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Why Destroy a Synagogue? A Reflection on Hitler’s Metaphysical Antisemitism German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Michael Meng
This article explores the possible metaphysical aspects of Hitler’s antisemitism by asking a basic question: Why did the Nazis, if motivated solely or at least largely by racial hatred, attack and destroy Jewish religious sites, above all synagogues? The answer the article gives, a speculative one, is that Hitler’s antisemitism expresses a hatred of life and death that has deep roots in Western history
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Introduction: Houses of Worship in Times of War German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-04-05 Thomas Brodie, Bridget Heal
The introduction to the Special Issue ‘Houses of Worship in Times of War’, surveying the relevant historical literature on war and religion and providing an overview of the key themes of the essays.
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Reconquest, Reconstruction, Resumption: Churching Poland after the Second World War German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-04-05 James Bjork
This article examines how the Roman Catholic Church in Poland navigated the enormous increase in church buildings at its disposal at the end of the Second World War. This expansion was largely due to the mass acquisition of post-German churches in lands transferred from Germany to Poland. But rapid reconstruction of most of the churches destroyed during the war as well as the resumption of new construction
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Lutheran Churches during the Thirty Years War German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Bridget Heal
Literary and artistic sources from the era of the Thirty Years War provide vivid accounts of the destruction and desecration of churches. This essay looks beyond these highly emotive descriptions and explores the fate of churches in Electoral Saxony, one of the worst-affected areas of the Holy Roman Empire. It considers patterns of destruction and argues that the plundering and desecration of Lutheran
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Sacred Space, Mourning and the War Dead in Protestant Germany, 1945– German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Thomas Brodie
Using the Flensburg Memorial Dispute of 1967 as a microstudy, this article explores how Germany’s twentieth-century war dead have been represented within Protestant sacred space since 1945. It highlights the central role played by church spaces in the mourning and commemoration of Germany’s war dead and the tremendous difficulties accompanying attempts to redesign these iconographies in the later twentieth
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Sacred Rubble and Humble Shelters: German Church Building after the Second World War German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-03-23 Paul Betts
This article centres on the cultural politics behind the feverish construction of new houses of worship in West Germany, as well as the restoration of damaged cathedrals and churches, in the first two decades after 1945. At issue is how and why ecclesiastical architecture took on heightened cultural significance at the time, attracting a star-studded group of international architects. After the war
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Fighting over Churches: Augsburg and Multiconfessional Cities in the Thirty Years War German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Emily Fisher Gray
The religious overtones of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) resonated in particular in multiconfessional towns and cities like Augsburg. Not only were churches destroyed, desecrated or reassigned in deliberate acts of war, but the military supremacy of one side or the other could mean a permanent end to the ability of a portion of the city’s inhabitants to practise their religion. In 1648 the Peace
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Desecration, Secularization, Restoration: Cologne’s Churches during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Michael Rowe
The Napoleonic era was transformative for Cologne’s churches. The wars that characterized this period brought destruction and upheaval. The invading French army that occupied the city in 1794 was an agent of the new Republic, a polity then at war with Catholicism. Most spectacularly, this resulted in the desacralization of Cologne’s churches, some of which were turned into storage depots for the army
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Bodies in Pain: Early Modern Suicide by Proxy German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Andreas Berger
This article examines early modern suicide by proxy in terms of the experience of pain. ‘Suicide by proxy’ refers to committing a capital crime in order to bring about one’s own death by execution. Exploring the history of prolonged pain typically associated with suicide by proxy, the article argues that suicide by proxy is primarily a story about pain. The analysis here follows the story of Sara Stähelin
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Ordinary Weimar: Global Press Photography, ‘Distant Seeing’ and the Normalcy of Crisis in the 1920s German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Malte Zierenberg
Press photography was an important medium of public communication in Germany in the 1920s. Scholarship on the topic has had two distinct foci. First, research on the ‘golden age’ of visual news has mainly concentrated on the visual coverage and political implications of singular events or certain topics. Secondly, the history of photography tends to concentrate on the period’s most prominent photographers
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Communication Breakdown: Sports Federations and Media Politics in the Weimar Republic German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Christopher Young
Organized sport in the Weimar Republic was dominated by three strands—so-called bourgeois sport, the gymnastics movement (Turnen) and the workers’ sports movement (Arbeitersport). While scholarship has rightly pointed out the differences between their federations, it has neglected a significant feature they had in common: the struggle to communicate key messages to their members. For the first time
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The Rise and Fall of the ‘World Economy’ in Weimar Germany German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Philipp Müller
Recent studies have emphasized the role of international institutions in the emergence of a transnational culture of economic experts in the interwar period. According to this view, collaboration over the difficulties of international trade in goods and finance was driven by a common language of problem diagnosis and solution finding. This interpretation has pushed the relevance of the domestic context
