Given the militarism of the Empire and Nazi Germany, why did postwar West Germany experience massive waves of peace protest in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s? How have postwar peace movements shaped German political culture? Will the cultural norms that frown on the use of military force constrain foreign policy in the new, unified, Germany? In Paradoxes of Peace, Alice Holmes Cooper traces the evolution of peace movements in West Germany (1945-90) and in united Germany since 1990. Cooper examines the domestic and international constellations that gave rise to the peace movements, the sources of their multi-faceted ideologies and participants, and their organizational structures and strategies. The author then investigates the peace movement's response to the challenges of the post-Cold War world. Whereas previous work on German peace movements has concentrated on one period of mobilization or on elite security-policy debates, this comprehensive study examines all phases of mobilization since 1945, taking into account the full spectrum of actors, movement organization and strategy, and the broad political, social, and economic environments spawning peace protest. Arguing that theories of resource mobilization, changes in values, and crises of modernity are insufficient to explain peace movements, Paradoxes of Peace tailors a "political process" approach to postwar German movements. It investigates the political opportunities--the changing domestic and international constellation--which most favored peace mobilization since 1945. It examines the process through which the peace movement transformed popular consciousness and created a peace constituency. It analyzes how German peace movements gradually built an indispensable organizational infrastructure autonomous from parties and other social institutions. Cooper argues that the convergence of these factors determined the movement's capacity to mobilize and have political impact and allowed these to grow over time. Alice Holmes Cooper is Assistant Professor of Government, University of Virginia.

East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party aimed to placate a public well aware of the higher standards of living enjoyed elsewhere by encouraging them to participate in outdoor activities and take vacations in the countryside. Scott Moranda considers East Germany’s rural landscapes from the perspective of both technical experts (landscape architects, biologists, and physicians) who hoped to dictate how vacationers interacted with nature, and the vacationers themselves, whose outdoor experience shaped their understanding of environmental change. As authorities eliminated traditional tourist and nature conservation organizations, dissident conservationists demanded better protection of natural spaces. At the same time, many East Germans shared their government’s expectations for economic development that had real consequences for the land. By the 1980s, environmentalists saw themselves as outsiders struggling against the state and a public that had embraced mainstream ideas about limitless economic growth and material pleasures.

A new account of the emergence of modern cultural politics through a study of music and theater in Berlin around 1800.

Berlin around 1800 has been seen—at the time and since—as somewhat behind other major European cities in terms of its musical culture, peripheral to the momentous developments attributed to the period.  By contrast, early nineteenth-century Berlin has been exhaustively studied as the site of a nascent German-national movement and the Prussian Reforms. In Performing Politics, Katherine Hambridge examines the confluence of music and politics in Berlin around 1800, engaging directly with the themes of being behind/ahead, central/peripheral, in order to tell new stories about nineteenth-century German history, musical and otherwise.

Performing Politics emphasizes events as much as repertoires, and non-canonical repertoires over the more familiar music of this period: dynastic birthday celebrations, the music of historical dramas, political song and communal singing, popular music theater. By focusing our attention on the unfamiliar specificity of Berlin Nationaltheater, Hambridge reenergizes our understanding of 1800–1815 as a key period in the development of musical and political modernity. Using sources largely unexploited by musicologists, and phenomena neglected by historians, she reveals the quotidian aesthetics, values, and practices that shaped both the sociopolitical narratives and musical developments of the time. Performing Politics is thus not only a history of music and theater in Berlin at a critical moment, but a music history of modern cultural politics.

An inciteful ethnography of cross-border elder care workers.

The precarious situation in the successor states of Yugoslavia created a specific dynamic in the field of labor mobility. Still, little research has been done in this region on how women, who are older care workers from Serbia or Bosnia commute—often via illegal border crossings—to German households to look after the elderly. In Peripheral Labor Mobilities, Tanja Višic explores this gender-specific migration pattern in the first expansive ethnography of contemporary cross-border elder care in this region. She takes up questions about how the mobility and work practices of women are integrated into the socio-economic networks of the informal care work sector while also looking at worker confrontations with labor laws and border regimes. Illustrative case studies clearly detail culturally specific patterns of perception of care work, family relationships, and the mobility demanded by these labor arrangements.
 

Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world.

The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show, this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves. 

Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. 

