Download or read book Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat written by Michael L. Hughes and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War II and its aftermath brought devastating material losses to millions of West Germans. Military action destroyed homes, businesses, and personal possessions; East European governments expelled 15 million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes; and currency reform virtually wiped out many Germans' hard-earned savings. These "war damaged" individuals, well over one-third of the West German population, vehemently demanded compensation at the expense of those who had not suffered losses, to be financed through capital levies on surviving private property. Michael Hughes offers the first comprehensive study of West Germany's efforts to redistribute the costs of war and defeat among its citizenry. The debate over a Lastenausgleich (a balancing out of burdens) generated thousands of documents in which West Germans articulated deeply held beliefs about social justice, economic rationality, and political legitimacy. Hughes uses these sources to trace important changes in German society since 1918, illuminating the process by which West Germans, who had rejected liberal democracy in favor of Nazi dictatorship in the 1930s, came to accept the social-market economy and parliamentary democracy of the 1950s.
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 Resettlers and Survivors written by Gaëlle Fisher and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, Resettlers and Survivors gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”
Download or read book The Lost German East written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 1945, Germany was inundated with ethnic German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe. Andrew Demshuk explores why they integrated into West German society.
Download or read book The Discreet Charm of the Police State written by Jose Raymund Canoy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complex and paradoxical relationship between authoritarian policing and the social and economic modernization of postwar Germany's largest and most historically "authentic" state, as Bavaria joined the rest of the Federal Republic in a passage from postwar crisis to consumer prosperity.
Download or read book Two Cultures of Rights written by Manfred Berg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papers of a conference held in Washington, D.C. in June 1997 and sponsored by the German Historical Institute.
Download or read book Capital and Ideology written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
Download or read book The Politics and Ethics of Identity written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the notion of consistent unitary identities, arguing that we are multiple, changing selves, shaped by social contexts and processes.
Download or read book Postwar Soldiers written by Jörg Echternkamp and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.
Download or read book The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe written by Richard Ned Lebow and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative case studies of how memories of World War II have been constructed and revised in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and the USSR (Russia).
Download or read book A German Catastrophe written by Bas Von Benda-Beckmann and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Academisch proefschrift ter verkrijging de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woensdag 20 oktober 2010, te 12:00 uur."
Download or read book The Contemporary Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Restitution and Memory written by Dan Diner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.
Download or read book A Nation Fermented written by Robert Shea Terrell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did beer become one of the central commodities associated with the German nation? How did a little-known provincial production standard DS the Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law DS become a pillar of national consumer sentiments? How did the jovial, beer-drinking German become a fixture in the global imagination? While the connection between beer and Germany seems self-evident, A Nation Fermented reveals how it was produced through a strange brew of regional commercial and political pressures. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the last decades of the twentieth, A Nation Fermented argues that the economic, regulatory, and cultural weight of Bavaria shaped the German nation in profound ways. Drawing on sources from over a dozen archives and repositories, Terrell weaves together subjects ranging from tax law to advertising, public health to European integration, and agriculture to global stereotypes. Offering a history of the Germany that Bavaria made over the twentieth century, A Nation Fermented both eschews sharp temporal divisions and forgoes conventional narratives centered on Prussia, Berlin, or the Rhineland. In so doing, Terrell offers a fresh take on the importance of provincial influences and the role of commodities and commerce in shaping the nation.
Download or read book Refugees and expellees in post war Germany written by Ian Connor and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Second World War, some 12 million German refugees and expellees fled or were expelled from their homelands in Eastern and Central Europe into what remained of the former Reich. The task of integrating these dispossessed refugees and expellees in post-war Germany was one of the most daunting challenges facing the Allied occupying authorities after 1945. The first study in English of the economic, social and political integration of the German refugees and expellees in post-war Germany, this book is based on extensive research in German archives and also incorporates the findings of numerous local and regional studies undertaken by German scholars. While its main focus is on the German Federal Republic, the book also provides coverage of the refugee problem in the German Democratic Republic. This accessible book on a key aspect of post-war German history will be of particular interest to undergraduates of history, politics and German.
Download or read book Nazi Germany written by Jane Caplan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of National Socialism as movement and regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, and one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe alone. This volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the history of Nazi Germany, with ten chapters on the most important themes, each by an expert in the field. Following an introduction which sets out the challenges this period of history has posed to historians since 1945, contributors explain how Nazism emerged as ideology and political movement; how Hitler and his party took power and remade the German state; and how the Nazi 'national community' was organized around a radical and eventually lethal distinction between the 'included' and the 'excluded'. Further chapters discuss the complex relationship between Nazism and Germany's religious faiths; the perverse economic rationality of the regime; the path to war laid down by Hitler's foreign policy; and the intricate and intimate intertwining of war and genocide, with a final chapter on the aftermath of National Socialism in postwar German history and memory.
Download or read book Rebuilding Germany written by James C. Van Hook and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-10 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social market economy has served as a fundamental pillar of post-war Germany. Today, it is associated with the European welfare state. Initially, it meant the opposite. Rebuilding Germany examines the 1948 West German economic reforms that dismantled the Nazi command economy and ushered in the fabled 'European Miracle' of the 1950s. Van Hook evaluates the US role in German reconstruction, the problematic relationship of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, the West German 'economic miracle', and the extent to which the social market economy represented a departure from the German past. In a nuanced and fresh account, Van Hook evaluates the American role in West German recovery and the debates about economic policy within West Germany, to show that Germans themselves had surprising room to shape their economic and industrial system.
