Download or read book The Nation as a Local Metaphor written by Alon Confino and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of WArttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity.
Download or read book Christmas in Germany written by Joe Perry and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perry's work is original, comprehensively researched, and a major contribution to understanding the central importance of the evolution of a consumer culture in modern Germany. The scholarship is sound, impressive, and provocative."ùRudy Koshar, University of Wisconsin-Madison --
Download or read book Fighting for the Soul of Germany written by Rebecca Ayako Bennette and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long believed that Catholics were late and ambivalent supporters of the German nation. Rebecca Ayako Bennette’s bold new interpretation demonstrates definitively that from the beginning in 1871, when Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a unified Germany, Catholics were actively promoting a German national identity for the new Reich.
Download or read book Germany A Nation in Its Time Before During and After Nationalism 1500 2000 written by Helmut Walser Smith and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past. For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith’s aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered over six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out genocide on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany’s shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. Nowhere is Smith’s mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler’s circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by German women throughout the nation’s history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Local Memories in a Nationalizing and Globalizing World written by M. Beyen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In historical studies, 'collective memory' is most often viewed as the product of nationalizing strategies carried out by political élites in the hope to create homogeneous nation-states. In contrast, this book asserts that collective memories develop out of a never-ending, triangular negotiation between local, national and transnational actors.
Download or read book Metaphor Nation and Discourse written by Ljiljana Šarić and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.
Download or read book Regionalism and Modern Europe written by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-13 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a valuable overview of regionalism throughout the entire continent, Regionalism in Modern Europe combines both geographical and thematic approaches to examine the origins and development of regional movements and identities in Europe from 1890 to the present. A wide range of internationally renowned scholars from the USA, the UK and mainland Europe are brought together here in one volume to examine the historical roots of the current regional movements, and to explain why some of them - Scotland, Catalonia and Flanders, among others – evolve into nationalist movements and even strive for independence, while others – Brittany, Bavaria – do not. They look at how regional identities - through regional folklore, language, crafts, dishes, beverages and tourist attractions - were constructed during the 20th century and explore the relationship between national and subnational identities, as well as regional and local identities. The book also includes 7 images, 7 maps and useful end-of-chapter further reading lists. This is a crucial text for anyone keen to know more about the history of the topical – and at times controversial – subject of regionalism in modern Europe.
Download or read book Region and State in Nineteenth Century Europe written by J. Augusteijn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In reaction to the centralizing nation-building efforts of states in nineteenth-century Europe, many regions began to define their own identity. In thirteen stimulating essays, specialists analyze why regional identities became widely celebrated towards the end of that century and why some considered themselves part of the new national self-image.
Download or read book Inventing the modern region written by Talitha Ilacqua and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the process by which the French Basque country acquired a folkloric regional identity in the long nineteenth century. It argues that, despite its origins in pre-modern customs, this stereotypical identity was invented as part of France’s process of nation-building. The abolition of privileges in 1789 prompted a new interest in local culture as the defining feature of provincial France, shaping the transition from the pre-‘modern’ province to the ‘modern’ region. The relationship between the region and the nation, however, was difficult. Regional culture favoured the integration of the French Basque provinces into the French nation-state but also challenged the authority of the central state. As a result, Basque region-building reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the unitary model of French nationhood, in the nineteenth century as well as today.
Download or read book Lost and Found written by Hiraku Shimoda and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lost and Found offers a new understanding of modern Japanese regionalism by revealing the tense and volatile historical relationship between region and nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aizu, a star-crossed region in present-day Fukushima prefecture, becomes a case study for how one locale was estranged from nationhood for its treasonous blunder in the Meiji Restoration, yet eventually found a useful place within the imperial landscape. Local mythmakers—historians, memoirists, war veterans, and others—harmonized their rebel homeland with imperial Japan so as to affirm, ironically, the ultimate integrity of the Japanese polity. What was once “lost” and then “found” again was not simply Aizu’s sense of place and identity, but the larger value of regionalism in a rapidly modernizing society. In this study, Hiraku Shimoda suggests that “region,” which is often regarded as a hard, natural place that impedes national unity, is in fact a supple and contingent spatial category that can be made to reinforce nationalist sensibilities just as much as internal diversity."
