Download or read book German National Identity in the Twenty First Century written by R. Wittlinger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wittlinger takes a fresh look at German national identity in the 21st century and shows that it has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world and recent domestic developments, Germany has re-emerged as a nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.
Download or read book Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth Century Germany written by Geoff Eley and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-09 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is one of the first to use citizenship as a lens through which to understand German history in the twentieth century. By considering how Germans defined themselves and others, the book explores how nationality and citizenship rights were constructed, and how Germans defined—and contested—their national community over the century. The volume presents new research informed by cultural, political, legal, and institutional history to obtain a fresh understanding of German history in a century marked by traumatic historical ruptures. By investigating a concept that has been widely discussed in the social sciences, Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany engages with scholarly debates in sociology, anthropology, and political science.
Download or read book The First World War and German National Identity written by Jan Vermeiren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative study of the impact of the wartime alliance between Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on German national identity.
Download or read book Beyond Political Correctness written by Christine Anton and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles assembled in this book discuss important questions about German society and the very notion of what being German means in the age of globalization and the vanishing of nation-states in a continuously strengthening European Union; the question about what is German culture in a postmodern era; and how the past affects and shapes the present and future of hybrid German generations. Taking into account not only national but also transnational and recent global developments and concomitant critical debates, this book continues to engage in the discourses of rethinking German national identity, exploring socio-cultural, literary and cinematic responses by German, German Jewish, and other minority authors and filmmakers. These essays focus particularly on trends since the turn of the millennium, and explore how these trends and their new developments are represented and interpreted through the eyes of different media. Beyond Political Correctness: Remapping German Sensibilities in the 21st Century will appeal to readers with a wide variety of academic interests, including cultural history, film studies and contemporary German literature, German-Jewish and Minority literature.
Download or read book Sweeping the German Nation written by Nancy R. Reagin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some 19th century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870–1945. After German unification, approaches to household management that had originally emerged among the bourgeoisie became central to German national identity by 1914. Thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness, along with particular domestic markers (such as the linen cabinet) and holiday customs, were used by many Germans to define the distinctions between themselves and neighboring cultures. What was bourgeois at home became German abroad, as 'German domesticity' also helped to define and underwrite colonial identities in Southwest Africa and elsewhere. After 1933, this idealized notion of domestic Germanness was racialized and incorporated into an array of Nazi social politics. In occupied Eastern Europe during WWII Nazi women's groups used these approaches to household management in their attempts to 'Germanize' Eastern European women who were part of a large-scale project of population resettlement and ethnic cleansing.
Download or read book German American Relations in the 21st Century written by Klaus Larres and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-22 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: German-American relations have become interesting again. U.S. President Donald Trump’s lukewarm policy toward Europe has ensured that the relationship between Berlin and Washington is once again regarded as an important field of scholarship within global politics. And yet it was only a few years ago that German-American relations seemed to take second place to transatlantic relations in general, and the European Union (EU)–USA relationship in particular. The advent of Donald Trump as US President in January 2017 has made all the difference. Trump’s difficult personal relationship with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and his denigration of everything the Western world – including the USA itself – has stood for since 1949, have given a new significance to German-American relations in practice and theory. This volume offers an empirical and conceptual analysis of German-American relations in the 21st century and highlights the serious and perhaps unprecedented challenges the two countries face at present. The authors discuss a number of aspects of the current, much more fragile state of German-American relations from different perspectives. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal German Politics.
Download or read book The Paradox of German Power written by Hans Kundnani and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: The return of history? -- The German question -- Idealism and realism -- Continuity and change -- Perpetrators and victims -- Economics and politics -- Europe and the world -- Conclusion: Geo-economic semi-hegemony.
Download or read book Food Culture and Identity in Germany s Century of War written by Heather Merle Benbow and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even in the harsh conditions of total war, food is much more than a daily necessity, however scarce—it is social glue and an identity marker, a form of power and a weapon of war. This collection examines the significance of food and hunger in Germany’s turbulent twentieth century. Food-centered perspectives and experiences “from below” reveal the social, cultural and political consequences of three conflicts that defined the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars and the ensuing global Cold War. Emerging and established scholars examine the analytical salience of food in the context of twentieth-century Germany while pushing conventional temporal frameworks and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these chapters interrogate the ways in which deeper studies of food culture in Germany can shed new light on old wars.
Download or read book Re Visualizing National History written by Robin Ostow and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2008-03-29 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas regarding the role of the museum have become increasingly contentious. In the last fifteen years, scholars have pointed to ways in which states (especially imperialist states) use museums to showcase looted artefacts, to document their geographic expansion, to present themselves as the guardians of national treasure, and to educate citizens and subjects. At the same time, a great deal of attention has been paid to reshaping national histories and values in the wake of the collapse of the Communist bloc and the emergence of the European Union. (Re)Visualizing National History considers the wave of monument and museum building in Europe as part of an attempt to forge consensus in politically unified but deeply divided nations. This collection explores ways in which museums exhibit emerging national values and how the establishment of these new museums (and new exhibits in older museums) reflects the search for a consensus among different generational groups in Europe and North America. The contributors come from a variety of countries and academic backgrounds, and speak from such varied perspectives as cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, and museum studies. (Re)Visualizing National History is a unique and interdisciplinary volume that offers insights on the dilemmas of present-day European culture, manifestations of nationalism in Europe, and the debates surrounding museums as sites for the representation of politics and history.