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The Photographic Fix explores how photographs from World War I were used in personal photo albums and mass-market picture books to determine the meaning and legacy of the postwar Weimar Republic. Due to their publication success and wide reception, picture books should be considered no small part of this broad struggle of ideas to cement the war’s legacy in the Weimar era. Drawing from a large archive of photographs created during the war by amateur soldier-photographers and professional reporters alike, Justin Court explores how visual depictions of the war were used to construct and distort memory in the highly contested realm of war commemoration in the Weimar. These books of photography reveal an effort to shape how the war was visually remembered in order to influence public opinion on myriad matters following in the war’s wake, including notions of German guilt and responsibility, the legitimacy of the Republic, and the political future of the German nation. By utilizing relatively neglected sources, The Photographic Fix expands scholarship on German war photography to illuminate how images from the war and Weimar period reflected the public’s understanding of the medium at the time.

A cultural history of German radio broadcasting from the 1920s to today

Since the rise of film and television, radio has continued to evolve, with satellite radio and podcasts as its latest incarnations. Any understanding of the development of radio, like its visual counterparts, depends on closely examining the artistic ventures that preceded commercial acceptance.

In Pieces of Sound, Daniel Gilfillan offers a cultural history that explores these major aspects of the medium by focusing on German radio broadcasting, providing a context that sees beyond programming to consider regulations, cultural politics, and social standardization. Gilfillan showcases the work of radio pioneers and artists over the past century, including Brecht’s work with the form, and how radio was employed before and after World War II. He traces how German radio broadcasters experimented with networked media not only to expand the artistic and communicative possibilities of radio, but also to inform perceptions about the advantages and direction of newer telecommunications media like Internet broadcasting and pirate radio, which artists are using today to engage with a medium that is increasingly under corporate control. Gilfillan astutely observes how claims made for the Internet today echo those made for radio in its infancy and puts forth a broad and incisive historical analysis of German cultural broadcasting.

Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, Pilgrimage and Pogrom is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.

An examination of the largely forgotten anti-war writing from West Germany spurred by the Vietnam War.
 
Though the Vietnam War did not directly involve West Germany, it was nonetheless a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements in that country, and it gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. Poetry and poetic writing were key to anti-war work. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in West Germany, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of that rich artistic production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical, or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. The book also offers a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.
 

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.

An ambitious, original work, The Politics of Sociability is Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's exploration of the social and political significance of Freemasonry in German history. Drawing on de Tocqueville's theory that without civic virtue there is no civil society, and that civic virtue unfolds only through the social interaction between citizens, Hoffmann examines the critical link between Freemasonry and the evolution of German civil society in the late nineteenth century. The practice of Masonic sociability reflected an enlightened belief in the political significance of moral virtue for civil society, indeed, for humanity. Freemasons' self-image as civilizing agents, acting in good faith and with the unimpeachable idea of universal brotherhood, was contradicted not only by their heightened sense of exclusivity; Freemasons unintentionally exacerbated nineteenth-century political conflicts---for example, between liberals and Catholics, or Germans and French---by employing a universalist language.

Using a wealth of archival sources previously unavailable, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann shows how Freemasonry became a social refuge for elevated and liberal-minded bourgeois men who felt attracted to its secret rituals and moral teachings. German Freemasons sought to reform self and society but, Hoffmann argues, ultimately failed to balance modern politics with a cosmopolitan ethos. Hoffmann illuminates a capacious history of the political effects of Enlightenment concepts and practices in a century marked by nationalism, social discord, and religious conflict.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Ruhr-University Bochum. The German edition of this book, Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen Bürgergesellschaft, 1840-1918 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), won the Association of German Historians' 2002 Hedwig Hintze Prize for Best First Book.

Tom Lampert was born in Boston in 1962 and grew up in northern California. He received a BA in political science from Stanford University (1986) and a PhD in government from Cornell (1998). His book, Ein einziges Leben (Hanser Verlag 2001) was published as One Life by Harcourt in 2004, which he translated himself. Lampert has worked as a freelance translator since 1998. He currently lives in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.

Cover Image: Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, erected between 1898 and 1913 by German Freemasons, Barbarossa-Head by Christian Behrens, located next to the stairs leading to the monument. The German mythical figure of the Kaiser Barbarossa is depicted as a sphinx, which in Masonic symbolism protects the Masonic secret from profanation. Courtesy of the Deutsche Bücherei, Leipzig.

