Prussia was also constrained by the religious dimension to imperial politics. Catholicism, lutheranism, and Calvinism. Prussia acquired three former church lands through the Peace of Westphalia, but this treaty prohibited further secularization, while, as Protestants, the Hohenzollerns were personally ineligible for positions in the still Catholic imperial church. The Rise and Downfall of Prussia — london, , —4, — Prussia had little to gain from pursuing the politics of religious radicalism which, in any case, had been discredited by the thirty Years War. Der konfessionelle Gegensatz bis Potsdam, Yet the corpus remained more than simply a forum to assert status, as suggested by one culturalist analysis.
Jahrhunderts Frankfurt am Main, , 49— For the following see also Aretin, Altes Reich, ii. Prussia secured parity in appointments to the imperial general staff in return for persuading the Protestants to drop this demand for other institutions. He alienated lutherans because he only secured safeguards from the Palatine elector for Calvinist rights. Cooperation with the Palatinate over a dispute in nassau-siegen further illustrates the difficulty of playing the religious card in imperial politics.
Prussia and the Palatinate wanted the small Westphalian principality to pay its share the duchy of Calenberg usually known after its capital as Hanover was raised to an electorate in , but this status was only fully accepted by its peers in Frankfurt am Main, , iv. Further details in Aretin, Altes Reich, ii. Prussia lost credit when its new king, Frederick William, crassly threatened reprisals against his own Catholic minority. Meanwhile, Prusso-Palatine cooperation collapsed as the War of the spanish succession ended, leaving the imperial commission split down confessional lines by At this point, however, sweden sued for peace in the Great northern War — Despite its considerable military power, Prussia was too weak to negotiate without saxon and Hanoverian cooperation.
Protestant opinion, meanwhile, demanded a speedy resolution to the disputed directory because the elector Palatine had resumed persecution of his lutheran subjects in Prussia and Hanover tried to outbid each other in their extremism, but merely alienated the smaller Protestant imperial estates.
Community, State and General Estate 2nd edn. The War of the Polish Succession lexington, Ky. Moreover, Habsburg rule in Hungary predated the evolution of more modern concepts of sovereignty, which slowly displaced the medieval ideals of universal monarchy. German History, — Basingstoke, , , , — First, their political status was intimately connected to the empire, which was visibly declining within the evolving european order. Bohemia had been elevated to a kingdom in the twelfth century at a time when the empire included not only a German, but also italian and Burgundian royal titles.
Emanuel von Bayern und das Spanische Erbe Mainz, Geschehensgeschichte und Verstehensgeschichte Munich, , 35—61; Johannes Kunisch ed. More significantly, the Prussian title was a novelty, in contrast to the Polish and British crowns, which were accepted by all as valid. Frederick i received his title from emperor leopold, but crowned himself in a deliberately ostentatious coronation which was not repeated. While most european powers accepted the Prussian title by , several still objected.
Moreover, by claiming that Prussia was still under Polish suzerainty, it struck at the basis for a fully sovereign Prussian crown. Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, — Cambridge, , —5; ead. Brandenburg-Prussia Farnham, , 1—3, 10— Prussia had to settle for a swiss declaration including them in their neutrality. Most electors accepted the Prussian title by , with Bavaria and Cologne doing so in in return for Prussian support for their restoration after they lost their lands in the War of the spanish succession.
Frankfurt am Main, —75 , i. A similar ambivalence is noted for Prusso-Hanoverian relations by schnath, Geschichte Hannovers, iii. Moreover, none of them saw the present situation as definitive. Prussia 77,; saxony 29,; Hanover 20,; Bavaria and the Palatinate about 9, each. Prussian ambitions and methods were not fundamentally different from those of its rivals in saxony, Hanover, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Prussia also wanted the cities of nordhausen and Hildesheim in lower saxony, the counties of Mansfeld and Wernigerode plus the abbey of Quedlinburg in Upper saxony, and the Franconian counties of limpurgspeckfeld and Geyer.
Bayreuth, Ansbach, Mecklenburg, and east Frisia all had populations of over ,, while Frederick i estimated the lands of the orange inheritance were worth 60 million taler and would produce , taler additional annual revenue. Prussia relied heavily on men from across the empire to sustain its inflated military establishment after and saw acquisition of even small enclaves as useful in extending its recruitment net.
Frederick i was keen to assert his position as Hohenzollern family patriarch and wrote this into his agreements with his swabian and Franconian relations in and Acquisition of Moers brought an additional princely vote in the Reichstag. Far from wanting to detach from the empire, Prussia pushed for even its smallest gains to be represented in imperial institutions. Acquisition of Geyer was opportunistic.
