Product Description
Essential to current discussions of gender and the working class in Germany
... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
While welfare has been subject to pronounced criticism throughout the twentieth century, social insurance has consistently enjoyed the overwhelming support of European policy makers and citizens. This volume argues that the emergence of social insurance represents a paradigmatic shift in modern understandings of health, work, political participation, and government. By institutionalizing compensation, social insurance transformed it into a right that the employed population quickly came to assume.
Theoretically informed and based on intensive archival research on disability insurance records, most of which have never been used by historians, the book considers how social science and political philosophy combined to give shape to the idea of a "social" insurance in the nineteenth century; the process by which social insurance gave birth to modern notions of "disability" and "rehabilitation"; and the early-twentieth-century development of political action groups for the disabled.
Most earlier histories of German social insurance have been legislative histories that stressed the system's coercive features and functions. Making Security Social, by contrast, emphasizes the administrative practices of everyday life, the experience of consumers, and the ability of workers not only to resist, but to transform, social insurance bureaucracy and political debate. It thus demonstrates that social insurance was pivotal in establishing a general attitude of demand, claim, and entitlement as the primary link between the modern state and those it governed.
In addition to historians of Germany, Making Security Social will attract researchers across disciplines who are concerned with public policy, disability studies, and public health.
Greg Eghigian is Associate Professor of History, Penn State University.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Insightful look at the implementation of social insurance
Much discussion about the birth of social insurance in Germany deals with the politics of it.This book discusses the actual implementation.The original Bismarkian social insurance system, while it clearly laid the groundwork for modern social insurance, differs greatly from contemporary programs, with their emphasis on age qualification.There was less focus on age per se and more on inability to work (although it seems the elderly were generally able to qualify for by meeting the definition of invalidity).One must also marvel at the elaborate screening bureacracy that was created to certify a potential beneficiary's worthiness.For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts and pratical history of early social insurance programs, this is a great book. ... Read more

Product Description
A powerful exploration of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifested itself in daily life in 19th and early 20th century Germany.
... Read more

Product Description
Whereas a large body of scholarly literature exists on German antisemitism in general, pre-Nazi histories of violence against Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been widely neglected. This coherent and well-focused collection of essays is the first comprehensive work in any language dealing with antisemitic pogroms in modern German history from the Hep Hep riots of 1819 to the Reichskristallnacht.
In the Western mind, outbursts of collective violence against Jews have been largely identified with Tzarist Russia and the medieval crusade massacres. However, by narrating pogroms as archaic, historians have overlooked their significance to the development of modern antisemitism in Germany and Europe as well as the reasons for its continued presence in the contemporary world. The evidence presented in this volume suggests that acts of exclusionary violence were not dead-end streets of futile protest. Rather, they were rehearsals for new kinds of destruction.
The integration of various perspectives and the close cooperation of scholars from different disciplines is a major achievement of this volume, which will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, academics and the general reader in a variety of disciplines, including German studies, Jewish studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, ethnic relations, history, and the social sciences in general.
Christhard Hoffmann is Associate Professor of Modern European History, University of Bergen, Norway. Werner Bergmann is Professor of Research on Antisemitism, Technical University, Berlin, Germany. Helmut W. Smith is Associate Professor of History, Vanderbilt University.
... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

high rate of reading
Reuveni gives us an account of Weimar Germany. Describing the reading experiences that were common. Showing that there was a consistent "thirst for education", as remarked by the sociologist Adolf Weber in 1908 of both the urban middle class and the urban working class. Driven in part through the universal literacy efforts promoted by the central government since Bismarck.

The budget for reading was considerable, across the social and economic spectrum. Due to various causes. Including the rise of a leisure culture in the 1920s, and the reduction in the work week. Which gave more time for reading activities.