"This is an exemplary study of the role of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft (civil society) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concise, comprehensive, and well written. It combines social profiling with a careful examination of contemporary concepts in a long-term diachronic study, based on an impressive amount of primary material. . . . Hoffmann's empirically and methodologically convincing study is not only a major contribution to our understanding of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft. It also reflects the complex social and political transformation of German society in the nineteenth century and the difficulties contemporaries faced in responding to it."
---German History

"Hoffmann's arguments are theoretically informed, supported by a wealth of archival sources. . . . Indeed, in many ways this is the best combination of painstaking social history and well-argued Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). . . . One of the great virtues of this book is that Hoffmann does not shy away from the contradictions in the Freemasons' rhetoric and actions. Such contradictions, in fact, are key to the Mason's importance, because they force us to rethink some of our assumptions about Imperial Germany. . . . This is an important book that encourages us to rethink many of our characterizations of the German Kaiserreich and our assumptions about civil society."
---Central European History

"Based on a rich variety of sources. . . . Hoffmann explores the evolving relationship between Freemasonry and the monarchy, state, and church, and he also scrutinizes the internal practices and discourse of these notoriously secretive and cosmopolitan societies. . . . Hoffmann engages fruitfully with a wide historiography covering themes such as masculinity and racism, he dissects the complex attitude of Freemasonry to Jews and Catholics, and he scrutinizes the attacks of its conservative, clerical, and antisemitic critics."
---Journal of Modern History

A history of the early twentieth-century movement for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. 
 
In the United Kingdom, the question of women’s suffrage represented the most substantial challenge to the constitution since 1832, seeking not only to expand but to redefine definitions of citizenship and power. At the same time, it was inseparable from other urgent contemporary political debates—the Irish question, the decline of the British Empire, the Great War, and the increasing demand for workers’ rights.  

This collection positions women’s suffrage as central to, rather than separate from, these broader political discussions, demonstrating how they intersected and were mutually constitutive. In particular, this collection pays close attention to the issues of class and Empire which shaped this era. It demonstrates how campaigns for women’s rights were consciously and unconsciously played out, impacting attitudes to motherhood, spurring the radical “birth-strike” movement, and burgeoning communist sympathies in working-class communities around Britain and beyond.

Too often dismissed as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation, popular cinema in the Third Reich was in fact sustained by well-established generic conventions, cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly developed star system—not unlike its Hollywood counterpart in the 1930s. This pathfinding study contributes to the ongoing reassessment of Third Reich cinema by examining it as a social, cultural, economic, and political practice that often conflicted with, contradicted, and compromised the intentions of the Propaganda Ministry. Nevertheless, by providing the illusion of a public sphere presumably free of politics, popular cinema helped to sustain the Nazi regime, especially during the war years.

Rather than examining Third Reich cinema through overdetermined categories such as propaganda, ideology, or fascist aesthetics, Sabine Hake concentrates on the constituent elements shared by most popular cinemas: famous stars, directors, and studios; movie audiences and exhibition practices; popular genres and new trends in set design; the reception of foreign films; the role of film criticism; and the representation of women. She pays special attention to the forced coordination of the industry in 1933, the changing demands on cinema during the war years, and the various ways of coming to terms with these filmic legacies after the war. Throughout, Hake's findings underscore the continuities among Weimar, Third Reich, and post-1945 West German cinema. They also emphasize the codevelopment of German and other national cinemas, especially the dominant Hollywood model.

Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450-1550 examines prognostic traditions and late medieval prophetic texts in the first century of printing and their effect on the new medium of print. The many prophetic and prognostic works that followed Europe's earliest known printed book---not the Gutenberg Bible, but the Sibyl's Prophecy, printed by Gutenberg two years earlier and known today only from a single page---over the next century were perennial best sellers for many printers, and they provide the modern observer with a unique way to study the history and inner workings of the print medium. The very popularity of these works, often published as affordable booklets, raised fears of social unrest. Printers therefore had to meet customer demand while at the same time channeling readers' reactions along approved paths. Authors were packaged---and packaged themselves---in word and image to respond to the tension, while leading figures of early modern culture such as Paracelsus, Martin Luther, and Sebastian Brant used printed prophecies for their own purposes in a rapidly changing society.

Based on a wide reading of many sources, Printing and Prophecy contributes to the study of early modern literature, including how print changed the relationship among authors, readers, and texts. The prophetic and astrological texts the book examines document changes in early modern society that are particularly relevant to German studies and are key texts for understanding the development of science, religion, and popular culture in the early modern period. By combining the methods of cultural studies and book history, this volume brings a new perspective to the study of Gutenberg and later printers.