Prussia persuaded its last count to sell his inheritance in in return for interim rights of usage and assistance against his numerous creditors in cases before the imperial courts. Prussia became more aggressive in asserting these rights as the competition intensified among the electors around For example, Prussian military occupation of nordhausen in was a direct response to Hanoverian success in pre-empting it in Hildesheim a few weeks earlier.
Political legitimacy remained defined by the imperial constitution.
German Historical Institute London. Bulletin
Prussia could not use its military superiority without compromising the very claims it sought to advance. For the Dillenburg unit, see lAM, A nr. Jahrhunderts Hildesheim, , esp. Moreover, like saxony, Prussia claimed feudal jurisdiction over Mansfeld, denying that it was a fully immediate territory. Protectorates had long been a way of extending domination over small territories, because the stronger see the agreements in loewe ed.
Brandenburg had already annexed the town of Herford in , claiming it was not a full imperial estate. Yet her response showed the continued efficacy of the imperial constitution in protecting its weakest elements.
Having being forced to withdraw its troops from Bayreuth in , Prussia was compelled by Charles Vi in to annul a favourable inheritance treaty it had negotiated with its Franconian relations in Prussia resigned its claims to Ansbach in and disengaged from Franconia, where its influence rested tenuously on the Prussian wives of the two Franconian Hohenzollern princes.
Hanover, meanwhile, blocked Prussian influence in Mecklenburg, thanks to backing from Charles Vi into the s. Count stolberg accepted Prussian overlordship over his county of Wernigerode in May , while Prussia retained rights over Mansfeld, though only secured physical possession on the death of the last count in However, he did not abandon the lesser territories altogether. However, compliance with imperial mandates and court verdicts at least enabled Prussia to minimize damage to its prestige by demonstrating respect for the established order.
Conclusion Acquisition of a royal crown changed how Prussia interacted with the empire, but did not affect the radical departure that the revolution of had on French behaviour. However, this approach only gains real value when integrated into a discussion of power politics to reveal how sidney seymour Biro, The German Policy of Revolutionary France: Grant Professor of History at the University of Hull. He is a specialist in early modern German history, in particular, the political, military, social, and cultural history of the Holy roman empire.
His major publications include The Holy Roman Empire — ; 2nd edn. A History of the Thirty Years War He is currently writing a history of the Holy roman empire from its medieval origins to its dissolution to be published by Penguin. ISBn 3 1. Eine szenische Promenade durch das Neue Palais. ISBn 3 8.
Siedler, , pp. ISBn 3 4. Verdammt, exhibition catalogue Stuttgart: ISBn 3 3. But despite their ephemeral nature, historical exhibitions do have an effect. With their objects suggesting authenticity and elaborate settings, they attract visitors in large numbers. Press releases, catalogues, and interviews all help to make historical exhibitions events with a large public impact. But these exhibitions are often more than just events; they also represent large-scale academic entertrans.
During years of preparation, curators and historians develop a flurry of research activity. Books are published and symposiums are held to sound out the territory and push forward the debate. Even before the exhibition, the proceedings of these conferences were published on the internet. September friedrich—colloquien, 1 , online at: Todestag, exhibition catalogue Potsdam, In the Gropius-Bau, korff and his staff put on display not only authentic artefacts, but supplemented these with reconstructions, replicas, and elements of stage design.
In the early s, the Gropius-Bau lay in an inner-city wasteland, just a few metres from the Berlin Wall. Versuch einer Bilanz, exhibition catalogue, With its rooms, four banqueting halls, and rococo theatre, it was not, as could be assumed, intended to be a royal residence. It primarily served to accommodate guests of the Prussian court, especially members of the dynasty, but it was much too big for this purpose. In its monumentalism it was a gesture of triumph, a sign that in the Seven Years War, Prussia had asserted it status as a European great power.
Frontmatter : Soziologische Revue
What visitors saw and still currently see are rooms of unrivalled opulence and luxury. It becomes clear that frederick, with an iron will, forced his architects to execute his ideas, and that his ambitions in matters of building were not necessarily matched by his expertise see the essay by Volker thiele. In an illuminating essay alfred P. Exhibition buildings have their own, unique aura. Parts of the exhibition seemed like a showcase for eighteenth-century Prussian arts and crafts.
Parts of the exhibition descended into courtly folklore. But we should careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In , in his review for Die Zeit mentioned above, Peter Wapnewski made the following general comments on the nature of a 9 Die Zeit, issue 36, Important themes were either not treated at all, or marginalized. In the latter, visitors saw a microscope, a quadrant, a telescope, a fish preserved in alcohol, some scientific illustrations, and a small selection of Enlightenment writings.
Visitors who wanted to know more about the thematic fields mentioned here had to take the trouble to consult the catalogue and volume of essays. Something else is important to Schenk. It can be argued that these are all highly conventional topics. But what are the alternatives?