There was also a big commercialisation in reading. Notably at railway stations. Light reading material became easily available there for passengers. Something familiar to a modern reader waiting at an airport, or even in a supermarket. Book clubs also arose in the 1920s, that made available books at reduced prices, compared to regular bookstores. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of essays explores the role of the senses in late medieval devotional culture and asks how the Reformation changed attitudes to the sensual. It also examines the nature of popular culture and the way the Reformation was institutionalized. ... Read more

Product Description
Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way of burying shame and animosity that might otherwise make social contact impossible. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description

Product Description
The East German uprising of 1989 was not a male revolution. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of the fall of East Germany, compared to that of other East European nations, was the presence of women demanding a political role in the newly emerging social order. As one slogan proclaimed, "Without Women There Is No State."
Yet despite the determination of these women--and of West German feminist groups--to help shape the future of the German state, their influence remained, in the end, very limited. In Triumph of the Fatherland, political scientist Brigitte Young draws on in-depth interviews, archival sources, newspapers, and her own observations from 1989 to 1991 to study the goals, strategies, and eventual fate of the German women's movements during this tumultuous period.
Young focuses on the relationship between the state and its citizenry, outlining the mobilization of women in four states: the East German and West German states before unification; the "stateless state" in East Germany after the collapse of the Wall, and the West German state during unification. Ultimately she finds that the political opportunity structures opened during the "stateless state" closed again with unification, resulting in what Young calls "double gender marginalization."
Brigitte Young is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Otto-Suhr-Institute, Free University Berlin, Germany.
... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Exclusive Revolutionaries traces the development of German liberal and later nationalist political culture in imperial Austria from the revolutions of 1848 to the outbreak of World War I. Drawing on archival research from several regions of the former Habsburg Monarchy, Pieter M. Judson provides a clear, chronological political narrative that demonstrates the continuing influence of liberal ideas and values well after the defeat of liberal political parties.
In the mid-1800s, Judson argues, German liberal activists built an effective political movement whose ideology was rooted in its members' social experience in voluntary associations. The liberals were committed to the creation of a market economy based on personal property rights, to a society based on the values of individual self-improvement and personal respectability, and to a fundamental distinction between active and passive citizenship. They were determined to achieve a harmonious community of free peoples, in which personal enlightenment would bring an end to the divisive influence of localism, ethnicity, religion, and feudal social hierarchy.
Yet after 1880, as newer, more radical mass political movements threatened their political fortunes, the liberals forged a German nationalist politics based increasingly on ethnic identity. Their emphasis on national identity became a way for former liberals to hold together an increasingly diverse coalition of German speakers who had little in common outside of their shared language. Only "Germanness" bridged the dangerous gulf between social classes. This nationalism helped the liberals to compete for power in the multinational, multicultural Austrian Empire down to 1914, but it left a legacy of nationalist extremism and tolerance of anti-Semitism that continues to influence political cultures in the former lands of the Habsburg Monarchy today.
Exclusive Revolutionaries will interest social and cultural historians of nineteenth-century Europe, and of Germany and Central Europe in particular.
Pieter M. Judson is Associate Professor of History, Swarthmore College.
... Read more

Product Description
Does the new, more powerful Germany pose a threat to its neighbors? Does the new German Problem resemble the old? The German Problem Transformed addresses these questions fifty years after the founding of the Federal Republic and ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Many observers have underscored the reemergence of Germany as Europe's central power. After four decades of division, they contend, Germany is once again fully sovereign; without the strictures of bipolarity, its leaders are free to define and pursue national interests in East and West. From this perspective, the reunified Germany faces challenges not unlike those of its unified predecessor a century earlier.
The German Problem Transformed rejects this formulation. Thomas Banchoff acknowledges post-reunification challenges, but argues that postwar changes, not prewar analogies, best illuminate them. The book explains the transformation of German foreign policy through a structured analysis of four critical postwar junctures: the cold war of the 1950s, the détente of the 1960s and 1970s, the new cold war of the early 1980s, and the post-cold war 1990s. Each chapter examines the interaction of four factors--international structure and institutions, foreign policy ideas, and domestic politics--in driving the direction of German foreign policy at a key turning point.
This book will be of interest to scholars and students of German history, German politics, and European international relations, as well as policymakers and the interested public.
Thomas Banchoff is Assistant Professor of Government, Georgetown University.
... Read more

