collections, the University Library at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. Letters written by L.vonWiese as a response to P.A.Sorokin are quoted in footnotes with numbering in Latin numerals. Footnote icons written in Arabic numerals refer to notes that supplement the main text.

Theodor Adorno. On the Democratisation of German Universities

The German social philosopher Theodor Adorno, the representative of the critical theory of society, wrote this work as a speech in 1959, ten years after his return from exile in West Germany. In his characteristic manner of neo-Marxist criticism of the educational system of West Germany, Adorno critically noted the dynamics of the process of democratisation of higher education and universities in this country. According to the neo-Marxist philosopher, the principled enemy of the ideology of bourgeois society, the democratisation of universities in that country faces serious obstacles on its way. Namely: the limited access to university education for young people from workers' families, which means insufficient social openness of universities. The predominance of material interest in the educational work of some teachers, which is obviously caused by the priority of material values of the industrial society. There is an absolute lack in the educational process of the personal participation of such teachers, whose educational activity is determined by the strength of their individual spirit. The prevailing apoliticalness of the then West German society as post-totalitarian, as a result — passive refusal of students and university graduates to participate in public affairs.
 Having defined democracy as the active participation of the population in public affairs, Theodor Adorno also defined the task of an intellectual — an educated person who is involved in the educational process at a university. Such a task is an intellectual's knowledge of social conditions that lead to a shortage of an active spirit in the process of democratisation of universities, and reflection on the possibility of corresponding changes. The task of the universities of West Germany as a democratic country was called the educational activation of graduates of their individual spirit as a factor of activity, which is emancipated from the influence of the ideology of adaptation society. Higher education due to a means of upbringing should to strengthen its students' critical self-consciousness — an important condition for social democratisation.

‘An Elite Among the Disabled’. The Welfare State and Identity Formation of Disabled Veterans in post‐war West Germany

This article explores how disabled war veterans received preferential treatment by Federal German social and welfare politics in the first two decades after the Second World War. Based on the case of their ‘sacrifice for the fatherland’, disabled veterans were entitled to a generosity not experienced by persons disabled since birth, by an accident or illness. Powerful war victims’ associations successfully lobbied parliament and the architects of social and labour politics in order to secure significant privileges for the war-disabled. These related not only to state-funded programs of physical rehabilitation, but also to integration into the recovering West German economy. To explain these benefits, the article will analyse the interaction of various privileges awarded by both Federal politics and West German society as a whole with the identity formation of disabled veterans. Their understanding of war disability as a ‘badge of honour’, and their upholding of an inherently masculinistic concept of camaraderie created a strong sense of belonging, which enhanced their negotiating position with regards to state-funded rehabilitation programmes and re-integration into the workforce. Against the backdrop of economic and moral reconstruction, disabled veterans successfully navigated the ambivalence of being regarded as a ‘symbol of defeat’ and self-identifying as victims of a war they had fought on the frontlines.

Fulda Gap: A board game, West German society, and a battle that never happened, 1975–85

This article explores the reception of the American-made board game Fulda Gap: The First Battle of the Next War in the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1980s. The German peace movement used the game, which depicted conventional, chemical, and nuclear war on German territory, as a potent symbol of what they believed to be American and NATO disregard for German lives and sovereignty. The controversy over the game reflected the changing character of German-American relations during the ‘Second Cold War’ and increasing concerns among Germans about the possible consequences of superpower conflict in Central Europe.

Between Stigmatization and Acceptance: Diabetic Patients as Civil Servants in West Germany, 1950\u20131970

Patient history has enriched medical history since about the 1980s. But there are still research gaps in certain periods and themes, especially in topics related to the medical history of West Germany. This paper deals with the efforts of patients, lay persons, and medical advisors (diabetologists) to enable diabetics to secure employment as civil servants (Verbeamtung). Attention will be payed to the fact that this success relied on the activities of mediators, who translated and conveyed the patients’ interests to society at large. This victory was concordant with similar initiatives in other fields of the diabetic life, including sexuality and lifestyle management. Therefore, efforts to achieve civil servant employment for diabetic patients were constitutive of a broader initiative that changed the image of the disease and promoted the integration of diabetic patients into West German society.

한국전쟁의 발발과 독일 개신교회(EKD)의 재무장 논쟁

First of all, this study raises the question, “What roles of the church for peace in the face of a national security crisis and rapidly changing political situation?” So, this study examines how the foreign policy of West Germany has changed in response to the international impact of the outbreak of the Korean War and the threat of war within the Cold War system. It also traces how the West German rearmament policy promoted by West German Chancellor Adenauer was accepted by West German society and German Protestants. When the Korean War broke out, Germans feared that a new war would break out in Germany; for this reason, West German Chancellor Adenauer promoted the rearmament of West Germany. Opinion in West Germany on the rearmament policy was divided. Even within the German Evangelical Church, a debate arose over West Germany's rearmament. Martin Niemoller and his group strongly opposed Adenauer's rearmament policy. Another group, however, argued that peace was what West Germany would rearm and contribute to European security. This study examines what the church has actual done and could have done for peace within these German church controversies.

