Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany


Book Description

Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany argues that political aesthetics and mass spectacles were no invention of the Nazis but characterized the period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. In so doing, it re-examines the role of state representation and propaganda in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship.




A Short History of the Weimar Republic


Book Description

It is impossible to understand the history of modern Europe without some knowledge of the Weimar Republic. The brief fourteen-year period of democracy between the Treaty of Versailles and the advent of the Third Reich was marked by unstable government, economic crisis and hyperinflation and the rise of extremist political movements. At the same time, however, a vibrant cultural scene flourished, which continues to influence the international art world through the aesthetics of Expressionism and the Bauhaus movement. In the fields of art, literature, theatre, cinema, music and architecture – not to mention science – Germany became a world leader during the 1920s, while her perilous political and economic position ensured that no US or European statesman could afford to ignore her. Incorporating original research and a synthesis of the existing historiography, this revised edition will provide students and a general readership with a clear and concise introduction to the history of the first German Republic.




'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany


Book Description

Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movies and pulp fiction, and prioritizing social rights over individual rights. These provisions enabled legislations to adopt two national censorship laws intended to regulate the movie industry and retail trade in pulp fiction. Both laws had their ideological origins in grass-roots anti-'trash' campaigns inspired by early encounters with commercial mass culture and Germany's federalist structure. Before the war, activists characterized censorship as a form of youth protection. Afterwards, they described it as a form of social welfare. Local activists and authorities enforcing the decisions of federal censors made censorship familiar and respectable even as these laws became a lightning rod for criticism of the young republic. Nazi leaders subsequently refashioned anti-'trash' rhetoric to justify the stringent censorship regime they imposed on Germany.




A National Acoustics


Book Description

A sound track of Germany in the early twentieth century might conjure military music and the voice of Adolf Hitler rising above a cheering crowd. In A National Acoustics, Brian Currid challenges this reductive characterization by investigating the transformations of music in mass culture from the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. Offering a nuanced analysis of how publicity was constructed through radio programming, print media, popular song, and film, Currid examines how German citizens developed an emotional investment in the nation and other forms of collectivity that were tied to the sonic experience. Reading in detail popular genres of music—the Schlager (or “hit”), so-called gypsy music, and jazz—he offers a complex view of how they played a part in the creation of German culture. A National Acoustics contributes to a new understanding of what constitutes the public sphere. In doing so, it illustrates the contradictions between Germany’s social and cultural histories and how the technologies of recording not only were vital to the emergence of a national imaginary but also exposed the fault lines in the contested terrain of mass communication. Brian Currid is an independent scholar who lives in Berlin.




Hitler's 'National Community'


Book Description

Lisa Pine's Hitler's 'National Community' explores German culture and society during the Nazi era and analyses how this impacted upon the Germany that followed this fateful regime. Drawing on a range of significant scholarly works on the subject, Pine informs us as to the major historiographical debates surrounding the subject whilst establishing her own original, interpretative arc. The book is divided into four parts. The first section explores the attempts of the Nazi regime to create a Volksgemeinschaft ('national community'). The second part examines men, women, the family, the churches and religion. The third section analyses the fate of those groups that were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft. The final section of the book considers the impact of the Nazi government upon German culture, in particular focusing on the radio and press, cinema and theatre, art and architecture, music and literature. This new edition includes historiographical updates throughout, an additional chapter on the early Nazi movement and brand new primary source excerpt boxes and illustrations. There is also expanded material on key topics like resistance, women and family, men and masculinity and religion. A crucial text for all students of Nazi Germany, this book provides a sophisticated window into the social and cultural aspects of life under Hitler's rule.




Imagining a Greater Germany


Book Description

In Imagining a Greater Germany, Erin R. Hochman offers a fresh approach to the questions of state- and nation-building in interwar Central Europe. Ever since Hitler annexed his native Austria to Germany in 1938, the term "Anschluss" has been linked to Nazi expansionism. The legacy of Nazism has cast a long shadow not only over the idea of the union of German-speaking lands but also over German nationalism in general. Due to the horrors unleashed by the Third Reich, German nationalism has seemed virulently exclusionary, and Anschluss inherently antidemocratic. However, as Hochman makes clear, nationalism and the desire to redraw Germany’s boundaries were not solely the prerogatives of the political right. Focusing on the supporters of the embattled Weimar and First Austrian Republics, she argues that support for an Anschluss and belief in the großdeutsch idea (the historical notion that Germany should include Austria) were central to republicans’ persistent attempts to legitimize democracy. With appeals to a großdeutsch tradition, republicans fiercely contested their opponents’ claims that democracy and Germany, socialism and nationalism, Jew and German, were mutually exclusive categories. They aimed at nothing less than creating their own form of nationalism, one that stood in direct opposition to the destructive visions of the political right. By challenging the oft-cited distinction between "good" civic and "bad" ethnic nationalisms and drawing attention to the energetic efforts of republicans to create a cross-border partnership to defend democracy, Hochman emphasizes that the triumph of Nazi ideas about nationalism and politics was far from inevitable.




The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic


Book Description

The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and pivotal period of German and European history and a laboratory of modernity. The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic provides an unsurpassed panorama of German history from 1918 to 1933, offering an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the fascinating history of the Weimar Republic.




Performing Statecraft


Book Description

The crafts of governance and diplomacy are spectacular, theatrical, and performative. Performing Statecraft investigates the performances of states, their leaders, and their citizens on an expanded field of the global arts of statecraft to consider the role of performance in the domestic and international affairs of states, and the interventions into global politics by artists, scholars, and activists. Treating theatre as both an art form and a practice of political actors, this book draws together scholarship on the embodied dimensions of governance, the stagecraft of revolution, arts activism on the world stage, sports performance by heads of state, the performativity of national dress, speechmaking and colonialism, war and medicine, singing diplomats, indigenous sovereignties, and performed nationalisms. It brings the perspective and methods of performance studies to bear on global politics, offering exciting new insights into encounters between states, sovereigns, and people. Whether one is watching a campaign speech, a nightly news broadcast, a sacred dance, or a play about global conflict, these chapters make clear the importance of performance as a tool wielded by amateurs and professionals to articulate the nation in global spaces.




East Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century


Book Description

The term “crisis,” with its complex history, has emerged as one of the pivotal notions of political modernity. As such, reconstructing the ways the discourse of crisis functioned in various contexts and historical moments gives us a unique insight not only into a series of conceptual transformations, but also into the underlying logic of key political and intellectual controversies of the last two centuries. Studying the ways crisis was experienced, conceptualized, and negotiated can contribute to the understanding of how various visions of time and history shape political thinking and, conversely, how political and social reconfigurations frame our assumptions about temporality and spatiality. A historical region wedged in between various competing imperial centers, East Central Europe has been an area often associated with crisis phenomena by both internal and external observers. Seeking to employ the regional gaze as a vantage point to reflect on issues which are relevant well beyond those countries between the Baltic and the Adriatic, this project is also in dialogue with a number of recent transnational attempts to rethink political and intellectual history with regard to the recurrent epistemological frames that structure the political and cultural debate. This book will thus be useful both for researchers, from the field of intellectual history and numerous adjacent fields, and graduate university students alike.




Weimar Culture Revisited


Book Description

Weimar Culture Revisited is the first book to offer an accessible cross-section of new cultural history approaches to the Weimar Republic. This collection uses an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on the everyday workings of Weimar culture to explain the impact and meaning of culture for German's everyday lives during this fateful era.