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Germany after the First World War
... The public viewed the system as a foreign imposition tied to the Treaty of Versailles, which many Germans resented. Bessel (2002), for example, stressed: "The inflationary financing of the War and the demobilization, combined with the demands imposed in the Versailles Treaty, meant that the difficulties of the transition in 1918-19 were soon replaced with the massive disorder and resulting political bitterness brought about by post-war inflation and hyperinflation" (p. 123). ...
... The Great Depression exacerbated economic inequality and fuelled public discontent. Moreover, Bessel (2002) stressed that "[w]hen the First World War came to an end, Germany possessed extremely fragmented and inadequate arrangements for satisfying the social and economic needs of those who had lost limbs, sight, earning capacity, husbands, fathers, and sons" (p. 274). ...
This study explores the dynamics of democratic systems under the threat of backsliding into "rigged" democracies. Democratic systems, even when mature, remain vulnerable to the interplay of rising polarization, institutional erosion, and uneven electoral processes. This paper develops a theoretical model integrating three core variables: (1) Institutional integrity. signifying the resilience and impartiality of democratic institutions; (2) electoral balance, capturing the fairness of electoral competition; and (3) polarization, gauging societal and ideological divisions. Such integration can be valuable as the literature so far has heavily focused on case studies or specific thematic aspects. The paper proposes a system of differential equations to assess how polarization intensifies institutional decay, how strong institutions bolster free elections, and how equitable electoral processes, in turn, moderate polarization. A stability analysis-drawing on the Jacobian matrix determinant and eigenvalues-reveals tipping points where democracies can shift from stable governance toward rapid decline.
... History has placed Germany as the instigator of WWI. In 1914, its population was around 67 million [10]. Its war aim was to occupy France by route of neutral Belgium. ...
... It had a mobilized force of 11,000,000. According to Bessel [10], approximately 2,000,000 Germans were killed with close to 5,000,000 wounded and nearly 15,000,000 servicemen registered as having illness. ...
This paper presents partial results of a large-scale multi-lingual (English, French, German, and Dutch) international study conducted in 2012, resulting in responses from over 60 countries (n=2490). This paper provides analyses of data obtained from respondents in nine countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States), which were involved in and impacted by the First World War (WWI). Eight factors influencing respondents’ memories of WWI (school lessons, TV news and documentaries, Internet, literature/arts, visits to WWI sites, story-telling, inheritance of memorabilia, and WWI movies), and impact of five demographic variables (country-of-origin, age, gender, education, and emotional proximity to WWI) on these factors are analyzed. Also examined is if how the way memories of WWI are formed relates to one’s intentions to visit a WWI heritage site in the near future and how it impacts support for granting UNESCO’s World Heritage Site (WHS) status to WWI battle fields. Results indicate that the way memories of WWI are formed vary by all five demographic factors and indicate that both intentions to visit a WWI heritage site in the near future and support for granting WHS status to WWI battlefields are related to how memories of WWI are formed. Implications for development and marketing of WWI heritage sites as tourism attractions are also discussed.
... A number of large German companies engaged in businesses related to war and were able to gain massive profits. However, this was in sharp contrast to the experience of the German public that endured sacrifices, food shortage, poverty and resulting consequences of the war (Abelshauser et al. 1985;Bessel 1993;Gebhardt and Mommsen 2002). Industry and government were aware that disclosure of huge profits to the public could lead to disapproval of state policies with the potential of raising enormous tensions. ...
... Industry and government were aware that disclosure of huge profits to the public could lead to disapproval of state policies with the potential of raising enormous tensions. Hiding the enormous profits as 'Stille Reserven' (quiet reserves) provided a simple solution and caused the government to further promote this secretive accounting practice (Gallhofer and Haslam 1991;Bessel 1993). Entities' positive attitude towards 'Stille ...
... Adolf Hitler, for example, rose to power in the context of the German defeat in World War I. Many Germans felt humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which many deemed unfair and which placed a disproportionate burden on the country (Bessel, 1993). This broader historical context, coupled with engineered blame for the burning of the Reichstag after Hitler was elected as German Chancellor (Evans, 2005), resulted from dark intelligence and dark creativity, and demonstrated the ability of potential autocrats to use these skills as a springboard to dictatorship. ...
