West German Research Articles

Changes in the gender pay gap over time: the case of West Germany

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyzes changes in the gender pay gap in West Germany between 1984 and 2020. The literature generally observes a catching-up of women over time with a slowdown since the mid-1990s and often concentrates on the USA. We present both an aggregate and detailed decomposition of changes in wages allowing us to directly test for changes in the components of the decomposition across gender and time. Apart from standard OLS, we use linear unconditional quantile regressions in order to be able to take changes in the gap and its components at the mean and across the distribution into account. We find that the gender pay gap statistically significantly declined at the bottom and the middle, while it increased at the top of the wage distribution. These results suggest that glass ceiling is a major challenge to the West German labour market.

General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE) in Simple Language: Internal Consistency, Standard Values and Correlations with Demographic Variables in a Representative German Sample

Approximately 6,2 million people with limited literacy live in Germany. They are unable to communicate in written language beyond single sentences and thus experience limited social participation in many everyday areas. In addition, they are also excluded from participation in survey-based social science research. In order to enable persons with limited literacy to participate in written surveys, existing questionnaires need to be converted to easy language and their psychometric quality needs to be reexamined. We went through this process for the Self-Efficacy Expectancy (SWE) questionnaire and tested the new scale in easy language (SWE-LS) on a representative sample of the German population aged 14 years and older (N=2,531). The SWE-LS scale showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's-Alpha=0,84) and adequate item difficulty and discriminatory power. We found correlations consistent with expectations for the demographic variables surveyed. Thus, men and persons with higher education and higher income showed significantly higher self-efficacy expectations. The effect was also evident for East Germans versus West Germans, married persons living together versus separated, unmarried, or persons living as singles. Compared to the original SWE scale, the SWE-LS scale in easy language has no methodological disadvantages. The additional effort of linguistic adaptation and renewed psychometric testing is thus directly offset by enabling participation in survey-based research by over 12% of the adult population. A systematic translation of particularly frequently used questionnaires or those that do not concern fundamental research but research areas in which demographic variables themselves are part of the research object would be desirable.

The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974 by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, eds.

<i>The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974</i> by Othon Anastasakis and Katerina Lagos, eds.

O 25 de Abril na imprensa da República Federal da Alemanha

The revolution of 25 April aroused public interest in Portugal for the first time in West Germany. Compared to other countries, however, the interest was rather modest. None of the Federal Republic of Germany’s newspapers sent a correspondent to Lisbon to report on the day-to-day events of the revolution, as did some European newspapers and even Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the German Democratic Republic’s ruling party. However, through the newspapers, the citizens of West Germany received a partial, superficial and biased view of the events in revolutionary Portugal. The treatment of the Carnation Revolution in the West German press says almost as much about Portugal as it does about the peculiar political culture of the Bonn Republic, which was deeply influenced by the Cold War.

Lexical and semantic features of translating names of Kazakh national clothing

The article provides information about the fact that in the distant Paleolithic – Stone Age, humanity began to create leather and textile clothing using bone needles, bones, and other types of clothing culture, along with the use of clothing without seams. In the Neolithic period, the profession of weaving, spinning and weaving developed, and when we consider the types of clothing worn on the shoulders and waist from a linguistic point of view, they have their own names, depending on their specific functions and national characteristics. The appearance of names related to clothing has enriched the vocabulary of our language. The peculiarities of translating the names of national clothes into other languages, including English, belonging to the West German group, can be considered as the relevance of scientific work because such complex scientific research is proposed for the first time. The practical significance of scientific work is to use the results of research work in the field of literature, translation, reading and understanding of texts, compiling dictionaries, preparing scientific reports, training in educational programs in the textile industry and design. The comparative method and the method of translation analysis were used in the scientific work. &nbsp; Keywords: linguistics, translation, transcription, transliteration, calculus, close translation, clothing names, lexical and semantic specifics &nbsp

