Historic preservation in Nazi Germany: place, memory, and nationalism

While numerous studies have examined the post-war contestation surrounding commemorative sites associated with the legacy of Nazi Germany, relatively little attention has been dedicated to the ways in which the Nazi regime itself sought to create places of memory congruent with the movement's political and cultural goals. Indeed, party leaders sponsored a variety of disparate, and at times contradictory, programs to re-orientate some of Germany's most prominent historic places to better serve the needs of the regime. To expand our understanding of this process, this article examines the practice and rhetoric of historic preservation in Bavaria during the Nazi period with a focus on the preservationist program sponsored by Bavarian President Ludwig Siebert. Nazi propaganda promised to rejuvenate and protect Germany's architectural heritage for the public good, but the regime's actual priorities and policies led to widespread confiscation, damage, and eventually destruction.     

Nation‐building in contemporary Germany: the strange conversion of Hitler's ‘word made of stone’

This article examines the contending redefinitions of national identity in contemporary Germany's memorial culture, focusing particularly on the ensemble of monuments and parade fields known as the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. In a detailed case study, I analyse the recent conversion of one of the physical remnants of National Socialism – Albert Speer's transformer station – into a fast‐food restaurant and interpret this conversion as a novel contribution to the discourse on German nationhood. I argue that the provocative commercial reutilisation of the former Nazi monument gives expression to a renewed self‐confidence that Germany has gained from displaying a willingness to face up to its past as perpetrator nation. While the intervention thus deviates from the self‐indicting spirit that had been characteristic for Germany's memorial culture after World War II, an ironic note is conspicuous in this act of commemorative politics that indicates a way of dealing with the fascist legacy that is, surprisingly in some respects, superior to more conventional memory strategies.     

Internet Domains and the Innovativeness of Cities/Regions--Evidence from Germany and Munich

This paper focuses on the factors determining a region's ability to produce Internet content and tries to identify relationships with the role of the same region in the national and global economy. The number of .de-domains is used to measure Internet content production, which serves as an indicator for the innovativeness of the regions in an emerging part of the service economy. Data used for the spatial distribution of .de-domains (1.2 million names at the end of 1999) is original and has not been published before. In the first part of the paper the development of the number of Internet domain names in German regions is described and independent variables to explain the spatial structure are analysed. Results show that those variables that are associated with potentials to create and commercialize new knowledge are especially suited to explain the regions' relative frequencies in domain name counts. However, no single hypothesis alone is able to explain the spatial structure of .de-domains, rather a mixture of factors indicating external economies, creation of knowledge and highly qualified labour is best. The knowledge and attitude of these individuals is crucial for the adaptation and diffusion of an innovation like the Internet. Thus, the Internet does not create new regions but it replicates, at least in Germany, the well-known ranking of regions in terms of high-tech. Concerning high-tech industries and knowledge-intensive services, Munich has stood at the top of German regions for about 15 years; this region will be analysed in the second part of the paper. Munich's national and global competitiveness depends mainly, as for other regions, on the innovativeness of its firms, research institutions, and people. The capability of Internet domain names as an indicator for regional innovativeness is the better the younger this innovation is. Despite the rather decentralized spatial structure of Germany (see the very low primacy index), compared, e.g. with the UK and France, Munich stands out in terms of the number of domain names. Munich's role in the national and global economy is supported by the early adoption of the Internet by the local firms and private users - and vice versa! If one considers the Internet as a basic innovation in the sense of Schumpeter's long wave approach then new combinations of resources in new or old regions can lead to strong national growth, but attended by increasing disparities between regions within the respective nation. We may distinguish two driving forces: the Internet as the basic innovation and the export of the respective content production to other parts of the global economy. Munich serves as a proof for the hypothesis that regions with a large potential of Internet production are also able to export these contents into other parts of the world. Zook's work on regional economic impacts of the Internet on US regions shows that regions with above-average Internet content production and marketing activities do profit significantly from the multiplicator and spin-off-effects of the related exports. Thus, although information can be distributed by the Internet in very short time to all places in the world, it nevertheless produces uneven economic landscapes (and in part manifest the old landscape) that sees the regions with strong Internet content production in a much better position than regions where the Internet consumption prevails, although this still has to be analysed for German regions.     

