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21. Book Reviews

Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Abstract:David Meskill, Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010) Reviewed by Gregory Baldi;Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) Reviewed by John Bendix;Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009) Reviewed by Suzanna M. Crage;Derek Hastings, Catholicism the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen;Review of Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Reviewed by Hope M. Harrison;Wolfgang Scholz, The Social Budget of Germany: Keeping the Welfare State in Perspective (Berlin: edition sigma, 2009) Reviewed by John Bendix;Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, eds., Berlin. Divided City, 1945-1989(New York: Berghahn Books, 2010) Reviewed by Helge F. Jani;Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010) Reviewed by Larson Powell
Political Geography:
New York and Germany

22. Intersectionality and the Substantive Representation of Migrant Interests in Germany

Author:
Barbara Donovan
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The paper uses the concept of intersectionality to examine the experiences of politicians with migrant backgrounds in Germany. The last decade has seen a significant increase in the number of persons with migrant backgrounds integrating into political parties and winning elections to both federal and regional legislatures. Do the migrant experiences of these persons shape their politics? Theories of substantive representation have suggested that gender shapes representation. What about the racial and ethnic identities that often coexist with immigrant status? Moreover, how do those identities and experiences interact with the prerogatives of party, partisanship, and regional representation? This study uses data gathered from both the federal and regional level to explore and explain the role of migrant-related concerns in the political behavior and articulated preferences of politicians with migrant background in Germany. It further explores how these relate to gender, careers, representational roles, and partisan identification. The article concludes that a consideration of the interaction of migrant identity with other factors allows us to see multiple dimensions of representation in Germany today.
Political Geography:
Germany

23. Party Formation and Dilemmas of Opportunity Structure: Freie Wähler in the German Political System

Author:
Helga A. Welsh
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The Freie Wähler (free voters, FW) offer the rare chance to analyze parties in the making. Their long-time anchoring in local elections, centrist, middle-class political orientation, and bifurcated organizational structure distinguish them from other new political parties that aspire to participate in Land (state), national and European elections. Against the backdrop of FW success in Bavaria, where they received 10.2 percent of the vote in 2008, this article explores the FW expansion to the state level but not their national aspirations. In contrast to most studies that emphasize opportunity structures that work in favor of new political actors, this article highlights their dialectical nature. For example, the FW self-image is based on their difference from political parties, but the rules of the game push them to the status of "almost-party" at the local level and parties at the Land level. Their local roots are a source of legitimacy, but when they reach beyond, divisions among members and voters hold back their electoral fortunes. Independence and issue orientation are appealing to some voters but hamper the establishment of a clear identity and effective campaigning in state elections. Success for FW candidates is linked to the weakness of the dominant parties in the conservative camp. Spatial-temporal conditions are significant in considering the future of the FW at the Land level.
Political Geography:
Europe and Germany

24. "Keep the Home Fires Burning": Fairy Tale Heroes and Heroines in an East German Heimat

Author:
Sonja Fritzsche
Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The article argues that the films Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart, 1950) and Der Teufel von Mühlenberg (The Devil of Mill Mountain, 1955) functioned in two ways-as fairy tales and also as new Heimat or “homeland' tale. Besides Wolfgang Staudte's The Story of Little Mook, these two films were the only two live action fairy tale films that appeared before East Germany's DEFA made its first Grimm feature adaptation in 1956, The Brave Little Tailor. Yet, unlike the Grimm-based films that take place in a generic “forest,“ these first two films take place explicitly in the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains, two locations synonymous with the beauty and timeless nature of past notions of German Heimat. The two films also engaged with the growing monetary and symbolic success of the West's postwar Heimatfilme or homeland films. The article focuses on how The Cold Heart and Mill Mountain contributed to the rearticulation of the emerging Heimat discourse in the early German Democratic Republic, with a particular focus on gender.
Political Geography:
Germany

25. Book Reviews

Publication Date:
12-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Abstract: William Collins Donahue, Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's "Nazi" Novels and Their Films(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Reviewed by Margaret McCarthyTheodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany, edited, translated, and introduced by Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)Reviewed by Gregory R. Smulewicz-ZuckerFriedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno, and Colleagues, Group Experiment and other Writings: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, edited and translated by Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).Reviewed by Jan BoestenGabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, eds. Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012).Reviewed by Sabine von MeringChristopher J. Fischer, Alsace to the Alsatians? Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939(New York: Berghahn Books, 2010)Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder
Political Geography:
New York, Germany, and Austria

26. The "Going" of the Third Reich: Recivilizing Germans through Political Education

Author:
Dieter K. Buse
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Historians and political sciences have begun to discuss how and when postwar Germany overcame its authoritarian past and reestablished democracy and a tolerant civil society. This article argues that the national and regional Offices for Political Education have contributed significantly to the recivilizing process. The article provides the first preliminary academic attempt to outline the offices' historical background, their changing institutional structure, and their place in the civic education context since the mid 1950s. A series of case studies examine the historical literature disseminated by specific offices to illustrate the process of overcoming a problematic past and constructing new identities. In turn, the historical role models promoted by the offices, the manner in which federalism was presented, the timing of and fashion in which the Holocaust became a significant theme and the way in which regional identities were understood and fostered, are examined. These cases illustrate how historical information was employed, at first in fairly simple and propagandistic fashion, but always to inculcate democratic and civil norms. The question of the impact of the offices' work is left open, since research on reception has yet to be undertaken, but some evidence about their important contributions to reshaping German values is provided.
Topic:
Democratization, Education, and Government
Political Geography:
Germany

