In the current issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft Philipp Nielsen writes about German Jews between ‘Heimat’ and German-ness:
Philipp Nielsen: „Blut und Boden“. Jüdische Deutsche zwischen Heimat und Deutschtum, 1892–1936
Tag: Religious Culture
Jewish periodicals online
The Compact Memory project has digitized 118 German-language Jewish periodicals, from Sulamith (1806-1843) to Central Verein-Zeitung (1922-1938) and Jüdische Welt-Rundschau (1939-1940). This amazing collection, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), offers a wealth of material for scholars of German-Jewish history.
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)
Virtual Tour of 1920s Berlin
The exhibition Berlin Transit on Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s at the Jüdisches Museum is (sadly) over already, but its website is still a great resource. Among other things, it offers a virtual tour of important places of Jewish life in 1920s Berlin.
A new approach to Weimar?
In the new Oxford Handbook of Modern German History the Weimar Republic is not treated as a discrete era, but is incorporated into longer periods from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. This certainly helps to highlight continuities, but is this a step back to treating Weimar merely as a ‘transition period’ (Übergangszeit)? Continue reading “A new approach to Weimar?”
Journal Review: Historische Zeitschrift 2/2012
In the April issue of Historische Zeitschrift, Stefan Gerber investigates the ‘Strategies of Political Communication within German Catholicism at the Beginning of the Weimar Republic’:
Stefan Gerber
Pragmatismus und Kulturkritik. Die politische Kommunikation des deutschen Katholizismus in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik Continue reading “Journal Review: Historische Zeitschrift 2/2012”
Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism
Derek Hastings’ Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism illuminates an important and largely overlooked aspect of early Nazi history, going back to the years after World War I–when National Socialism first emerged–to reveal its close early ties with Catholicism. Although an antagonistic relationship between the Catholic Church and Hitler’s regime developed later during the Third Reich, the early Nazi movement was born in Munich, a city whose population was overwhelmingly Catholic. Focusing on Munich and the surrounding area, Hastings shows how Catholics played a central and hitherto overlooked role in the Nazi movement before the 1923 Beerhall Putsch. He examines the activism of individual Catholic writers, university students, and priests and the striking Catholic-oriented appeals and imagery formulated by the movement. He then discusses why the Nazis embarked on a different path following the party’s reconstitution in early 1925, ultimately taking on an increasingly anti-Catholic and anti-Christian identity.
German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War
Tim Grady’s new study on German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory charts the development of remembrance of Jewish soldiers fighting for Germany in WWI from the Weimar Republic to post-WWII Germany:
‘By examining Germany’s complex and continually evolving memory culture, this book opens up a new approach to the study of both German and German-Jewish history. In doing so, it draws out a narrative of entangled and overlapping relations between Jews and non-Jews during the short twentieth century. The Jewish / non-Jewish relationship, the book argues, did not end on the battlefields of the First World War, but ran much deeper to extend through into the era of the Cold War.’
Conference: Catholic Theology after 1918
The academy of the Rottenburg-Stuttgart diocese is hosting a conference on the development of Catholic theology in the first half of the 20th century:
Nach dem Antimodernismus? Wege der katholischen Theologie 1918–1958