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.     

What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography

Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level of interpretive strategies, "Europe" remained the yardstick for historiographical explanation. This article will use the example of postwar Japanese historiography to show that historians resorted to a European model in order to turn seemingly unconnected events in the Japanese past into a historical narrative. This is not to imply, however, that Japanese historiography passively relied on concepts from Western discourse. On the contrary, Japanese historians appropriated and transformed the elements of this discourse in the specific geopolitical setting of the 1940s and 1950s. This act of appropriation served the political purpose of positioning Japan with respect to Asia and the "West." However, on an epistemological level, the priority of "Europe" persisted; Japanese historiography remained a "derivative discourse." Studies in comparative historiography, therefore, should be attentive to these traces of the European descent of academic history and privilege the transnational history of historiography over meditations on its internal rationalization.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

Overlapping rivalries: the two Germanys,Israel and the Cold War

The case of early German-Israeli relations offers unique insight into the dynamics of the German Cold War. As this article shows, the two Germanys were ideologically and geopolitically antithetical, but vis-a-vis the question of relations with Israel East and West German representatives faced a situation that was uniquely related to the German past and to the German Cold War competition.     

‘Mightier Than Marx’: Hassoldt Davis and American Cold War Politics in Postwar Ivory Coast

ABSTRACT

Using the travels of Hassoldt Davis in Ivory Coast to explore the global Cold War in French West Africa in the 1950s, this article argues that the main line of confrontation in the postwar era did not always pit Americans against Russians. In many instances, the struggle for the mind and soul of Africans was between the Americans and the French. The study highlights the role of everyday technology in the expansion of the American informal empire. By focusing on Davis and the significance of low-tech artifacts, the article suggests that in our scrutiny of Cold War science/technology, we need to supplement the study of the various production regimes of consumer goods with a comparable research on consumption and how they mediated the daily battles of the era. Such approach not only underscores the historical reality of the ‘social life of things’, but also gives agency to non-state actors as both users of Cold War technoscience and as participants in the politics that informed its mobilization on the world stage. Besides bringing Francophone Africa in the historiography of US–Africa relations, the article demonstrates a convergence of vision among American consular agents, US transnational corporations and an idiosyncratic travel writer.     

From Cold War battleground to a footnote to history? Labour history in divided and unified Germany

History of labor and industrial relations was a well-established and mutually contested subdiscipline in both parts of Germany during the Cold War. Though it did not stand in the center of the overall settling of accounts with the communist past in unified Germany the swift opening of all relevant archival sources made sure that these themes established themselves as relevant topics on the research agenda about the history of the GDR. Profiting both from an advanced state of art in West Germany and a handful of original innovators in East Germany the GDR was explored and increasingly understood as an essentially ‘work-centered society’ governed by a panoptic ‘welfare dictatorship’. When it came to interpreting the multifold and heterogeneous findings one line of reasoning gained peculiar attractiveness, namely to read the East German ‘case’ as a variant of Fordist modernization in the middle of the twentieth century which unable to face the challenges of globalization.     

“With almost clean or at most slightly dirty hands”. On the self-denazification of German geography after 1945 and its rebranding as a science of peace

Since the 1980s there is an overall agreement that German academic and applied geography between 1933 and 1945 were closely linked to the ideology and practice of National Socialism. There is very little historical work, however, on how geography was reestablished in Germany after the end of National Socialism. This paper deals with West German geography after 1945 and the attempts to reestablish geography as a legitimate discipline within academia. Taking the influential paper by German geographer Carl Troll as a starting point, this paper deals, on the one hand, with the way geographers positioned geography in relation to National Socialism, and how they told the history of their recent past. It then asks what the defeat of Germany and the experiences of the war in general meant for how geographers in Germany thought about the relation between the discipline and politics. It is argued that a number of cleansing and legitimating strategies that freed geography from direct involvement with National Socialism, went hand in hand with a very quick adaption to the new world order and a rebranding of geography as a science of peace.     