Anticommunism and Détente: Mindszenty, the Catholic Church, and Hungarian Émigrés in West Germany, 1972

AbstractCardinal Mindszenty was head of the Catholic Church of Hungary between 1945 and 1974, but had been imprisoned between 1949 and 1956 and hiding in the US embassy in Budapest from 1956 to 1971. In 1971, Mindszenty left the country and settled in Vienna after long negotiations between the Vatican and the Hungarian communist government. When he visited the Hungarian diaspora and non-Hungarian followers in the West between 1972 and his death in 1975, controversies about communism, Catholicism, and Western society and social change in general erupted. This article analyzes these controversies and the different groups that supported the cardinal and their understanding of anticommunism in the context of a changing West German society and against the background of changes within the Catholic world after Vatican II. The ideas about communism Mindszenty and his right-wing supporters formulated were outdated in the 1970s but had a long afterlife.

Social Pathology of Dementia

When Alois Alzheimer first discussed his findings about plaques and tangles in dementia at the 1906-7 Psychiatric Convention of the South West German Society in Tubingen there was no discussion and no interest shown. His first attempt to publish the findings was rejected. It was already known at the time dementia results in the biological markers of plaques and tangles. It was Emil Kraepelin, Alois Alzheimer’s supervisor, that pushed for the publication of these observations and later adopted Alzheimer’s eponym for the disease. But this was all about political and not science. The argument was that although these biological markers were common, it was not common among younger people, and hence the need for a new disease.

Klingender Zeuge – Bernd Alois Zimmermann, „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ – gruppenanalytisch gehört

Summary Sounding Witness – Bernd Alois Zimmermann „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ Group Analytically Listened The last work of the Cologne composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann („Ekklesiastische Aktion“, 1970) is interpreted in a group-analytical way as his musical announcement of suicide. Suicide can basically be understood in a group-analytical perspective as a group process personalized in the protagonist. In Zimmermann’s case, the repulsed response of post-fascist West German society to his traumatic experiences as a Wehrmacht soldier in World War II plays a decisive role. The „Ekklesiastische Aktion“ can be understood as a sounding Wehrmacht exhibition both in the presentational symbolism of its tonal language and in the discursive symbolism of the texts used in it. In retrospect, the work makes up performatively for exactly what its composer lacked and drove him to suicide: the emotional response to his war traumatizations by the audience.

Witness between Languages: The Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context by Peter Davies

 Reviews Goethe specialists, but to all of us who are inclined to hope that literature might make things better. M E C, C C L Witness between Languages: e Translation of Holocaust Testimonies in Context. By P D. (Dialogue and Disjunction: Studies in Jewish German Literature , Culture, and ought) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. $. ISBN ––––. Tantalizingly written and dely argued, this monograph by Peter Davies offers a fresh perspective on the study of testimonies of the Holocaust through the lens of translation. In the Introduction, Davies argues that ‘without translation there would be no Holocaust’ (p. , author’s emphasis), by which he means that the proliferation of knowledge about the Holocaust, as we understand it today, influenced to great extent by eyewitness accounts, would be unthinkable without the oen occluded or de-emphasized work done by translators. Davies’s argument works from a central tenet, namely that the work of translation entails a highly dialogic practice. Translations, and the translators that make them possible, form an important part of the larger transnational, multilingual conversation connected to source texts. To put it another way, translators are active participants, key players in the discrete intertextual networks that arise out of the translation of source texts into other languages. Indeed, this study’s principal strength lies in its tightly interwoven combination of close textual analysis with the insightful exploration of how social and political expectations regarding Holocaust representation within specific historical contexts have affected the translation of Holocaust testimonies. is study takes care to document how authors and translators interact with varying practices of Holocaust memory at particular historical moments and in particular geographic areas. As one might expect from a study of this scope, Davies explores a wide variety of Holocaust testimonies, including texts originally penned in Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish. In Chapter , ‘Translation and the Witness Text’, Davies situates his study as a ‘mediati[on] between Holocaust studies and translation studies’, which ‘will discuss methods that offer points of contact between descriptions of translations and the philosophical, literary, ethical, and political concerns of Holocaust scholars, and that take into account the agency of the translator and the expectations placed on a Holocaust testimony in particular cultural and historical circumstances’ (p. ). Chapter , ‘Making Translation Visible’, explores how translators treat the question of voice, specifically translating the ‘voice’ of a Holocaust survivor and eyewitness from one linguistic and cultural context to another. Using the theoretical framework established in the first two chapters as a point of departure, the third chapter reconsiders the complex, to some extent controversial, translation history surrounding Elie Wiesel’s Night () by analysing the German and two separate English translations that orbit to varying degrees around the iconic  French La Nuit, which MLR, .,   has until more recently overshadowed its textual predecessor, the  . . . un di velt hot geshvign. In Chapter  Davies switches gears from Holocaust memory in the West, exploring the question of Soviet memory in Vasily Grossman’s ‘e Hell of Treblinka’ () and Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babii Yar (). Using these two accounts as his primary examples, Davies investigates the effects the Cold War had on the translation and dissemination of Holocaust texts from East to West. Krstyna Żywulska’s Auschwitz testimony and the question of self-translation form the focal point of Chapter . Davies traces Żywulska’s conscious articulation of herself as a Polish anti-Fascist resistance fighter in her  autobiographical account Przeżyłam Oświęcim (I Survived Auschwitz), and her attempt to maintain this identity in the German translation (Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau), which she prepared and published in  aer resettling in West Germany. Davies demonstrates how Żywulska’s selftranslation , both as the literal act of translating her own text from one language to another (i.e. Polish to German) and as the metaphorical cultivation of a particular narrating persona, had to contend with ‘quite incompatible “victim cultures”’, at one end of the spectrum, ‘a postwar Polish Stalinist culture that stressed the martyrdom of the nation as a whole’, and at the other end ‘a West German society that [. . .] was in the process of renegotiating its...

