Strategic R&D as an answer to the oil crisis. West and east German investment in coal refinement and the chemical industries, 1970–1990

Abstract

In reaction to the oil‐price shocks of 1973/4 and 1978/9 both of the German states reconsidered coal refinement as a technological answer to economic and political constraints. In the GDR the chemical industry in particular could not do without this technology, but the state did not undertake a major R&D programme, preferring rather to continue with existing plants and processes. The disastrous consequences of this policy were felt when the Soviet Union cut off oil supplies to the GDR in the early 1980s, so damaging irreversibly not only the chemical industry, but the entire East Germany economy too. In the FRG the chemical industry was an active interlocuter with the federal government but notwithstanding the offer of generous subsidies was always prudent about the need for a switch back to coal from oil, and believed that new R&D programmes in the coal refining area were not imperative given Western German leadership in the field. In the event it was sectors of the economy other than the chemical industry which benefitted from the federal government's concerns about the oil price rises in the 1970s.     

“UNABLE TO RESIST”: ON THE “POSSIBILITY” OF “IMPOSSIBILITY” AND CHRISTOPHE BOUTON'S TIME AND FREEDOM

This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger's remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton's Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger's Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay's themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological‐existential significance of Heidegger's text. Although Bouton's treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton's study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical‐intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton's lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger's assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being's most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others has been widely praised as the first German film to confront the horrors of the East German communist regime. But the film's politics may be ambiguous. As critical as it is of East Germany, it does not offer a ringing endorsement of West Germany. For example, the film's playwright-hero seems to have artistic problems in the West, just as he did in the East. The film's equivocal attitude toward communism is epitomized by its apparently positive view of the Marxist author Bertolt Brecht. This essay compares The Lives of Others with Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in an effort to understand Donnersmarck's attitude toward his East German predecessor and what it means for his larger view of communism and its relation to art.     

Coming to Terms with the Stasi: History and Memory in the Bautzen Memorial

This paper examines the role played by the encounter of history and personal memories in the difficult process of coming to terms with the Stasi in present-day eastern Germany. While historians have made substantial progress over the last two decades in accounting for the wide range of ways in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is remembered by East Germans, the memorials and museums of the reunified Germany remain unable to integrate memories of dictatorial oppression and happiness in everyday life. Sites commemorating state repression are thus often assumed to lack impact on former GDR citizens whose memories differ from official versions of history. These assumptions are tested for the Bautzen Memorial, formerly known as the ‘celebrities’ prison' of the East German Ministry of State Security. Focusing on the differing receptions of GDR memorial sites, this article draws on interviews with two former political prisoners and with visitors to the Memorial who grew up in socialist East Germany. It argues that the open approach of the Memorial, which leaves visitors to draw their own conclusions from the exhibition, allows different stakeholders to find ways of personal engagement with the past at the site despite the disparities with their own memories.     

“Die wissenschaftliche Ausbildung des Arztes ist eine Culturfrage …”. Über das Verhältnis von Wissenschaftsanspruch,Bildungsprogramm und Praxis der Medizin

The article shows that the elite, nationalistic and imperial mentality of German medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century was closely connected to its aim to be understodd as a natural science. With this in view leading representatives of German medicine propagated a scientific approach to man and nature instead of the traditional values of humanistic education (“Bildung”). One of the most important consequences of the new scientific ideal in medicine — integration in governmental planning, the change in professionel status of doctors, the increasing tendeny to recognize biologistic ideologies — was the loss of the medical ideal of the ars medica, a subject which has not received sufficient thematic attention. This theme is explored in the third part of the article.     

Acknowledging economic realities. The CMEA policy change vis-à-vis the European Community, 1970–3

In the early 1970s, the economic consequences of European Community (EC) policies forced the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to devise its trade policy vis-à-vis the outside world. With the implementation of its Common Commercial Policy, the EC was about to change the rules and conduct of its foreign trade. The East–West trade boom that took off in the 1960s had created significant commercial links, and substantial dependencies, across the Iron Curtain. The smaller members of the CMEA began to advocate an opening up towards the EC due to their fears of worsening trade prospects caused by the new EC policies. After reconsideration of its allies' commercial needs, the Soviet leadership was pressured to change its mind in favour of a common approach vis-à-vis the EC. This article follows the debate within the CMEA Executive Committee on the socialist countries' dependency on the Western market and on the advisability of opening up to the global market. It relies on official CMEA documents as well as Soviet and German Democratic Republic (GDR) policy-making documents. This article analyses the process of socialist integration in connection with the simultaneous developments taking place in their Western European counterparts, and thereby fills a gap in the historiography of Europe in the Cold War.     