Geschichte einer wechselvollen Beziehung, 2 vols. Stuttgart, , ii. Perhaps this would have put some of what was said and shown about frederick into perspective. Perhaps it would help if frederick and his history were read from the perspective of the end of the eighteenth century. What collapsed was largely the system that frederick had left as a legacy to his successors. Januar friedrich colloquien, 7 , online at: Jahrhunderts ; ed. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century ; ed. Konsum und Inszenierung des Fremden ; and ed.
Dickinson, and martin Schmidt Reactions to Revolutions: The s and their Aftermath Ergon Verlag, , pp. ISBn 3 5. In the main, Beyer achieves this balancing act quite well, even if one notes that at some points, what she and her readers would really have liked to investigate is whether an acerbic display of wit presented in a particularly charged situation actually occurred in the manner the sources would have us believe.
Skill in the delivery of facetiae was taken by some twelfth-century authors as a distinctive feature of national identity—of Britishness, Englishness, or, in the case of Gerald of Wales, Welshness—and they could also be deployed to political effect. In the second set of three chapters, Beyer turns to three different spheres of life and thought: Instances in which a treacherous nobleman was put to death at the order of a ruler had, therefore, to be especially legitimized in some way by subsequent narrators of the events.
It is clear that Beyer has an eye for detecting the ironic, but one would like to know how the episodes singled out for particular examination were chosen, on what grounds the material basis was selected, and why the study was conceived as it is. It is not easy, after the chapters dealing with facetia, to grasp the integral coherence of the study, or always to understand whether the features identified are exceptional to particular works, or are representative of broader trends in contemporary political culture. What, then, of the quality of the humour and wit presented in this study?
Beyer notes that scholars of medieval literature have focused more on laughter than on humour, and that few historians have touched on either. One begins to see what the long-standing ecclesiastical distaste for laughter was getting at. Facetiae are more genuinely witty, and one can further admire the oratorical skill and literal quick-wittedness of a Hugh of Lincoln. But with the exception of certain outstanding individuals—those like Walter Map, who gave real thought to constructing humorous episodes—the wit and irony on display is, in itself, often not very sophisticated.
A History of Europe from to London, , German Migrants in the British Empire, — leiden: What is absent, however, is the actual transfer, the entanglement beyond the fact of individuals or goods moving to, and perhaps from, the British empire. Both individuals left their mark on Britain and the empire as knowledge-producers, that is, as a scientist and explorer respectively. Did the British undertaking acquire new facets in the process or was knowledge free of bias—which, as the sociology of science tells us, it is not?
But more is to follow, very likely in a larger and considerably more comprehensive study that will focus less on migration itself than on its effects, transnational interactions, and exchanges at the level of values, assessments, ideas, and mentalities.
ISBN 0 19 4. Herder stands wholly in the tradition and the debates of this Enlightenment thinking about language, and something similar could also be said of Humboldt. According to Lifschitz, two main features are common to Trans. Vico, Hamann, Herder Princeton, ; id. Essays in the History of Ideas Princeton, , 1— In contrast to physical phenomena, institutions such as private property or forms of government are constituted by language.
Herder contributed this insight to the image that language had created cities and transformed deserts into gardens. Secondly, the language theorists of the Enlightenment, building on the models of Epicurus and Lucretius from Antiquity, developed a naturalistic theory of the evolution of human language. Rather, he contextualizes these debates in the history of institutions, thus placing forms of discourse in relation to social forms of knowledge. The Berlin Academy of Sciences in particular was a centre of the European discourse on language around the middle of the eighteenth century.
All the authors discussed were associated with it, and the debates focus on it. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, no other subject provided the topic for these competitions as frequently as the question of language: In addition, there were further questions relating to logical connections between language and thought, such as that of , won by Mendelssohn ahead of Kant, on the difference between mathematical and metaphysical certainty.
This contest, therefore, brought together two partners who, at first glance, could hardly seem more different: Lifschitz meticulously documents how Michaelis gradually approached a naturalistic view of language, culminating in his prize73 Book Reviews winning essay of in which he argued that there was no divine universal language, but that languages had evolved.
Thus in language, the whole population is the sovereign lawmaker, and women as the main reading public and men of letters play a special role. On the contrary, it makes a passionate plea for linguistic diversity. Successfully combining the larger picture with thick description of local contexts, Language and 74 Language and Enlightenment Enlightenment is a rich book that will be read with profit by those interested in the philosophy of language, the history of ideas, and cultural history alike.
Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, — London, He has published extensively on eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, in particular, on the history of the Enlightenment in Brandenburg—Prussia. He has also edited with Stefanie Stockhorst Rousseau und die Moderne: ISBN 0 19 8. He is looking for a way to escape the master narratives of modernization and nationalization without paying the price of his account falling apart into unconnected stories.
