German history

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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."

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.