Staging Forgetting: How Botho Strauß and Heiner Müller Dislocate A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract: Comedy may well be the generic form most intensely tied to the contemporary. If contemporariness, as defined by Giorgio Agamben, is “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism,” comedy stages this relationship by making such disjunctions the prerequisite of laughter while subjecting its protagonists to confusions and anachronisms, in the words of Shakespeare’s Puck, “that befall preposterously” (3.2.121). How, then, does comedy travel through time? How may its disjunctions be displaced to very different circumstances? And how, specifically, can it be rewritten so as to contest the pastness of the past? This article sets out to explore these issues through a reading of two little known, but highly resonant and symptomatic, German stage plays that engage, in rather different ways, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream : whereas Heiner Müller’s Waldstück (1969) relocates the erotic and political entanglements of Shakespeare’s Athens to a workers’ recreation home in the German Democratic Republic, Botho Strauß’s Der Park (1983) tries to reimagine mythic characters and their magic charm under conditions of West German banality. Both merit comparison and study as their project is less directed at remembering and retrieving powerful Shakespearean legacies than marking loss and making us forget their power—comedies which, in Agamben’s sense, hold their gaze on their own time so as to perceive its darkness.

West German Cities and the End of Guest Worker Recruitment, 1973–1978

Abstract This article examines the response of West German cities to the end of guest worker recruitment in 1973 and to the federal government's implementation of its foreigner policy of “consolidation” in the mid-1970s. It argues that cities critiqued federal policies as failing to address the long-term impact of a permanent migrant population and called for a more comprehensive immigration policy that addressed such a population. Fearing potential social problems from a settled foreigner population, cities saw greater social infrastructure investments as essential for the integration of not just individual guest workers but entire foreigner families. By continuing to support the reunification of foreigner families after the end of guest worker recruitment, cities decoupled their assessment of a resident foreigner population from a purely labor market perspective and thought more broadly of the multifaceted impact and demands that the foreigner population made on their communities.

CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC UNION/THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL UNION AND THE FRANKFURT ECONOMIC COUNCIL OF BIZONIA IN 1947-1949

The fate of Germany after the collapse of the Nazi regime was in the hands of the victors, who took upon themselves the responsibility to ensure its unity. However, the actions of the military authorities in the west and in the east of the country led to the opposite result. The creation of Bizonia by the Anglo-American administrations and the establishment of the Economic Council, as discussed in the article, was a departure from the decisions of the Potsdam Conference. This was facilitated by the German CDU and CSU parties, which prepared the economic, political and legislative foundations of the future West German state. However, it must be admitted that the activities of the Economic Council contributed to the normalization of the life of the German population in the Western occupation zones, the revival of the market economy, which, with the participation of Ludwig Erhard, became known as the ‟socio-market economy”. In fact, as highlighted in this article, German politicians, deputies of the Economic Council took responsibility for overcoming the devastating consequences of the war.

Die Frauen und Kinder deutscher Kriegsgefangener. Integriert, ignoriert und instrumentalisiert, 1941–1956

With her book, Ann-Kristin Kolwes provides important new insights into the history of German prisoners of war (POWs) of the Second World War. Her study primarily emphasizes the history of the families of those who were taken captive. As Kolwes notes, ‘The absence of husbands and fathers was a mass phenomenon during the war, which characterized the everyday life of most German families, and even in the years after the war, the so-called incomplete family remained part of everyday life for many women and children’ (p. 8). Kolwes is quick to note, however, that conditions for families varied between the National Socialist, West German and East German states. Her work presents a comparative study between these three major political regimes across what would become the British and Soviet occupation zones. She organizes her work primarily around three chronological eras to explore what effect the status of a husband or father had upon their family during captivity. Across these three regimes, she gives insight into the welfare regimes for families of captives; societal attitudes towards the family, marriage and motherhood; and how politics and families dealt with the phenomenon of mass postwar captivity.

Good Bye Lenin Revisited: East-West Preferences Three Decades after German Reunification.

In this paper, we document that living under Communism versus Capitalism has lasting effects on preferences for a strong government. Relying on the natural experiment of German reunification and extending the analysis of Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007), we show that East Germans still have stronger preferences for redistribution than West Germans 27 years after reunification. While convergence of preferences occurs, the speed of convergence decreases significantly over time. Evidence from cohorts born after German reunification points towards significant intergenerational transmission of preferences.

