The story of modern Orthodox Judaism is usually told only from the perspective of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. Ellenson’s work, a thorough examination of the life and work of one of Hirsch’s contemporaries, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, reveals another important contributor to the creation of a modern Jewish Orthodoxy during the late 1800s. like Hirsch, Hildesheirmer felt the need to continue certain traditions while at the same time introducing certain innovations to meet the demands of a modern society. This original study of an Orthodox rabbinic leader shows how Hildesheirmer’s flexible and pragmatic approach to these problems continues to be relevant to modern Judaism. The way in which this book draws upon response literature for its comprehension of Hildesheimer makes it a distinctive work in modern Jewish historiography and sociology.
Scholars exploring the history of science under the Nazis have generally concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science or the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Racial Hygiene focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Robert Proctor demonstrates that the common picture of a passive scientific community coerced into cooperation with the Nazis fails to grasp the reality of what actually happened—namely, that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.
The book presents the most comprehensive account to date of German medical involvement in the sterilization and castration laws, the laws banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and the massive program to destroy “lives not worth living.” The study traces attempts on the part of doctors to conceive of the “Jewish problem” as a “medical problem,” and how medical journals openly discussed the need to find a “final solution” to Germany’s Jewish and gypsy “problems.”
Proctor makes us aware that such thinking was not unique to Germany. The social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century in America and Europe gave rise to theories of racial hygiene that were embraced by enthusiasts of various nationalities in the hope of breeding a better, healthier, stronger race of people. Proctor also presents an account of the “organic” health movement that flourished under the Nazis, including campaigns to reduce smoking and drinking, and efforts to require bakeries to produce whole-grain bread. A separate chapter is devoted to the emergence of a resistance movement among doctors in the Association of Socialist Physicians. The book is based on a close analysis of contemporary documents, including German state archives and more than two hundred medical journals published during the period.
Proctor has set out not merely to tell a story but also to urge reflection on what might be called the “political philosophy of science”—how movements that shape the policies of nations can also shape the structure and priorities of science. The broad implications of this book make it of consequence not only to historians, physicians, and people concerned with the history and philosophy of science, but also to those interested in science policy and medical ethics.
The body is both a site for medical practice and a source of therapeutic and scientific tools. As such, there are a variety of meanings ascribed to the body which both affect and are affected by cultural, economic, political and legal complexities. In order to access and use body parts, Linda F. Hogle states, transformative scientific and cultural processes are brought into play. Nowhere is this more evident than present-day Germany, where the spectre of Nazi medical experimentation still plays a large role in national policies governing the use of body parts and the way these policies are put into practice. In their efforts to be perceived as not repeating atrocities of the past, German medical practitioners and policy-makers reformulate ideas of bodily violation. To further confuse the issue, the reunification of East and West Germany has engendered new questions about the relationship between individuals’ bodies, science, and the state.
Hogle shows how “universal” medicine is reinterpreted through the lens of national and transnational politics and history, using comparative examples from her research in the United. States. Recovering the Nation’s Body is the first book to analyze the actual practices involved in procuring human tissue, and the first to examine how the German past and the unique present-day situation within the European Union are key in understanding the form that medical practices take within various contexts.
The Catholic Church’s claims to spiritual and temporal authority rest on Jesus’ promise in the gospels to give Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. In the sixteenth century, leaders of the German Reformation sought a fundamental transformation of this “power of the keys” as part of their efforts to rid Church and society of alleged clerical abuses. Central to this transformation was a thoroughgoing reform of private confession.
Unlike other Protestants, Lutherans chose not to abolish private confession but to change it to suit their theological convictions and social needs. In a fascinating examination of this new religious practice, Ronald Rittgers traces the development of Lutheran private confession, demonstrating how it consistently balanced competing concerns for spiritual freedom and moral discipline. The reformation of private confession was part of a much larger reformation of the power of the keys that had profound implications for the use of religious authority in sixteenth-century Germany.
As the first full-length study of the role of Lutheran private confession in the German Reformation, this book is a welcome contribution to early modern European and religious history.
"Modernity" was an inescapable fact of life for the first generation to come of age in the German Empire. Even the most extreme political opponents saw the chaotic transformation of all spheres of life in the wake of industrial capitalism as the central problem facing young men and women at the fin de siècle. This fresh look at Wilhelmine perceptions of modernity challenges both the traditional emphasis on anti-modernism as a peculiarly German response that led to the rise of National Socialism, and the more recent post-Foucauldian studies on the "pathologies of modernity," which point instead to an unreflective faith in science and efficiency on the part of German progressives. Shifting the focus away from radical extremes on either side, Kevin Repp explores the more moderate agendas of hundreds of mainstream intellectuals and activists from diverse social backgrounds who sought to surmount the human costs of industrialization without relinquishing its positive potential.
