German Politics and Society

In the years following unification, East German cityscapes have been subject to fierce contention because historic preservation and urban renewal have served as a local allegory of national redemption. Using conflicts over preservation and renewal in the city of Eisenach as a case study, I argue that historic cityscapes have served as the focus of many East Germans' efforts to grapple with the problem of Germanness because they address the past as a material cultural legacy to be retrieved and protected, rather than as a past to be worked through. In Eisenach's conflicts, heritage and Heimat serve as talismans of redemption not just because they symbolize an unspoiled German past, but also because they represent structures of difference that evoke a victimized Germanness—they are above all precious, vulnerable possessions threatened with disruption, pollution, or destruction by agents placed outside the moral boundaries of the hometown by its bourgeois custodians.

Commentators in the popular media of Weimar Germany paid great attention to questions of women's sport, athleticism, and physicality. Their concerns were not restricted to women's reproductive capacities—rather, women's physical emancipation was increasingly interpreted within the framework of larger cultural discourses surrounding the "masculinization" and political emancipation of the modern woman. This article examines such representations of the "masculinized" female athlete, arguing that female athleticism provided an important focus for broader concerns about changing gender relations, female sexuality, and acceptable female life trajectories at this period. Although the perceived threat to traditional male dominance symbolized by the female athlete prompted some commentators to denounce women's physical activity and emphasize traditional gender roles, the article also examines less conventional contemporary responses to women's athleticism, in particular, how a female body "steeled by sport" was reclaimed as an aesthetic ideal within the female homosexual subculture of interwar Berlin.

This article analyzes the most influential weltanschauungen at play in the politics of immigration in Europe. I categorize relevant value judgments into what I, following Theodore Lowi, call "public philosophies." I highlight three competing public philosophies in the politics of immigration in Europe: 1) liberalism; 2) nationalism; and 3) postmodernism. Liberalism prescribes universal rights protecting the autonomy of the individual, as well as rational and democratic procedures (rules of the game) to govern the pluralism that inevitably results in free societies. Against liberalism, nationalism stresses community and cultural homogeneity in addition to a political structure designed to protect both. Rejecting both liberalism and nationalism, postmodernism posits insurmountable relativism and irreducible cultural heterogeneity accompanied by ultimately irrepressible political antagonism. I examine the three outlooks through a case study of the headscarf debate. The article concludes with consideration of how normative ideas combine with other factors to influence policymaking.

Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander, eds., Nazi Crimes and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Nazi Crimes and the Law, a collection of eleven studies introduced and edited by Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander, is the best collection to appear in years on war crimes trials of Germans. The following paragraphs will attempt to describe what the various essays offer and why they matter.

Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (eds.) Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: the Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)

Reviewed by Ran Zwigenberg

Hanna Papanek, Elly und Alexander: Revolution, Rotes Berlin, Flucht, Exil—eine Sozialistische Familiengeschichte, trans. Joachim Helfer and Hannah C, Wettig (Berlin: Vorwärts Buch, 2006).

Reviewed by Gerard Braunthal

Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)

Reviewed by Thomas A. Baylis

Tom Dyson, The Politics of German Defense and Security: Policy Leadership and Military Reform in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)

Reviewed by Gale A. Mattox

Rolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)

Reviewed by Barbara Stelzl-Marx