German Politics and Society

Anti-immigration sentiments can take on a variety of forms, but a particularly prevalent version across Europe is welfare chauvinism. According to welfare chauvinism, the services of the welfare state should be provided only to natives and not to immigrants. Like many other European countries, German politics also features welfare chauvinism, and not only on the far right segment of the political spectrum. What drives welfare chauvinism? Most studies of welfare chauvinism try to assess whether economic or cultural factors matter most. In an attempt to bridge these perspectives, this article brings in neoliberalism. An examination of survey results from ebrd's Life in Transition project suggests that neoliberal economic attitudes are a key determinant of welfare chauvinism. German respondents who have neoliberal economic views tend to see immigrants as a drain on the welfare state, while those who have economically leftist views tend to see immigrants as providing a positive contribution.

This article centers on the League of People's Friendship of the German Democratic Republic. The League, composed of a main organization in East Berlin and national partner societies scattered around the globe, served as a tool of nontraditional diplomacy for East Germany's ruling communist party across much of the Cold War. This article sketches out the activities of the League's partner organizations in the U.S.—the first analysis to do so—arguing first that given the variety of challenges and problems the League and its partner organizations faced, the limited success of these groups in the U.S. is, in the end, rather remarkable. Second, this essay argues that these organizations offer further evidence that East Germany was not exactly a puppet state.

At the 1987 World Figure Skating Championship, Katarina Witt skated to instrumental music from West Side Story playing the role of Maria. But how could her performance to Broadway show tunes be in line with sed ideology? Through histoire croisée—establishing multiple intersections with different cultures and tracing their continuing effects—this article examines how Witt's, her coach Jutta Müller's and choreographer Rudy Suchy's privileged exposure to Western culture through dance, music, film, experiences abroad, and other skaters’ choreography and costuming inspired reappropriated manifestations through an East German lens into the packaging of Witt's skating programs in the 1980s. Using television broadcasts, I analyze the gradual to overt Americanization of her programs as her government loosened its grips by granting her more artistic freedom.

By the end of 2018, Germany's secret service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) started composing a report on Germany's most notorious right-wing political party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD).¹ In January 2019, one of the authors asked Germany's secret service to supply this report but was told “It's secret.” On 28 January 2019, a short note even noted: “We will not send the document.”² On the very same day, Netzpolitik.org posted the entire report online-all 436 pages of it.³ Netzpolitik.org stated: “We make the report available because open debate is vital in a democracy … and because it destroys the AfD's fairy-tale of being a normal political party.”⁴ In their introduction, Netzpolitik's Andre Meister, Anna Biselli, and Markus Reuter, who published the report, also emphasize: “We make the report available because the secret service believes ‘parts of the AfD violate Germany's constitutional guarantee that human dignity is inviolable.”’⁵ Netzpolitik.org is convinced that Germans have a right to know. Reading through the report one hardly finds evidence that would justify secrecy. Instead, it is a valid report written by a German state agency tasked with defending the Basic Law (Grundgesetz) concerning a political party.

Paul Roland, Life in the Third Reich: Daily Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2015)

Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A supernatural history of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)

Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen, and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, A Companion to Nazi Germany (Hoboken: Wiley, 2018)

Simon Bulmer and WIliam Paterson, Germany and the European Union: Europe's Reluctant Hegemon (London: Red Globe Press, 2018)

Paul Lever, Berlin Rules: Europe and the German Way (London: ib Tauris, 2017)

Christoph von Marschall, Wir Verstehen die Welt nicht Mehr: Deutschlands Entfremdung von seinen Freunden (Freiberg: Herder, 2018)

Dolores L. Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018)

Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)

Constantin Goschler, ed. Compensation in Practice: The Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ and the Legacy of Forced Labour during the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017)

Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Rochester: Camden House, 2018)