We suggest that toxic creative leaders succeed by creating a fantastic future in a fantasy world that we call “Wonderland.” They make what was thought to be impossible, not only possible but actual. The game is similar to board games that bring one of the players playing them to some wonderful destination at the end of the game. The future they create, however, is an illusion, designed to appeal to people who feel under-appreciated, disempowered, victimized, deprived of material or other resources, or in need of a radical change that will empower them. The creatively toxic leaders are usually underestimated and their overwhelming skills at acquiring and maintaining power are viewed as malleable for other powerful people’s purposes. Ultimately, the toxic creative leaders take over and end up manipulating rather than being manipulated by those who had sought to use the leaders for their own ends. We discuss some of the ways that can be used to combat toxic creative leaders so that what should have been “never again” stays that way—in the realm of impossibility.
... Some may seek representation, as Black veterans did in the US South after the end of World War II (Parker 2009). Others may support authoritarianism, as German Army World War I veterans did based on perceptions of an ungrateful public and that the First World War was lost by German politicians (Bessel 1993). ...
How is service history associated with returning veterans' attitudes about democracy? Existing research predicts pro-government militia veterans have less support for democracy because of political efficacy gained from service and divergent policy preferences from the general population. We test that theory in Ukraine through surveys of both returning veterans and the general population between 2019 and 2022. Our findings differ from predictions. Veterans who joined the armed forces as volunteers were more supportive of democracy as an institution than ordinary Ukrainians. At the same time, Army volunteers, as well as veterans who were drafted into the armed forces and veterans who were rejected from the armed forces and joined pro-government militias were more likely to be dissatisfied with democracy. In-depth interviews reveal both those rejected from the armed forces and army conscripts opposed democracy because they felt rampant draft evasion made civilians unqualified to make political decisions.
... In 1814 and in 1870, the military and political crises that led to these regimes being toppled were accelerated by underlying conflicts resulting from the downturn. Likewise, the inability of the German Reich, which was dominated by Prussia, to ensure the civilian population's food supply during the 1914 war, and to balance the interests of the different groups within the wartime economy, triggered the collapse of the Prussian monarchy in 1918, even before the military defeat came (Winter 1989;Bessel 1993;Vincent 2006). The credibility of the state elites who were connected to this state model was deeply damaged, and the abuses that characterized their management of state affairs were not as well tolerated as previously by the groups who were denied access to state privileges. ...
This study investigates the impact of political connections on government contract success rates of publicly listed companies in Canada (2010–2014). It illustrates how public information, basic financial accounting and Two-Stages Least Squares (2SLS) estimation can be used to analyse the power plays between public authorities and large corporations. The results show that political connections are frequent among publicly listed Canadian companies. While weak, these connections are positively and significantly associated with the winning of government contracts. Our study is the first to demonstrate a direct relationship between corporate political connections and government contracts in the Canadian context. The study confirms the interdependence between politics and business, particularly the increase in the number of corporate actions intended to influence government decisions. Its robust results call for more studies on what board members with political credentials actually do, on top of securing public contracts.
... In 1814 and in 1870, the military and political crises that led to these regimes being toppled were accelerated by underlying conflicts resulting from the downturn. Likewise, the inability of the German Reich, which was dominated by Prussia, to ensure the civilian population's food supply during the 1914 war, and to balance the interests of the different groups within the wartime economy, triggered the collapse of the Prussian monarchy in 1918, even before the military defeat came (Winter 1989;Bessel 1993;Vincent 2006). The credibility of the state elites who were connected to this state model was deeply damaged, and the abuses that characterized their management of state affairs were not as well tolerated as previously by the groups who were denied access to state privileges. ...
This chapter proposes a global interpretation of the relations between the elite corps serving the French State during the last two centuries. Based on a European comparative historiography and sociological assessment of this period, a joint analysis of elites usually studied separately (high-ranking government officials and political figures) reveals overarching continuities and recurring phenomena in the ways that various regimes have exercised State power.
... Militant organizations such as the Freikorps and the Stahlhelm were formed barely a month after the Armistice and played a cardinal role in converting the myth into a militarized, political mass movement. For a detailed account of postwar Germany and militarism, see, for example, Richard Bessel's (1993) landmark study. ...
This essay explores Käthe Kollwitz’s antiwar graphic work in the context of the German, and later, international No More War movement from 1920 to 1925, where it played an important role in antimilitarist campaigns, exhibitions, and publications, both in Germany and internationally. Looking at Kollwitz’s production closely, we discover a deeply pragmatic artistic strategy, where the emotionality of Kollwitz’s famed prints was the result of tireless technical, formal, and compositional investigation, contrived to maximize emotional impact. By choosing the easily disseminated medium of printmaking as her main vehicle and using a deliberately spare but powerful graphic language in carefully chosen motifs, Kollwitz intended her art to reach as broad an audience as possible in engaging antiwar sentiment. In connection with the leading antiwar voices of the time, including French Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland and the founder of War Resisters’ International, Helene Stöcker, she deployed her work to reach beyond the confines of the art gallery, into internationally distributed posters, periodicals, and books.