Staying on Top: Why is Munich so Resilient and Successful?

This article seeks to explain why Munich, Germany's most economically successful city in recent decades, has proved so resilient despite various challenges and shocks. It begins by discussing different theoretical understandings of resilience and our methodological approach which builds on complex adaptive systems and evolutionary economic geography perspectives. Using a blend of historical analysis and in-depth investigation of the dynamics of one of the city's most innovative clusters, we argue that Munich's resilience essentially stems from the complex interplay of Germany's distinctive political history and federal system, which has promoted multi-level governance and a strong urban system, longstanding city regional leadership and entrepreneurialism, Munich's inherent assets and diverse economy and the combined strength of its many knowledge institutions, innovation system and networks. The evidence suggests that historic, structural and locational factors and agglomeration effects largely explain Munich's rise to prominence but that sustained urban and regional leadership and effective governance and policy especially in the technological, scientific and educational spheres coupled with intelligent urban planning have played an increasingly important role in sustaining its competitiveness.     

Commemoration versus Vergangenheitsbewaltigung: Contextualizing Austria's Gedenkjahr 2005

This essay explores the politics of memory in post-1945 Austrianpolitical culture, focusing on the shift between the fiftiethanniversary of the Anschluss and the sixtieth anniversary ofthe end of the Second World War. Postwar Austrian society experienceda particular tension associated with the Nazi past, manifestedin communicative and cultural forms of memory. On the one hand,the support of many for the Third Reich—expressed throughactive or passive complicity—threatened to link Austriawith the perpetrator status reserved for German society. Onthe other, the Allies' Moscow Declaration (1943) created a mythof victimization by Germany that allowed Austrians to avoidconfronting difficult questions concerning the Nazi era. Consequently,discussion of Austrian involvement in National Socialism becamea taboo subject during the initial decades of the Second Republic.The 2005 commemoration is notable insofar as it marked a significantbreak with this taboo. New forms of cultural memory expressedin 2005 are examined here as the culmination of two things:first, criticism from the centre and left of the Austrian politicalspectrum that began during the Waldheim Affair of the mid-1980sand the 1988 commemoration; second, efforts by successive SocialDemocratic chancellors and certain federal party leaders, beginningin the early 1990s, to break the pervasive silence that madeVergangenheitsbewältigung difficult, and to challenge theAustrian right wing's glorification of elements of the Nazipast. This process included the novel step of acknowledgingthe Nazi skeletons in the Social Democratic Party's own cupboard.     

Deutsch als Weltsprache? Franz Thierfelder, the Deutsche Akademie in Munich and the Promotion of the German Language Abroad, 1923-1945

The Deutsche Akademie (DA) in Munich was founded in the contextof a general upsurge in cultural diplomacy in Germany afterthe First World War and it was the precursor of today's GoetheInstitute. After a difficult start, by the early 1930s the DAhad become the leading institution in the promotion of the Germanlanguage abroad. The emergence of the DA's language policy wasclosely intertwined with the general development of German culturaldiplomacy, which was largely financed by the AuswärtigesAmt but executed by private associations. It was also influencedby the discussions in the 1920s about the role of language inshaping German national identity, by contemporary developmentsin German linguistics and language teaching, and by the discourseof the socalled ‘conservative revolution’. FranzThierfelder, secretary-general of the DA, managed to forge thesedevelopments into a coherent argument as to why Germany shouldintensify its language policy, centre it around the DA, anddirect it mainly towards the Balkan countries. The languagepolicy of the DA remained largely undisturbed by the Nazi seizureof power until the outbreak of war, even though the emphasiswas now on race rather than language as the determining factorin German national identity. The reason for this was, firstly,that the cultural diplomacy of the Auswärtiges Amt andits private institutions such as the DA continued to be dominatedfor some time by non-Nazis and, secondly, that Germany's culturaldiplomacy was dictated more by the constraints and dynamicsof international politics and by economic necessities than byideology. It was only after the outbreak of war that the expansionof the DA's language programme became closely linked to theracially motivated ‘new order’ for a Europe underNazi rule.     