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Transnational Propaganda and National Media Cultures in Weimar Political Thought German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Benno Nietzel
This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former
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Introduction: Communication in the Weimar Republic German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Christopher Young, Malte Zierenberg
Communication has always featured prominently in Weimar research. Disputes about how the war was lost, the disdain in which the republic was held by its foes, the scepticism with which it was regarded by many of its citizens, and the manifold ways its various crises were interpreted—the history of the republic offered many angles from which to assess how communication was used to process events. Taking
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Inscription, the Embossed Surface and the Ceremonial Sip: The Traubenpokal of Bernkastel-Kues, 1661–2001 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Allison Stielau
This article relates the biography of a seventeenth-century gilt-silver cup from its origins in Nuremberg in the 1630s to its use in civic drinking rituals in the small town of Bernkastel-Kues on the Moselle River during the twentieth century. It investigates in particular two of the cup’s physical features, its 1661 inscription and the lobate forms populating its surface, which facilitate different
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Simple Ceramics? Design, Decorative Materiality and Anabaptist Pottery in Early Modern Central Europe German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Kat Hill
This article traces the manufacture and consumption of faience ceramics made by Hutterite communities in central Europe from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The production, use and survival of Anabaptist Haban ware offers insights into the nature of Anabaptist material regimes and communities and into overlapping but distinct communities of consumption and collecting. Hutterite craftsmen were
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African Gowns and Turkish Buttons: Global Horizons of Material Expertise in a German Town German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Philip Hahn
This article enquires into how townspeople in early modern Germany invested objects of foreign origin with meaning in the context of urban material culture. The basis of the argument are two interconnected case studies from Ulm in south-west Germany. The first part analyses how the seventeenth-century merchant Christoph Weickmann made sense of African artefacts which he displayed to visitors in his
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Locating the Material: Prussian Carved Ambers, Place Ambiguity and a New Geography of Central European Art German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-06-17 Tomasz Grusiecki
No material is linked more closely to early modern Prussia than amber, and both the Hohenzollerns (rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia) and the Vasas (overlords of Royal Prussia) used it extensively for diplomatic gifts, linking this prized material to their territories. Amber was also one of the most enigmatic materials of the period, with its alchemical nature often examined by natural philosophers who
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Introduction: Material Cultures and Communities in the Holy Roman Empire German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Kat Hill, Ulinka Rublack
This introduction outlines the key themes of this Special Issue, which responds to a need to formulate nuanced accounts of material cultures in relation to social life, religion and politics in the Holy Roman Empire. It approaches ‘the material’ through different themes in relation to sites of production, consumption and practices that created specific material regimes and communities throughout time
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Craft, Labour and Cabinets of Curiosities: Rethinking the Body of the Artisan German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-05-13 Ulinka Rublack
This article asks how we should best historically situate processes of making and knowing in early modern luxury crafts. It focuses on the Augsburg merchant Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) and his celebrated cabinets of curiosities. The article methodologically argues for the need to cross-fertilize scholarship on ‘the body of the artisan’ (Pamela H. Smith) with the history of labour. The notion of the
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Empress and Virgin: St Cunigunde and Female Sainthood in the Early Thirteenth Century German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Antonia Anstatt
This article uses the previously unjustly discarded early thirteenth-century hagiographical text Vitae s. Heinrici additamentum to show how different ideals of female sainthood could be combined within one figure. In two of its chapters, the Additamentum presents two distinct but not contradictory images of its female protagonist, Cunigunde (d. 1033), the wife of the German emperor Henry II (d. 1024)
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What’s Next? Historical Research on the GDR Three Decades after German Unification German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-03-21
The once-heated controversies about the history of the East German state and its legacy in the post-unification years have finally come to an end, some historians of the GDR have recently emphasized. Picking up on this cue, this forum enquires how a potential new openness might shape historians’ research agendas in the mid-term future. To make such predictions, we start by reflecting on our own intellectual
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The Kaiser’s Silver: German Nationalism and the 1913 Nationalspende for Christian Mission German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Jeremy Best
In 1913, in honour of the kaiser’s silver jubilee, a group of secular colonial advocates organized a national fundraising campaign to raise money for Germany’s missionary societies. The nationalist motivations of this campaign ran counter to the theological and ideological self-conception of the missionaries, especially the leadership of Germany’s Protestant missions. Despite the ambivalence of the
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Meaningful Work: Cultural Frameworks of Forced Labour in Accounts of Nazi Concentration Camp Inmates German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Ella Falldorf, Kobi Kabalek