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

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

The COVID-19 curtain: Can past communist regimes explain the vaccination divide in Europe?

As of December 2021, all former Communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe were still lagging behind in terms of COVID-19 vaccination rates in Europe. Can institutional legacy explain, at least in part, this heterogeneity in vaccination decisions across Europe? To study this question we exploit novel data from the second wave of the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) COVID-19 Survey fielded in Summer (2021) that covers older individuals in 27 European countries. First, we document lower COVID-19 vaccine take-up amongst those who were born under Communism in Europe. Next, we turn to reunified Germany to get closer to a causal effect of having lived behind the Iron Curtain. We find that exposure to the Communist regime in East Germany decreased one's probability to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by 8 percentage points and increased that of refusing the vaccine by 4 percentage points. Both effects are large and statistically significant, and they hold when controlling for individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics. We explore several possible mechanisms. The East-West Germany gap does not seem to be explained by differences in the impact of the first wave of the pandemic or in general exposure to vaccines. We find that East Germans have lower social capital than West Germans and that social capital correlates negatively with Covid-10 vaccine uptake, but only a small fraction of the East-West Germany Covid-19 vaccination gap can be explained by our measures of social capital.

Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy

Reviewed by: Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy Anna Horakova Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic. By Sean Eedy. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 218. Hardcover $135.00. ISBN 978-1800730007. Sean Eedy's monograph fills a gap in GDR, comics, media, and education studies by charting the ways in which the East German government sought to summon the popular appeal and educational powers of comics to instigate enthusiasm for socialism and the development of the socialist personality among the GDR's youths. Eedy's study focuses on the paradoxical efforts by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) as the most representative state-mediating institution of the GDR's youths, to channel the semantically polyvalent and, as he suggests, potentially uncontrollable hybrid medium of the comics. Seeking to portray the interplay between dissent and state power in the culture of the GDR in nuanced and historically contingent ways, Four-Color [End Page 174] Communism constitutes an invaluable contribution to recent scholarship dedicated to dissident or marginalized cultures in the GDR, alongside Seth Howes's Moving Images on the Margins (2019), Sara Blaylock's Parallel Public (2022), and Sarah E. James's Paper Revolutions (2022). However, instead of documenting the critique of state power from within the ranks of East German avant-garde artists and filmmakers, Eedy's study locates this critique within its mass-produced but still relatively marginalized comic book print culture. In so doing, Eedy's monograph follows in the footsteps of Scott McCloud's classic study Understanding Comics (1993), as it maintains a dual focus on close reading and historical context, teasing out the formal qualities of GDR comics as well as their uneasy relation to state power and oblique practice of social and institutional critique. Eedy's study traces the origins of East German comic book production to larger postwar anxieties about the medium's rootedness in perceived "US cultural imperialism and the destruction of national and cultural identities" (21) that were likewise shared by, for instance, West Germany, France, and the UK. The first two chapters, "Comics and the Crisis of Kultur in the SED State" and "State Power and the East German Zeitgeist," offer a meticulously researched and historically grounded account of how the GDR's policies desired to create alternatives to American (and later West German) productions in order to encourage East German child-readers to perpetuate the East German socialist state. The chapters follow the evolution of the country's two major comics, Mosaik von Hannes Hegen and Atze (and to a lesser extent, Frösi), from their inception in the mid-1950s as a bulwark against the perceived capitalist-imperialist influence of Western comics that were feared to be deleterious to the fledgling socialist state, all the way to the surprisingly positive impact of the Berlin Wall's construction on the quality of East German comics that were now allowed to become "more than derivative clones of West German and American publications" (8). That even at their qualitative peak, however, East German comic books did not evolve in the supposed vacuum of the "walled-in state" is correctly maintained by Eedy, who demonstrates the formal influence on these comic books exerted by both their German precursors (such as nineteenth-century and Weimar-era comics and children's literature) and Disney studios productions. In terms of the latter, Eedy's study takes seriously the official demand to "create a socialist alternative to Mickey Mouse," demonstrating Disney's influence especially on Mosaik's creator and drafts-man Hannes Hegen, and discussing how Mosaik's subsequent popularity with East German children is attributable to the transnational influences it had been intended to countermand (a topic that is discussed in depth in chapter five, "Western Influence, Popular Taste, and the Limitations of the FDJ's Publishing Regime"). Crucial to Eedy's study is a theoretical model of the GDR society as Nischengesellschaft (first defined by Günter Gaus), where the population is thought of as having retreated into the private, domestic sphere to escape from the thorough politicization [End Page 175] of East German society by the...

Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 ed. by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik

Reviewed by: Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990 ed. by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik Patricia Anne Simpson Minority Discourses in Germany since 1990. Edited by Ela Gezen, Priscilla Layne, and Jonathan Skolnik. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. vi + 286. Cloth $145.00. ISBN 978-1800734272. Both scholarly and popularized examinations of Germany during the 1990s hotly debated the "new normal" of its national politics and cultures, from the so-called "Leitkultur" (guiding culture) of the late 1990s to the plural, intersectional identities within the Federal Republic, among them "Ossis," "Wessis," and the multiple minoritized groups negotiating various points on the peripheries. The publication of Jürgen Habermas's interventions under the title: Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, 1997) raised further questions about democracy, anti-democratic potentials, and problematic patriotisms. With a legitimate sense of unease, Habermas cautioned against the normalizing of extreme nationalism and its German-specific legacy. By the time the Federal Republic hosted the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the official motto emphasized a sense of sports-inspired unity: "Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden"—the slogan was translated into a number of languages as well as dialects (English: "A time to make friends"). The sports event contributed to a national branding in the early 2000s that expanded the repertory of ways to claim Germanness; expressions of national sentiment could take the leap from constitutional patriotism to "party patriotism." Still, even as the outward-facing image of the new Germany projected inclusion and unity, deep divisions remained. Yet another new historical beginning, the year of unification under the West German constitution was not the rising tide presumed to lift all boats. On the contrary, alleged normalization released repressed political id: acts of violence toward visible minorities increased, driven by hatred and anger in slogans like "Das Boot ist voll" (the boat is full). Frequently invoked but not the subject of extended analysis, May Ayim's poem "blues in Schwarzweiß" (blues in black and white) calls out the euphoria of the newly unified country: "das wieder vereinigte deutschland / feiert sich wieder 1990 / ohne immigrantInnen flüchtlinge jüdische und schwarze menschen … / es feiert in intimem kreis" (Orlando, 2003; "a reunited germany / celebrates itself in 1990 / without its immigrants, refugees, jewish and black people / it celebrates in its intimate circle / it celebrates in white," trans. Anne V. Adams, Africa World Press, [End Page 181] 2003). Her enumeration of those left out could serve as a literary antecedent for this collection of essays. The 2017 conference that preceded this collection set out to explore the "since" of minority discourses; their "intersections (and divergences) regarding cultural, political, and theoretical interventions by different minorities into German public and political discourse on issues of memory, racism, citizenship, immigration, and history" (2). The ten essays in the volume, published in the Spektrum Series (volume 23), engage the discursive plurals of intersectional identities and their positions visà-vis dominant whiteness in German-speaking Europe since German unification and the later founding of the European Union in 1993. To achieve a kind of coherence or common cause across the essays, the editors focus the discussions on Black Germans, Turkish Germans, and Jews in Germany. Without making any claims to being comprehensive in scope nor intention to exclude other minoritized groups, such as the Sinti and Roma or Asian and Arab Germans, Minority Discourses advances a coherent thesis about the urgent need for including multiple subject positions and vocal registers in the effort to refocus the projection of a "German" image as hegemonic. The collective impact of this volume makes strides toward dismantling the binary oppositions between white Germans and all others. The strengths of the volume are based in the depth and breadth of the analyses. The volume opens with an essay by Esther Dischereit, the award-winning, Berlin-based writer and activist whose work forges connections across genres and generations. The following chapters feature astute readings of literary interventions by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoğlu, and Elizabeth Blonzen. These three form a cluster of sorts: Turkish German imaginative archive, Günter Senkel and Zaimoğlu's use of Jewish and Muslim material in an Oberammergau...