“学生冷战”及其悖论——以国际学生大会为中心的探讨

第二次世界大战结束后,美苏两国在政治经济领域和地缘政治方面的矛盾和冲突频仍,冷战格局逐渐形成。在此过程中,以不同社会或文化属性为特征的跨国民众组织纷纷建立,并借助思想和文化的力量将裂痕延伸至民族国家内部,形成更为深度的东西方对峙样态。学生群体在这场冷战对抗中表现格外突出。以美国全国学联和国际学生大会为代表,跨国学生组织虽然参与到冷战政治对抗进程中,却并未完全遵循政府议事日程。学生组织的独立性和进步性使其始终与冷战政治保持距离,并成为促进冷战缓和乃至终结的重要力量。对“学生冷战”及其悖论展开探讨,有助于建立更加完整的冷战叙事,回应仍旧处于争议中的冷战史研究母课题。     

Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.     

Beyond the carrot and stick: the political economy of US military aid to China, 1945–1951

By applying the rent-seeking assumption and sifting through both the archival materials and published historical documents, this article revisits the US–China relationship during the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) and the early Cold War period, when the United States was caught in the conundrum of aiding the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. As military aid is usually regarded as an important representation of broader economic aid, this research mainly concentrates on the US military assistance to postwar Nationalist China. This topic is important, as it signifies a direct American involvement in the Chinese Civil War, when the influence of the United States in postwar world politics was overwhelmingly predominant. As a result, postwar Chinese history might be reevaluated in a broader global postwar context. In addition, this article also tells the story about rent-seeking behaviors in the complicated US–China military relations during the early Cold War period at both micro and macro levels. When it came to US military assistance to China, the formulation of policy was perennially in the name of one's best interest.     

Former Nazi Officers in the Near East: German Military Advisors in Syria, 1949–56

In the early days of the Cold War, Syria was the first Arab country where former officers of the German Wehrmacht played an active role as military advisors. This was due, in part, to the fact that Germany was not burdened by its past political relations to Arab states for, in contrast to the Western powers, Germany which had never had territorial ambitions in the Near East. Even in the very early stages, German advisors contributed considerably to the development of Syria's armed forces and military intelligence. The advisory activities of German experts became even more intensive as a result of increased trade between the two countries; however, in 1956 the political situation in Syria worsened and the country began moving towards the Eastern Bloc putting an end to the non-official activities of German military advisors.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

Pushed into Pragmatism: British Approaches to Science in Post-War Occupied Germany

One of the most important dilemmas facing the British authorities when they occupied their zone of Germany at the end of the Second World War was what to do with German science. The contributions made by scientists and engineers to the Nazi war machine, in fields such as rocketry and submarines, meant that German science was both revered and feared, and was therefore closely linked to concerns about a post-war military resurgence in Germany. This article aims to chart the changing approaches which the British occupation officials adopted towards German science in this period. While the initial intention was to prevent Germany from ever waging war again, through demilitarisation, denazification and dismantling, the focus changed as British enmity shifted from a former adversary, Germany, to a former ally, the Soviet Union. Policy reflected this shift as technology transfer and the reconstruction of domestic German science won greater favour. This article aims to show that, in the face of growing hostility from the USSR and in the deeply suspicious climate of the early Cold War, Britain was forced to abandon its moral mission towards German science and adopt a far more pragmatic strategy instead.     

Turning Points in the Greek Resistance

Abstract

Resistance to enemy occupation has stood rather apart from the general history of the Second World War. Historians have been doubtful whether to treat it as a part of military and strategic history or a part of political and diplomatic history. Some have thought the less said about it the better, in any context. In the history of particular countries which suffered enemy occupation, the treatment of resistance has varied widely according to the outcome of the war. In some countries it has occupied a major place in their war-time history: Denmark and Yugoslavia, for quite different reasons, are important examples. In other occupied countries very little has been written about the occupation by professional historians: Greece is an outstanding example. Although Britain played a leading role in promoting resistance everywhere, the subject has not attracted, many professional historians, other than those who had a personal engagement in it during the war.     