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany written by Matthew Jefferies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germany's imperial era (1871-1918) continues to attract both scholars and the general public alike. The American historian Roger Chickering has referred to the historiography on the Kaiserreich as an 'extraordinary body of historical scholarship', whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. This Companion is a significant addition to this body of scholarship with the emphasis very much on the present and future. Questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry and while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German and European history. The volume allows 25 experts, from across the globe, to write at length about the state of research in their own specialist fields, offering original insights as well as historiographical reflections, and rounded off with extensive suggestions for further reading. The chapters are grouped into five thematic sections, chosen to reflect the full range of research being undertaken on imperial German history today and together offer a comprehensive and authoritative reference resource. Overall this collection will provide scholars and students with a lively take on this fascinating period of German history, from the nation’s unification in 1871 right up until the end of World War I.
Download or read book Making Prussians Raising Germans written by Jasper Heinzen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into why the creation of nation-states coincided with bouts of civil war in the nineteenth-century Western world.
Download or read book Nation and Loyalty in a German Polish Borderland written by Brendan Karch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century-long struggle to make a borderland population into loyal Germans or Poles drove nationalist activists to radical measures.
Download or read book Ecumenism Memory and German Nationalism 1817 1917 written by Stan M. Landry and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relationship among the German confessional divide, collective memories of religion, and the construction of German national identity and difference. It argues that nineteenth-century proponents of church unity used and abused memories of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation to espouse German religious unity, which would then serve as a catalyst for German national unification.
Download or read book Localism Landscape and the Ambiguities of Place written by David Blackbourn and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a person call a particular place ‘home’? Does it follow simply from being born there? Is it the result of a language shared with neighbours or attachment to a familiar landscape? Perhaps it is a piece of music, or a painting, or even a travelogue that captures the essence of home. And what about the sense of belonging that inspires nationalist or local autonomy movements? Each of these can be a marker of identity, but all are ambiguous. Where you were born has a different meaning if, like so many modern Germans, you have moved on and now live elsewhere. Representing the ‘national interest’ in parliament becomes more difficult when voters demand attention to local and regional issues or when ethnic tensions erupt. In all these situations the landscape of ‘home’ takes on a more elusive meaning. Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place is about the German nation state and the German-speaking lands beyond it, from the 1860s to the 1930s. The authors explore a wide range of subjects: music and art, elections and political festivities, local landscape and nature conservation, tourism and language struggles in the family and the school. Yet they share an interest in the ambiguities of German identity in an age of extraordinarily rapid socio-economic change. These essays do not assume the primacy of national allegiance. Instead, by using the ‘sense of place’ as a prism to look at German identity in new ways, they examine a sense of ‘Germanness’ that was neither self-evident nor unchanging.
Download or read book What Is a Nation written by Timothy Baycroft and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-06-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume analyses and compares different forms of nationalism across a range of European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. It aims to put detailed studies of nationalist politics and thought, which have proliferated over the last ten years or so, into a wider European context. By means of such contextualization, together with new and systematic comparisons, What is a Nation? Europe 1789-1914 reassesses the arguments put forward in the principal works on nationalism as a whole, many of which pre-date the proliferation of case studies in the 1990s and which, as a consequence, make only inadequate reference to the national histories of European states. The study reconsiders whether the distinction between civic and ethnic identities and politics in Europe has been overstated and whether it needs to be replaced altogether by a new set of concepts or types. What is a Nation? explores the relationship between this and other typologies, relating them to complex processes of industrialization, increasing state intervention, secularization, democratization and urbanization. Debates about citizenship, political economy, liberal institutions, socialism, empire, changes in the states system, Darwinism, high and popular culture, Romanticism and Christianity all affected - and were affected by - discussion of nationhood and nationalist politics. The volume investigates the significance of such controversies and institutional changes for the history of modern nationalism, as it was defined in diverse European countries and regions during the long nineteenth century. By placing particular nineteenth-century nationalist movements and nation-building in a broader comparative context, prominent historians of particular European states give an original and authoritative reassessment, designed to appeal to students and academic readers alike, of one of the most contentious topics of the modern period.
Download or read book Historiography Culture written by Robert M. Burns and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection aims to enable the reader to disentangle some of the ambiguities and confusions which have characterized the use of the term 'historiography'.