West German Single Action Army-inspired Revolvers in the United States

After the Second World War, the proliferation of western movies and television shows in the United States drove substantial demand for revolvers styled after the Colt Single Action Army. While domestic companies such as Ruger, Great Western, and Colt themselves provided products to fulfil this demand, there were market opportunities for imported revolvers as well. Today, Italy dominates the U.S. consumer market for imported historical replica firearms, but at one time West Germany—with its still-recovering post-war economy—was a substantial source of inexpensive single-action revolvers. Despite their prevalence, very little has been published on these revolvers. To date, five West German firearms companies have been identified as producing these revolvers for the U.S. consumer market. Prior to the Gun Control Act of 1968, there were limited product marking requirements, which, combined with these revolvers being imported under a wide range of brands, can make identification challenging. This article provides an overview of the broader post-Second World War U.S. market for Colt Single Action replicas, provides a summary of each of the five key West German manufacturers, and presents a straightforward identification schema allowing the reader to differentiate between common makes and models.

Clinical Outcome and Treatment Sequences of Patients with Advanced Pancreatic Cancer Treated with Contemporary Chemotherapy Protocols

Introduction: Systemic therapy is firmly established in patients with advanced or metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Clinical efficacy is still modest and options are limited. Combination therapy protocols such as FOLFIRINOX and gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel (Gem/NP) define standard-of-care. Patients may receive a sequence of both regimens as first- and second-line palliative treatment. However, there is no guidance regarding a preferred order. Methods: This is a retrospective analysis of clinical characteristics, treatment trajectories, and outcomes of patients with advanced PDAC treated at the West German Cancer Center Essen from 2014 to 2020 to inform treatment decisions with respect to predictive factors, impact of chemotherapy regimen sequence, and maintenance treatment. Results: We identified 170 patients with available follow-up. Of those, 160 (94.1%) patients received palliative CTX for primary metastatic, locally advanced, or recurrent PDAC. Median progression-free survival (PFS) upon first palliative chemotherapy was 4.1 (3.1–5.9) months. First-line FOLFIRINOX was associated with superior PFS (median 6.3 months) and OS (9.7 months, HR 0.7, p = 0.03) as compared to Gem/NP or other regimens (PFS 3.0, OS 6.9 months). However, OS benefit of first-line FOLFIRINOX was lost in patients who received at least two treatment lines (median OS 12.1 vs. 13.1 months, p = 0.43). A landmark analysis of patients with clinical benefit (defined as CR/PR/SD for at least 20 weeks) upon first-line therapy revealed improved OS (HR 0.53, p = 0.02) for patients receiving continued deescalated maintenance therapy. Second-line regimens resulted in similar PFS (overall log-rank p = 0.92, median PFS upon second-line therapy 2.3 [1.8–2.9], per-regimen median between 1.8 and 3.9 months). A previously established systemic inflammation score proved to be strongly prognostic and allowed identification of a patient subgroup with dismal prognosis (OS 2.9 vs. 11.4 months, HR 5.23, p < 0.001), independent of other prognostic factors and with no relevant interaction with the choice of first-line regimen. Conclusion: In this real-world population of PDAC patients treated with contemporary combination chemotherapies, a positive impact of first-line FOLFIRINOX was only observed when no second or further line treatment was administered. Intensity-reduced maintenance therapy may lead to superior survival.

&lt;i&gt;Das unsichtbare Visier&lt;/i&gt; – A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too

This article addresses a franchise of intelligence films in the former Communist East Germany. Under the general title Das unsichtbare Visier—The Invisible Visor—they were produced for television and very popular. In general, the Cold War East produced a rich array of its own intelligence heroes, which cannot be reduced to mere derivatives of Western models. Yet there were commonalities and interactions across Cold War divides. One of these common features that Visier shared with many intelligence films globally was the depiction of abroad as both an “invisible front” of dangers and temptations and an exciting realm of adventure and consumption. Visier could not but also be a fantasy about East German citizens encountering, withstanding, and also enjoying the dangers and temptations of the Western Cold War Other. This included their facing two peculiar challenges: a degree of international mobility unlike anything the vast majority of ordinary East Germans could experience and the West’s consumerism. Visier addressed both these issues through what we could describe as an essentially playful—and dis-playful—practical cosmopolitanism. A careful look reveals Visier as a rich artifact of Cold War popular culture, with complex messages. The image of the heroic East German agent included a running comment of compensatory wish fulfillment. Here were ideal East German citizens doing their duty and yet also getting a fair slice of the capitalist good life abroad that most of their compatriots could not reach. They also consistently punched above their weight vicariously for East Germany as a whole. Like Britain’s James Bond, these were agents of an at-best middling power doing major things in the world at large. And finally, perhaps most satisfyingly of all, they turned into gentle, benevolent guardian angels of hapless West German cousins, neatly reversing West Germany’s claims of superiority.