Studies of forced labour in Nazi camps tend to stress the exceptionality of inmates’ experiences and their profound difference from common views of work. Yet examination of the wartime and postwar accounts of inmates and survivors reveals that they often combine features of the camp reality itself with phenomena from other times, places and situations. In this way, written, oral and visual depictions
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Postwar Italian Journeys: Narratives of Homecoming, National Cohesion and German-Italian Friendship German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Karrin Hanshew
Scholars, journalists, diplomats and even archivists routinely assert that to understand German–Italian relations one must start with Goethe. Without denying Goethe’s importance, this article suggests that the emotional pull and prominence of Italy for postwar Germans may have had less to do with Goethe than with the Italian journey’s importance as a shared script. By providing familiar sets of baseline
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A West German Civil Movement in the 1970s: Opposition to the kooperative Schule in Nordrhein-Westfalen German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-11-23 Jae-Ho Choi
This study examines the popular petition of 1978 against the introduction of the kooperative Schule in Nordrhein-Westfalen. As a result of this campaign, reforms initiated by the SPD were halted. The reforms had been directed at the eventual introduction of a comprehensive school system, which would have replaced Germany’s traditional three-track school system. Previous studies have usually presented
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Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its Reception in German Thought, 1794–1845 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Klaus Ries
This article challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the article argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on
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Emancipation and Constitutional Patriotism: The Centralverein and the Weimar Republican Order German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Jan Rybak
The article explores the conceptualization of Jewish emancipation and the republican order of state by activists of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, CV) in the Weimar years. It argues that activists adopted a liberal conception of constitutional patriotism and involved themselves in a republican nation-building
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German Princes in the Prussian Army: Political Patronage and Family Networks under Frederick II, 1740–1786 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Carmen Winkel
Drawing primarily on Frederick II of Prussia’s correspondence, which was filtered through his cabinet secretaries, this article explores how the king used his army in constructing patronage networks that reached beyond the limits of Brandenburg-Prussia. He not only appointed members of German families as officers but also expected them to train with and command their men. Frederick II’s army was certainly
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The Ambiguities of Being Stateless: Property Rights, Statelessness and Enemy Aliens in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Germany, 1914–1930 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-08-06 Cristiano La Lumia
By retracing the fate of stateless people of German origin, mainly former Reich citizens, who suffered persecution as enemy aliens during the First World War and in the 1920s, the article examines the ambiguities of stateless status in terms of enjoyment of civil rights and national inclusion (and exclusion). In particular, the essay highlights how statelessness was a resource for many stateless persons
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Sensing Multiconfessionality in Early Modern Germany German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-07-05 Martin Christ
This article brings together sensory history and research on multiconfessionalism in early modern Germany. It argues that research has not yet paid sufficient attention to the fact that many of the towns in the Holy Roman Empire were not monoconfessional but instead highly diverse, home to a range of religious groups, which influenced the respective town’s sensescape. For a fuller understanding of
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Prisoners of the World Unite: The Internationalism of the 2 June Movement from Berlin Moabit Prison German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-06-01 Catriona Corke
When, in February 1975, the 2 June Movement kidnapped Peter Lorenz, the CDU candidate for mayor of West Berlin, it framed the act in terms of global solidarity. Lorenz was held in a ‘people’s prison’ (Volksgefängnis) on account of his symbolic responsibility for injustices taking place not only in West Berlin but also across the world, including Pinochet’s Chile and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Once
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The German Response to Austria’s Annexation of Cracow in 1846 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-06-01 Miroslav Šedivý
The annexation of the Free City of Cracow by Austria in November 1846 has been regarded by historians as one of the most important international events in the period before the outbreak of revolutions in 1848. The annihilation of an independent state has been seen as a flagrant violation of international law that led to a weakening of Europeans’ faith in the justice of the post-Napoleonic order. Consequently
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The Gender Anxiety of Otto von Bismarck, 1866–1898 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-30 Claudia Kreklau
Abstract Building on critical re-examinations of the ‘Bismarck myth’ and scholarship on the fin de siècle crisis of identity in Europe, this article examines key vignettes in the political career of Otto von Bismarck during Prussia’s era of expansion and consolidation, c.1866–1898, through the lens of gender. It finds the legendary ‘Iron Chancellor’ experienced extreme gender-anxiety to the point of
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Wannsee: The Road to the Final Solution German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Sandra Lipner
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Georg Simmel and German Culture: Unity, Variety and Modern Discontents German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Jonathan Sperber
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Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Jessica C Lowe
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Messengers of Disaster: Raphael Lemkin, Jan Karski, and Twentieth-Century Genocides German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Michael Fleming