He enlists the concepts of journeys, place-makers, and rhythms to help him in this, but it is unclear whether their content is more analytical or metaphorical. However one may judge the overall success of the book in achieving its stated aim, it is true that the author has interesting stories to tell about changes in three medium-sized German towns in the second half of the nineteenth century. The selection of Ulm, Augsburg, and Ludwigshafen, three towns with very different socio-economic and confessional structures, for this purpose does not need to be discussed.
And towns of this size, that is, those with more than 20, inhabitants but fewer than ,, shaped the everyday life of the majority of German city-dwellers until well into the twentieth century. Here, as in the book as a whole, his method is to investigate revealing key controversies, such as the debate in Ulm about the establishTrans. This debate allowed large sections of local commerce and industry to voice the doubts which they had about the ambitions of transit and long-distance trade especially in grain , an attitude that was reflected in attempts to hold on to traditional economic forms and status hierarchies symbolized by the museum for local crafts Gewerbemuseum which opened a few years later.
This sort of mentality was not to be expected in a recently founded industrial town such as Ludwigshafen, and, indeed, was not observed there. Wholesale trade and large industry long dominated Ludwigshafen unchallenged. This permitted the spatial co-existence of a commercial centre of small businesses and a periphery with a neglected infrastructure. Where the journey was to end was a question not only of economic development.
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Progress required education, and this meant that the question of schools was of central importance. The issue of non-denominational primary schools was controversial. Their advocates could argue that the ability of teachers and students was crucial, not their religious affiliation. Nondenominational schools were the ideal of the liberals who dominated local politics in Augsburg, but they remained a minority phenomenon in the face of confessional resistance. For the liberals, it was all the more important to retain control over the school inspectorate and to reduce the influence of the religious orders, who provided a number of teachers in the predominantly Catholic town.
But in Ulm, with its Protestant majority, the inspection of schools was also at the heart of a number of debates, and it is a strength of this microhistory that it reveals the subtle strategies which the town used to gain influence over the appointment of an increasing number of Catholic primary school teachers. Until then, these had been able to pass on the social costs of an increasingly mobile population by sending the poor back to their communities of origin, which were obliged to support them.
The city authorities now checked all the more carefully whether they could not deport those in need of assistance and their families after all, before they had been resident in the city for two years without claiming poor relief, which secured them the right to support in Ulm. And as late as the s Ludwigshafen tried to collect fees for which the legal basis had been abolished in by threatening to withdraw the Heimatrecht in cases of non-payment. And Augsburg, finally, as late as the first half of the s, used fees levied for granting the right of citizenship and the Heimatrecht to fund around 10 per cent of its annual outgoings on poor relief.
Locally, therefore, progress towards freedom of movement was much bumpier than national legislation, or that of individual states, may make it seem. Imperial legislation, however, not only placed a question mark over the traditional link between the right to poor relief and citizenship status in the community of origin, but also contrasted the right to vote in local elections, tied to local citizenship status, with the socially much more open male suffrage at national level.
As late as the mid s, applications from war veterans for citizenship rights to be granted without a fee were treated with reserve. Taking the example of consumer cooperatives, Zimmer illustrates tellingly that these basic structures, which differed from locality to locality, also shaped other areas of life. He thus distinguishes between the type of consumer cooperative common in Augsburg and Ludwigshafen, and that found in Ulm: Looking at Sedan Day celebrations and Corpus Christi processions, it introduces areas in which local loyalties might come into conflict with larger ones.
An outline of the different political cultures is indispensable background to this. In Ulm, by contrast, beyond all differences of opinion, political debates were much more about social cohesion, and in Ludwigshafen it was customary, until well into the twentieth century, to select candidates for local office so that all the most important areas of the local economy and society were represented. Given the balance of power in communal politics it is no surprise that in Augsburg broke ranks with the Bavarian towns that had declined an invitation to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig.
The Bavarian—Swabian town also distinguished itself in its celebration of Sedan Day, erecting a war memorial on the Fronhof, a town square. And finally, Augsburg celebrated on 2 September for the entire existence of the Kaiserreich, while in Ludwigshafen, which was similarly dominated by liberals and equally fun-loving, soon shifted the celebrations to the preceding or following Sunday. But it was far less divisive there than in Augsburg. Although anti-Prussian democrats were strong in Ulm, the confessional component of the conflicts was not comparable with that in Augsburg, even when the Centre Party and the Social Democratic Party increasingly questioned the liberal hegemony from the late s.
Rather, struggles took place behind closed doors, with the result that the Catholic community also held a commemoration, but at a place of its own choosing, and with special emphasis on the fallen soldiers. In the s and early s, the same diocese had had to exert enormous pressure on its clergyman in Ludwigshafen before he was prepared to take part in a Corpus Christi procession outside his own church. The right to hold such a procession, guaranteed by the Bavarian constitution, had been challenged by the liberal town council, which feared traffic disruption, but it took place for the first time in and was well attended.