Das Problem der “entscheidenden Experimente”

In this historical essay an attempt is made to discuss the problem of decisive experiments both from the point of view of History of Science and of Philosophy of Science. The first part deals with Francis Bacon's idea of instantiae crucis and with the use of the term experimentum crucis mainly in optics. With respect to the experimental confirmation of Maxwell's electrodynamics the Duhem-Quine Thesis is discussed. Duhem had argued that not a single hypothesis but only a complete theory is examined by experiment. So a single experiment neither can prove nor can disprove a single hypothesis. With regard to Bucherer's and Neumann's data concerning the velocity-dependence of the electron's mass the question of the certainty of conclusions arising from experimental tests is treated. In the last parts the really historical problem of the decisive experiments is considered, namely the gap between the context of design of an experiment and the context of evaluation of an experiment in retrospect. The examples here are the Michelson-Morley experiment, the Franck-Hertz experiment, and the Compton-Effect. In the conclusion parity violation is discussed. Perhaps due to the possibility of a single alternative in theory and an unambiguous result of the experiment this test really was crucial. In general, however, the experimentum crucis will prove to be a very seldom event.     

Redefining ‘sub‐culture’: a new lens for understanding hybrid cultural identities in East‐Central Europe with a case study from early 20th century L'viv‐Lwów‐Lemberg

This paper proposes a new definition of the term ‘subculture’, as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East‐Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now‐Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state – either from the ‘top down’, or else the ‘bottom up’ as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno‐linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term ‘subcultures’ to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg (German) or Lwów (Polish). It argues that Lemberg/Lwów/L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence – in particular, court records – is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating ‘hybrid’ identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio‐political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19–65; King 2002; Zahra 2008).     

A Minimax Method for Finding the k Best “Differentiated” Paths

In real-world applications, the k-shortest-paths between a pair of nodes on a network will often be slight variations of one another. This could be a problem for many path-based models, particularly those on capacitated networks where different routing alternatives are needed that are less likely to encounter the same capacity constraints. This paper develops a method to solve for k differentiated paths that are relatively short and yet relatively different from one another, but not necessarily disjoint. Our method utilizes the sum of a path's distance plus some fraction of its shared distance with each other path. A minimax algorithm is used to select the path whose largest sum of length, plus shared length vis-à-vis each previously selected path, is as small as possible. We present computational results for the Chinese railway system, comparing the paths generated by a standard k-shortest-path algorithm with those from our new model.     

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.     

The rise and demise of the Irish and Scottish computer hardware industry

This paper examines the dynamics of the computer hardware industry in Ireland and Scotland in a global context, from its inception in the late 1950s to the present. It provides a detailed account of plant openings and closures in both the system assembly and the component manufacturing segment. It describes the development of the computer hardware industry from mainframe assembly, through minicomputer assembly to microcomputer assembly and the shift of system assembly and component production activity to the Far East and Eastern Europe since the mid-1990s. The developments are analysed in terms of Schoenberger's (1997) model of concentrated deconcentration in the context of time-based-competition. It is shown that the model, with substantial qualification, fits the developments since the 1980s.     

Mankind and its Histories: William Robertson,Georg Forster,and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate

The Scottish historian William Robertson's works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition […] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal “value” (Wert) of the various “races of mankind” (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ‘science of man’ in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forster's direct engagement with Robertson's work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man – built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertson's historiography was crucially indebted – is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ‘sciences of man’.     