The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Reviewed by: The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Charles Lansing The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present. By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 399. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-1108497497. In this fascinating and original account, Gavriel Rosenfeld sets himself the difficult task of writing the history of something that never existed—the Fourth Reich that would have followed Hitler's Third Reich. Even though a Fourth Reich was never created, the idea of it emerged during the Nazi dictatorship and survived its collapse, evolving and gaining traction throughout the postwar era, both in the two Germanies and also the larger West. Rosenfeld examines the idea's origins and evolution in the discourse of intellectuals, politicians, and artists and by doing so forces us to reconsider long-accepted truths about West Germany's "success story" and the dynamics of West Germany's Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The specter of a Fourth Reich was taken seriously by postwar contemporaries, as Rosenfeld convincingly shows, and efforts to realize it might have succeeded had circumstances been slightly different, as he plausibly argues. The result of such careful historical analysis and sensible counterfactual interpretation is a persuasive illumination of the complexity of the postwar era in western Germany, highlighting the fragility and contingent nature of many of the political, social, and cultural developments that eventually resulted in a democratic West German state and society. At the same time, the discourse on the Fourth Reich was an important part of the early West German confrontations with the Nazi past and later, as the idea became aestheticized and universalized, became a significant element of global trends in remembrance. In the first part of the book, Rosenfeld chronicles the emergence of the idea of the Fourth Reich within Nazi Germany—as a reaction to the Nazi dictatorship—and its evolution over the course of the Federal Republic of Germany's first decade. [End Page 195] It was the anti-Nazi resistance, according to Rosenfeld, that first began using the term, consciously building upon various historical precedents. For German émigrés such as Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein or right-wing anti-Nazis like Otto Strasser, thoughts about a Fourth Reich were a useful vehicle to criticize the current state and to imagine an ideal society that, they hoped, would eventually follow Nazism's collapse. But it was not just Germans who were talking about a Fourth Reich; following the outbreak of World War II, American and British intellectuals and policy makers, for example, began to use the term as they considered a potential postwar era. As the war neared its end, however, the idea of a Fourth Reich shifted, in the mind of the Allies, from a mutable progressive vision of the post-Nazi world to, increasingly, the specter of a resurrected Nazi state. And such fears were not at all unreasonable or unfounded, Rosenfeld argues, although scholars in past decades have either ignored manifestations of resurgent Nazism in the early Federal Republic or dismissed them as insignificant given that they didn't succeed, Rosenfeld examines episodes such as the Werewolf movement and the suppression of the "Deutsche Revolution" to argue that the possibility of serious attempts to reestablish a Nazi state in the form of a Fourth Reich was significantly more realistic than we acknowledge today. That men such as Artur Axmann or Klaus Barbie failed to resurrect some kind of Nazi state was, the author argues, thanks largely to Allied interventions that suppressed the threats and enabled a postwar society and polity to take root. The founding of the Federal Republic neither extinguished efforts to restore Nazism in Germany nor lessened Allied fears of such threats, and careful Allied supervision of German developments remained crucial to ensuring that political, social, and economic developments did not lead to re-Nazification. The second part of the book focuses on the continued specter of a Fourth Reich in West Germany from the 1960s to the twenty-first century, analyzing the ways in which the idea of a Fourth Reich disentangled itself from its historic German context...

