Download or read book The Happy Burden of History written by Andrew S. Bergerson and published by Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Germans are often accused of failing to take responsibility for Nazi crimes, but what precisely should ordinary people do differently? Indeed, scholars have yet to outline viable alternatives for how any of us should respond to terror and genocide. And because of the way they compartmentalize everyday life, our discipline-bound analyses often disguise more than they illuminate. Written by a historian, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, The Happy Burden of History takes an integrative approach to the problem of responsible selfhood. Exploring the lives and letters of ordinary and intellectual Germans who faced the ethical challenges of the Third Reich, it focuses on five typical tools for cultivating the modern self: myths, lies, non-conformity, irony, and modeling. The authors carefully dissect the ways in which ordinary and intellectual Germans excused their violent claims to mastery with a sense of 'sovereign impunity.'They then recuperate the same strategies of selfhoodfor our contemporary world, but in ways that are self-critical and humble. The book shows how viewing this problem from within everyday life can empower and encourage usto bear the burden of historical responsibility - and be happy doing so.
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 Burden of Guilt written by Hannah Vogt and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1964 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German's description of the Nazi rule of Germany and of the conditions which led up to it
Download or read book The Burden of German History written by Konrad H. Jarausch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the leading historians of Modern Europe and an internationally acclaimed scholar for the past five decades, Konrad H. Jarausch presents a sustained academic reflection on the post-war German effort to cope with the guilt of the Holocaust amongst a generation of scholars too young to have been perpetrators. Ranging from his war-time childhood to Americanization as a foreign student, from his development as a professional historian to his directorship of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung and concluding with his mentorship of dozens of PhDs, The Burden of Germany History reflects on the emergence of a self-critical historiography of a twentieth-century Germany that was wrestling with the responsibility for war and genocide. This partly professional and partly personal autobiography explores a wide range of topics including the development of German historiography and its methodological debates, the interdisciplinary teaching efforts in German studies, and the role of scholarly organizations and institutions.
Download or read book Law History and Justice written by Annette Weinke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.
Download or read book The Burden of German History 1919 45 written by Michael Laffan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-01-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1988, The Burden of German History 1919-45 examines the vast literature surrounding Weimar years and the National Socialist tragedy, daunting even for the specialist historian or political scientist. The essays included in this volume provide an invaluable guide to research of the time and provides a stimulating review of a wide range of topics in modern German cultural, political, economic and military history. The essays are based on a series of lectures given by German and Irish scholars to a conference on the theme ‘Weimar Germany and National Socialism’, which was held in March 1986 in University College, Dublin, under the auspices of the Goethe Institute, Dublin. This book offers a significant commentary on a period of German history which included the exciting and ambivalent freedom of the Weimar society and the repressive, murderous uniformity of National Socialism.
Download or read book The Burden of the Past written by Kan Kimura and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Burden of the Past reexamines the dispute over historical perception between Japan and South Korea, going beyond the descriptive emphasis of previous studies to clearly identify the many independent variables that have affected the situation. From the history textbook debates, to the Occupation-period exploitation of “comfort women,” to the Dokdo/Takeshima territory dispute and Yasukuni Shrine visits, Professor Kimura traces the rise and fall of popular, political, and international concerns underlying these complex and highly fraught issues. Utilizing Japanese and South Korean newspaper databases to review discussion of the two countries’ disputed historical perceptions from the end of World War II to the present, The Burden of the Past provides readers with the historical framework and the major players involved, offering much-needed clarity on such polarizing issues. By seeing behind the public discourse and political rhetoric, this book offers a firmer footing for a discussion and the steps toward resolution.
Download or read book A History of Germany written by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Green and the Brown written by Frank Uekötter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides the first comprehensive discussion of conservation in Nazi Germany. Looking at Germany in an international context, it analyses the roots of conservation in the late 19th century, the gradual adaptation of racist and nationalist thinking among conservationists in the 1920s and their indifference to the Weimar Republic. It describes how the German conservation movement came to cooperate with the Nazi regime and discusses the ideological and institutional lines between the conservation movement and the Nazis. Uekoetter further examines how the conservation movement struggled to do away with a troublesome past after World War II, making the environmentalists one of the last groups in German society to face up to its Nazi burden. It is a story of ideological convergence, of tactical alliances, of careerism, of implication in crimes against humanity, and of deceit and denial after 1945. It is also a story that offers valuable lessons for today's environmental movement.
