Tilling the Field of Interest Group Research: An Overview of New Insights

Abstract

This article argues that The Lives of Others contains a particularly powerful portrait of what the Czech dissident–philosopher Václav Havel called “post-totalitarianism.” I will explore Havel's understanding of this concept and the film's evocation of its key features. In Havel's view, these regimes preserve themselves through the principle of “social auto-totality.” They make every person, every citizen, an accomplice in their own oppression. Even more troubling for Havel is that these regimes do not continue to exist because of the evil will and historical misunderstandings of their originators. He suggests these horrors “can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system.” Donnersmarck's brilliant film explores how it is that people are capable of living within a lie. This leads to a consideration of an important but heretofore unexplored question: What is the meaning of the movement of a totalitarian regime to a post-totalitarian regime? Was what seemed for many in the West to be a sign of Communism's ability to moderate itself actually the emblem of its true evil?     

Heroes and Political Communities in John Ford's Westerns: The Role of Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine

Abstract

Widespread moral corruption, particularly of the sort fostered by their internal security agencies, was a key feature of communist regimes. The Lives of Others provides a dramatic portrayal of this phenomenon as it occurred in East Germany. The film can appear, given its central story of the moral redemption of a Stasi officer through his becoming intrigued by the lives of artists, to be an overly idealistic or audience-pleasing testament to the humanizing power of art. But the film also reveals the possible moral corruption of the artists. This essay provides a typology of the sorts of moral corruption exemplified by the situations of different characters in the film and shows that the main artist is actually saved from his impending corruption by the Stasi officer's actions. This reciprocal rescue is the key feature of the film's plot; it teaches that while art can undermine and resist totalitarian corruption, it is also susceptible to its snares—especially when it apolitically relies upon its own resources.     

How to Further Develop the Nonproliferation Regime? West German Nuclear Exports to Brazil and Iran in Context of US Criticism

ABSTRACT

Nuclear exports were a crucial part of West Germany's nuclear industry. Its domestic market was too small to keep a big nuclear industry alive. But nuclear exports were subject to a nonproliferation regime which West Germany had accepted when signing the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). During the 1970s, there were major quarrels with the United States about West Germany's nuclear export policy and its approach to the nonproliferation regime. Using sources from several German archives, this article examines the nuclear export policy of West Germany and the patterns of justification as a further development of the nonproliferation regime. It is focused on two different cases, the nuclear export to Brazil and to Iran, which are strongly connected and both included sensitive technology such as reprocessing and enrichment.

The export cases touch on the issue of further development of the nonproliferation regime, the emerging nuclear world order and broader conflicts about the hegemonic and discriminatory structure of the NPT. The way West Germany handled US criticism of the exports shows West German willingness to shape its own foreign policy and the attempt to gain independence from US dominance, thus contributing to the decline of bipolarism and strengthening middle powers.     

The Origins of American Expansion in Hawaii and Samoa, 1865–1900

From Nixon to Reagan, official US perceptions of West German trade with the Soviet Union (Osthandel) underwent a remarkable evolution. Despite initial skepticism, the Nixon and Ford administrations placed no major obstacles to West German–Soviet economic relations. Carter, however, changed the situation. His stance on human rights and economic sanctions against the Soviets for various developments - along with his belief that West Germany should follow the United States' lead - led Carter to ask Schmidt to curtail Osthandel, an action that contributed to Schmidt's notoriously poor relationship with the US President. Despite coming from a different political party, Reagan initially continued Carter's outlook on Osthandel. Yet rather than emphasize human rights, he publicly stressed Poland's self-determination as the reason to implement his aggressive policy to curb trade with the USSR, even though his advisers feared the strategic implications of greater German dependence on Soviet energy. Carter's and Reagan's early approaches were ineffective. Their actions, especially the latter's, strained US relations with Germany, the United States' most important ally in central Europe. Equally important, both Carter's and Reagan's policies undermined détente with Moscow. Because Nixon and Ford's approach to Osthandel harmed neither US–German relations nor US–Soviet relations, these presidents' responses had conspicuous advantages over succeeding administrations.     

THINKING AFTER HITLER: THE NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY1

This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing subfield in the historiography of post‐1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses' prize‐winning monograph German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German‐language monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals' confrontation with the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany's failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.     

The German question in Jakarta Indonesia in West Germany’s foreign policy, 1955–65

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany’s relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of ‘anti-imperialism’. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the ‘Third World’, West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno’s increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies.     