In the years that followed it evoked no further disputes. In Augsburg, the liberals would have liked to ban the processions, but in essence accepted the constitutional situation. The right to process was not enshrined in the constitution there, but in the early twentieth century, when the regularly authorized procession expanded its route and threatened to obstruct access to the railway station, a solution was speedily found.
Instead of rows of two people marching close together, the procession would now consist of rows of six, with large gaps between rows, making it possible for people to cross the procession. While the rhythms of religion and traffic could not be synchronized, they at least did not obstruct each other. Zimmer does not treat Ulm as an exception. Rather, it seems important to him to reverse the standard question about tensions between national liberalism and Catholicism and to ask why, given the competition for the same public space and competing rhythms, deeper conflicts did not come about more frequently.
His answer 80 German Communities in the Age of the Nation-State relates on the one hand to urban societies, where mixed religious marriages were increasingly seen as normal, promoting tolerance, and on the other, to a non-denominational Christianity which made it possible for the Catholic population to participate in the nation below the threshold of a national religious transfiguration.
Not all the evidence adduced in support of this hypothesis is necessarily convincing, for example, the common Christian anti-socialism of the Catholic Conference in Ulm, cited for its obvious rhetorical function. The anti-Jewish implications of this sort of non-denominational Christian nationalism could have been explored in greater depth, but the Jewish communities of the towns under investigation are not often mentioned.
This may be because the period on which Zimmer concentrates and the themes which he analyses have, so far, been seen primarily from the perspective of a basic conflict between Catholicism and the liberal ideology of progress. His comparative case studies are able to make these dichotomies fluid. To what extent this is due to his concepts of journeys, place-markers, and rhythms remains to be seen. In any case, his comparative urban histories are stimulating, especially in their approach to local, regional, and national problems, and their relations with each other. Eine Biographie ; Stadt-Geschichten: ISBN 1 0.
During this era of German militarism and colonial expansion, Germans nevertheless used India for a wide array of religious, political, cultural, and social purposes. In this newest addition to his collection of Indo-German studies, he takes an interdisciplinary literary and historical approach, critically examining religious, travel, and other literary texts within their historical context. Especially innovative ideas in this book include linking the German interest in India to domestic German concerns such as the Catholic response to the Kulturkampf, the role of German discourse about India in contemporary debates about science and religion, and the meshing of India with German imperial interests.
The Kulturkampf was a failed attempt under Chancellor Bismarck to forge unity within the German Empire by forcing southern German Catholics into conformity with northern German Protestant society. During this north German cultural assault in Europe, beleaguered Catholic southern Germans displaced their religious struggle half a world away onto India, where they thought they had a promising foreign field on which they could better their confessional rivals p.
Myers helps to document how during the difficult Kulturkampf years German Catholics cast their missionary gaze on India, which served as a surrogate, replacing losses at home in Germany. This is an intriguing compensation argument, one that has a rough parallel in P. While the German Catholics were unable to achieve what the British empire-builders did, exposing their ambitions provides insight into Germans of the early Kaiserreich.
German interest in India came to fulfil a response to anxiety about the cultural despair that Fritz Stern examines in The Politics of Cultural Despair and the crisis the religious faced as they experienced competition from a growing body of evidence for biological evolution and other sciences that challenged traditional religious narratives. Among his arguments, Dahlke made the claim that both biology and religion depended on an evolutionary process of progress to form knowledge p. On the other hand, adherents of traditional faiths such as Catholicism, like many religious Europeans of the era, hated and feared Buddhism.
Sinthern also took the opportunity to swipe at the old nemesis of Catholicism, Protestantism, for which he blamed the origins of Theosophy p. German travellers, fellow Europeans, believed the version of colonialism of their British hosts. This German acceptance of pro-British civilizing mission arguments is noteworthy, as the British were vulnerable to much potential criticism. Mike Davis in Late Victorian Holocausts shows how Victorian bureaucrats such as Lord Lytton could organize an expensive Durbar in to celebrate Queen Victoria assuming the title of Empress of India while millions of ordinary Indians starved and died because of the free market systems the British had introduced into their colonial administration.
Indians themselves, such as R. At the same time, however, as Myers argues, German criticism of British colonial rule took a less controversial cultural rather than material angle. Myers well understands the nuances of religious and intellectual currents of the era he examines, and develops these connections persuasively. For example, he notes the Pietistic roots of introspection, a peculiar Christian approach that in turn informed the German under84 German Visions of India, — standing of Buddhism p.