... Total war in Germany was accompanied by unprecedented censorship, silent military dictatorship, and far-reaching state intervention in the economy (Chickering 1998). While it is true that in the war's immediate aftermath Germany was forced to adopt parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic's association with a lost war and the Versailles Treaty undermined its legitimacy (Bessel 1993). That, coupled with the disintegration of the world trading system under rising protectionism and a collapse in international banking due to the financial dislocations of the war and the Great Depression, undermined the Weimar Republic from without (Findlay and O'Rourke 2007, chap. ...
A basic premise of the limited/open access orders framework of North, Wallis, Webb and Weingast is a variant of the Hayek–Friedman hypothesis that economic and political freedom sustain each other. Keys to this framework are the specific “doorstep” conditions that enable a transition from limited to open access, which the authors draw from the historical experience of Britain, France and the United States. This essay analyzes the transition process of Imperial Germany to reveal that maintaining economic competition did not depend on democracy and that the middle classes became stakeholders in authoritarianism. It then explores the specific challenges posed by this large, mature limited access order as it was integrated into an international system sustained by a declining liberal hegemon, Great Britain. The refinements of the framework suggested by the case of Imperial Germany allow for a better understanding of some of the parallel transition processes in present-day China and its evolving relationship to both the United States and the current international order.
... Total war in Germany was accompanied by unprecedented censorship, silent military dictatorship, and far-reaching state intervention in the economy . While it is true that in the war's immediate aftermath Germany was forced to adopt parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic's association with a lost war and the Versailles Treaty undermined its legitimacy (Bessel 1993). That, coupled with the disintegration of the world trading system under rising protectionism and a collapse in international banking due to the financial dislocations of the war and the Great Depression, undermined the Weimar Republic from without (Findlay and O'Rourke 2007, chap. ...
Heinrich Winkler’s two volume history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth century is titled Der lange Weg nach Westen. For him, ‘nach Westen’ means becoming a Western democracy, like England, France and the US. How did they do it?Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, in their book Violence and Social Orders: a Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (2009), take up the question of how countries make such a transition. The framework is that of limited and open access orders (LAO/OAO), as explained in Steven Webb’s article in this issue. Although they intend the framework for universal application, most of the North, Wallis, and Weingast book focuses on the economic and political history of England, the US, and France from early modern times up to the end of the nineteenth century—the times when these three countries became Western capitalist democracies as we think of them today. Violence and Social Orders does not discuss the twentieth and twenty-first cent ...
... Total war in Germany was accompanied by unprecedented censorship, silent military dictatorship, and far-reaching state intervention in the economy . While it is true that in the war's immediate aftermath Germany was forced to adopt parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic's association with a lost war and the Versailles Treaty undermined its legitimacy (Bessel 1993). That, coupled with the disintegration of the world trading system under rising protectionism and a collapse in international banking due to the financial dislocations of the war and the Great Depression, undermined the Weimar Republic from without (Findlay and O'Rourke 2007, chap. ...
How do countries become open capitalist democracies? Why do they often fail? What can be the violent consequences of such failures? Douglass North, John Wallis, Barry Weingast, and Webb have proposed a framework for addressing these questions, as described in the first part of this article. It recognizes that the politics and economics of this process are jointly determined—the control of violence capacity in society and the distribution of economic benefits depend on each other. The second part of the article sketches out what this framework implies for interpreting the evolution of Germany’s politics and economics from the early nineteenth century through the mid twentieth century. This overview introduces five subsequent articles that discuss the framework in relation to specific historic sub-periods: 1814–1870 when the separate states of Germany competed economically and politically; 1871–1914 when a unified Germany made impressive progress on many dimensions but without making a transition to full democracy and civilian control of the military; the Weimar period when it consciously attempted such a transition and perhaps succeeded for a few years; the Nazi period of severe regression; and the post World War time when Germany did make the transition to full democratic capitalism.