Lügen ist überhaupt das Kennzeichen unserer. Zeit Über einen unveröffentlichten Briefwechsel zwischen Max Born und Friedrich Herneck

The East Berlin marxist Friedrich Herneck and Max Born, Nobel Price winner in physics, exchanged more than 140 letters in the years between 1958 and 1970. In the beginning they discussed problems of the history of science, especially Born's personal memories of the development of physics in the 20th century. In later years they discussed political and social problems too. Only in these letters Born expressed clearly his attitude to communism and the social system of East Germany.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

Heroin Use as Everyday Radicalism: Opiate Consumers and the Leftist Counter-Culture in Frankfurt am Main, 1970–80

Abstract

This article details the impact of heroin in the early to mid-1970s leftist scene, with a focus on Frankfurt am Main, but an eye to larger developments in West Germany as a whole. Heroin challenged leftist assumptions about substance use and made a deep impact on the West German counter-culture, student left, and New Left at large. Early heroin users saw themselves as part of the left, and the practices of heroin consumption can be usefully seen as a sort of everyday radical praxis. Heroin users saw in the substance a way to ‘do something’ against a society they deemed oppressive. The wider counter-culture never embraced the drug and, indeed, repudiated its use as reactionary much in the same way that they eventually repudiated the violent activism of West German terror groups. As such, heroin users took part in and helped shape the process of splintering and radicalization that defined the early 1970s counter-culture in West Germany.     

The convictions of a realist: concepts of ‘solidarity’ in Helmut Schmidt’s European thought, 1945–82

Abstract

This article reconstructs concepts of ‘European solidarity’ in Helmut Schmidt’s political thought. Tracing Schmidt’s beliefs from the late 1940s to the period of his chancellorship and beyond, it shows how his concepts of European solidarity were shaped by the lessons he drew from the political and economic catastrophes of the 1920s and 1930s. The article reveals how Schmidt developed a largely functionalist understanding of ‘European solidarity’ that was grounded in both his generational experience and the piecemeal logic of European integration he derived from Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet. Schmidt believed that ‘European solidarity’ was not a given, but that it had to be consciously constructed through mutually beneficial intra-European cooperation. He was guided by two central convictions: that the interdependence of European economies made their cooperation both necessary and desirable; and that Germany’s unique historical burden and geostrategic location meant that its foreign policy always had to be embedded in a wider European framework. As West German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, Schmidt then sought to translate these convictions into practice, trying to avoid a relapse into 1930s protectionism whilst at the same time hoping to avoid perceptions of German dominance in economic matters. Yet, he remained highly sceptical of any attempts to transfigure West European integration into a greater ‘European identity’, believing that the Cold War context made any such attempts futile since true European solidarity could only be practised on a pan-European scale. Putting these views in a broader context, the article concludes that Schmidt’s thoughts offer valuable insights into the relationship between constructions of ‘European solidarity’ and notions of ‘crises’, and suggests that the analysis of his pragmatic approach adds to new, less teleological narratives of European integration that are now emerging in the historiography.     

Clowning and tragic clowning: Miguel de Unamuno as a funny writer

ABSTRACT

The present study considers the role and function that humor has in Unamuno's intellectual and literary universe. It traces Unamuno's attitude toward humor to his reading of the Spanish character in En torno al casticismo (1895) and to his dialogue with the figure of Don Quixote, as found in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) and Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912). Finally, it looks at the theory of humor offered in the novel Niebla (1914) and also at the role that humor played in Unamuno's later political writings, especially those of exile (1924–1930).     

The Cold War Politics of Cultural Minorities: Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic, 1976-1989

This article compares cultural identity politics relating toJews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from1976 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Drawing on stateand party sources, oral histories, literature and documentsfrom the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), it juxtaposesstate constructions of minority identities with the views andactions of Jewish and Sorbian students, writers and intellectuals.In its first three decades, the East German Communist party(SED) generally treated Jewish culture with suspicion or indifferenceand often conflated Jewishness with the capitalist West. Incontrast, the party celebrated a folkloric vision of Sorbianculture that linked Germany with the Slavic East. By the mid-1980s,the SED altered its posture towards Jews and Sorbs. In the GDR'sfinal decade, SED officials attempted to cultivate Jewish culturewhile viewing Sorbs with increased suspicion. The main reasonfor this shift was that SED officials placed Cold War foreignpolicy concerns over Marxist–Leninist ideological consistency.Treatment of Sorbs worsened as Sorbs forged ties with dissidentsin other Eastern Bloc nations. Meanwhile, celebrations of Jewishculture aimed to improve the GDR's ties with Western Europeby embracing Western Holocaust memory. The article also showsthat SED efforts to cultivate minority cultural identities oftenbackfired at the grassroots level. The minority cultural imagespromoted by the state often had little resonance outside leadershipcircles. Average GDR citizens frequently grew disenchanted withSED cultural minority policies, ultimately helping by the 1980sto destabilize the regime.     

NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.     

The German Secret State Police in Spain: Extending the Reach of National Socialism

Germany encroached in Spain's internal affairs that followed providing military support the Spanish Civil War in the interest of pursuing National Socialist objectives through the establishment of an extensive apparatus of National Socialist organisations in Spain, including the Gestapo. Cooperation was officially established between Spanish and German police on 25 November 1937, which was extended to the Spanish political police on 31 July 1938, when they entered into a secret agreement with the German Gestapo for mutual assistance. The Gestapo trained the Spanish ordinary police and political police to contribute to maintaining the Franco regime in control of Spain, just as the Gestapo in Germany was charged with investigating and suppressing all forms of anti-state tendencies, and exported its methods and proceedings to Spain under the guise of contributing to the struggle against the alleged danger of worldwide communism. In addition to cooperation with Spanish police on suppressing dissent against the Franco regime, other functions related to serving the interests of National Socialist Germany, which deployed the Gestapo for various purposes while Spain constituted an extension of National Socialist Germany's sphere of influence. This was ensured through the Gestapo maintaining a presence in Spain until 1945.     

