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5 books match the query 'Imperial Germany'

cover of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany

Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany

Angela Elisabeth Zimmerman

University of Chicago Press, 2001

With the rise of imperialism, the centuries-old European tradition of humanist scholarship as the key to understanding the world was jeopardized. Nowhere was this more true than in nineteenth-century Germany. It was there, Andrew Zimmerman argues, that the battle lines of today's "culture wars" were first drawn when anthropology challenged humanism as a basis for human scientific knowledge.

Drawing on sources ranging from scientific papers and government correspondence to photographs, pamphlets, and police reports of "freak shows," Zimmerman demonstrates how German imperialism opened the door to antihumanism. As Germans interacted more frequently with peoples and objects from far-flung cultures, they were forced to reevaluate not just those peoples, but also the construction of German identity itself. Anthropologists successfully argued that their discipline addressed these issues more productively—and more accessibly—than humanistic studies.

Scholars of anthropology, European and intellectual history, museum studies, the history of science, popular culture, and colonial studies will welcome this book.
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cover of Christian Internationalism and German Belonging: The Salvation Army from Imperial Germany to Nazism

Christian Internationalism and German Belonging

The Salvation Army from Imperial Germany to Nazism

Rebecca Carter-Chand

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Ever since the Salvation Army, a British Protestant social welfare organization, arrived in Germany in 1886, it has navigated overlapping national and international identities. After existing on the margins of the German religious landscape while solidifying its role as a social service provider, the Salvation Army proactively shaped its public profile during the Nazi rise to power. Accepted into the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (ethnonational community) and made an auxiliary member of the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV), the organization continued limited operations throughout the Nazi period before returning to its international affiliations in the immediate postwar period, thereby bypassing denazification and rehabilitating its reputation.

In this groundbreaking reevaluation, Rebecca Carter-Chand argues that the Salvation Army was able to emphasize different aspects of its identity to bolster and repair its reputation as needed in varied political contexts, highlighting the variability of Nazi practices of inclusion and exclusion. In that way, the organization was similar to other Christian groups in Germany. Counter to common hypotheses that minority religious groups are more likely to show empathy to other minorities, dynamics within Nazi Germany reveal that many religious minorities sought acceptance from the state in an effort to secure self-preservation.
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cover of Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany

Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany

Andrew Lees

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany breaks new ground in the history of social thought and action in Imperial Germany, focusing on socially liberal efforts to counteract perceived problems in the area of moral behavior.
Thematically and methodologically wide-ranging and innovative, this volume considers a broad spectrum of responses not only to the supposed breakdown of social cohesion but also to specific forms of deviant behavior. It draws on large numbers of writings from the period by clergymen, jurists, medical doctors, educators, social workers, and others. This literature illuminates the histories not only of urbanization and cities but also of sexuality and Christianity, crime and criminology, leisure and education, youth and women, charity and social work, and the welfare state as well as local government.
Focusing on positive instead of escapist responses to the challenges that inhered in urban society, this work can be read as part of an ongoing reassessment of the German Empire that points away from the idea that Germans were traveling an antimodernist Sonderweg, or special path, that led inevitably to National Socialism and the Third Reich. Although intended primarily for scholars and students of modern Germany, this book should speak to a variety of readers, among them anyone who cares about the history of cities, deviant behavior, or social reform.
Andrew Lees is Professor of History, Rutgers University.
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cover of Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany

Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany

Christian S. Davis

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany examines the relationship between the colonial and antisemitic movements of modern Germany from 1871 to 1918, examining the complicated ways in which German antisemitism and colonialism fed off of and into each other in the decades before the First World War. Author Christian S. Davis studies the significant involvement with and investment in German colonialism by the major antisemitic political parties and extra-parliamentary organizations of the day, while also investigating the prominent participation in the colonial movement of Jews and Germans of Jewish descent and their tense relationship with procolonial antisemites.

Working from the premise that the rise and propagation of racial antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century Germany cannot be separated from the context of colonial empire, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany is the first work to study the dynamic and evolving interrelationship of the colonial and antisemitic movements of the Kaiserreich era. It shows how individuals and organizations who originated what would later become the ideological core of National Socialism---racial antisemitism---both influenced and perceived the development of a German colonial empire predicated on racial subjugation. It also examines how colonialism affected the contemporaneous German antisemitic movement, dividing it over whether participation in the nationalist project of empire building could furnish patriotic credentials to even Germans of Jewish descent. The book builds upon the recent upsurge of interest among historians of modern Germany in the domestic impact and character of German colonialism, and on the continuing fascination with the racialization of the German sense of self that became so important to German history in the twentieth century.

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cover of Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany

Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany

Dennis Sweeney

University of Michigan Press, 2010

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Saar river valley was one of the three most productive heavy industrial regions in Germany and one of the main reference points for national debates over the organization of work in large-scale industry. Among Germany's leading opponents of trade unions, Saar employers were revered for their system of factory organization, which was both authoritarian and paternalistic, stressing discipline and punitive measures and seeking to regulate behavior on and off the job. In its repressive and beneficent dimensions, the Saar system provided a model for state labor and welfare policy during much of the 1880s and 1890s.
 
Dennis Sweeney examines the relationship between labor relations in heavy industry and public life in the Saar as a means of tracing some of the wider political-ideological changes of the era. Focusing on the changing discourses, representations, and institutions that gave shape and meaning to factory work and labor conflict in the Saar, Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany demonstrates the ways in which Saar factory culture and labor relations were constituted in wider fields of public discourse and anchored in the institutions of the local-regional public sphere and the German state. Of particular importance is the gradual transition in the Saar from a paternalistic workplace to a corporatist factory regime, a change that brought with it an authoritarian vision that ultimately converged with core elements in the ideological discourses of the German radical Right, including the National Socialists. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of labor, industrial organization, ideology and political culture, and the genealogies of Nazism.
 
Dennis Sweeney is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta.
 
"The author makes a very insightful argument about the emergence of a kind of scientific racism within the new corporatism, one that brings biopolitics into German industry prior to the rise of National Socialism. This book will be an important contribution to the history of Imperial Germany, and has much potential to appeal to audiences in other fields of history."
---Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University
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