The loss of World War I (1914-1918) forced Germany into a decade of uncertainty: the conversion to democracy, crippling war reparations and runaway inflation plunged the country into dire socio-political upheaval. Despite such devastation, the army and the government perpetuated militant imagery through the popular press and other media: highly fabricated, idealised images of soldierhood proliferated throughout the 1920s. Simultaneously, the traumatic effects of combat on the nation’s veterans were played down, exemplified by the reluctance to accept war trauma as a legitimate illness. This paper explores representations of soldierhood in the work of German soldier-artist Otto Dix (1891-1969) during the 1920s, focusing on how Dix’s work negated the mythologizing of the war experience and exposed the effects of industrialized warfare on the body during a time when the government and the army sought to conceal these effects. The monumental battlefield pictures Der Schützengraben [The Trench] (1920- 1923) and the triptych Krieg [War] (1929-1932), and the cycle of etchings Der Krieg [The War] (1924) reveal the artist’s efforts to counter negative scrutiny of soldiers, particularly with regard to how the body was expected to survive the effects of industrialised warfare. These works are reconsidered here as stinging pictorial critiques of the widespread idealization of militant masculinity in 1920s Germany. Virulently nonconformist in his projection of modern warfare, Dix challenged the popular, romanticizing imagery of the heroic, militarized male, his pictures tracking attempts to nullify the mythologizing of the war experience that pervaded popular media. With reference to the works’ provenance, the socio-political climate and the artist’s recollections, the genesis of Dix’s battlefront pictures is re-evaluated within the contexts for which the pictures were originally intended.
In this chapter, Pittaluga and Seghezza show how, after WWI, the widespread belief in the myth that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” prevented the public from accepting the consequences of defeat. This resulted in a “war of attrition” in which no interest group was willing to bear the burden of macroeconomic adjustment. The social conflict was temporarily resolved through an implicit alliance between the productive classes to the detriment of the rentier class. This alliance was expressed most clearly in the adoption of an expansionary fiscal policy by the Government and an accommodative monetary policy from the Reichsbank. This policy gave rise to periodic accelerations in inflation with a redistribution of resources from rentiers to the Government and the productive classes.
This thesis explores the complex relationship between food and power, focusing on an analysis of the role food security played in shaping Nazi Germany's strategy for invading the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) during Operation Barbarossa in the Second World War. The study looks at the wider context of war, highlighting the often-overlooked importance of food as a geopolitical tool for States. Thus, this thesis seeks to validate or reject the following hypothesis: food security influenced the Third Reich's strategy of expansion towards the USSR, with the aim of creating a new world order around Nazi Germany. Through a fusion of the Copenhagen School, Foucault, Mintz and Schmitt, the theoretical framework of this thesis postulates a new measure of state power. A state's power can be measured by its role in the food production chain. The more it concentrates the forces of production, the greater its capacity to influence the daily lives of populations (economically, socially, politically, logistically), thus holding a major geopolitical leverage to state stability 3 and the guarantee of world order. To apply our theory, our thesis is based on a case-study analysis, with an emphasis on words and discourse to enable a rich contextualization and analysis of the multiple dimensions of Nazi policies. The results of the analysis reveal that food security was indeed a driving force behind the German expansion strategy. The Hunger Plan instrumentalized food for appropriation, distribution, and production, contributing to the Third Reich's vision of a new world order. Famine, conceived as a biopolitical weapon, aims to eliminate undesirable populations, and legitimize the colonization of these "empty" territories by German peasants, the only genetically superior race capable of fertilizing these lands. Food becomes a means of forcing depopulation, deterritorialization and thus racial, cultural, economic, and political reorganization, reinforcing Nazi domination in the eastern territories. This thesis underlines the multifaceted role of the geopolitical tool of food in Nazi strategy. While the reality of the Nazi expansionist vision and project to the east was marked by setbacks, notably due to Hitler's poor anticipation of British reactions and the resistance of the Russian people, the instrumentalization of food resources had considerable consequences, demonstrating that it is a threat to be taken seriously in conflicts.
Through the colorful world of Berlin's grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics. Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the surface and failed to resolve in the following years. Doubting the ability of the Weimar Republic to contain these conflicts, a group of hotel owners, some of the most prominent Jewish industrialists and financiers in the country, chose to let Adolf Hitler use their hotel, the Kaiserhof, as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. From a splendid suite opposite the chancellery, Hitler and his henchmen engineered the assumption of power, the death of the Weimar Republic, and the ruin of their hosts, the Kaiserhof's owners: Jewish liberals now fleeing for their lives. Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy asks how this came about and explores the decision-making processes that produced such catastrophic consequences. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
World War I dismantled Imperial Germany and, long after the fighting had ceased, continued to shape the newly-born Weimar Republic. This paper argues that a war over the memory of the Great War in Germany led to Weimar’s downfall. The Weimar Republic’s lack of a collective memory of the first total war became the center of the political debate on the republic’s viability and Germany’s future. This war debate was potently wielded in the arenas of literature and art to heighten political conflict and ensure that the war’s memory seeped into every aspect of society. Ultimately, Weimar’s inability to promote any consensus on the war’s meaning in the face of opposition from the conservative and extremist right weakened the republic significantly and led to its downfall.