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The Legacies of 1936: Hitler’s Olympic Grounds and Berlin’s Bid to Host the 2000 Olympic Games German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Molly Wilkinson Johnson
Abstract Although the 1936 ‘Nazi Olympics’ in Berlin have landmark status both in the history of Nazi Germany and in the history of the modern Olympic Games, it was not until the early 1990s that Berlin begin to reckon with their architectural and historical legacies. The impetus for these discussions was the city’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games, for which it planned to reuse the 1936 Olympic
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Struggles for Belonging: Citizenship in Europe, 1900–2020 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-14 Anika Seemann
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Die importierte Nation. Deutschland und die Entstehung des flämischen Nationalismus 1914 bis 1945 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-02 Marnix Beyen
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Germany’s Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-04-02 Tyler Carrington
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Anglo-Jewish Humanitarianism and the Jewish Relief Unit, 1943–1950 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Tom Sampson
Abstract The Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) was an Anglo-Jewish humanitarian agency of 213 members that operated across Europe during 1945/50, particularly in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany. JRU staff cared for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) who lingered in United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) assembly centres such as Belsen before their
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Sixties EuropeStudent Revolt in 1968: France, Italy and West Germany German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Joachim C Häberlen
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Franz Graf von Galen 1879-1961. Ein „Miles Christianus“im Spannungsfeld zwischen Katholizismus, Adel und Nation German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Larry Eugene Jones
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Bismarcks ewiger Bund. Eine neue Geschichte des Deutschen Kaiserreichs German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Matthew Jefferies
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Prussian Army Soldiers and the Seven Years’ War: The Psychology of Honour German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Leighton S James
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Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 David Mayes
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Projecting Imperial Power: New Nineteenth-Century Emperors and the Public Sphere German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Frederik Frank Sterkenburgh
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Hamburg: Tor zur kolonialen Welt. Erinnerungsorte der (post-)kolonialen Globalisierung German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Andreas Greiner
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A Posture of Protestation: Civil Litigation and Constitutional Culture in the Reformation-Era Holy Roman Empire German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-02-05 Sarah Ludin
What role did judicial courts play in the constitution of the early modern Holy Roman Empire? Scholars have shown that the frameworks of judicialization (which highlights the peaceful channelling mechanisms of law) and of instrumentalization (which underscores the political uses and abuses of law) are unsatisfactory for fully describing the ways in which high courts shaped and participated in the constitutional
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Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2021-11-27 Verlaan T.
Photography, Reconstruction and the Cultural History of the Postwar European City. By AllbesonTom. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 2021. xvii + 272 pp. £120.00 (hardback); £36.99 (e-book).
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‘Blut und Eisen auch im Innern’: Soziale Konflikte, Massenpolitik und Gewalt in Deutschland vor 1914 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2021-11-27 Chickering R.
‘Blut und Eisen auch im Innern’: Soziale Konflikte, Massenpolitik und Gewalt in Deutschland vor 1914. By CarusoAmerigo. Frankfurt/Main and New York: Campus Verlag. 2021. 361 pp. €29.95 (paperback); €27.99 (e-book).
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Local Lives, Parallel Histories. Villagers and Everyday Lives in the Divided Germany German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2021-11-27 Schaefer S.
Local Lives, Parallel Histories. Villagers and Everyday Lives in the Divided Germany. By ThomasMarcel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. 304 pp. £65.00 (hardback).
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Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe. The Deluge of 1919 German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Bodó B.
Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe. The Deluge of 1919. By AblovatskiEliza. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii + 300 pp. £75.00 (hardback).
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Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-01-24 Rasmussen A.
Prostitution and Subjectivity in Late Medieval Germany. By PageJamie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. xii + 164 pp. £65.00/$85.00 (hardback).
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The Last Ghetto. An Everyday History of Theresienstadt German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Cole T.
The Last Ghetto. An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. By HájkováAnna. New York: Oxford University Press. 2020. 364 pp. £22.99 (hardback).
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France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840–1930: Maritime Competition and Imperial Power German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Todzi K.
France and Germany in the South China Sea, c. 1840–1930: Maritime Competition and Imperial Power. By BeckerBert. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. vii + 483 pp. £99.99 (hardback); £79.50 (e-book).
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Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present German History (IF 0.295) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Gortat J.
Revisiting Austria: Tourism, Space, and National Identity, 1945 to the Present. By GramlGundolf. New York: Berghahn Books.2020. 292 pp. $149.00/£110.00 (hardback); $34.95 (e-book).