Download or read book The Course of German History written by Alan John Percivale Taylor and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 610 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 Germany written by Neil MacGregor and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 140 years, Germany has been the central power in continental europe. Twenty-five years ago a new German state came into being. How much do we really understand this new Germany, and how do its people understand themselves? Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. Its frontiers have constantly shifted. Königsberg, home to the greatest German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is now Kaliningrad, Russia; Strasbourg, in whose cathedral Wolfgang von Geothe, Germany's greatest writer, discovered the distinctiveness of his country's art and history, now lies within the borders of France. For most of the five hundred years covered by this book Germany has been composed of many separate political units, each with a distinct history. And any comfortable national story Germans might have told themselves before 1914 was destroyed by the events of the following thirty years. German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examining some of these is the purpose of this book. MacGregor chooses objects and ideas, people and places that still resonate in the new Germany—porcelain from Dresden and rubble from its ruins, Bauhaus design and the German sausage, the crown of Charlemagne and the gates of Buchenwald—to show us something of its collective imagination. There has never been a book about Germany quite like it.
Download or read book Hitler s Willing Executioners written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book The Himmler Brothers written by Katrin Himmler and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals – in all its dark complexity – the gulf between the ‘normality’ of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. This riveting family memoir provides essential new information on the private life and background of one of the twentieth- century’s most notorious killers – not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family. It also offers a unique account of one women’s courageous attempt to deal with her chilling inheritance. ‘It is part of the creeping discomfort in reading her book to realise the incredibly ordinary middle-class background of these three sons of a rather pompous provincial headmaster and to see how, right until the end, he was almost able to convince himself it hadn't happened like it had' Sunday Times ‘You get a vivid sense of a particular kind of German conservatism - Roman Catholic, monarchist - and of how, weirdly, it found an outlet in the upstart, part-pagan thuggery of Nazism’ Independent ‘One can only admire her bravery . . . In a way, Katrin Himmler's book is not a story about the past, but one about the present. The most interesting details are the ones she gives of her own quest’ Daily Telegraph
Download or read book Germany s Foreign Policy of Reconciliation written by Lily Gardner Feldman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, Germany has confronted its own history to earn acceptance in the family of nations. Lily Gardner Feldman draws on the literature of religion, philosophy, social psychology, law and political science, and history to understand Germany's foreign policy with its moral and pragmatic motivations and to develop the concept of international reconciliation. Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation traces Germany's path from enmity to amity by focusing on the behavior of individual leaders, governments, and non-governmental actors. The book demonstrates that, at least in the cases of France, Israel, Poland, and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Germany has gone far beyond banishing war with its former enemies; it has institutionalized active friendship. The German experience is now a model of its own, offering lessons for other cases of international reconciliation. Gardner Feldman concludes with an initial application of German reconciliation insights to the other principal post-World War II pariah, as Japan expands its relations with China and South Korea.
Download or read book Feelings Materialized written by Derek Hillard and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-01-10 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the many innovative approaches to emerge during the twenty-first century, one of the most productive has been the interdisciplinary nexus of theories and methodologies broadly defined as “the study of emotions.” While this conceptual toolkit has generated significant insights, it has overwhelmingly focused on emotions as linguistic and semantic phenomena. This edited volume looks instead to the material aspects of emotion in German culture, encompassing the body, literature, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other themes.
Download or read book The German Right 1918 1930 written by Larry Eugene Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism remains one of the most challenging problems of twentieth-century European history. The German Right, 1918-1930 sheds new light on this problem by examining the role that the non-Nazi Right played in the destabilization of Weimar democracy in the period before the emergence of the Nazi Party as a mass party of middle-class protest. Larry Eugene Jones identifies a critical divide within the German Right between those prepared to work within the framework of Germany's new republican government and those irrevocably committed to its overthrow. This split was only exacerbated by the course of German economic development in the 1920s, leaving the various organizations that comprised the German Right defenceless against the challenge of National Socialism. At no point was the disunity of the non-Nazi Right in the face of Nazism more apparent than in the September 1930 Reichstag elections.
