Departments

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German history

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    10/8/2022

    The Nazi use of Legalism to Consolidate Power and Eliminate Democracy

    by Christopher R. Browning

    Hitler's lesson after a token prison sentence for organizing a coup attempt was to work to seize power through legal means with the support of ideologically sympathetic courts. Non-MAGA conservatives appear to be missing important lessons. 

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    6/23/2022

    Dangerous as the Plague: The History of Moral Panics over Queer "Seduction"

    by Samuel Huneke

    From the perspective of the post-Obergefell US, this year's politicized attacks on LGBTQ people—particularly as threats to the nation's youth—seem like a sudden reversal. But such attacks have a long and miserable history that has shadowed movements for queer freedom at every turn. 

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    2/23/2022

    The Beginnings of Queer Citizenship in West Germany

    by Samuel Clowes Huneke

    An emerging gay activist culture in West Berlin in the 1970s made substantial gains in building cultural spaces and expanding tolerance, but struggled to build political solidarity out of sexual identity amid other social divisions.

  • SOURCE: Forward
    2/12/2022

    Was Forgetting the Holocaust a Pillar of West German Rebuilding?

    Harald Jähner's book contents that the West German public's view of the nation's recent past grew darker as the years passed, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, a mood of adventurousness and liberation was widespread – at the cost of avoiding discussions of atrocity.

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    1/27/2022

    Remember, too, the Victims Nazis Singled Out for their Politics

    by Adam J. Sacks

    A German organization dedicated to the remembrance of left-wing victims of the Nazis has had its charitable status revoked. While the history of Nazism's persecution and murder of Jews and other groups is rightly commemorated, Nazism's violence against the political left has been obscured. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    12/1/2021

    Review: How the Germans Coped With Defeat

    by Richard J. Evans

    Monica Black's new book argues that irrationality and mysticism filled the cultural void created by defeat and the discrediting of Nazism in postwar Germany; Richard Evans says it doesn't quite prove its case, but offers insight into the present spread of nonsense on social media.

  • SOURCE: The Guardian
    11/17/2021

    Helen Roche's Work Examines the Elite Schools Nazis Modeled on Eton

    Helen Roche has published the first comprehensive history of the Napolas, the schools Nazis established to train future leaders of the Reich, and notes deep patterns of exchange between teachers and students at British and German schools before the start of war. 

  • SOURCE: Cabinet
    9/9/2021

    Melcher's Ghosts

    by Monica Black

    "Denazification prompted less soul-searching than resentment and anxiety among the German population. People worried that their prior affiliations and involvement in everything from war crimes to far less nefarious acts—like having obtained property illegally during the Nazi years—would be revealed."

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    7/14/2021

    Jenny Erpenbeck Is Keeping Time

    German author Jenny Erpenbeck's work is an exercise in preserving the objects that place a person's memory in history, particularly her own childhood in East Germany.