The work does a discerning job connecting the figures and texts he picks to currents in German history such as the Kulturkampf and colonialism, as noted above. He is also aware and sensitive to counter-currents and figures cutting against the grain of the times p. Myers spends ample time critically examining texts and introducing readers to their authors and the times and activities that shaped their thoughts.
One potential criticism concerns how representative the texts and figures he chose actually are. How do the authors he picks fit into wider fields? What other areas, scholars, popularizers, are worth examining? Myers resolves this dilemma by picking a handful of seemingly important, leading figures and examining their works in some detail.
He helps to chart the trees in his chosen area carefully, while the overall forest outline of Indo-German studies, although clearer, remains shrouded—the venue for further exploration, as one book cannot capture the entire landscape into which others are venturing. Myers is responding to, and building upon, recent scholarly books on Indo-German connections. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: This approach yields interesting insights, such as how German Catholics suffering cultural attacks under the programme of national unification in Germany helps to explain their later animosity to Indian nationalism and the Indian independence movement p.
Myers makes good use of sources with in-depth readings of key texts that help to put their authors into their context, fleshing them out. Leipzig Indologist Ernst Windisch in his history of Indology looked at texts disembodied in time and context, as if the Orientalists themselves who wrote the works did not matter. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Essays in Asian-German Studies Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds.
Perspectives on South Asia Other notable works include those by Dorothy M. Figueira, Translating the Orient: A Decadent Quest ; J. The Philosophers and the Buddha Myers does an admirable job along these lines, adroitly examining the biographical detail of figures and relating them to their historical milieu. He also thoroughly examines the texts they have written, showing where the context informs the texts themselves. Like any good researcher, Myers explores other avenues for further examination, raises questions to develop, and opens veins well worth mining for more ideas.
This volume should therefore spur on yet more fruitful work in the area of Indo-German interactions. Indology and Comparative Linguistics in Germany, —, ed. Kindred Spirits in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. ISBN 1 42 7. ISBN 3 8. The whole point of knowing about the past of humanity in Australia is to prevent all of us, the Aborigines, the British, the Europeans, and the Asians, from being doomed to go on repeating the past. Geschichte und Gesellschaft Vienna, Most of those who visited Germany in the s, including members of government such as attorney-general Robert Menzies who later denied it were impressed by what they saw.
They regarded the National Socialist leadership as of high quality, and the patriotism they observed as deep rooted. Other Nazi enthusiasts in Australia, such as A. In five chapters Bird portrays the people who were, to a greater or lesser degree, part of a group of Nazi enthusiasts. Among them were W. Mills and Hardy Wilson. Bird describes their lives in a detailed but rather incoherent manner. Sometimes it might have been better for the author to look at what held these men and women together rather than providing such detailed accounts of individual lives and views. Mills became more radical.
While their focus before the war had been on cultural and literary aspects, during the war the aims of Nazi enthusiasts became more political. In chapter 10 Bird looks in greater detail at poet Ian Mudie, who in July put forward Stephensen as the leader Australia so desperately needed, and tried to gain the support of fellow writers for a more political movement. In this context Mudie stressed that Australians were not Europeans. In his final two chapters the author deals with the reticence of the Australian authorities in dealing with Nazi enthusiasts at the end of and early in , and with the internment of some of the major figures of the Australia First movement in March These examples are not really linked to the rest of the book and therefore seem a little out of place.
This material is still waiting to be put into the context of a global history of enthusiasm for Nazi ideas before and during the Second World War. Francis is also much more aware than Bird of recent research on proimperial sentiments and issues of citizenship and national identity within the British Empire. Given that, according to Australian and European studies, the enthusiasm at the beginning of the war was to a large extent a constructed phenomenon of the middle classes, this reviewer would have expected the author to have been a little more critical on this issue.
Francis continues with an analysis of immigration in New Zealand and the various laws governing this. Although the country was open to migrants from all parts of the world, British settlers always remained a large majority and minorities, especially those from China and the Dalmatian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, often suffered prejudice, especially at times of war or economic crisis. Settlers of German origin were at first not affected by the worsening global relationship between Britain and Germany Boer War, maritime build-up, German expansion into the South 91 Book Reviews Pacific , although the press became more critical of the Hohenzollern empire.
What happened, however, was that issues of Britishness and loyalty to the mother country and the Empire became more and more important. The groundwork for the virulent anti-German campaign during the Great War was thus laid p. Whether they were German troops in Belgium or German-born settlers in New Zealand, they at once became a problem that had to be dealt with. There was no differentiation, and settlers of Scandinavian or Swiss origin could not be sure of not becoming a target of anti-German activities.