Repp combines detailed case studies of Adolf Damaschke, Gertrud Bäumer, and Werner Sombart with an innovative prosopography of their milieu to show how leading reformers enlisted familiar tropes of popular nationalism, eugenics, and cultural pessimism in formulating pragmatic solutions that would be at once modern and humane. Easily obscured by radical voices on right and left, this quiet search for alternatives nevertheless succeeded in building a nationwide network of educational centers, associative ties, and institutions that substantially altered the landscape of Wilhelmine political culture in the decades before the First World War.
Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Schoenberg—all were Jews who considered themselves more European than Jewish. Yet their experience of anti-Semitism and injustice undermined a full commitment to their native German or Austrian heritage. Writing about Moses—the towering architect of the nation of Israel and also the quintessential diaspora figure who wandered between bondage and liberation—the four very different writers articulated a shared quandary. Their writings about Moses are Bluma Goldstein's focal point in her eloquent book about Jewish identity and assimilation, tradition and cultural allegiance. Skillfully blending textual interpretation, historical context, and biography, Goldstein is able to illuminate the particular meaning of these works as well as their political significance.
The writings considered here at times express despair over the dominant culture's unfulfilled promises of emancipation and equality. Alternatively, adopting the terms of Jewish tradition, they articulate a paradigm of freedom and Jewish identity. But more often, as Goldstein shows, they do both, reflecting a continuing, albeit disillusioned, commitment to European culture and a return to Jewish heritage. Reinscribing Moses thus reveals the ways in which these texts speak with two voices, opposing injustice and oppression within the bounds of German or Austrian society and advancing the biblical story of national liberation within Jewish tradition. It will be a valuable addition to the ongoing debate over questions of Jewish as well as German heritage and identity.
Jurgen Herbst’s account of growing up in Nazi Germany from 1928 to 1948 is a boy’s experience of anti-Semitism and militarism from the inside. Herbst was a middle-class boy in a Lutheran family that saw value in Prussian military ideals and a mythic German past. His memoir is a compelling, understated tale of moral awakening.
In February 1943 the Gestapo arrested approximately 10,000 Jews remaining in Berlin. Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."
Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.
The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."
One of the most harrowing phenomena in recent political history was the attempt by the Nazi government to liquidate, shift, and redistribute the populations of the unfortunate territories that came under its domination during the second World War. By tracing the rise and fall of the agency created to effect this gigantic geopolitical movement, the RKFDV (Reichskommisariat fur die Festigung deutschen Volkstums or Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom), Robert Koehl reveals the complexity, brutality, and inconsistency of National Socialism, the neofeudalism of Nazi power politics, and the nature of the men who manipulated the monstrous scheme.
Using captured documents which have never been published before, some signed by Hitler's and Himmler's own hands, Koehl relies for the main source of his study on the actual testimony, evidence, and statements made during the United States Military Tribunal Trials Numbers Eight and Eleven at Nuremberg. His conscientious marshaling of concrete facts serves better than the most dramatic intervention to drive home the implications of this recent tragedy involving millions of Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Russians, Yugoslavs.
The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) is now recognized as one of the most important European authors of the modernist period, having garnered high praise from such prominent voices as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and J. M. Coetzee. Robert Walser: A Companion is the first comprehensive guide to Walser’s work in English. The twelve essays in this collection examine Walser’s literary output, historical milieu, and idiosyncratic writing process, addressing aspects of his biography; discussing the various genres in which he wrote (the novel, short prose, drama, lyric poetry, and letters); and analyzing his best-known novels and short stories alongside lesser-known but no less fascinating poems, plays, and prose pieces.
An essential addition to the scholarship about this eccentric, prolific, and influential writer’s work, Robert Walser: A Companion will be of interest both to established scholars and to those coming to Walser for the first time.
The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but enhances understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims, and accomplishments--and of its continuing relevance.
Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded--and still demands--that we transform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticized." Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labor in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined in this book.
Romanticism: A German Affair is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.
Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
In 1945, when the Red Army marched in, eastern Germany was not “occupied” but “liberated.” This, until the recent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is what passed for history in the German Democratic Republic. Now, making use of newly opened archives in Russia and Germany, Norman Naimark reveals what happened during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany from 1945 through 1949. His book offers a comprehensive look at Soviet policies in the occupied zone and their practical consequences for Germans and Russians alike—and, ultimately, for postwar Europe.
In rich and lucid detail, Naimark captures the mood and the daily reality of the occupation, the chaos and contradictions of a period marked by rape and repression, the plundering of factories, the exploitation of German science, and the rise of the East German police state. Never have these practices and their place in the overall Soviet strategy, particularly the political development of the zone, received such thorough treatment. Here we have our first clear view of how the Russians regarded the postwar settlement and the German question, how they made policy on issues from reparations to technology transfer to the acquisition of uranium, how they justified their goals, how they met them or failed, and how they changed eastern Germany in the process. The Russians in Germany also takes us deep into the politics of culture as Naimark explores the ways in which Soviet officers used film, theater, and education to foster the Bolshevization of the zone.
Unique in its broad, comparative approach to the Soviet military government in Germany, this book fills in a missing—and ultimately fascinating—chapter in the history of modern Europe.
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