This chapter argues that the First World War and German military defeat in 1918 were crucial prerequisites for the emergence of National Socialism as a political mass movement and for the development of some of its key political tenets. One of them was an antisemitism that was not based on rhetoric, but on direct violent action against Jews. However, an analysis of the alleged ‘brutalization’ of German political culture in the aftermath of the war and of the repercussions of the front‐line experience reveals that the impact of the war on the radicalization of nationalism and of the extreme right was neither uniform nor linear, but rather was dependent on generational background and was in many ways protracted.
The ‘income change’ which has the potential to cause political conflict is change in expected ‘lifetime’ or ‘permanent’ income, not change in actual past income. For rational political action relates to the future, not the past! Where income change has been continuous for a long period, past change may satisfactorily proxy expected long-term change. In cases of abrupt and discontinuous income change, it might not. Interwar Germany conformed to the latter case. Where, however, real income expectations do collapse, they may be expected to undermine democracy by narrowing the scope for compromise. This is because, with lower expected incomes, the margin for ‘absorbing’ adverse economic policy decisions out of future income growth is reduced. Democracy presupposes a willingness to accept the adverse decisions of the majority — as ascertained by some agreed political formula — on many economic policy choices potentially affecting future incomes.
The remarkable proportion of the ex-servicemen within the membership of the BUF had huge impact on the ideology and the development of the movement. BUF´s propagandists always looked to exploit the attraction of the ex-servicemen to the movement´s military style and organization based on leadership, hierarchy, discipline and physical fitness. They also stressed the existence of the camaraderie similar to the “comradeship of the trenches” within the movement membership. However, in contrary to the continental fascist movements, BUF advocated peace and sought the revival of the British power through economic policies based on self-sufficiency and non-intervention. In its attempt to deepen our knowledge of the ex-servicemen, this article seeks to analyse the BUF´s ideology, economic programme and its appeal to ex-servicemen.
The phenomenon of the huge number of disabled veterans belongs to the most bitter of long-term consequences of the industrialised warfare of the First World War. In the defeated nation of Germany, it was the handling of precisely these many millions of war victims which proved to be a difficult inheritance for the Weimar Republic and greatly complicated its inner stability throughout the 1920s. It was ultimately National Socialism that was able to massively exploit the unresolved question of the war victims and thus the embattled memory of the First World War.
This article explores the widespread international debate in modern historiography maintained around the “brutalization” thesis, which was popularized in George L. Mosse’s book Fallen Soldiers (1990). According to Mosse, the war experience of the front soldiers during World War I was the cause of the heightened levels of political violence during the Weimar Republic. Such brutalization allegedly provided the basis for Nazism and the Genocide. In an attempt to clarify the origins of Mosse’s interpretation this work analyses criticism, reformulations and uses of “brutalization”. In spite of the fact that the heated debate reached no consensus, it eventually managed to establish a revealing –though vague and scarcely open to analytical potential notion in the professional language of historians. | Este artículo explora el amplio debate internacional mantenido por historiadores contemporaneístas en torno a la tesis de la “brutalización”, popularizada por George L. Mosse a partir de su libro Soldados caídos (1990), y según la cual la experiencia de guerra de los soldados del frente en la Primera Guerra Mundial habría sido la causa de los altos niveles de violencia política de la República de Weimar y, por ende, el origen del nacionalsocialismo y el genocidio. El artículo clarifica las raíces de la interpretación mosseana, analiza las críticas, reformulaciones y usos de la “brutalización” y concluye que el fuerte debate mantenido, a pesar de no alcanzar consenso, terminó por consagrar una noción sugerente, aunque obscura y de cuestionable capacidad analítica, en el lenguaje profesional de los historiadores.
This article explores the origins of the historical relationship between war veterans and Fascism. Transcending the predominant paradigm of the controversial ‘brutalization’ thesis (George L. Mosse), the article relies on a transnational perspective that focuses on the interconnections between historical events and on processes of political communication and symbolic appropriation. Examining historical processes taking place in different European countries, as well as their effects on Mussolini and the Italian interventionists, the article argues that a transnational process of symbolic appropriation of the notion of the ‘veteran’, taking place between 1917 and 1919, is crucial to understand how the Fascist ideology and movement were born.