Responding Responsibly: West Germany’s Relations with the Mujahideen During the Soviet-Afghan War, 1979–1987

This article draws on extensive archival research to account for the complex dynamics and interplay between the Federal Republic of Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt and various Afghan mujahideen between 1979 and 1987. It discusses the resistance groups as diplomatic actors in their own right who attempted to gain material, financial and moral support by lobbying the West German government, law-makers and society. It also uncovers Bonn’s strategic considerations in dealing with these diplomatically proactive leaders, a reality that is contextualized in the FRG’s broader Cold War foreign policy guided by ‘politics, not force’ and the notion of ‘responsibility’. This article concludes that given the FRG’s strong preference for moderation, de-escalation and conflict settlement, West German support for the mujahideen largely remained indirect. Instead of providing weapons or making concrete commitments to resistance groups in Peshawar, Bonn settled on a solution that involved providing large sums of uncontroversial humanitarian assistance to the refugee camps in Pakistan, which they were fully aware would also benefit the resistance groups. Nonetheless, West Germany’s cautious approach failed to bring about the much-desired early political solution. This article contributes to the literature on resistance movements during the Cold War and the history of conflict in Afghanistan.

‘Between Politics and Scholarship’: The First Decade of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1949–1958

Through the consultation and examination of meeting minutes, correspondence, and memoranda, this article contends that a political-scholarly nexus characterized the formation of the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte and directly shaped its research activities within the first decade of its existence, from 1949 to 1958. As a government-funded body it was obliged to service the needs of those governments at a federal and state level, in response to bureaucratic, administrative, and judicial demands – most notably the construction of expert reports (or Gutachten) in response to government requests for advice. The research directions of the Institute were driven by the demands of West German society beginning to come to terms with its Nazi past, and expressed through its political representatives.

RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society: Caught between Nature Protection Activism and Anti-Americanism

This article contributes to the historiography of two separate topics that became intertwined in the final decade of the Cold War: wildlife protection activism and Cold War broadcasting. The article explains how the activities of Radio Free Europe (RFE), a U.S.-funded radio station based in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that transmitted shortwave broadcasts to five Soviet-bloc countries, throw into sharp relief the fine line between the advantages of radio technologies and their pitfalls. The article focuses on a protracted conflict between RFE and the FRG's bird protection activists in the 1980s and early 1990s. Some U.S. officials viewed the fight over the station's superior “killer technologies” as reflecting anti-Americanism during Ronald Reagan's presidency, but West German officials saw it more as an outgrowth of the species protection movement that had recently become a part of the FRG's political mainstream. The article highlights the complex social and international political dimensions of the dispute.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF FAMILY-LAW IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY DURING THE LAST DECADES. FACTS AND OPINIONS

I should like to give you an account of what has been going on in the Federal Republic in the field of family law during the last decades. Now, before talking about family law I should probablysay a few words about the German family, and that means, first of all, the West-German society in general

A legal odyssey: denazification law, Nazi elite schools, and the construction of postwar memory

This article examines the responses of former Nazi elite school staff to the pressures of denazification. Teachers of the National Political Education Institutes, known as Napolas for short – boarding schools for the Third Reich’s racial elite – were especially affected by the purge of National Socialist supporters from positions of influence, due to the schools’ intimate relationship to Heinrich Himmler’s SS. The introduction of the Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism in the US occupation zone in 1946, however, allowed Napola apologists to construct a selective interpretation of the past, which rehabilitated the Napolas’ postwar image and successfully reintegrated alumni into West German society, in many cases long before the Adenauer government issued a series of amnesty laws.

Making a Town: Urbanity, Rurality, and the Politics of Place in Ebersbach (Fils), 1945-1989

Histories of modern society have often relied on a static understanding of urbanity and rurality that views both terms as inherent characteristics of places, divided along the fault lines of modernity and tradition. This article uses the example of Ebersbach (Fils), a small town in Southwest Germany, to explore urbanity and rurality as discourses through which different societal actors tried to shape the development of localities. When Ebersbach tripled its population in the first two postwar decades, local planning elites tried to redefine the industrial village as “urban” to promote its role in the rapidly modernizing West German society. Local residents, however, often challenged these plans to stay in control of the transformation of their hometown. It will thus be demonstrated that what it meant to be urban or rural became a key question in contests over the direction and outcomes of social change in modern society.