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Living on the frontline of the Cold War, young people in East Germany were subject to a number of competing influences: the culture of their parents, the new official culture taught in schools, and new youth cultures. Fenemore presents an account of what it was like in the 1950s and 1960s.
In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany. Determining that by age ten children’s minds could be turned from play to politics, the regime inducted nearly all German juveniles between the ages of ten and eighteen into its state-run organization. The result was a potent tool for bending young minds and hearts to the will of Adolf Hitler. Baldur von Schirach headed a strict chain of command whose goal was to shift the adolescents’ sense of obedience from home and school to the racially defined Volk and the Third Reich. Luring bo...
Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany explores the world of the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the female section within the Hitler Youth that included almost all German girls aged 10 to 14. The BDM is often enveloped in myths; German girls were brought up to be the compliant handmaidens of National Socialism, their mental horizon restricted to the "three Ks" of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church). Dagmar Reese, however, depicts another picture of life in the BDM. She explores how and in what way the National Socialists were successful in linking up with the interests of contemporary girls and young women and providing them a social life of their own. The girls in the BDM found ...
"This significant contribution to German history pioneers a conceptually sophisticated approach to German-German relations. Poiger has much to say about the construction of both gender norms and masculine and feminine identities, and she has valuable insights into the role that notions of race played in defining and reformulating those identities and prescriptive behaviors in the German context. The book will become a 'must read' for German historians."—Heide Fehrenbach, author of Cinema in Democratizing Germany "Poiger breaks new ground in this history of the postwar Germanies. The book will serve as a model for all future studies of comparative German-German history."—Robert G. Moeller, author of Protecting Motherhood "Jazz, Rock, and Rebels exemplifies the exciting work currently emerging out of transnational analyses. [A] well-written and well-argued study."—Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans
Who remembers, and how? Debates about the role of memory as history – and of literature as memory – have increasingly come to fascinate those interested in how we look at our pasts as a means for understanding the present. Women without a Past? brings together for the first time autobiographies written by seven women who experienced Nazism from different perspectives: Elfriede Brüning, Hilde Huppert, Greta Kuckhoff, Elisabeth Langgässer, Melita Maschmann, Inge Scholl, and Grete Weil. Their autobiographies provoke diverse and challenging answers to questions about who remembers what, when, where, how and on behalf of whom. This book foregrounds the positive political potential of re-reading well-known texts and seeking out reasons why others have been marginalized. It examines autobiography as a form of writing at the very centre of contemporary debates on the ‘self’, ‘truth’ and ‘history’. Women without a Past? offers new insights into the politics of memory and autobiography, and will be of particular interest to researchers and students engaging with women’s writing and memories of Nazism.
Lamberti (history, Middlebury College) examines the culture wars that took place in 1920s and 1930s Germany over issues in education. She describes how innovative educators attempted to reform the stratified educational system to foster democracy and social justice. She also shows the relationship between the traditionalists' opposition to school reform and the attraction of certain sections of the teaching profession to the Nazi movement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Tracing teachers' experiences in the Third Reich and East Germany, Charles Lansing analyzes developments in education of crucial importance to both dictatorships. Lansing uses the town of Brandenburg an der Havel as a case study to examine ideological reeducation projects requiring the full mobilization of the schools and the active participation of a transformed teaching staff. Although lesson plans were easily changed, skilled teachers were neither quickly made nor easily substituted. The men and women charged in the postwar era with educating a new “antifascist” generation were, to a surprising degree, the same individuals who had worked to “Nazify” pupils in the Third Reich. But significant discontinuities existed as well, especially regarding the teachers' professional self-understanding and attitudes toward the state-sanctioned teachers' union. The mixture of continuities and discontinuities helped to stabilize the early GDR as it faced its first major crisis in the uprising of June 17, 1953. This uniquely comparative work sheds new light on an essential story as it reconceptualizes the traditional periodization of postwar German and European history.
Presents a fascinating account of the emotional politics and practices in the West German alternative left.
This study comprises an analysis of public spheres in National Socialist Germany. It investigates where and under what circumstances resistance to Hitler's regime was possible. The author focuses on the space of the crypto-public - defined as a politicized private sphere - as a potential realm for anti-state activism. Based on the activities of four organizations operating in Germany between 1933 and 1944 - the Jewish Cultural Association Berlin, the Kreisau Circle, the White Rose, and the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organization - she analyzes how this social locus functioned to foster resistance to National Socialism. She examines the artifacts of these groups - leaflets, pamphlets, politico-economic treatises, and theater performances - in order to establish models of crypto-public spaces and evaluate their possibilities and limitations as sites of resistance.
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