German history 
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SOURCE: Jewish Currents
7/5/2023
Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
The anti-antisemitism of German Holocaust education is based on the implicit premise that immigrants will identify with a sense of shame held by ethnic Germans. If those immigrants ask instead whether contemporary nativism could result in their own persecution, it is seen as a sign of their non-Germanness.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/4/2023
Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel
Kitty Schmidt's Berlin brothel has been the subject of lurid speculation that its owner was forced by the Nazis to spy on her clients for evidence of subversion and disloyalty. A new book tries to untangle the more complicated history of commercial sex in the Weimar and Nazi eras, but struggles against the pervasiveness of myth.
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SOURCE: CNN
6/13/2023
The Lesson of Germany's Most Famous Trans Woman? Freedom Requires Joy
by Samuel Huneke
As anti-trans and homophobic legislation and rhetoric pervade the political arena, this Pride month may feel less than celebratory. A historian of queer life under both Nazism and East German Communism says it's a mistake to embrace doom.
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SOURCE: Science News
5/16/2023
Former East Germans Largely Eschewed Opportunity to Read their Stasi Files—What that Says about Ethics
Few of the former residents of East Germany have chosen to view the files kept on them by the communist secret police; scholars have investigated this as an example of strategic ignorance that can help individuals function and preserve social harmony.
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4/2/2023
A Small Village's History During the Third Reich Raises Big Questions about Complicity
by Julia Boyd
A new history of the personal experiences of the residents of a small Bavarian village show that, while Nazism was driven by ideologues, it was able to maintain power because the personal risks of nonsupport convinced many to put their moral objections aside.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/7/2023
Cracking Stasi Puzzles is Key to Some Germans Finding the Truth
by Katja Hoyer
With an informant for every 90 citizens, the East German secret police left behind 16,000 sacks of shredded documents. Can information technology help reconstruct a record of what happens when a government commits to spying on its own citizens?
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SOURCE: San Diego Union-Tribune
2/26/2023
Natalye Pass Harpin on the Lives of Black Germans under Nazism
Nazi policy toward the nation's Black residents was strongly influenced by American Jim Crow laws and illustrates the dangers of militantly racial ideas of nationhood.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
1/11/2023
Will Ukraine Be the Death of German Pacifism?
by Stephen Milder
The real transformation wrought in Europe by the Russian invasion isn't the return of war (which was certainly present in the 1990s) but the turn of Germany away from a post-fascist pacifist posture to a potential remilitarization.
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SOURCE: National Geographic
12/19/2022
The Complicated History of Germany's Christmas Markets
It's unclear when medieval Germany's winter markets became affixed to nostalgic ideas of Christmas. But they've been adopted by ruling classes to offer prescriptive visions of class hierarchy, religion, and even Nazism.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
12/15/2022
Richard Evans on the Ideology of the German Coup Attempt
The historian of Nazism discusses the surprising arrest of German Reichsburger adherents for plotting a coup against the German parliament.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/13/2022
Take Calls for a "Fourth Reich" Seriously
by Gavriel Rosenfeld
The concept of a new German Reich emerged almost immediately after the fall of Hitler, and reflected the incomplete effort to remove the far-right from German politics as well as the growth of an international authoritarian movement.
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SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
12/9/2022
The Disturbing Truth: What's Behind the German Coup
by Annika Brockschmidt
Like January 6, the German coup reflects the radicalization of a significant portion of the affluent "bourgeois center" of the society, making a reckoning with the sources of far-right allegiance particularly urgent.
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SOURCE: Foreign Policy
12/12/2022
What the German Coup Plotters Took from the American Right
by Lucian Staiano-Daniels
The German Reichsburger movement has been influenced both by the legalistic theories of the American "sovereign citizen" movement and the lurid conspiratorial fantasies of QAnon.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
10/20/2022
German Debate About Arming Ukraine is an Argument About Germany
by Anne Applebaum
Do Germany's lessons from the Nazi era mean that Germans should help other natins resist aggressive war, or that Germany shouldn't be involved? Germans still aren't sure.
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SOURCE: National Geographic
10/13/2022
The Tortured Confession of a "Werewolf" Horrified 1500s Europe
In centuries where Europe was plagued by war, famine and plague, the supernatural became luridly appealing. Unlike more common trials for witchcraft, werewolf prosecutions remain more of a historical mystery.
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SOURCE: Saturday Evening Post
10/10/2022
Journalist Dorothy Thompson's Warnings About Fascism – Abroad and at Home
by Ben Railton
After being expelled as a journalist from Germany for criticizing Hitler, Dorothy Thompson worked to make clear to Americans what fascist movements stood for and how they could take root in the soil of racism and nativism here.
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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.
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7/8/2022
The Story of the School that Defied Nazi Ideological Control
by Deborah Cadbury
Amid the intense politicization of education today, what can we learn from one remarkable story of a teacher's defiance of official ideological control?
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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.
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SOURCE: Codastory
3/30/2022
Germany's Racial Reckoning Offers Warnings for US
"Seen from an American perspective, Germany is often portrayed as the wise and capable professor of remembrance; the U.S its difficult student."