Peter Thompson, director of the Centre for Ernst Bloch Studies at the University of Sheffield, is writing a series in The Guardian about the Frankfurt School. It might be useful to anybody teaching the subject to pass on to their students as introductory read.
Category: Intellectual History
The ‘European Question’ in the 1920s
Europe in Crisis, a collection of essays on the intellectual origins of the EU edited by Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, includes some very interesting articles on the debate about the ‘European question’ in the interwar years:
‘The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of ‘crisis,’ many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. Continue reading “The ‘European Question’ in the 1920s”
CfP: Catholic Intellectuals in Weimar Germany
The conference ‘Siegkatholiken’, Kulturpessimisten, ‘Gegenintellektuelle’? Katholische Kultur- und Zeitkritik in der Zwischenkriegszeitaims for a revaluation of Catholic intellectuals of the interwar years beyond cultural pessimism. One-page abstracts of 20-30-minute talks should be sent to the organisers until 15 March 2013.
‘Siegkatholiken’, Kulturpessimisten, ‘Gegenintellektuelle’? Katholische Kultur- und Zeitkritik in der Zwischenkriegszeit (CfP in German)
at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, 26-27 September 2013
Organisers: Stefan Gerber (FSU Jena); Denis Kitzinger (Thomas More College, Merrimack)
Weimar politics in Britain, 1929-1939
Bernhard Dietz’s new study on British ‘Neo-Tories’ adds much-needed insight into the neglected social and cultural history of interwar Britain (which Richard Overy’s Morbid Age has started to draw attention to). Dietz describes British conservatives of the 1930s as an equivalent to the German ‘Konservative Revolution’, sympathizing with Italian fascism and cultivating an antifeminist ‘ideology of masculinity’.
New Perspectives on Weimar
The new book Beyond Glitter and Doom. The Contingency of the Weimar Republic, edited by Jochen Hung, Godela Weiss-Sussex and Geoff Wilkes and based on the proceedings of a conference of the same name, gathers the latest research on Weimar history and culture:
‘The Weimar Republic has received more attention in academic research and popular culture than almost any other period in German history. Nevertheless, its prevailing historical image remains surprisingly simplistic: it is often seen as an era of accelerated cultural progress on the one hand and extreme political unrest, social upheaval and economic crisis on the other, a view epitomized in the ubiquitous image of the ‘dance on the volcano’.
German Minorities and Interwar Eugenics
The proceedings of the conference ‘The German Archipelago. German Minorities and Interwar Eugenics’, hosted at Balliol College, Oxford, on 16 – 19 December 2011, are now available on pulse-project.org.
Panels of the conference included ‘Eugenics and National Identity’ and ‘Volksdeutsche and Nazi Germanys’ Racial Policy’, among others.
Hitler, Holocaust and ‘Volksgemeinschaft’
According to the blurb for Thomas Kühne’s new book Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945, ‘no one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust.’ Künhe’s study is not giving one, either, but it offers a provocative and thought-provoking argument, putting the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ and the German people’s yearning for it at the centre of the antisemitic dynamic that started in the Weimar Republic and ended in the Holocaust.
German History in Documents and Images
German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source material documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present, created by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. in cooperation with the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and IEG-MAPS (Institute for European History, Mainz). It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery, including maps.
The section on Weimar Germany has been curated by Eric Weitz and Eric Roubinek and is divided into 14 categories, including Politics, Economics and Society, Architecture and Urban Life and Bodies and Sex. Featured documents include the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 1918, Walter Gropius’ Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), data on regional secondary school enrollment (1911, 1926/27, and 1938) and George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’ (1926).
Journal Review: Mediengeschichte 11 (2011)
The Archiv für Mediengeschichte, based at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, is a yearly publication for media history. In its current issue, Ethel Matala de Mazza analyizes the role of ‘America’ in Fritz Giese’s work. Giese was a well-known Weimar psychologist, his most famous work is Girlkultur from 1925.