Seit der militärischen Mobilmachung im Sommer 1914 waren Erklärungen des Belagerungs- und Ausnahmezustands in Verbindung mit weitreichenden Ermächtigungsgesetzen des Reichstags nicht nur ein Grundzug politischer Praxis und Gegenstand theoretischer Reflexionen, sondern auch Ausdruck mentaler Dispositionen einer von Krieg, Revolution und Bürgerkriegsängsten geprägten Gesellschaft. Damit verbunden waren kritische Grenzüberschreitungen, mit denen schon Zeitgenossen das Ende einer Epoche verbanden. Diese Grenzüberschreitungen betrafen die unterschiedlichsten Bereiche, sei es die verfassungspolitische Ordnung einschließlich der Sozial- und Wirtschaftsverfassung, den Umgang mit innerstaatlicher Gewalt oder die habituelle und mentale Prägung einer »Generation des Unbedingten« (Wildt 2003). Die Suspendierung von (Rechts-)Ordnungen nahm dabei eine prominente Rolle ein.
Es ist schon fast zum Klischee geworden, den Ersten Weltkrieg als »Urkatastrophe des 20. Jahrhunderts« (George F. Kennan) zu bezeichnen. Dieser erste große industrialisierte Krieg habe die Selbstverständlichkeiten des 19. Jahrhunderts zerstört und damit eine neue Epoche eingeläutet. Ein bis dahin unvorstellbares Ausmaß der Mobilisierung von Mensch und Waffen gab dem Krieg einen so neuartigen Charakter, dass der neu geprägte, in jeder Hinsicht extreme Begriff »totaler Krieg« ihn am besten zu beschreiben schien (vgl. Chickering 2000; Chickering/Förster 2003). Schätzungsweise 20 Millionen Menschen verloren ihr Leben als Folge des Krieges. In Deutschland allein wurden etwa 13 Millionen Männer eingezogen, von denen 2 Millionen fielen. 60 Prozent der über 10 Millionen Frontsoldaten mussten mindestens einmal wegen Verwundung oder Krankheit von der Front abgezogen werden.
At the end of the nineteenth century, in Germany, as in most of Europe, women were frequently made responsible for male actions despite their lack of power and legal rights. At that time, German women were downtrodden even by the standards of the rest of Europe, with women trapped by legal, social and class restrictions, by established customs and the militarization of civil society, until they existed in a state of almost complete dependence on and subjection to men (Gerhardt 1978). Women were subject to male guardianship; the doors of most professions were closed to them, as were those of higher education. The Prussian Law of Association, which prevented women from even being present at political meetings, remained in place from 1851 to 1908, making campaigning for female suffrage well-nigh impossible during this period.
On 4 November 1918, many Italians celebrated victory in the First World War. With total fatalities estimated at around 600,000, the price of victory was tremendous.1 Nevertheless, when the defeat of Austria was completed, even some opponents of Italy’s entry to the war in May 1915 expressed delight. Turin’s La Stampa newspaper announced that victory amounted to the realisation of the ‘dreams of the poets, the hopes of the martyrs, and the burning desires of the entire Italian soul’.2 Victory tasted equally fine to the war’s most ardent supporters. One of their leading spokesmen, Benito Mussolini, the future Duce, wrote ‘now that the Patria is no longer mutilated, the light of victory opens the eyes of the blind and the injured no longer feel their wounds, while mothers bless the sacrifice of their fallen sons’.3 In Rome, Turin, Pisa, Genoa and elsewhere, these patriotic discourses were matched by the formation of small crowds that celebrated in the streets. They included refugees from the territories of Northeast Italy that had been lost and regained during the final year of the war, as well as natives of the terra irredenta — those parts of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire that were, in the eyes of Italian nationalists, about to be reunited with their Italian motherland.4
Amongst the foremost supporters of the Weimar Republic were veterans’ associations. German veterans were also amongst the most visible supporters of a policy of reconciliation with their former enemies. Of course, veterans’ associations, such as the Stahlhelm and Der Rote Frontkämpferbund, were powerful opponents of the Republic and the foreign policy of fulfilment. The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between support for constitutional politics in the domestic sphere and reconciliation and internationalism in the foreign policy sphere, with particular reference to the most prominent of the veterans’ associations, the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold. The Reichsbanner articulated a culture of peace that recognized that the preservation of the Republic was dependent upon and bolstered the re-establishment of peace after the First World War. In this context the meaning of peace was broadly conceived. Peace did not simply mean an end to fighting and a signature on a treaty. Peace required constitutional democracy, the primacy of civilian control of the military, welfare provision (particularly for disabled veterans, war widows and orphans), the reduction of armaments, territorial guarantees, international institutions to regulate and moderate disputes between states and reconciliation between societies as well as states. A broad range of parties and associations in the Weimar Republic espoused this culture of peace, though different groups emphasized different elements of the broader vision. These groups faced challenges, including the persistence of war cultures, particularly on the right of the political spectrum.