Jannis Panagiotidis. The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany.

Jannis Panagiotidis’s ambitious comparative study, The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany, highlights what was common and what was distinctive in policies of the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel that privileged access to citizenship for certain immigrants belonging to the dominant ethnic or, in the case of Israel, religious group. Panagiotidis focuses especially on rejections of individual applications for treatment as Aussiedler (resettler) or oleh (someone who goes up, to Israel) that forced policy makers and gatekeepers in each country to clarify their priorities. “It was the unchosen ones who defined the chosen ones” (4). Both states justified their privileging of members of the dominant ethnic or religious group on the basis of past and current persecution. During and after the Second World War, ethnic Germans suffered both from popular hatreds created by Nazi rule and official policies of ethnic cleansing, which led to the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from their homes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The West German Basic Law of May 1949, the constitution of the Federal Republic, established the right of expellees and refugees of German Volkszugehörigkeit (belongingness to the German people) to be considered German citizens once they arrived in West Germany. The 1953 law that implemented this clause extended the meaning of the term “expellee” to include all ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc countries, and Yugoslavia even after the end of official expulsions. This continuing access to West German citizenship was “a consequence of the assumption that conditions in the old homeland [of the “expellee”] under foreign and communist rule had become unbearable” (42).

Identities in transition: Audit recruits and the German reunification

This paper studies the identity transitions of East German audit recruits during the fundamental ideological, economic, and societal change brought about by the reunification of Germany in 1990. Integrating the identity work literature with key concepts from Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman, we build on semi-structured interviews with two groups of recruits—university graduates and former state auditors—to explore and theorize the marked differences observed in these recruits' transition processes. In line with wider processes of territorial stigmatization, we argue that the West German audit firms pragmatically instrumentalized their local personnel, seeking to deploy them without intending to integrate them into the profession. In turn, the audit recruits met with this exertion of symbolic violence by managing a ‘spoiled identity’. The university graduates found it easier to recognize and accumulate legitimate forms of capital, thereby submitting themselves to the inculcation of the profession's socialization process, which ultimately yielded their institution into the profession. In contrast, the former state auditors' local knowledge and access to client networks provided immediately useful capital to the West German firms, which, however, sought to retain a status differential vis-à-vis these recruits. As a result of such strategies of condescension, the former state auditors maintained key aspects of their identity as a salient part of their self-conception. We further highlight the role of the local audit offices in the recruits' transition processes, as they evolved from flexible spaces, which allowed for experimentation and improvisation, into more structured units. This process embedded professional values and practices, thereby creating localized office identities.

Entanglements of Scale: The Beer Purity Law from Bavarian Oddity to German Icon, 1906–1975

Today, the Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) is presented as a timeless touchstone of German commercial sentiments, but that was not always the case. Until the mid-twentieth century, the law was relatively unknown and unevenly applied across Germany. This began to change thanks to the market protectionism of Bavarian brewers in two conflicts of integration between the 1950s and 1970s. The first was sparked by West German market integration and pitted capital interest Old Bavaria (Altbayern) against consumer practices in Franconia. The second followed a parallel development but was initiated by Western European market integration and set Bavarian and West German brewers and regulators in opposition to Brussels. In both, brewers, fearful that integration threatened their market share, rallied around the Reinheitsgebot to win political allies, cudgel industry outliers and generate popular support through claims to culture and tradition. Analysing the transformation of the Reinheitsgebot, this article theorises the causal ‘entanglements of scale’ by which a little-known provincial law transformed into a German icon.