Download or read book American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany 1945 1955 written by Jeffry M. Diefendorf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays by German and American historians discusses key issues of US policy toward Germany in the decade following World War II.

Download or read book Selling the Economic Miracle written by Mark E. Spicka and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.

Download or read book The Miracle Years written by Hanna Schissler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stereotypical descriptions showcase West Germany as an "economic miracle" or cast it in the narrow terms of Cold War politics. Such depictions neglect how material hardship preceded success and how a fascist past and communist sibling complicated the country's image as a bastion of democracy. Even more disappointing, they brush over a rich and variegated cultural history. That history is told here by leading scholars of German history, literature, and film in what is destined to become the volume on postwar West German culture and society. In it, we read about the lives of real people--from German children fathered by black Occupation soldiers to communist activists, from surviving Jews to Turkish "guest" workers, from young hoodlums to middle-class mothers. We learn how they experienced and represented the institutions and social forces that shaped their lives and defined the wider culture. We see how two generations of West Germans came to terms not only with war guilt, division from East Germany, and the Angst of nuclear threat, but also with changing gender relations, the Americanization of popular culture, and the rise of conspicuous consumption. Individually, these essays peer into fascinating, overlooked corners of German life. Together, they tell what it really meant to live in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Volker R. Berghahn, Frank Biess, Heide Fehrenbach, Michael Geyer, Elizabeth Heineman, Ulrich Herbert, Maria Höhn, Karin Hunn, Kaspar Maase, Richard McCormick, Robert G. Moeller, Lutz Niethammer, Uta G. Poiger, Diethelm Prowe, Frank Stern, Arnold Sywottek, Frank Trommler, Eric D. Weitz, Juliane Wetzel, and Dorothee Wierling.

Download or read book The Economic Consequences of the War written by Tamás Vonyó and published by Cambridge Studies in Economic History: Second Series. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the statistical evidence on Germany's post-war reconstruction sheds new light on the foundations of German economic power.

Download or read book Learning Democracy written by Brian M. Puaca and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarship on the history of West Germany's educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture? This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.

Download or read book Reconstruction in Post war Germany written by Ian D. Turner and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reconstruction of post-war Germany is a major research focus for historians. This book offers insights into Allied occupation policy in the late 1940s, showing the painful adjustment which German industry, institutions and citizens had to make in the post-1945 world.

Download or read book Revival After the Great War written by Luc Verpoest and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges of post-war recovery from social and political reform to architectural design In the months and years immediately following the First World War, the many (European) countries that had formed its battleground were confronted with daunting challenges. These challenges varied according to the countries' earlier role and degree of involvement in the war but were without exception enormous. The contributors to this book analyse how this was not only a matter of rebuilding ravaged cities and destroyed infrastructure, but also of repairing people’s damaged bodies and upended daily lives, and rethinking and reforming societal, economic and political structures. These processes took place against the backdrop of mass mourning and remembrance, political violence and economic crisis. At the same time, the post-war tabula rasa offered many opportunities for innovation in various areas of society, from social and political reform to architectural design. The wide scope of post-war recovery and revival is reflected in the different sections of this book: rebuild, remember, repair, and reform. It offers insights into post-war revival in Western European countries such as Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, as well as into how their efforts were perceived outside of Europe, for instance in Argentina and the United States.

Download or read book Three Cities After Hitler written by Andrew Demshuk and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

Download or read book Disciplining Germany written by Jaimey Fisher and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-20 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how the discussions, debates, and controversies in Germany about youth and reeducation after World War II helped Germans come to terms with their Nazi past, negotiate Allied occupation, and construct postwar German identity. During Hitler’s reign, the Nazis deliberately developed and exploited a youthful image and used youth to define their political and social hierarchies. After the war, with Hitler gone but still requiring cultural exorcism, many intellectuals, authors, and filmmakers turned to these images of youth to navigate and negotiate the most difficult questions of Germany’s recent, nefarious past. Focusing on youth, education, and crime allowed postwar Germans to claim one last realm of sovereignty against the Allies’ own emphatic project of reeducation. Youth, reeducation, and reconstruction became important sites for the occupied to confront not only the recent past, but to negotiate the present occupation and, ultimately, direct the future of the German nation. Disciplining Germany analyzes a variety of media, including literature, news media, intellectual history, and films, in order to argue that youth and education played a central role in Germany’s coming to terms with the Nazi past. Although there has been a recently renewed interest in Germany’s coming to terms with the past, this attention has largely ignored the role of youth and reeducation. This lacuna is particularly perplexing given that the Allies’ reeducation project became, in many ways, a cipher for the occupational project as a whole. Disciplining Germany opens up the discussion and points toward more general conclusions not only about youth and education as sites for wider socio-political and cultural debates but also about the complexities of occupation and the intertwining of different national cultures. In this investigation, the study attends to both "high" and "low" cultural text—to specialized versus popular texts—to examine how youth was mobilized across the generic spectrum. With these interdisciplinary approaches and timely interventions, Disciplining Germany will find a diverse readership, including upper-division and graduate courses in German studies and German history as well as those general readers interested in Nazi Germany, cultural history, film and literary studies, youth culture, American studies, and post-conflict and occupational situations.

Download or read book West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past written by S. Jonathan Wiesen and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2004-02-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking study, S. Jonathan Wiesen explores how West German business leaders remade and marketed their public image in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. He challenges assumptions that West Germans - and industrialists in particular - were silent about the recent past during the years of denazification and reconstruction, revealing how German business leaders attempted to absolve themselves of responsibility for Nazi crimes while recasting themselves as socially and culturally engaged public figures. Through case studies of individual firms such as Siemens and Krupp, Wiesen depicts corporate publicity as a telling example of postwar selective memory.

