Showing results for "Political Science" in Germany

From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini's influence on his German ally. Goeschel, a scholar of 20th-century Germany and Italy, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler's key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public.

Im Sommer 1948 stehen große Entscheidungen an: Die westlichen Alliierten beauftragen 65 Männer und Frauen damit, eine Verfassung auszuarbeiten. Monate leidenschaftlicher Diskussionen beginnen, in denen gestritten, getrickst und geträumt wird. Wie soll es werden, das neue Land? Kurz nachdem in den drei Westzonen im Frühsommer 1948 eine neue Währung eingeführt wird, riegelt die Sowjetunion West-Berlin ab: Die Stadt ist blockiert. Die USA beschließen, zwei Millionen Menschen aus der Luft zu versorgen und schicken "Rosinenbomber" los, von denen gleich einer der ersten abstürzt.

Am 7. Dezember 2022 rückten mehr als 3 000 Polizisten zur wohl größten Anti-Terror-Razzia in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik aus. Sie verhafteten die Rädelsführer einer Gruppe aus dem Reichsbürgermilieu, die einen gewaltsamen Umsturz der Regierung geplant hatte. Wer aber sind diese Reichsbürger, die die Bundesrepublik Deutschland nicht als legitimen Staat anerkennen, von einer BRD GmbH fabulieren und sich immer noch im Deutschen Reich wähnen?

Was bedeutet es, eine Ost-Identität auferlegt zu bekommen? Eine Identität, die für die rasant wachsende gesellschaftliche Spaltung verantwortlich gemacht wird? Der Attribute wie Populismus, ein mangelndes Demokratieverständnis, Rassismus, Verschwörungsmythen und Armut zugeschrieben werden? Der Leipziger Germanist Dirk Oschmann zeigt in seinem augenöffnenden Text, dass der Westen sich über dreißig Jahre nach Mauerfall als Norm definiert und den Osten als Abweichung. Unsere Medien, Politik, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft werden von westdeutschen Perspektiven dominiert.

The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to end all traffic between the city’s two halves: the democratic west and the communist east. The iconic symbol of a divided Europe, the Wall became a focus of western political pressure on East Germany; as Ronald Reagan’s famously said in a 1987 speech in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Richard Bessel, history professor at the University of York, specializes in the social and political history of Nazi Germany. In four compelling essays, he forcefully argues that racism made war inevitable. The Third Reich, led by "[A] band of political gangsters", came to power with a deep ideological commitment to war and racism. As the driving force behind the economics, social policy, and propaganda of Germany, racial hatred was the catalyst that plunged Europe into war.

The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.

February 26, 1924 was the first day of the greatly anticipated high treason trial that would galvanize Germany - but few in the courtroom that morning anticipated that the leading defendant, General Erich Ludendorff, whose risky offensives during World War I doomed Germany to defeat, would soon be eclipsed by the private first class at his side, Adolf Hitler. Hitler was charged with treason after unsuccessfully trying to seize power in the notorious Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.

History has focused on Hitler's use of charisma and terror, asserting that the dictator made few concessions to maintain power. Nathan Stoltzfus, the award-winning author of Resistance of Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Germany, challenges this notion, assessing the surprisingly frequent tactical compromises Hitler made in order to preempt hostility and win the German people's complete fealty.

An insightful historical account, Democrat and Diplomat exposes the dark underbelly of 1930s Germany and explores the terrible burden of those who realized the horror that was to come. Dodd was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, arriving in Berlin with his wife and daughter just as Hitler assumed the chancellorship. An unlikely candidate for the job - and not President Roosevelt's first choice - Dodd quickly came to realize that the situation in Germany was far grimmer than was understood in America.

Die deutsche Wiedervereinigung in Originalaufnahmen Als Ronald Reagan 1987 am Brandenburger Tor rief: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!", hielt die Welt diese Worte für Utopie. Doch nur zwei Jahre später fiel die Mauer. Anhand von bewegenden Originalaufnahmen zeichnet Dorothee Meyer-Kahrweg die deutsche Wiedervereinigung nach: von den "Wir sind das Volk!"-Rufen während der friedlichen Montagsdemonstrationen und den dramatischen Worten Hans-Dietrich Genschers in der deutschen Botschaft in Prag bis hin zur berühmten Pressekonferenz.