The Image of Weimar in Cold War Germany
At least since Sebastian Ullrich’s path-breaking study on the Weimar-Komplex, the West-German image of the Weimar Republic has been subjected to closer critical scrutiny. The articles collected in the new volume Rückblickend in die Zukunft. Politische Öffentlichkeit und intellektuelle Positionen in Deutschland um 1950 und um 1930 contribute to this on-going reassessment by highlighting continuities and discontinuities of intellectual discourses in the Weimar Republic and the Bonner Republik:
‘Die politische Öffentlichkeit und intellektuelle Diskussionskultur der Jahre um 1930, in der Wirtschafts- und Staatskrise am Ende der Weimarer Republik, und um 1950, in der Gründerzeit der Bundesrepublik, unterschieden sich in markanter Weise. Die weltrevolutionären Hoffnungen und nationalistischen Energien waren nach NS-Regime und verlorenem Krieg einer elegischen, gedämpften Stimmung angesichts des katastrophalen Ausgangs aller Illusionen gewichen. Continue reading “The Image of Weimar in Cold War Germany”
Democratic Legal Scholars in the Weimar Republic
Kathrin Groh’s study on democratic scholars of public law in the Weimar Republic (subtitle: ‘From the Traditional Doctrine of the Authoritarian State to a Modern Theory of the Democratic Constitutional State’) challenges the traditional view of Weimar as a ‘democracy without democrats’, especially regarding the legal profession:
‘It is only recently that researchers have started to focus their attention on the theories of democracy developed by teachers of public law in the Weimar Republic. In this work, Kathrin Groh analyzes the writings of the five major figures in this era: Hugo Preuß, Gerhard Anschütz, Richard Thoma, Hans Kelsen and Hermann Heller. She studies the concepts of the state and the constitution used by the teachers of public law, who had been socialized in the German Empire, to react to the challenges of the Weimar Republic and the remedies they found to solve the Republic’s crises in the spirit of the constitution. In spite of their differences, their answers to the main challenges of the Republic, such as state ideology, leadership, political parties, pluralism, the governmental system and fundamental rights were determined by their thinking in terms of the rule of law.’
Das Tage-Buch Online
Das Tage-Buch, founded by Stefan Grossmann, was one of the most important intellectual magazines of the Weimar Republic, publishing articles, poems and stories by authors like E. E. Kisch, Bertolt Brecht and Erich Kästner. The volumes 1920-26 (when Grossmann resigned as editor) are available online on the Internet Archive.
Rethinking Weimar’s Political Culture
WEIMAR PUBLICS/WEIMAR SUBJECTS. Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s (ed. by Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire) is a collection of ‘interdisciplinary scholarship on Weimar political culture […] uncovering arenas of conflict and change that had not been studied closely before, such as gender, body politics, masculinity, citizenship, empire and borderlands, visual culture, popular culture and consumption.’
Contributions include:
Anton Kaes: The Return of the Undead: Weimar Cinema and the Great War
Thomas Mergel: High Expectations – Deep Disappointment: Structures of the Public Perception of Politics in the Weimar Republic
Peter Fritzsche: The Economy of Experience in Weimar Germany
Kathleen Canning: Claiming Citizenship: Suffrage and Subjectivity in Germany after the First World War
Special CEH Issue on Weimar
The December issue of Central European History is dedicated to the history of the Weimar Republic, with articles by Eric Weitz, Kathleen Canning, Rüdiger Graf and Nadine Rossol:
Kathleen Canning: The Politics of Symbols, Semantics, and Sentiments in the Weimar Republic
Eric D. Weitz: Weimar Germany and its Histories
Rüdiger Graf: Either-Or: The Narrative of “Crisis” in Weimar Germany and in Historiography
Nadine Rossol: Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936
Eric Bryden: Heroes and Martyrs of the Republic: Reichsbanner Geschichtspolitik in Weimar Germany
Manuela Achilles: With a Passion for Reason: Celebrating the Constitution in Weimar Germany
Journal Review: Journal of Contemporary History (1/2011)
The new issue of the Journal of Contemporary History features an article on ‘Germany’s Postwar Re-education and Its Weimar Intellectual Roots‘ by Udi E. Greenberg: ‘Historians have often observed the intrusion by the USA into German intellectual and institutional life as part of the USA’s overall plan to “re-educate” Germany and to tie it to its own political traditions and Cold War goals. Through examination of the political theories and academic educational reforms of Carl J. Friedrich, one of the most important intellectuals of the Cold War, this article argues that US policies were simultaneously shaped and determined by intellectual traditions from the Weimar period.’