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The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic
No full textThe Weimar Republic (1918–33) was a pivotal period of German and European history and a laboratory of modernity. This handbook is a comprehensive reference book presenting the key findings of recent research on Weimar Germany in the most concise and accessible way. Weimar is often presented as a warning from history, and as such invoked time and time again when challenges of democratic governance are debated. But the chapters of the Handbook demonstrate that Weimar’s history is more than just the lead-up to the Third Reich or a crisis-ridden democracy: It was a period of bold experimentation in politics, society, and culture. Written by an international team of leading experts, the Handbook’s thirty-three chapters provide cutting-edge synthesis of all key topics in the history of Germany’s first democracy, covering social, political, economic, and cultural history with a focus on the historical openness of the period. The Handbook also includes a section with chronological chapters on key developments in the political sphere. Each of the chapters can be read on its own. In addition to established topics, the book includes crucial areas of Weimar history that are often forgotten. These cover the relevance of religion, the strength of pro-republican groups, federalism and nationalism, the significance of rural communities and the agricultural sector, as well as the importance of mass and visual cultures for Weimar contemporaries. Navigating Weimar Germany’s complex and contradictory history is made easier by the sound compass this Handbook provides to all readers interested in this turbulent period.</p
Introduction
No full textThe introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic identifies key trends in the historiography on this period of German history and suggests that rather than using ‘Weimar’ as a cipher for the current problems of parliamentary democracies in the West, historians should focus on strategies to historicise the specific predicament of the first German democracy and the expectations and experiences of its citizens at the time. The first section charts the arguments and narratives of landmark general histories of the era by West German historians that were published during the 1980s and early 1990s. The second section discusses key historiographical trends since the 1990s, when historians reformulated the notion of a ‘crisis’ of the republic and applied different approaches to the Weimar Republic that offer a more open interpretation of Weimar's society and political processes. A final brief section explains the remit, structure, and selection criteria of this handbook. Ultimately, the formation of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 was not a predetermined, but a contingent outcome, with alternatives open right up to the last minute on 30 January 1933, yet historians need to continue to account for the developments that led to this moment.</p
Understanding the imaginary war: Culture, thought and nuclear conflict, 1945-90
No full textThis collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable. The book will be required reading for everyone who wants to understand the cultural dynamics of the Cold War through the angle of its core ingredient, nuclear weapons
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