Consumption is not only about cultural values, lifestyles, and market interaction but also about politics. Shaped by institutions, laws, and ideologies, consumption interacts with political power to legitimize or delegitimize governments. States can control available supplies and prices and define acceptable forms of consumption. The burgeoning field of consumption studies, however, has devoted relatively little attention to these political implications.
Wars nearly always increase state debts; perhaps the most common of all postwar problems is what to do about those debts. The theoretical literature on this subject tends to distinguish between the international distributional conflicts which arise, usually described as the victors seeking to shift part of their debt burden onto the shoulders of the losers, 1 and the domestic distributional conflicts, which are frequently portrayed in terms of class. Thus Alberto Alesina has argued that ‘the choice of how to manage [a large public debt] is the result of a redistributive struggle between economic agents. . . over income and wealth distribution.’2 Following Ricardian practice, Alesina’s ‘political theory of debt’ distinguishes between three economic ‘groups’: rentiers, businessmen (profit-earners) and workers (wage earners):
For Germany more than any other country under review in this volume, the three ends of wars brought dramatic change. Each involved fundamental alterations to Germany’s internal political and social structure. Each confronted Germany with a new international environment, in particular with a new political constellation on its Eastern borders. Yet the significance of these turning points for Germany’s ability to maintain a stable democracy was vastly different. The new democracy that emerged in 1918 was contested from the start, subject to violent attack from within and gave way after 15 years to one of the most murderous regimes in human history. After 1945, in the western part of Germany at least, a much more successful democracy emerged. The Federal Republic became as indelibly associated with stability as Weimar was with crisis. The third turning point 1989, despite increasing the size of the population by a third and fundamentally altering the Federal Republic’s geopolitical situation, has until now had a much more limited impact on Germany’s political system.
Kant’s 200-year-old essay is considered in light of its enduring impact on peace studies, the creation of
the United Nations, and the implementation of a new world order based on lasting peace. Through a
detailed analysis of its content and the cross-examination of various sources, it is suggested that the repu-
tation of Perpetual Peace is not undeserved: while stressing the importance of fundamental principles ap-
plied to world affairs, it also provides realistic steps towards conflict resolution. Most importantly, the
present study attempts to show how Kant’s view of religion’s role in human life, based on his critical phi-
losophy, serves as the underlying catalyst of his apparently secular considerations.
Die Weimarer Republik stellt in vieler Hinsicht ein zivilgesellschaftliches Paradoxon dar. Denn einerseits hatte sie eine lebendige Zivilgesellschaft aufzuweisen. Eine große Zahl von Vereinen, Verbänden und Gruppen artikulierte sich in einer vielfältigen Medienöffentlichkeit; die zwanziger Jahre waren eine Zeit des kulturellen Aufbruchs und der Experimente, und ein hohes Maß an Partizipation und sozialer Offenheit der Institutionen honorierte die politische Bürgerliehkeit, unterfüttert dureh den politisch gewollten Ausgleich zwischen den verschiedenen Interessengruppen. Dies ist die eine Seite. Die andere ist, dass die politische Unzufriedenheit groß und das Systemvertrauen selbst bei den Gruppen, die die Republik trugen, gering war, dass schrumpfende Verteilungsspielräume sofort in Gruppenauseinandersetzungen mündeten, vor allem aber auch, dass die politische Gewalt nie wirklich zu einem Ende kam und die Gesellschaft nach 1930 in den Bürgerkrieg schlitterte (Bessel 1993; Reichardt 2002; Schumann 2000). Man kann diese Spannung, an die Theorie der Zivilgesellschaft gerichtet, dahingehend formulieren, dass die formale Existenz zivilgesellschaftlicher Institutionen alles andere als eine Garantie für zivilgesellschaftliche Verhältnisse darstellt. Institutionelle Demokratie bedeutet noch nicht Zivilität, ja, man könnte für den Fall der Weimarer Republik auch vermuten, dass es vielleicht gerade Demokratisierungsprozesse waren, die die Zivilgesellschaft schwächten, weil sich die Anforderungen an die Politik erhöhten.