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.     

Dilemmas of Party Leadership: Majority Whips in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1962-1982

This article examines party leadership in the context of personal ambition, institutional commitments and the representative's dilemma of choosing between a national vs. local perspective. The research focus is on the careers of five recent House Democratic party leaders and their tenure as appointed majority whips. From these case studies the whip, who occupies the third-ranking leadership post in the House, appears as an emerging leader who must develop strategies to enable him to balance a series of contradictory expectations: loyalty to leadership vs. self-promotion, service to the rank and file vs. policy impact, and support for national party positions vs. district preferences.     

Restoring Berlin's Unter den Linden: ideology,world view,place and space

Berlin's Unter den Linden, a primary thoroughfare and ensemble of historic architecture and nationally significant cultural institutions, lay in ruins at the close of the Second World War. The buildings, public spaces, and public art forming this street bore testimony to diverse facets of German history, presenting a range of semantic issues to those interested in their future. Differences in key groups' world view resulted in different interpretations of these spaces, thus different approaches to policy development with regard to their future. Initially, the German cultural elite was determined to restore significant architecture, asserting architectural value while avoiding mention of ‘Prussian’ or ‘German’ identity. However, the German communist leadership viewed these same structures as testimony to ‘Prussian–German militarism’ and sought their effacement. The Soviet Military Administration remained largely indifferent to all but spatial value until 1947, when they began to use architecture to represent the Soviet Union. Finally, with the founding of the German Democratic Republic and import of Soviet ‘socialist-realist’ urban theory, architecture considered progressive was restored as national cultural heritage, although sites with considerable ‘militaristic’ content prompted more debate over their future.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

The Problem of National Solidarity in Interwar Germany

The history of nationalism in interwar Germany has mostly beentold as a success story in which integration and mobilizationloom large. While not disputing this view this article proposesa closer look at the tensions between different proponents ofthe Volksgemeinschaft and the radicalizing consequences resultingfrom these tensions both before and after 1933. In practice,the prevailing interpretation of nationalism as the moral foundationfor unity and solidarity created various new divisions: refugeesfrom the lost Prussian provinces as well as people in the occupiedparts of the Rhineland expected to be supported by their fellowcitizens but were often bitterly disappointed. Interest groupsadapted the rhetoric of national community more or less successfullyto their own needs and purposes, but to their great anger didnot manage to improve their public image in this way. Right-wingintellectuals lamented the widespread lack of patriotic attitudesand found good Germans only in utopian spaces outside actualGerman society. Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and the proponentsof radical antisemitism even abandoned the moral approach tonationalism altogether. National Socialism claimed to solvethis problem by both integration through mass propaganda andexclusion through racism and violence. But in the reports ofthe Gestapo there was still much complaint about morally deficientGermans allegedly unwilling to sacrifice their private intereststo the national good. As recent research has shown, many Germansheld similar views of fellow citizens and party members. Thiscontinuing scenario of moral crisis was an important aspectof Nazi discourse closely related to the ever radicalizing exclusionisttendency of the Volksgemeinschaft.     

Philipp Otto Runge and the Semiotic Language of Nature and Patriotism

Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) was a leading German Romantic artist whose iconography represents a transition from the Neoclassical iconography of classical mythology and allegory to an abstract semiotic system of signs based on a mystical interpretation of nature. An admirer of Herder's theory of language, Runge's iconography was representative of a trend among Romantic artists to promote nationalism and cultural values through the implementation of formal epistemological systems in the medium of art. Runge's individual iconography reveals a synthesis of rational and mystical systems of knowledge that emphasizes Herder's concept of the German Volk as a unique cultural identity, and presents an analogy between the creation of the cosmos, the organic origins of language, and the conception of the German Volk. Runge's iconography expresses the nationalist sentiments and linguistic theory of Herder that formed the basis of German propaganda movements during the Wars of Liberation, 1807–1815.     

