A slightly different take of the currently popular Weimar comparisons in the Berlin-based expat magazine Exberliner: “Our new issue looks at the impact that Weimar’s gay sexologists, expat authors, cabaret dancers and Dadaist visionaries had on today’s Berlin and asks: How close are we to Weimar 2.0?”
Category: General History
Return of the “Big Picture”?
Historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage have published the History Manifesto (free download on Cambridge University Press), challenging the increasing specialization and limitation of historical inquiry. They argue for a return to “long-term history” – an analysis of longer periods and comprehensive narratives – to be able to show “the Big Picture”: ‘How should historians speak truth to power – and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history – especially long-term history – so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? Continue reading “Return of the “Big Picture”?”
Adam Tooze: Remaking of Global Order, 1916-31
Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931 has been included in the Financial Time‘s Books of 2014: ‘Tooze’s book […] possesses the virtue of analysing the 1920s not as a prelude to the Great Depression, the rise of the dictators and another global conflict, but as a decade worthy of study in its own right.’
Reviews:
Financial Times
The Guardian
Foreign Affairs
Sehepunkte
Conference: European Democracies after WWI
The conference Nach dem „Großen Krieg“. Vom Triumph zum Desaster der Demokratie 1918/19 – 1939 at the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden covered the development of European democracies after WWI– and their rapid disintegration from the end of the 1920s – in a comparative perspective. A conference report has just been published on H-Soz-Kult (in German).
Online Lecture: Weimar Germany
In this online lecture, Moritz Foellmer gives an in-depth introduction to the complex history of the Weimar Republic. This webinar is a perfect resource for undergraduate students from one of the leading experts on Weimar Germany.
Journal Review: Journal of Modern European History 3/13
In the current issue of the Journal of Modern European History, Dominik Geppert, Harold James, Hans Kundnani, Jakob Tanner, Peer Vries and Andreas Wirsching are analyzing ‘The European Debt Crisis in Historical Perspectives’. Weimar hyperinflation and the Great Depression of course feature heavily in these articles.
Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project at Brown University and the University of Tulsa has been an important digital archive since 1995, offering scans of English-language avant-garde publications from 1890 to 1922. The archive includes titles like Wyndham Lewis’ Blast, The Crisis and Scribner’s Magazine, and more will be added in the future.
European History Online
EGO (European History Online) is a multi-media portal to 500 years of European history in transnational perspective, featuring articles by esteemed scholars and experts: ‘EGO | European History Online is a transcultural history of Europe on the Internet. The project investigates processes of intercultural exchange in European history whose impact extended beyond state, national and cultural borders. Continue reading “European History Online”
Short History of the Weimar Republic
Colin Storer has written A Short History of the Weimar Republic, a concise introduction to Germany’s first democratic experiment: ‘It is impossible to understand the history of modern Europe without some knowledge of the Weimar Republic. The brief fourteen-year period of democracy between the Treaty of Versailles and the advent of the Third Reich was marked by unstable government, economic crisis and hyperinflation and the rise of extremist political movements. At the same time, however, a vibrant cultural scene flourished, which continues to influence the international art world through the aesthetics of Expressionism and the Bauhaus movement. In the fields of art, literature, Continue reading “Short History of the Weimar Republic”
Online Encyclopedia of the First World War
In 2014, the project “1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War” will go live. It promises to be an indispensable source for research on the Great War and its aftermath, but the website is already worth a look. Particularly the collection of WWI websites is a handy guide for anyone interested in the era.
New Rathenau biography
A new biography investigates how Walther Rathenau reconciled his Germanness and his Jewishness: ‘This deeply informed biography of Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) tells of a man who—both thoroughly German and unabashedly Jewish—rose to leadership in the German War-Ministry Department during the First World War, and later to the exalted position of foreign minister in the early days of the Weimar Republic. His achievement was unprecedented—no Jew in Germany had ever attained such high political rank. But Rathenau’s success was marked by tragedy: Continue reading “New Rathenau biography”
Study about Federalism Debate
Anke John’s study Der Weimarer Bundesstaat. Perspektiven einer föderalen Ordnung (1918–1933) sheds some much-needed light on the significance of Germany’s federal structure in Weimar politics and the contemporary discussion about it.
Who was Hitler?
Eighty years ago today, on 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Reich President Hindenburg and for many, his appointment marks the end of the Weimar Republic. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has an interesting article on the remarkably vague historical image of Hitler in Germany: Continue reading “Who was Hitler?”
German Digital Library online
The beta version of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek goes live today. Financed by the Federal Government, by the states and by local authorities, the DDB offers ‘everyone unrestricted access to Germany’s cultural and scientific heritage, that is, access to millions of books, archived items, images, sculptures, pieces of music and other sound documents, as well as films and scores, from all over Germany.’
Database for German History
The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities offers an online database of the Jahresberichte für deutsche Geschichte, a bibliography of publications on German history. The JDG was founded in 1880 and lists all German and foreign-language publications (monographs, articles in edited books, journal articles, etc.). Its database reaches back to 1974 and is searchable for keywords, titles and authors. Digitalized versions of the JDG from 1925-1938 are also available.