27. "Subaltern Nationalism" and the West Berlin Anti-Authoritarians

Author:
Jennifer Ruth Hosek
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
The West Berlin anti-authoritarians around Rudi Dutschke employed a notion of subaltern nationalism inspired by independence struggles in the global South and particularly by post 1959 Cuba to legitimate their loosely understood plans to recreate West Berlin as a revolutionary island. Responding to Che Guevara's call for many Vietnams, they imagined this Northern metropolis as a Focus spreading socialism of the third way throughout Europe, a conception that united their local and global aims. In focusing on their interpretation of societal changes and structures in Cuba, the anti-authoritarians deemphasized these plans' potential for violence. As a study of West German leftists in transnational context, this article suggests the limitations of confining analyses of their projects within national or Northern paradigms. As a study of the influence of the global South on the North in a non-(post)colonial situation, it suggests that such influence is greater than has heretofore been understood.
Topic:
Nationalism and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, Cuba, Island, and Berlin

28. Access to Secret Police Files, Justice, and Vetting in East Germany since 1989

Author:
Gary Bruce
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
In order to situate the current debate on whether the Federal Commission for the Files of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (the Stasi Archive) should cease to be an autonomous institution in the larger context, this article traces the history of the Stasi Archive and of the Stasi Files Law since 1989. Key to understanding the Stasi Archive and access to its files is the 1989 revolution which saw demonstrators demand access to information gathered by the secret police. Although the research quasimonopoly that the Stasi Archive enjoys would be ended by integration into the federal archives, file access for Stasi victims—the raison d'être of the archive—would be jeopardized. Calls for the dismantling of the Stasi archive are, therefore, premature. Some criticism can be directed at the vetting and trial process in East Germany since 1989, but it is important to remember that the Stasi Archive acted only in a support capacity for those activities.
Topic:
Security, Communism, Corruption, and Law
Political Geography:
Germany

29. Migration and Cultural Interaction across the Centuries: German History in a European Perspective

Author:
Dirk Hoerder
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
Once upon a time, German studies seemed to be an easy field to define. Like fairytales, the resulting stories were addressed to a faithful audience—but here, an audience of adults, true believers in the nation and nation state. Today, by contrast, we understand that defining area studies is, in fact, a highly complex task involving overlapping regions and social spaces, and analyses of borderlands, interpenetrations, and métissage, as well as of processual structures and structured processes. Even geographies have become “processual.” The origins of area studies are often traced to the U.S., the hegemon in the Atlantic world's academe, and the emergence of American studies in the 1930s. Nevertheless, something like area studies also emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century, juxtaposing 1) a country and its colonies; and 2) a country and its neighbors. The former were inferior societies, the latter competitors in world markets and, repeatedly, enemies in war. Area studies—after a preceding period of knowledge acquisition as reflected in early mapmaking— became colonial studies, competitor state studies, enemy state studies—in each case transnational, transterritorial, and transcultural. Unable to deal with the concept of “trans,” i.e., with fuzzy borders and shifting categories and geographies, scholars in each bordered country set their own society, their Self, as the “yardstick.” The Other, the delimited opposite, was meant as a background foil before which their respective own nation was to appear as the most advanced and to which—knowledge and interest are inextricably linked—the profits from worldwide trade and the spoils from colonial acquisitions were naturally due (Folien- or Spiegeltheorie). Since then, motivations for country studies have become more complex but they basically are framed still by bordered territories, “national culture,” national consciousness or identity, nation-state policies, and international relations. Once the ideology of “nation” is abandoned, the blindfold removed so to say, it appears that German-language people may be studied in America or Russia—or Africans, Poles, and Turks in the German-language societies (plural!).
Topic:
Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, America, Europe, Turkey, and Germany

30. New Places, New Identities: The (Ever) Changing Concept of Heimat

Author:
Uta Larkey
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
German Politics and Society
Institution:
German Politics and Society Journal
Abstract:
This article analyzes contrasting notions of Heimat and Fremde, as explored cinematographically by three contemporary German filmmakers. The spatial aspect of Heimat, traditionally connected to a particular region or even neighborhood denotes the sense of belonging, whereas the temporal aspect—often associated with childhood and youth—carries the sense of longing. In the second half of the twentieth century, the concept has shifted to include identity, reflection and self-reflection, the loss of Heimat, and even multiple Heimaten. The article argues further that the notions of Heimat and Fremde are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. Peter Lilienthal's film Ein Fremder concludes that in parts of German society the binary opposites of Heimat and Fremde are still intact. On the other hand, Peter Patzak in Adeus und Goodbye shows how Heimat and Fremde are mutually dependent and include a search for identity and individuality. In Michael Gutmann's travelogue-documentary, Familienreise, the protagonists experience aspects of Fremde and Heimatlosigkeit without ever finding Heimat.
Topic:
Migration
Political Geography:
Germany