Product Description
During the hundred years examined in this volume, ordinary Germans discovered a new and powerful attachment to the nation. But throughout this period, national loyalties competed with preexisting loyalties to the locality and the region. The resulting tension made it difficult for Germans to assign clear priorities to one kind of symbolic attachment over another.
Focusing on the east German state of Saxony, the contributors to this volume refuse easy resolution of that tension, seeking instead to illustrate how local, regional, and national cultures commingled, diverged, and influenced each other over time. By considering both the erosion and the persistence of traditional identities and regional boundaries, these essays help to restore an appreciation of regional "ways of seeing," suggesting they really did matter--in their own right, and for the nation as a whole.
Topics considered include the expansion of a German reading public, Jewish emancipation, the formation of socio-moral milieus, working-class leisure, the expansion of the public sphere, the rise of consumer co-operatives, gendered attempts to fashion the "new" liberal man, and degradation rituals in the 1920s. Presenting to English-reading audiences the fruits of cutting-edge research conducted in Saxon archives since 1989, the contributors offer innovative ways to reassess the larger sweep of German history.
This book serves as a how-to guide for the study of any region in history. Beyond its primary appeal to European historians, it will also speak to students and scholars in comparative politics and sociology.
James Retallack is Professor of History, University of Toronto.
... Read more

Product Description
Examining the ways in which politics and ideology stimulate and shape changes in human science, this book focuses on the cultural sciences in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany.The book argues that many of the most important theoretical directions in German cultural science had their origins in a process by which a general pattern of social scientific thinking, one that was closely connected to political liberalism and dominant in Germany (and elsewhere) before the mid-nineteenth century, fragmented in the face of the political troubles of German liberalism after that time. Some liberal social scientists who wanted to repair both liberalism and the liberal theoretical pattern, and others who wanted to replace them with something more conservative, turned to the concept of culture as the focus of their intellectual endeavors.Later generations of intellectuals repeated the process, motivated in large part by the experiences of liberalism as a political movement in the German Empire.Within this framework, the book discusses the formation of diffusionism in German anthropology, Friedrich Ratzel's theory of Lebensraum, folk psychology, historical economics, and cultural history.It also relates these developments to German imperialism, the rise of radical nationalism, and the upheaval in German social science at the turn of the century. ... Read more

Product Description
Given the militarism of the Empire and Nazi Germany, why did postwar West Germany experience massive waves of peace protest in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s? How have postwar peace movements shaped German political culture? Will the cultural norms that frown on the use of military force constrain foreign policy in the new, unified, Germany? In Paradoxes of Peace, Alice Holmes Cooper traces the evolution of peace movements in West Germany (1945-90) and in united Germany since 1990. Cooper examines the domestic and international constellations that gave rise to the peace movements, the sources of their multi-faceted ideologies and participants, and their organizational structures and strategies. The author then investigates the peace movement's response to the challenges of the post-Cold War world.
Whereas previous work on German peace movements has concentrated on one period of mobilization or on elite security-policy debates, this comprehensive study examines all phases of mobilization since 1945, taking into account the full spectrum of actors, movement organization and strategy, and the broad political, social, and economic environments spawning peace protest. Arguing that theories of resource mobilization, changes in values, and crises of modernity are insufficient to explain peace movements, Paradoxes of Peace tailors a "political process" approach to postwar German movements. It investigates the political opportunities--the changing domestic and international constellation--which most favored peace mobilization since 1945. It examines the process through which the peace movement transformed popular consciousness and created a peace constituency. It analyzes how German peace movements gradually built an indispensable organizational infrastructure autonomous from parties and other social institutions. Cooper argues that the convergence of these factors determined the movement's capacity to mobilize and have political impact and allowed these to grow over time.
Alice Holmes Cooper is Assistant Professor of Government, University of Virginia.
... Read more