You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This edited collection explores the perceptions and memories of parliamentarianism across Europe, examining the complex ideal of parliament since 1800. Parliament has become the key institution in modern democracy, and the chapters present the evolution of the ideal of parliamentary representation and government, and discuss the reception and value of parliament as an institution. It is considered both as a guiding concept, a Leitidee, as well as an ideal, an Idealtypus. The volume is split into three sections. The establishment of parliament in the nineteenth century and the transfer of parliamentary ideals, models and practices are described in the first section, based on the British and F...
“Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time.” —Samuel Moyn “Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history.” —The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Hau...
When confronted by a range of violent actions perpetrated by lone individuals, contemporary society exhibits a constant tendency to react in terms of helpless, even perplexed horror. Seeking explanations for the apparently inexplicable, commentators often hurry to declare the perpetrators as “evil”. This question is not restricted to individuals: history has repeatedly demonstrated how groups and even entire nations can embark on a criminal plan united by the conviction that they were fighting for a good and just cause. Which circumstances occasioned such actions? What was their motivation? Applying a number of historical, scientific and social-scientific approaches to this question, this study produces an integrative portrait of the reasons for human behavior and advances a number of different interpretations for their genesis. The book makes clear the extent to which we live in socially-constructed realities in which we cling for dear life to a range of conceptions and beliefs which can all too easily fall apart in situations of crisis.
A revisionist account of interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community that upends histories of Jewish agency to rediscover reckonings with nationalismÕs pathologies, diasporaÕs fragility, ZionismÕs promises, and the necessity of choice. What did the future hold for interwar EuropeÕs largest Jewish community, the font of global Jewish hopes? When intrepid analysts asked these questions on the cusp of the 1930s, they discovered a Polish Jewry reckoning with Òno tomorrow.Ó Assailed by antisemitism and witnessing liberalismÕs collapse, some Polish Jews looked past progressive hopes or religious certainties to investigate what the nation-state was becoming, what powers minority communities ...
After the Nazi seizure of power on January 30, 1933, over 250 German rabbis, rabbinical scholars, and students for the rabbinate fled to the United States. The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate follows their lives and careers over decades in America. Although culturally uprooted, the group's professional lives and intellectual leadership, particularly those of the younger members of this group, left a considerable mark intellectually, socially, and theologically on American Judaism and on American Jewish congregational and organizational life in the postwar world. Meticulously researched and representing the only systematic analysis of prosopographical data in a digital humanities database, The Last Generation of the German Rabbinate reveals the trials of those who had lost so much and celebrates the legacy they made for themselves in America.
The third issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) devotes a thematic section to experimental spaces for knowledge production. The articles in this section investigate the role of experimental environments as sites for knowledge production during the long nineteenth century, thereby extending the scope beyond the confines of traditional academic institutions such as academies, laboratories, and universities. By focusing on intentional communities, colonial gardens, agricultural colonies, and artistic colonies as experimental spaces, the authors investigate the intertwined social, natural, and aesthetic aspects of environments. An overarching aim is to develop a distinct pe...
The contributions in Civilizing Missions in the Twentieth Century discuss how top-down interventions to “improve” societies were justified in terms such as nation building, social engineering, humanitarianism, modernization or the spread of democracy.
World War I marks a huge break in Central European Jewish history. Not only had the violent wartime events destroyed Jewish life and especially the living space of Eastern European Jews, but the impacts of war, the geopolitical change and a radicalization of anti-Semitism also led to a crisis of Jewish identity. Furthermore, during the process of national self-discovery and the establishing of new states the societal position of the Jews and their relationship to the state had to be redefined. These partially violent processes, which were always accompanied by anti-Semitism, evoked Jewish and Gentile debates, in which questions about Jewish loyalty to the old and/or new states as well as concepts of Jewish identity under the new political circumstances were negotiated. This volume collects articles dealing with these Jewish and gentile debates about military service and war memory in Central Europe.