Presidential Impeachment and Institutional Dynamics in the Iran-Contra Affair and the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

This paper analyzes institutional dynamics affecting Congress's impeachment decisions regarding the Iran-Contra Affair and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. While other scholars have explained the Clinton impeachment by pointing to differences in the nature of the scandals–a decoupling of public opinion from legislative action, increasing partisanship, and a new media regime–these explanations overlook the nature of impeachment as an institutional confrontation, governed by institutional choices and dynamics. Taking an institutional approach, we argue that congressional decisions were strongly affected by the institutional arrangements adopted by Congress to handle the scandals' investigations. In brief, the earlier strategic approaches of party leaders and the congressional investigatory approach restrained inclinations to impeach President Reagan, while later ones promoted President Clinton's impeachment. More broadly, this analysis demonstrates the important interaction between institutional choices and party leaders' powers and strategies in affecting congressional action.     

Articulating minority nationhood: cultural and political dimensions in Québec's reasonable accommodation debate

Given their precarious position within larger states, national minorities cannot rely on federal governments to affirm their nationhood. Moreover, insofar as nationhood is predicated on a shared history, language and culture, immigrants place additional strains on the maintenance of national distinctiveness and the political claims that derive from it. In 2006–2007, following a series of confrontations over religious practices in the public sphere, Québec's provincial government appointed the Bouchard–Taylor Commission to investigate avenues for the accommodation of immigrant‐related cultural and religious differences. While it failed to generate policy, the commission did provide a discursive space for the (re)assertion of Québécois nationhood. Analysing the production of national identity in newspaper debates of the Bouchard–Taylor report, we offer an alternative to the ethnic–civic paradigm in nationalism theory. Rather than treat ethnic and civic as two separate ends of a single continuum, we conceptualise a relationship between two dimensions: one of culture and one of politics. We show that in contemporary articulations of Québec national identity, the prerequisites of political membership derive their meaning from a productive tension between blood‐based and adoptive conceptions of national culture.     

Martin Luther's Use of Rhetorical Masks for Jews,Princes, Clerics,and other Enemies: The Problem of Meaning in a Post Modern Age

In modern times, there is a common widespread and common misunderstanding of Martin Luther's views on Jews, Peasants, Clergy, Women, and Princes. An analysis of Luther's rhetorical use of “masks” as metaphors will help us understand that he was not the father of anti‐Semitism, or of political and social elitism. The purpose of this article is to explore and understand Luther's rhetorical intent in the context of early modern German culture. The central thesis of this article is that Martin Luther may have had in his use of rhetorical masks in his public discourse a hidden communicative strategy. Often his masks involved vulgar, crude, and violent words in his attempt to stimulate and persuade public opinion. Does language have consistent long‐term meaning regardless of context? Michael Giesecke, a professor of German linguistics, correctly argues that each cultural period develops its own ways of triadic perception that involves thinking, acting, and communicating. New ways of processing information as we now see in the electronic revolution holds true in the cultural shift in the sixteenth century fostered by the printing press. The new medium of printed works forces a new way of thinking in every affected age. Our problem is to understand the “new way.”     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

Healthy for Family Life: Television, Masculinity, and Domestic Modernity during West Germany's Miracle Years

This article uses the history of West German television as alens to analyse the politics of consumption and domestic modernityduring the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and early1960s. Politicians, academics, broadcast executives, industrypromoters, clerical leaders, and cultural critics engaged ina ferocious debate about the effects of the new mass media onWest German society and family. While some championed the democratizingand modernizing effects of television, others decried its supposedlytotalitarian and ‘feminizing’ qualities; their arguments,pro and con, marked a foundational moment in contemporary culturalcriticism that continues to resonate. Installed in the familyhome, television accelerated the arrival of a highly commodifiedsociety and transformed the private habits of everyday life.Men in particular began to spend more leisure time on domesticpursuits, crossing traditional boundaries between public andprivate gender roles. Such private practices had larger effects:buying, watching, and thinking through television helped replacetraditionalist social conservatism with its neoliberal variantand linked West Germany into the social, political, and culturalstructures of corporate capitalism and western consumer society.     

