Comparisons with Hitler’s rise in the Weimar Republic have been ubiquitous during the recent nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election (see, for example, Eric Weitz‘s piece for Tablet. Jeffrey Herf has offered the best analysis of these historical comparisons).
Recently, Jill Stein, the US Green Party’s presumptive nominee, made a different sort of link to Weimar times: she suggested that it was known “for a long time ever since Nazi Germany” that putting someone like Clinton in the White House would only “fan the flames of this right-wing extremism” embodied by Trump. Continue reading “Trump, Clinton, and Weimar Germany”
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Digital Tools for Historians
There are some online tools that can help the historian with analyzing large bodies of text:
– The Voyant website is a very simple tool, where the user uploads texts or pastes them right into a textbox. It is also possible to use URLs (of online journals, for example). The program will count the frequency of unique words in the text and also supply a visual representation in the form of a tag cloud.
– The Google Ngram Viewer is a very powerful, if somewhat crude, program that trawls through Google’s vast digital library (20 million books and counting), spitting out a graph charting the popularity of user-defined words through the ages (1800 – 2008).
There are also various podcasts and online workshops on digital tools for historians on the Institute of Historical Research‘s History SPOT website.
Simplicissimus and Jugend online
The satirical magazine Simpicissimus (1896-1945) and the cultural magazine Jugend (1896-1940) have been digitalized by a DFG-funded research group including the Literaturarchiv Marbach and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Leo Baeck Institute Archive Online
Many original sources held at the Leo Baeck Institute are available online at the Internet Archive. Besides the private papers of eminent Weimar scholars and artists like Albert Einstein, Emil Ludwig, Joseph Roth, Ludwig Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and Alfred Schirokauer, the Leo Baeck archive also holds gems like a collection of Berlin theatre programs from 1913-1933 and the files of the intellectual magazine Der Neue Merkur.
Journal Review: ZfG 3/2011
The Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft‘s current issue focuses on German sports pioneer Carl Diem (1882-1962). In the 1920s, Diem initiated the Reichsjugendwettkämpfe and co-founded the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen in Berlin. Contributions include:
Wolfgang Benz: Der Streit um Carl Diem
Michael Krüger: Zur Debatte um Carl Diem
Frank Becker: Carl Diem und der Nationalsozialismus
Journal Review: Historische Zeitschrift 2/2011
The March issue of the Historische Zeitschrift features two interesting reviews of:
Hans-Peter Becht/Carsten Kretschmann/Wolfram Pyta (eds.): Politik, Kommunikation und Kultur in der Weimarer Republik
and
Andreas Wirsching (ed.): Das Jahr 1933. Die nationalsozialistische Machteroberung und die deutsche Gesellschaft
History of the Prussian Cultural Ministry
Prussia has always been portrayed as a military state, this new book finally sheds some light on her cultural administration and policies regarding education, health services, science, religion and the arts, with much hitherto unpublished primary material.
Recensio.net, a European history platform
Recensio.net is a ‘Europe-wide, multi-language platform for reviews of historical literature’, a joint project by the Bavarian State Library (BSB) Munich, the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) and the Institute for European History (IEG) Mainz and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Journals or institutes who have only published in print so far will be able to publish their review sections on the site, but individual authors will also be able to publish abstracts of their work. The big new thing (compared to traditional journals) is the comment section: users can comment on all uploaded content, creating a continous discussion and ‘live reviews’:
‘On the one hand, we want to allow for the changing review patterns in the academic sector. Reviewers often lack the time to write an entire review of a text in its entirety. With a comment they get the chance to give their opinion quickly and easily on an aspect of the text, which at the same time facilitates reviews across various disciplines: A sociologist can review a chapter of an historical publication in reference to his own field without any difficulties.
On the other hand, recensio.net wants to do justice to the central position of articles published in journals or edited volumes in academic writing by giving the possibility to present them, too. So far, articles have only attracted attention within reviews of edited volumes, in which the individual articles have often been neglected. Here, recensio.net wants to offer an up-to-date alternative.’
Journal Review: Monatshefte (Spring 2011)
The current issue of Monatshefte features several interesting book reviews:
Theodore F. Rippey on Eric Weitz: Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
Daniel Weidner on Andrew J. Webber: Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography
Jochen Hung on Sebastian Marx: Betriebsamkeit als Literatur. Prosa der Weimarer Republik zwischen Massenpresse und Buch
August Thyssen correspondence
The industrialist August Thyssen (1842-1926) was one of the most important figures of German society and economy. The correspondence between him and his youngest son Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza sheds some light on private conflict of the Thyssen family and official company policies in the Weimar Republic.