Commemoration in Germany: Rediscovering history

In Germany a common narrative of the First World War could never be established. In the post-1918 period, explanations of Germany's defeat were highly contested between the political factions of the Weimar Republic. The subsequent Nazi tyranny, the Second World War and the Holocaust came – and continue – to overshadow any other event in German history. During the Cold War, the First World War was largely a forgotten conflict. In recent years, the federal government has remained hesitant about embracing the centenary, but countless exhibitions, seminars, books and other media productions have brought this aspect of history back to public attention from late 2013, and with it has come a renewed public debate on war guilt.

在德国是不会有共同的一战叙事的。1918年以后,对德国战败的解释成为魏玛共和国不同的政治派别的战场。接下来的纳粹独裁、二战以及大屠杀,则让德国历史上的任何其他事件黯然失色。在冷战期间,一战差不多被遗忘了。近些年联邦政府一直对庆祝百年的事犹犹豫豫。不过2013年底以来,无数的展览、研讨会、图书以及其他媒体产品使得这段历史成为公众关注的对象,关于战争的罪孽问题又起纷争。     

The Fate of Academic Freedom in the Age of High Liberalism: The Case of Charles Beard

In the early years of the Cold War, the American historical community fought vigorously over the reputation of Charles Beard. Midwestern progressives defended his legacy, while postwar liberals denounced Beard as an isolationist whose scholarship had not prepared the United States to fight either German fascism or Soviet communism. This essay explores the attack on Beard, its implications for academic freedom, and its role in silencing critics of the Cold War.     

'Is he still alive, or long since dead?': Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-1956

This article uses the search for the ‘missing’ Wehrmachtsoldiers in the 1950s as a prism through which to explore theways in which we might insert the notion of trauma into ourunderstanding of West Germany's status as a postwar society.In seeking to point out the connections between the ways inwhich ‘ordinary Germans’ suffered during and afterthe war on the one hand, and the inability of post-war WestGerman society to ‘confront’ the crimes of the paston the other, it argues that the traumatizing impact of warhas to be considered alongside the ideological and politicalnecessities of the Cold War and reconstruction if we are tounderstand why West German society failed to place the Holocaustat the centre of its memorial culture in the immediate post-waryears. Moreover, in pointing to the Lutheran church as a keysite of memorial politics in the post-war era, it argues forthe integration of a study of religious narratives, mentalitiesand discourses into an understanding of the evolution of thecommemorative practices of the 1950s which has hitherto beenshaped by an excessively one-sided focus on secular sites andnarratives.     

THE SHOVEL IS OUR WEAPON

There are many functional, organizational and ideational similarities between the labour services in Germany, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) and in Norway, Arbeidstjenesten (AT). There were numerous conduits for transnational transfers of ideas and practices, especially as the RAD oversaw the creation of the Norwegian obligatory service during the occupation. Although the German conception of labour service inevitably influenced the development of the AT, the AT was not simply a copy of a German model. Norway had its own history of voluntary labour services and the labour service idea resonated with existing structures in Norwegian society and politics. This article discusses what elements of the model were adopted and rejected. Contingencies, context and continuities also played a decisive role in shaping the Norwegian service, for which the German RAD served as an example of what a labour service should look like, but also what it should not look like.     

对纳粹暴政与德意志历史最早的反思——德国流亡社会科学家与纳粹主义研究

德意志人对纳粹暴政以及德意志历史的反思并非始于第二次世界大战结束之后,而是早自1933年就开始了。只不过,它不是由当时生活在德国境内的德意志人,而是由一批逃出德国、流亡国外的德意志人开始的。美国高校接纳的德国流亡哲学家、政治学家、社会学家、经济学家和历史学家们最早开始了反思。这场反思不仅影响了西方政治理论的发展,更为重要的是,它还影响了战后美国对德国的占领政策和“民主化”的改造行动、联邦德国的经济重建以及德意志社会对自身历史的深刻反思。战后德意志社会的这场全面深刻的反思,正是在流亡美国的德国知识精英们所构筑的思想平台上进行的。