Collective MemoryPatterns of Memory in the Interwar YearsMourning and Hatred, 1918–24Demobilizing Minds, 1925 to the Later 1930sCultural Remobilization and Engagement in World War IIReferences and Further Reading
This dissertation examines Berlin newspaper coverage of Karl Grossmann, Fritz Haarmann, Karl Denke, and Peter K??rten, four serial killers apprehended between 1921 and 1930. After discussing the development of the German press up through 1918, I examine these cases to understand what sensational reportage intended to convey/assert about the journalist and the newspaper and what internal logic drove these particular news narratives. In particular, I argue that this sensational newspaper coverage asserted that reportage itself represented a sort of expertise. These journalists claimed an expertise of location???a specialized ability to navigate and understand crime locations that would be dangerous for the average reader to visit. I further consider how these newspaper reports related to other ascendant expertise, particularly criminology and psychiatry. These newspaper narratives at times supported the claims of psychiatric and criminological experts, but they could also undermine or even challenge these expert diagnoses. I similarly examine the relationship between the German state???s juridical apparatus and reportage during these serial murder cases. Finally, I also suggest that sensational reportage of nonpolitical events was often politicized in ways consistent with the political orientation of each paper.
Mass death in World War One had significant costs on the home front, including disruption of marriage and bereavement practices. Home front novels, women's fiction written with an aim of depicting this disruption as well as supporting the war effort, provide a lens through which to examine discursive attempts to reconcile personal love and loss with nationalist imperatives to suppress grief and make willing sacrifices for the good of the nation. Authors failed to achieve a consistent, clear prescription for their readers: their attention to personal pain and the war's effects on broad sections of society made adherence to collective ideologies, including nationalism and socialism, difficult to maintain.
The article deals with the Great Economic Depression of 1929−1933. The research problem is the depression's negative consequences on the economy of the German Weimar Republic. The aim of the article is to present the main causes and consequences of the global economic and financial crises known as the Great Economic Depression and to investigate how this depression influences the economy and finance of the newly democratic postwar German state called as the Weimar Republic. The particular importance of this research subject is the fact that among all European states at the time it was exactly the Weimar Republic to be mostly affected by the global crises with terrible consequences on social and political life which finally brought Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP to the power in Germany. From the methodological point of view we used a relevant scientific literature followed by the historical sourses. We found that a global Great Economic Depression had mostly nagative economic, social and political influences to the German Weimar Republic which finally became on January 30 th , 1933 a prison of Hitler's NSDAP party in order to seek its salvation.
‘Geography costs – why does the map of Europe never stay put?’ The American poet Carl Sandburg posed that question in 1940 as the European continent was engulfed by another great conflict, the second in a generation. The course and conduct of the two world wars continue to dominate publishers’ lists but several recent volumes offer stimulating interpretations of Europe's international history during the intervening twenty years. They shed a sobering light on the cost of geography and on the challenges of statecraft, because what moved the map were not only the tectonic forces of socio-economic change but also the decision-making of political leaders.
This article explores the ways in which theories of political religion can contribute to our understanding of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, and not least to the problem of the emotional enthusiasm they undoubtedly mobilised. The article contains comparative materials drawn from Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and discusses such major thinkers as Eric Voeglin, whose 1938 essay on political religions was seminal to this approach.
In March 1920 the German Reichstag passed legislation which fundamentally altered the country's tax system. The tax package, known as the Erzberger taxreform after its chief architect, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Center Party, soughtto stabilize the chaotic financial affairs of the young Weimar Republic. Not unexpectedly, the effort provoked intense opposition from many segments of the population. Resistance to the tax plan was particularly strong among the working class, and when it was implemented in July and August, large-scale protests and strikes occurred in various parts of the country. Although an enormous literature exists on labor problems in the Weimar Republic, the tax protests of 1920 have been largely ignored.
Just before the First World War, German agricultural economists and social-welfare experts constructed a new social category – rural female youth, whose mobility provoked growing alarm. Framing rural flight in terms of gender and generation allowed experts to focus on its demographic, economic, and moral threats, and rural female youth became a target for reform. These debates presaged a wave of popular anxiety over rural female youth that expanded dramatically during the Weimar Republic. However, prewar court testimonies of runaway maids in rural Saxony suggest that some rural girls understood their mobility in terms of ‘getting ahead’, and resisted efforts to restrict their occupational, social, and spatial horizons.
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