Showing papers in "German History in 2007"

Time Consuming: Women's Radio and the Reconstruction of National Narratives in Western Germany 1945-1948

Abstract: The question of the proper place of women in German society was one of the most pressing issues of the time immediately after the Second World War. The sheer numerical disproportion of women to men in Germany, combined with the expanded public roles many women had adopted during wartime, meant that there was hardly a debate about postwar German society that was not in some way touched by this question. The expanded role and visibility of women in the immediate postwar era coincided with the unprecedented dominance of the radio, which had emerged from the war as the best preserved means of mass communication, information and cheap entertainment. This article shows the important role played by the radio, and in particular women's programmes, in helping to shape the role and visions of women in the developing West German society. Based on an analysis of the way women's programmes addressed the activity of women in society, it is argued that in the years of scarcity before the 1948 currency reform, women's time gained unprecedented value as a consumer ‘commodity’. In particular, the efforts of women's programmes to structure and discipline women's use of time contributed significantly to the discourse of women as consumer citizens that developed dominance in the social market economy of the Federal Republic. The image of the female time consumer was combined in women's programmes with essential notions of femininity to create new narratives of German national identity. Within the broader context of the debate on the role of women in society, radio programming of the immediate postwar years helped to embed certain discourses on femininity, consumption and Germanness that later developed in 1950s society.

Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-Existence and Political Communication in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland

Abstract: This article sets out to explore how a local quarrel in the Grafschaft of Baden, a bi-confessional Swiss county, occasioned by efforts to install a separate font for Protestant parishioners, activated larger constitutional and confessional tensions between the Catholic and Protestant cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The article reconstructs the lengthy political negotiations caused by the rearrangement of church space since the Landfrieden of 1531: this treaty had enshrined bi-confessionalism in the Swiss Confederation and had established the duties and rights of both confessions, although to the disadvantage of the Reformed Protestants. It had also transformed the consecrated space of the church into a stage for political action by the cantons. From 1531 onwards, changes in religious belief and observance were subject to the will of the supreme governing authority. The article shows that local conflicts over the arrangement and furnishing of certain church spaces can give us fascinating insights into political practice, the establishment of social order and the handling of denominational differences within the Swiss Confederation. It attempts to contribute to our understanding of early modern political history by using concepts from cultural history and communication theory in which politics is closely linked to social and confessional processes generating meaning and order.

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Bürgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract: This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to the increasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an age of political emancipation and social integration. It argues that the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestants in the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importance in this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movements such as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology, Protestant theology or philology provided ample material for discussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four ways of perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialist and as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributed to these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions were frequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions. Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewish character: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation, which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofold nature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semitic polemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewish adaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however, this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concern on the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thus further Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematic perceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacy of bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany. Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpreted as a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishment of neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews and non-Jews.