Musical memory,heritage and local identity: remembering the popular music past in a European Capital of Culture

This paper explores the relationship between rock music, collective memory and local identity, by focusing on events connected to Liverpool's status as European Capital of Culture 2008. The first part of the paper describes these events and how memories of local rock music were attached to heritage and local identity and mobilised to validate Liverpool as a capital of culture, whilst in turn the city's Capital of Culture status served to validate particular ways of remembering the local musical past. The second part of the paper considers the broader significance of these events by relating them to three pan-European trends in cultural policy: the development of the cultural and heritage industries; the protection and promotion of local culture and identity; and the fostering of cultural diversity and integration. It highlights the general significance of the popular music past for cultural policy in Europe, but also the politics of popular music memory and how it involves a complex and dynamic process of negotiation that relates to cultural policy in particular ways. The paper concludes by arguing that popular music offers a specific and productive focus for research on cultural policy, heritage and local identity in Europe.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 1. February 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 1 Front cover Greece‐German relations The Prussian goose‐step survives in Greek official ceremonies as part of the ‘traditional’ display by the famed Evzones, or presidential guards – a relic of the German‐derived monarchy and its militaristic traditions. It is combined here with a male costume popular in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially among Albanians and Greeks, and nowadays associated in popular imagination with the Greek War of Independence (1821–1833). German cultural influence still lingers in Greece, most visibly in the remnants of 19th‐century neoclassical architecture in Athens and other cities. The brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and Germany's role in Greece's current economic turmoil together represent another side of a tormented historical relationship between the two countries and their peoples. In an essay of which Part I appears in this issue, Michael Herzfeld argues that the mutual stereotyping by Greeks and Germans – a habit deeply rooted in these complex interactions – has become a major cause of Greece's difficulties, perpetuating its ‘crypto‐colonial’ status within the European Union. He suggests that the only possibility for escaping this destructive downward spiral is through a determined attempt to stop the stereotyping, and argues that anthropology could play an important role in that reversal of accumulated hurt and mutual distrust. Back cover FOOD POVERTY IN THE UK If, as Lévi‐Strauss suggested, food is bon à penser, how can an anthropologist interpret a lack of food in a highly developed society? Can an anthropological lens illuminate either the recent rise in food insecurity in the UK or the exponential growth of food banks? In this issue, Pat Caplan reflects on her current fieldwork on these topics in north London and west Wales. She focuses particularly on food banks, making use of interviews and participant observation with clients, trustees and volunteers, as well as local and national media reports. The author poses a series of questions: firstly, she considers who needs food aid and why, which involves a consideration of insecure employment and low wages, as well as changes to the benefit regime which have adversely impacted on food bank clients. Secondly, she discusses who provides food aid and how, by considering those giving to and running food banks and other types of organization, including their motivations for getting involved. Thirdly, she asks what kind of solution food aid offers to an apparently growing problem. Does this form of charity merely depoliticize the arguments? Finally and most importantly, she asks what this tells us about the society in which we live, about the state and its policies and the public discourse around such issues. She notes that there are many well‐honed anthropological concepts which can be brought to bear on these issues, including gifting and reciprocity, shame and stigma, entitlements and blame. Finally, a consideration of voluntarism raises important questions about rights and entitlement, including the state's compliance with the international covenants to which it has signed up.     

The Mafia misunderstood – again

Abstract

Observers who have investigated Alleanza Nazionale's relationship to historical fascism have mostly relied on programmatic documents as well as Gianfranco Fini's speeches and interviews. This article tackles the same question by considering the visual propaganda produced by the party from its launch in 1994 to its merger with Silvio Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà in March 2009. An examination of the logos, the portraits of Fini and other imagery that feature on posters, brochures, websites and the party daily Secolo d'Italia shows that they frequently refer, albeit mostly covertly, to the iconographies of fascism. The contemporary visual sources used by Alleanza Nazionale and the strategies adopted to present a modern and respectable image are also explored. The article argues that much of the propaganda of Alleanza Nazionale incorporates two levels of meaning: an overt and moderate one, which addressed the general public, and a concealed one celebrating ideas and values of the Ventennio, which aimed to reassure a hard-core of activists that the party had not betrayed its original identity.