Naturalization, which had been handled in a very liberal manner in New Zealand before , was no help at all. Right from the start of the war, but more so after the sinking of the Lusitania and the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign, which saw a rising number of New Zealand war dead, pressure from the press to do something about enemy aliens began to mount. As in Britain and Australia Francis refers to the studies by Panayi and Fischer3 , the New Zealand government took measures against men of enemy origin, both naturalized and not naturalized, mainly in response to these growing demands from the public and the press.
Unfortunately, in this context Francis discusses only the years at the beginning and the end of the war, but has nothing to say about , which in terms of the British Empire was significant in regard to the intensification of the war effort. The author then looks at living conditions in the two main internment camps at Somes Island near Wellington and Motuihi Island close to Auckland, where German and Austro-Hungarian citizens, and later also naturalized settlers of German origin, were at first interned.
Interestingly, Francis includes a map opposite p. On this map the author also includes Swiss and Polish migrants, about whom it would have been interesting to read more than just that many of the non-British settlers who were not German were mistaken as such and vilified in a similar manner p. Unlike other German residents, he was not dismissed from his post at the outbreak of the war, and therefore became the focus of anti-German feelings. The affair finally turned from an internal university matter into a national crusade.
In the following two chapters Francis links the policy on enemy aliens to economic warfare in the form of Imperial and New Zealand Trading with the Enemy legislation, and compares the New Zealand experience with that of Canada. Not surprisingly, many companies tried to profit from the war by accusing business rivals of being German. As across the Tasman Sea in Australia, measures were taken to displace German economic interests after the war.
This would probably have gone beyond the scope of this book. Here he shows that alternatives were possible if New Zealanders had been as mature in regard to their sense of nationhood as Canadians, and had trusted their government to Nadine Helmi and Gerhard Fischer, The Enemy at Home: The author, however, could have delved more closely into the issue of what greater maturity in regard to the sense of nationhood might mean. Francis finishes his study by remarking that New Zealand was never more British than during the First World War, and that the press played a large part in conveying the hatred of Germans that was never as great during the Second World War as during the First World War.
He ends with the words: For all their weaknesses, the two studies by Bird and Francis have the merit that they focus on aspects of the history of Australia and New Zealand that are not well known so far, at least in Europe, and that deserve greater attention from academics in a discipline that aims for a more global approach to its subject. His main publications include Der Erste Weltkrieg in globaler Perspektive 3rd edn.
Kriegsverbrechen in der internationalen wissenschaftlichen Debatte — ; and Empire und Totaler Krieg: It has long been argued that its burdens were too heavy to bear, or even that it was a republic without any republicans, but recent research goes down different paths. It emphasizes the potential of German democracy, and has shown that the new system had many supporters who were committed to democracy symbolically as well as politically. The work under review fits into this research field. Nonetheless, the republic did not face the growing right-wing nationalist movement without a chance, as the author stresses.
The history of Weimar is not a tragedy but, he insists, must be regarded as open. The book convincingly argues that in the context of commemorating the war, left-wing forces played an important part, developing their own representations of the war with republican and moderately pacifist topoi. Ziemann begins by outlining the years up to which, he argues, were shaped largely by criticism of the war and the Kaiserreich. A highly diverse and by no means only hardline left-wing journalism discussed the war from a republican point of view. They condemned the corruption and incompetence of the Wilhelmine elites who had caused the war and contributed to defeat.
Thus they forcefully rejected the claim that the collapse had ultimately been the fault of left-wingers and democrats who had administered the infamous stab in the back. The imperial army was represented as a system of oppression that privileged officers and tormented common soldiers. The Etappe rear area in particular came to epitomize these conditions.
The common soldiers at the front were seen as victims of war, something that must be avoided in future. Thus for many, Ziemann argues, it was an obvious conclusion to draw that was the year of liberation from both the Kaiserreich and war chapter 1. The Reichsbund is a little neglected by contrast.
His investigation of the memorials and ceremonies underlines that the republicans by no means left the field of memory to right-wing forces, but appeared as actors in the political public sphere deep into the provinces. Nonetheless, they were only able to influence the design of memorials in communities where the SPD had a majority.
Einstein Forum
At local level, an alliance between the Church and the citizenry was able to implement its symbolic and political ideas, especially as the Reichsbund and its sympathizers tended to concentrate on the welfare of survivors in the early years of the republic. Although the Reichsbanner found it difficult to assert itself against a conservative consensus in the culture of remembrance, it developed its own rituals and took part in commemorations chapters 4 and 5.
Not only commemorations, but also war journalism was increasingly contested. Martin Hobohm was one of the few historians sym96 Republican War Veterans and Weimar pathetic to the republican cause in the Reichsarchiv, which was dominated by the old military elites. His example shows that moderate or critical accounts of the war were not welcomed by the official historiography, which, in fact, tried to prevent them. The left had nothing to set against this national power of interpretation, as individual publications by pacifist and republican officers had no comparable impact and distribution.
