Nationalism, racism and propaganda in early Weimar Germany: contradictions in the campaign against the "black horror on the Rhine"

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.     

Intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior during the demographic transition

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDP) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.     

The Fires of Grasshopper: Enlightening Transformations in Subsistence Practices through Fire-Feature Analysis

This article is a case study of the changing fire features of the Grasshopper region of Arizona. Specifically, it focuses on the relationship between fire features and maize agriculture. The article shows that as the fourteenth century began, fire-feature patterns changed in this region and several entirely new fire-feature types appeared. While archaeologists have clearly demonstrated the intensification of maize agriculture during this same period, the possible links between maize and changing fire features have not been investigated. This article demonstrates that such links do in fact exist and that fire features respond dramatically to changes in human subsistence.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

Geobasisdaten für die Planung?

Die Nutzer von Geobasisdaten der Vermessungs- und Katasterverwaltungen finden heute vor allem in ATKIS (Amtliches Topographisch-Kartographisches Informationssystem) und in der ALK (automatisiert geführte Liegenschaftskarte; hier noch eingeschr?nkt) fl?chendeckende und für eine Fachdatenintegration geeignete Geodatenbest?nde vor. Gleichwohl wird von Nutzerseite h?ufig ein differenziertes und in Teilen kritisches Bild gezeichnet. Die Kritik richtet sich v.a. auf die Probleme, die ATKIS-Anwender mit dem Nutzerkomfort, dem komplexen Datenmodell, unrichtigen Fl?chennutzungsangaben, inkompatiblen Objektdefinitionen, den Preisen sowie mangelnder Aktualit?t und Vollst?ndigkeit haben. Dennoch gibt es für viele Zwecke auch in der Planung langfristig keine echte Alternative zu den Geobasisdaten.