The nuclear nation and the German question: an American reactor in West Berlin

This essay analyses the relationship between nuclear technology and ideas about the nation in the late 1950s by looking at the US–West German bilateral agreement and at American proposals to develop reactors in West Berlin, both of which emerged from Eisenhower's 1953 Atoms for Peace programme. American efforts to maintain tight control over the German nuclear sphere contradicted the claim that reactors were solely instruments of peace. At the same time, plans to build a reactor in West Berlin underscored that city's status as an occupied city with an uncertain future and with ill-defined relationships to East and West Germany.     

Extranational spaces and the disruption of national boundaries: Turkish immigrant media and claims against the state in 1980s West Germany

After the 1980 coup that shook Turkey and almost twenty years after the bilateral ‘guest worker’ treaty shifted Germany's demographic make‐up, West German policy makers proposed increasingly restrictive regulations on the ‘guest workers’ who had heavily contributed to West Germany's economy. In this crucial historical moment, Turkish‐language newspapers, published in West Germany, created a politically motivated extranational public sphere in which they launched claims against both the West German and Turkish states. These claims shaped immigration and integration policy between the two countries, fostered diasporic activism and cross‐national religious and political organisations and gave rise to a variety of unexpected organisational outcomes that continue to impact both Germany and the Turkish Republic.     

Ancient Greek Myth in Angelos Sikelianos

Abstract

In the introduction to Angelos Sikelianos: Selected Poems, the translators speak of Sikelianos's ‘mythological attitude … toward life’ and of his conception of myth not so much ‘as a rhetorical or metaphorical device but as a spontaneous creation of the human soul directed toward the revelation of a hidden spiritual life’, in short, of mythology as a kind of religion closely related to Schelling's perception of the function of myth. These remarks, written originally some years ago, may have their just proportion of truth, but in keeping with most introductory remarks, they strike me as rather too general, rather too undiscriminating when one brings them face to face with Sikelianos's practice at different moments of his career. I want to try to be more discriminating by considering the role of myth – specifically ancient Greek myth – in the poet's work both early and late in his career. I think it is a changing role, perhaps not in his fundamental association of gods with a contemporary landscape and his revelation of those mysteries that lie hidden in our everyday lives, but in the mode of this association and this revelation, and in the depth of their poetic significance.     

Sir Edward Grey and Austria-Hungary

ABSTRACT

Although in terms of their bilateral relations the ‘traditional friendship’ between Great Britain and Austria-Hungary was no mere phrase, in general political terms British policy in the last decade before the War was characterised by Grey's determination to cultivate the ententes with France and Russia and to do nothing to upset that division of Europe into two balancing groups (with Austria-Hungary firmly in the German camp) which he saw as the best guarantee of peace. Even though the Austrians gradually recovered from the shock of the Bosnian Crisis, in which Grey had come forward against them as Russia's chief supporter, and though the British for their part came to see in Austria-Hungary a useful element of stability in the Near East, Grey's attempts to uphold the unity of the Concert in the Balkan Wars were in the end vitiated by his overriding concern to avoid offending his Entente partners. Indeed, as the crisis deepened in the last year of peace, he took refuge in an increasingly abstentionist attitude, the objective effect of which - and herein, it is here argued, lies Grey's responsibility - was to intensify Vienna's desperation and loss of faith in the Concert that soon proved fatal to peace.     

Changing Regional Inequalities in United Germany

An American geographer and specialist on Germany analyzes temporal patterns of regional socioeconomic inequalities within Germany since unification. The results, based on analysis of changing distributional characteristics of GDP per capita, infant mortality, and unemployment, indicate a lack of progress in reducing regional inequalities within the country. Although the inequalities are not particularly severe by EU standards, promises made at the time of unification and the German constitution's requirement that regional equality be achieved are among pressures confronting German politicians and regional policy makers in achieving equality across the country. The author notes a number of domestic and international conditions that complicate and impede regional equality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O52, R11, R12. 2 figures, 6 tables, 70 references.     

Navigating global socialism: Tanzanian students in and beyond East Germany

This article investigates tensions and dynamics in global socialism through a focus on Tanzanian students in East Germany between the late 1950s and 1990. Disciplinary techniques partially known from Tanzania and everyday strategies of survival explain why most students complied with official requirements, but did not necessarily agree with East German ideological tenets. Additionally, throughout the decades, mobility across the Iron Curtain remained an important strategy to further own interests. The article concludes that an analytical framework spanning several decades and paying attention to dynamics in the country of origin sheds new light on agency and mobility among ‘East’, ‘West’, and ‘South’ during the Cold War.