German History 

About: German History is an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): German & Nazism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0266-3554. Over the lifetime, 1963 publications have been published receiving 12529 citations.

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History

Abstract: The experience of grief is one of history’s most universal yet elusive themes, ever present even in peacetime but generated with almost intolerable intensity and frequency by wars. The practice of mourning, both public and private, provided essential consolation for those bereaved as a result of the Great War. Jay Winter admits that \"how healing occurs, and what quietens embitterment and alleviates despair can never be fully known\". Yet \"not to ask the question . . . is both to impoverish the study of history and to evade our responsibility as historians\" (116). If directed to every scholar individually, this injunction would indeed be outrageous – some of us must be allowed to indulge other interests in, say, laughter, labour, railways, sex, incunabula, or diplomacy. In fact, Winter is addressing historians of the Great War as if they were a team, an ideal rarely achieved in scholarship but to some extent realised in the conferences and collaborations associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, which he helped establish. The collaborative approach suffuses this book, and the endnotes are strewn with warm and deserved acknowledgements of help from numerous colleagues. The effect is to suggest a series of lively and speculative seminars, complete with sometimes indistinct and half-explored images flashing onto the whiteboard from an overheated projector: the 31 illustrations are often dark and dim, in contrast to the splendidly sharp reproductions in Winter’s The Experience of World War I (1988). This is history in the making: inconclusive, uneven, but consistently exhilarating.

A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat

Abstract: largely absent in French culture generate, although both were socially and educationally conservative concepts by World War I. Ringer convincingly argues that German academics, who denounced almost without exception the evils of \"positivism,\" were really opposing materialist and natural-science methods in the humanities and social sciences and worried about the eroding effect on the unity of knowledge posed by overspecialization. By contrast, in France, positivism was \"an orthodox philosophy of science and the methodological underpinning of republican social and political doctrines\" (p. 211). There was also a reaction to positivism in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, drawing on some of the same arguments current in Germany and reflecting a socially conservative agenda. Ringer also has interesting suggestions about classicism and modernism in the narrower educational as well as the broader cultural sense, about the similarities and differences between higher educational systems, and about differing structures of the bourgeoisie and social origins of academic ideology in the two countries. Significantly and appropriately, Ringer attacks many old myths about the differences between their modern cultures that were inflated by political animosities, as in World War I. On the other hand, as a good comparativist should, he points out important differences in the traditions and circumstances of the two countries that led to sometimes different ways of pegging the \"fields of knowledge,\" the arena of intellectual debate. Although the book is primarily focused on France, its side views and comparisons to Germany are most valuable in themselves. And it is heartening to see that some historians actually undertake international comparisons of this complexity, rather than merely bewail the lack of them.