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Degenerate Spaces: The Coordination of Space in Nazi Germany
Get PDFThis dissertation examines how Nazi officials, bureaucrats, city planners, architects, and ordinary Germans envisioned and redesigned space (from entire cityscapes down to specific neighborhoods, streets, and buildings) to fit their worldviews between 1933 and 1945. I term this process the “coordination of space” and draw from human geography and urban theory to write a cultural history of space and a social history of spatial practices in Nazi Germany. Nazi interactions with space were directly influenced by the belief that Jews had “infected” Germany in the modern era and that “Judeo-Bolshevism” represented an existential threat to the German nation. Therefore, the regime confiscated, destroyed, or repurposed sites associated with political bolshevism and cultural bolshevism. This destruction was followed by active construction which refashioned cityscapes to physically and symbolically align with Nazi ideology. In the public sphere, Nazi ideology proved unyielding. Authorities demanded visible conformity from “Volksgenossen” during public rituals and ceremonies.Elsewhere, Nazi ideology was surprisingly flexible in practice. Instead of being physically altered, some spaces were rhetorically coordinated, or reexplained, to align with Nazi ideology. This was true in the case of modern architecture, which had a long afterlife in the Third Reich. Furthermore, the semipublic sphere evinced plasticity as well. “Racially fit” nonconformists (such as Communists, Socialists, and homosexuals) were able to maintain access to semipublic spaces, such as bars and cafes, if they outwardly conformed in the public sphere. The inclusion of these groups in the national community was increasingly predicated on the exclusion of German Jews. Indeed, only in the case of German Jews was Nazi ideology rigid at all times. In the end, Nazi efforts to coordinate and “Germanize” spaces could only be realized via the wholesale exclusion and eradication of Jews from Germany. In short, I maintain that Nazism should be understood as a spatial project that sought to make German judenrein (clean of Jews). These practiced methods of cleansing spaces were important antecedents to similar, more systematic measures, unleashed on Central and Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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Preaching to Nazi Germany: The Confessing Church on National Socialism, the Jews, and the Question of Opposition
Get PDFThis dissertation examines sermons delivered by Confessing Church pastors in the Nazi dictatorship. The approach of most historians has focused on the history of the Christian institutions, its leaders, and its persecution by the Nazi regime, leaving the most elemental task of the pastor—that is, preaching—largely unexamined. The question left unaddressed is how well did Confessing pastors fare in articulating their views of the Nazi regime and the persecution of the Jews through their sermons? To answer this question, I analyzed 910 sermons by Confessing Church pastors, all delivered or disseminated between 1933 and the end of World War II in Europe. I argue that new trends in preaching popular among Confessing Church pastors discouraged deviation from the biblical text in sermons, and thus one result was few criticisms concerning German politics and society. Nevertheless, a minority of pastors criticized the Nazi regime and its leaders for their racial ideology and claims of “Aryan” superiority, and also for unjust persecutions against Christians. They condemned Nazism as a morally corrupt ideology in contradiction to Christianity. Further, I argue that these sermons provide mixed messages about Jews and Judaism. While on the one hand, the sermons express admiration for Judaism as a foundation for Christianity and Jews as spiritual cousins; on the other hand, the sermons express religious prejudice in the form of anti-Judaic tropes that corroborated the Nazi ideology that portrayed Jews and Judaism as inferior. In the final section of the dissertation I explore the ministries of German pastors of Jewish descent and argue that they not only experienced persecution from the Nazi state, but also from their own congregations. Nevertheless, the themes of their sermons are consistent with those found in those of their colleagues. My research demonstrates that the German churches were in fact places to offer criticism of the Nazi regime, which was often veiled through biblical imagery and metaphor. Yet the messages reveal criticism from a position of obedience and subservience to the state, and at the same time the expose a confused ambiguity about the Jews and Judaism and their relation to Christians in Nazi Germany
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The People's Drink: Beer, Bavaria, and the Remaking of Germany, 1933-1987
Get PDFFew commodities enjoy the global prestige of German, and especially Bavarian beer. Enshrined in the mythology of the 1516 Beer Purity Law, beer is unique even among other iconic German commodities like high performance automobiles for its apparent timelessness, its simultaneous simplicity and sophistication, and its ability to draw the attention of tourists, aspiring craftsmen, and businessmen the world over. People in German-speaking Europe have been drinking beer of one variety or another for hundreds, and indeed thousands of years. From the 1930s to the 1980s, however, beer became far more than a consumption habit. This dissertation investigates many efforts—within and beyond Germany—to define both the people and what qualifies as their drink. “The People’s Drink” demonstrates how, in the tumultuous mid-twentieth century, beer became a cultural, political, and economic site of contesting, defining, legislating, embodying, performing, and representing the German nation.Drawing on archival sources from ten archives in three countries, as well as trade journals, magazines, advertisements, and newspapers from around the world, what follows is a commodity history that weaves together National Socialism, the allied occupation, the West German Federal Republic, the Cold War, international trade, European integration, and the history of capitalism before and after “the boom.” While each chapter builds on specific scholarly literatures, the dissertation as a whole employs commodity history to speak to two main bodies of scholarship in modern German and European history. First, the contested history of people’s drink spans a number of conventional periodizations, revealing not a “fragmented” or “shattered past,” but one characterized by remarkable adaptability and malleability in spite of—and often because of—the dramatic social and political shifts of German history. Second, following beer from the local to the regional, national, European, and global, this dissertation features a sliding geographical scale in a single story. The aspirations and limits of the Nazi dictatorship, the politics of scarcity and agriculture, the process of European integration, and even the global stereotype of the beer drinking German are part of the same story of contesting and defining Germany and Germanness in the mid-twentieth century
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The Bundesgrenzschutz: Re-civilizing Security in Postwar West Germany, 1950-1977
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates West Germany’s Federal Border Police, the Bundesgrenzschutz, and seeks to connect its development to the broader questions surrounding democratization. Why did the democratic government re-establish and sustain a militarized national police force? Existing scholarship connects the return of militarized policing to Cold War politics and rearmament. But these findings fail to explain why the Bundesgrenzschutz endured after the Federal Republic established a new army. As a contribution to the topic, I explore the development of this force from its foundation into the 1970s when it was integrated into the state’s civilian law enforcement infrastructure. This case study of the Bundesgrenzschutz sheds new light on important insights into the larger process of West Germany’s postwar democratization; it shows how security was re-civilized in the aftermath of the Nazi dictatorship.In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that the federal government used rearmament to justify the force, but intended to maintain it even after establishing a new army. It was the government’s only symbolic instrument of coercive force since the army remained under the supranational control of NATO. Border policemen rather than soldiers contained minor disturbances at the demarcation line to prevent them from triggering larger conflicts. In the second part, I examine how the Interior Ministry recruited, hired, and trained border policemen. Drawing upon research in gender history, I argue that the Bundesgrenzschutz was used to promote conservative ideals of masculinity in West Germany’s young men. Redefining masculinity was one way that Germans attempted to make sense of the Nazi past while facing the new cultural challenges of Americanization.Finally, I focus on the ongoing struggle between continuity and change as the organization underwent a series of reforms that transformed it into a modern civilian law enforcement agency. During the 1960s, for example, border policemen still imagined and prepared for a guerilla war against the East. It took the crisis of domestic terrorism in the 1970s to bring the organization into the state’s professional internal security forces
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