Download or read book German Culture Politics and Literature Into the Twenty first Century written by Stuart Taberner and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2006 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features sixteen thought-provoking essays by renowned international experts on German society, culture, and politics that, together, provide a comprehensive study of Germany's postunification process of "normalization." Essays ranging across a variety of disciplines including politics, foreign policy, economics, literature, architecture, and film examine how since 1990 the often contested concept of normalization has become crucial to Germany's self-understanding. Despite the apparent emergence of a "new" Germany, the essays demonstrate that normalization is still in question, and that perennial concerns -- notably the Nazi past and the legacy of the GDR -- remain central to political and cultural discourses and affect the country's efforts to deal with the new challenges of globalization and the instability and polarization it brings. This is the first major study in English or German of the impact of the normalization debate across the range of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and historical discourses. Contributors: Stephen Brockmann, Jeremy Leaman, Sebastian Harnisch and Kerry Longhurst, Lothar Probst, Simon Ward, Anna Saunders, Annette Seidel Arpaci, Chris Homewood, Andrew Plowman, Helmut Schmitz, Karoline Von Oppen, William Collins, Donahue, Katharine Schödel, Stuart Taberner, Paul Cooke Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society and Paul Cooke is Senior Lecturer in German Studies, both at the University of Leeds.
Download or read book Ambiguous Memory written by Siobhan Kattago and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambiguous Memory examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views. Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity.
Download or read book Music and German National Identity written by Celia Applegate and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-08 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire: composers like the three "Bs" of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, all of whom are German. Over the past three centuries, many supporters of German music have even nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music. This book brings together seventeen contributors from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and German literature to explore these questions: how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated "the most German of arts." Unlike previous volumes on this topic, many of which focused primarily on Wagner and Nazism, the essays here are wide-ranging and comprehensive, examining philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, rock, and pop. The result is a striking volume, adeptly addressing the complexity and variety of ways in which music insinuated itself into the German national imagination and how it has continued to play a central role in the shaping of a German identity. Contributors to this volume: Celia Applegate Doris L. Bergen Philip Bohlman Joy Haslam Calico Bruce Campbell John Daverio Thomas S. Grey Jost Hermand Michael H. Kater Gesa Kordes Edward Larkey Bruno Nettl Uta G. Poiger Pamela Potter Albrecht Riethmüller Bernd Sponheuer Hans Rudolf Vaget
Download or read book The Orient of Europe written by Nicholas Germana and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August Wilhelm Schlegel proclaimed that “[i]f the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.” How can this remarkable identification of Germany with the subjugated oriental ‘other’ be explained? In The Orient of Europe, Nicholas A. Germana explores how German thinkers, especially those associated with the Early Romantic movement, set India up as an “ideal mirror,” in which they could perceive the image of the Germany they longed for – a nation whose greatness lay not in political and military power, but in the realm of culture and the spirit. Such an image was especially important during the years of French occupation and the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. The ‘mythical image’ of India, however, underwent profound changes in the decades after 1815. The end of the Wars of Liberation and the onset of the Restoration era, led to the decline of the romantic image of India. As statist visions of German unity rose in prominence, especially in Prussia, this image of the connection between Germany and ancient India took on a new complexion. Politically volatile romantic “Indomania” gave way to a new, more acceptable, ideology – the ideology of Wissenschaft. In this book, which engages with the most recent scholarship in the rapidly emerging field of German Orientalism, Germana challenges traditional Saidian Orientalist readings of German intellectual engagement with Indian thought and literature. German romantic and humanist fascination with India, he argues, is best understood within the context of debates about the nature of ‘Germany’ and ‘Germanness’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than in connection with nascent German “colonial fantasies.”
Download or read book Being Jewish in 21st Century Germany written by Olaf Glöckner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unexpected immigration wave of Jews from the former Soviet Union mostly in the 1990s has stabilized and enlarged Jewish life in Germany. Jewish kindergartens and schools were opened, and Jewish museums, theaters, and festivals are attracting a wide audience. No doubt: Jews will continue to live in Germany. At the same time, Jewish life has undergone an impressing transformation in the second half of the 20th century– from rejection to acceptance, but not without disillusionments and heated debates. And while the ‘new Jews of Germany,’ 90 percent of them of Eastern European background, are already considered an important factor of the contemporary Jewish diaspora, they still grapple with the shadow of the Holocaust, with internal cultural clashes and with difficulties in shaping a new collective identity. What does it mean to live a Jewish life in present-day Germany? How are Jewish thoughts, feelings, and practices reflected in contemporary arts, literature, and movies? What will remain of the former German Jewish cultural heritage? Who are the new Jewish elites, and how successful is the fight against anti-Semitism? This volume offers some answers.
Download or read book Fear Anxiety and National Identity written by Nancy Foner and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic? Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate. Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity. With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.
Download or read book Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe written by Eric Langenbacher and published by . This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today's eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more "self-critical" memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term "collective memory" is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.
Download or read book Becoming Old Stock written by Russell A. Kazal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. Arguably, German Americans form America's largest ethnic group. Yet they have a remarkably low profile today, reflecting a dramatic, twentieth-century retreat from German-American identity. In this age of multiculturalism, why have German Americans gone into ethnic eclipse--and where have they ended up? Becoming Old Stock represents the first in-depth exploration of that question. The book describes how German Philadelphians reinvented themselves in the early twentieth century, especially after World War I brought a nationwide anti-German backlash. Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms--as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners. Becoming Old Stock sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, Becoming Old Stock challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.