The Psychologization of the Socialist Self: East German Forensic Psychology and its Deviants, 1945--1975

In the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s, East Germanylargely criminalized and politicized such things as drug abuse,alcoholism, delinquency, and even mental illness, often treatingthem as moral threats and acts of subversion. By the 1960s,however, policy makers, courts, and social services in the GDR,in a development paralleled in other industrialized countriesat the time, began turning to psychological and psychiatricapproaches in addressing antisocial behaviour. Based on publishedand archival records, this essay argues that this change wasthe result of a constellation of social, party-political, institutional,and international developments that led not only to a reconsiderationof anti-social conduct in the GDR, but also to a sweeping reconceptualizationof the psychological workings of the individual within socialism,culminating in the ideal of the ‘socialist personality.’This mirrored trends in contemporary western Europe and theUnited States, granting psychological complexity and depth todeviant personalities in East Germany; however, it representedless a pragmatic concession to western reforms than an extensionof the socialist utopian project. As a result, professionalsand policy-makers in the GDR minted an historically unique conceptof deviance that wedded Marxism—Lenin-Leninism with mainstreampsychiatry and psychology. The example of forensic psychologyin East Germany raises important questions about the relationshipbetween liberal, socialist, and fascist projects of social reformin twentieth-century Germany.     

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism,Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place‐making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.     

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation,Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.     

Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Equus asinus</Emphasis> into Southern Africa

Donkeys are the only ungulate definitely known to have been domesticated in Africa and were widely employed in the north of the continent and through the Sahara and the Sahel as pack animals, as well as spreading through much of the Old World. Used in Egypt by 4000 bc, they are attested in Nubia in the third millennium bc, in eastern Sudan in the second millennium bc and, in a Pastoral Neolithic context, at Narosura, Kenya, in the first millennium bc. However, they went completely unremarked by early European observers in southern Africa and appear never to have reached that region, unlike cattle and sheep, both of which reached it before the beginning of the Christian era in a process that linguistic and genetic data now firmly link to the migration of herders from East Africa. Taking its lead from previous studies of the impact of epizootic disease on the expansion through Sub-Saharan Africa of cattle and dogs, this paper asks if disease also constrained the southward movement of donkeys and, if so, what the consequences of this may have been.     

Practical Orientalism – Bodies, Everyday Life and the Construction of Otherness

In the light of the increasing questioning of multi‐culturalism in popular debate, the focus of this paper is the ways in which cultural/national identities are constituted and renegotiated in everyday, banal bodily practices. Denmark is the case, but the processes experienced in this context are seen as part of a broader European development. We first discuss recent changes in the political semiotics of Europe in which former East/West boundaries are blurred and new ones constructed and renegotiated in many scales. Many studies, we argue, do in this context underestimate the degree to which this process is going on in banal, bodily and sensuous practices. An entrance to this discussion is to follow the idea of ‘banal nationalism’, but we want, by way of examples from the Danish case, to suggest that what we are dealing with is a practical orientalism, articulated through processes of ‘othering‘ developed in the concrete bodily encounters in everyday life.     

Der Natur‐Begriff des 17. Jahrhunderts und zwei seiner Inter‐pretamente: „res extensa”︁ und „intima rerum”︁

This article aims to show the general and broad use of the concept of nature in the philosophical discourse of the 17th century ‐ and in this context it is obvious that this discourse includes both philosophy and theology. I will discuss two opposite views concerning its fundamental understanding of nature, yet will not go into elaborating differences concerning such particular concepts as, for example, space, void or motion. These views and the theoretical positions from which they emerged will here be called res extensa and intima rerum ‐ this is done in order to clarify the basic opposition: there is no interior in pure extension and there is no extension at all in that what is called the interior. My aim is to show that these two views are, in fact, not quite as incompatible and contradictory as it easily may seem at first glance. Although I will for heuristic purposes introduce the two concepts res extensa and intima rerum as complete opposites and in a wholly contrary manner, ist should become clear that there exist both influences and interactions between these two notions. Theorists introduced here as advocates of the intima rerum‐position, can, for example, be seen as having been influenced by the mechanistic, or res extensa‐position, mainly through the formally and methodologically attractive geometric and mathematical argumentation. Likewise theorists advocating a mechanistic position can be said at some points to have been led by a substantial necessity concerning the contect of their argumentation to take recourse to the concept of intima rerum, at least partly or in a modified manner.