In the final chapter, Ziemann takes a more chronological approach and investigates the period to as a time when memories of the war were more strongly politicized and mediatized than before. The main question that arises on reading Contested Commemorations concerns the scope of the narratives presented here. Rather, he suggests, the strengths and weaknesses of the symbols and narratives employed were crucial p.
Ziemann makes qualifications without succumbing to the temptation to grant the republican groups under investigation too much relevance. On the contrary, he constantly works out the limits of republican interventions and representations. Occasionally they lacked the institutional backing to advance their interpretations; in some arenas of remembrance they engaged too late; women played almost no part.
A central problem that emerges is the victimization narrative. If, in the republican discourse, ordinary soldiers were considered victims of a war instigated by unscrupulous elites, there was no interpretation of the past that could integrate the ruptures and sufferings caused by the war positively into individual biographies, or instru97 Book Reviews mentalize them collectively for republicanism.
The further debate about contested commemorations may perhaps look at whether memories of the war provide an example of left- and right-wing narratives and symbols temporarily coming closer to each other, or even overlapping. He also provides much evidence to show that anti-militarism and internationalism were strongly anchored in the Social Democratic milieu both before and after Ziemann denies this for his period of investigation, although there is some evidence that patriotic or nationalist motifs played a part in republican memories of the war, at least temporarily, and that partisans of the left also approved of them.
Why did Weimar fail? Ziemann makes clear that the end of the republic cannot be explained in terms of contested commemorations alone. They are an example, however, of how republican values were undermined by the growing attractiveness of right-wing narratives of the war. Around they had achieved a position of hegemony for many reasons.
At first the republicans were unable to position a broad palette of successful war narratives on a media mass market that was increasingly dominated by national, heroic, and romanticizing motifs. Narratives of this sort appealed to young people who had not taken part in the war themselves, and to sections of the labour force. The National Socialists fully backed such escapist narratives, which seemed to point a way out of the depression that had hit these groups hard since Memories of the war were also an area of confrontation in which ideas of political order were negotiated.
Although Ziemann discusses the problem of images of the past and hopes for the future in the introduction, his later account says little about their significance in this context. By the crisis at the latest, leftwing narratives were probably less attractive than right-wing ones. This is about the only criticism that can be made of this important book. Weimar was not condemned to fail from the start, but had numerous and well-organized supporters. Ziemann traces its workings by presenting a stringent and differentiated argument that always stays close to the research and the sources.
That the reader wants to know more about certain aspects of the investigation shows that this account will stimulate new research. His current research project is on the idea of security and monarchy in Britain and Prussia during the nineteenth century. ISBN 1 5. Within less than fifty years, no fewer than five political systems ruled over the city. The book is chronologically split into three parts, each containing three chapters.
Various contemporary novels and newspapers described capitalism and the economic hardships of the late Weimar years as engendering a crisis of individuality in the German capital. At the same time, other contemporary accounts rendered a different, more positive relationship between the urban environment and the cultivation of individuality. Flexibility, authenticity, and consumption were portrayed as paving the way for individuality in Berlin during the late Weimar Republic. He shows that various political groups could use the focus on the individual in Berlin to attack the Weimar Republic as an impersonal and corrupt system.
The third chapter on Berlin during the Weimar Republic introduces the notion that Nazism did not simply pit the individual against the collective, but that it offered a particular understanding of individuality to non-Jewish Berliners. The possibilities of cultivating individuality under Nazi rule are further explored in the second part of the book.
It is a strength of this part of the book that it describes in detail how Jewish Berliners were at the same time deprived of the very means of maintaining their lives in the city. While the book pays much attention to the effects of Nazi persecution on the lives of a number of people, it is limited to the experience of Jewish Berliners, thus losing sight of other persecuted groups, such as homosexuals or Roma. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, two separate political systems with differing positions on individuality emerged in Berlin. The third part of the book analyses this development throughout the s.
The immediate post-war years saw a focus on self-help in the eastern and western parts of the city that was conducive to claims of individuality. In the destroyed urban environment, a focus on individual achievement could help to overcome material hardship. At the same time, the emphasis on individuality made it easier for city-dwellers Book Reviews to dissociate themselves from Nazism, which was mainly portrayed as based on a collective ideology.
As the Cold War unfolded, the German Democratic Republic had to walk a fine line between catering to the individualist aspirations of a much needed skilled middle class consisting of doctors, engineers, and other professionals, and collectivist rhetorics. It is a central argument of this part of the book that the conflicts surrounding individuality ultimately led to more dictatorial politics in the eastern part of the city.
In West Berlin, tension between an individuality based on material goods and a value-based individuality appeared during the s. This clashed with the more mundane priorities of some West Berliners for individualized consumption. Volume 31 Issue 4 Apr , pp.
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