Download or read book Histories of the Aftermath written by Frank Biess and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1945, Europeans confronted a legacy of mass destruction and death: millions of families had lost their homes and livelihoods; millions of men had lost their lives; and millions more had been displaced by the war's destruction. This volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts.

Download or read book Exorcising Hitler written by Frederick Taylor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 was an event nearly unprecedented in history. Only the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier compares to the destruction visited on Germany. The country's cities lay in ruins, its economic base devastated. The German people stood at the brink of starvation, millions of them still in POW camps. This was the starting point as the Allies set out to build a humane, democratic nation on the ruins of the vanquished Nazi state-arguably the most monstrous regime the world has ever seen. In Exorcising Hitler, master historian Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's Year Zero and what came next. He describes the bitter endgame of war, the murderous Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of people in Central and Eastern Europe, and the nascent cold war struggle between Soviet and Western occupiers. The occupation was a tale of rivalries, cynical realpolitik, and blunders, but also of heroism, ingenuity, and determination-not least that of the German people, who shook off the nightmare of Nazism and rebuilt their battered country. Weaving together accounts of occupiers and Germans, high and low alike Exorcising Hitler is a tour de force of both scholarship and storytelling, the first comprehensive account of this critical episode in modern history.

Download or read book How German is She written by Erica Carter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1950s have passed into the history books as the period of the Federal Republic of Germany's so-called "economic miracle"; yet attention to women's roles in economic reconstruction has until now been negligible. In this book, Erica Carter explores how the development of a "social market economy" after 1949 gave a new centrality to consumers as key players in the economic life of the nation, and, in that process, gave women a new public significance. Public attention focused in particular on the nation's housewives, who were to train the populace for entry into a new world of consumer prosperity. Carter investigates this focus from two perspectives: in part 1, she tackles the political economy of postwar West German consumption, and in part 2, she looks at representations of the consuming woman across a range of popular cultural forms. Since visual imagery is discussed at length, the book is lavishly illustrated with advertisements, fashion photographs, film stills, and documentary photography from the period. How German Is She? also makes a distinctive contribution to questions of national identity. While many historians agree that nationalism was a spent force after 1945, Carter argues that concepts of nationhood survived in the rhetorics of public policy and in popular culture of the period. In this context, national and efficient consumption became a housewife's duty, not just to husband and family, but to the postwar "nation." The book will be of primary interest to scholars and students in German studies, women's studies, and cultural studies. Erica Carter is Research Fellow in German Studies, University of Warwick.

Download or read book The Russians in Germany written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1945, when the Red Army marched in, eastern Germany was not "occupied" but "liberated." This, until the recent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is what passed for history in the German Democratic Republic. Now, making use of newly opened archives in Russia and Germany, Norman Naimark reveals what happened during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany from 1945 through 1949. His book offers a comprehensive look at Soviet policies in the occupied zone and their practical consequences for Germans and Russians alike--and, ultimately, for postwar Europe. In rich and lucid detail, Naimark captures the mood and the daily reality of the occupation, the chaos and contradictions of a period marked by rape and repression, the plundering of factories, the exploitation of German science, and the rise of the East German police state. Never have these practices and their place in the overall Soviet strategy, particularly the political development of the zone, received such thorough treatment. Here we have our first clear view of how the Russians regarded the postwar settlement and the German question, how they made policy on issues from reparations to technology transfer to the acquisition of uranium, how they justified their goals, how they met them or failed, and how they changed eastern Germany in the process. The Russians in Germany also takes us deep into the politics of culture as Naimark explores the ways in which Soviet officers used film, theater, and education to foster the Bolshevization of the zone. Unique in its broad, comparative approach to the Soviet military government in Germany, this book fills in a missing--and ultimately fascinating--chapter in the history of modern Europe.

Download or read book Civilizing the Enemy written by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2006-06-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past century, politicians have claimed that "Western Civilization" epitomizes democratic values and international stability. But who is a member of "Western Civilization"? Germany, for example, was a sworn enemy of the United States and much of Western Europe in the first part of the twentieth century, but emerged as a staunch Western ally after World War II. By examining German reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, author Patrick Jackson shows how the rhetorical invention of a West that included Germany was critical to the emergence of the postwar world order. Civilizing the Enemy convincingly describes how concepts are strategically shaped and given weight in modern international relations, by expertly dissecting the history of "the West" and demonstrating its puzzling persistence in the face of contradictory realities. "By revisiting the early Cold War by means of some carefully conducted intellectual history, Patrick Jackson expertly dissects the post-1945 meanings of "the West" for Europe's emergent political imaginary. West German reconstruction, the foundation of NATO, and the idealizing of 'Western civilization' all appear in fascinating new light." --Geoff Eley, University of Michigan "Western civilization is not given but politically made. In this theoretically sophisticated and politically nuanced book, Patrick Jackson argues that Germany's reintegration into a Western community of nations was greatly facilitated by civilizational discourse. It established a compelling political logic that guided the victorious Allies in their occupation policy. This book is very topical as it engages critically very different, and less successful, contemporary theoretical constructions and political deployments of civilizational discourse." --Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University "What sets Patrick Jackson's book apart is his attention, on the one hand, to philosophical issues behind the kinds of theoretical claims he makes and, on the other hand, to the methodological implications that follow from those claims. Few scholars are willing and able to do both, and even fewer are as successful as he is in carrying it off. Patrick Jackson is a systematic thinker in a field where theory is all the rage but systematic thinking is in short supply." --Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Assistant Professor of International Relations in American University's School of International Service.

Download or read book Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.

Download or read book Postwar written by Tony Judt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-05 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.