Browse

This book explores the paradox that Europe’s seemingly peaceful “playgrounds” were battlegrounds where competing visions of Germany and Austria clashed. Using newly available archival materials from state and private collections throughout Germany, Austria, as well as Switzerland, and Italy, Apostles of the Alps shows how recreational pursuits in the Eastern Alps, Alpinism, placed distant mountains at the heart of German nationhood questions. The book explores how Alpinism changed the borderlands both physically and discursively and analyzes what these Alpine intersections meant for Germans and Austrians. The Alps staged the struggles that fundamentally shaped Germany and Austria, and yet the mountains get overlooked as places of meaningful historical change. Apostles of the Alps takes an original approach that incorporates environmental, social, and cultural history and situates tourism and environmental change on borderlands as central to nation building projects. Unlike other studies, this book emphasizes Austria’s pivotal place in Germany’s troubled modernization. The emotionally charged relationship that Germans and Austrians shared with the Alps reveals the importance of the periphery for both states. Their mountaineering clubs opened the Alpine frontier to the masses in hopes of bonding patriotic loyalties to a landscape that united Germany and Austria. But tourists carried their prejudices with them to mountains, politicizing the Alps. Now pressures that had formed the contours of the modern state—political fights, social conflicts, culture wars, and environmental crusades—shaped the peaks. These borderlands did not reflect the struggles occurring at the center; they were the center of nationhood struggles.

For poets, priests, and politicians—and especially ordinary Germans—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the image of the loving nuclear family gathered around the Christmas tree symbolized the unity of the nation at large. German Christmas was supposedly organic, a product of the winter solstice rituals of pagan “Teutonic” tribes, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, and the age-old customs that defined German character. Yet, as this book argues, Germans also used these annual celebrations to contest the deepest values that held the German community together: faith, family, and love, certainly, but also civic responsibility, material prosperity, and national belonging. The book explores the invention, evolution, and politicization of Germany's favorite national holiday. According to the book, Christmas played a crucial role in public politics, as revealed in the militarization of “War Christmas” during World War I and World War II, the Nazification of Christmas by the Third Reich, and the political manipulation of Christmas during the Cold War. The book offers a close analysis of the impact of consumer culture on popular celebration and the conflicts created as religious, commercial, and political authorities sought to control the holiday's meaning. By unpacking the intimate links between domestic celebration, popular piety, consumer desires, and political ideology, it concludes that family festivity was central in the making and remaking of public national identities.

Throughout the Cold War, the United States encountered unexpected challenges from Italy and France, two countries with the strongest, and determinedly most anti-American, Communist Parties in Western Europe. Based primarily on new evidence from Communist archives in France and Italy, as well as research archives in the United States, this study reveals how the United States was forced by political opposition within these two core Western countries to reassess its own anti-Communist strategies, its image, and the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology. The author shows that the resistance to Americanization was a critical test for the French and Italian Communists' own legitimacy and existence. Their anti-Americanism was mostly dogmatic and driven by the Soviet Union, but it was also, at crucial times, subtle and ambivalent, nurturing fascination with the American culture of dissent. The staunchly anti-Communist United States, the author argues, found a successful balance to fighting the Communist threat in France and Italy by employing diplomacy and fostering instances of mild dissent in both countries. Ultimately, both the French and Italian Communists failed to adapt to the forces of modernization that stemmed both from indigenous factors and from American influence. The book illuminates the political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural conflicts behind the U.S.–Communist confrontation.

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As this book demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. This affinity stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Locating the origins of the fascination for Indian life in the transatlantic world of German cultures in the nineteenth century, the author explores German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational worlds of American Indian performers. As he traces this phenomenon through the twentieth century, the author engages debates about race, masculinity, comparative genocides, and American Indians' reactions to Germans' interest in them. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.

Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, this book reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. The text argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach tried to use “soft power” in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc. The book shows that the Stalinist system ultimately undermined Soviet efforts to secure popular legitimacy abroad through persuasive propaganda. It also highlights the limitations and contradictions of Soviet international cultural outreach, which help explain why the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumbled so easily after less than a half-century of existence.

This book offers a history and analysis of Republican political life during the Spanish Civil War. Completed in 1987 and first published in English in 1991, this text is the culmination of fifty years of research. This book is regarded as an authoritative political history of the war and a valuable encyclopedic guide to Republican affairs during the Spanish conflict. This new edition includes a new introduction by a Spanish Civil War scholar, an updated bibliography featuring books on the Spanish Civil War published since 1987, and seventy-three photos of the war's participants.

Approximately nine million soldiers fell into enemy hands from 1914 to 1918, but historians have only recently begun to recognize the prisoner of war's significance to the history of the Great War. Examining the experiences of the approximately 130,000 German prisoners held in the UK during World War I, this book brings wartime captivity back into focus. Many German soldiers of the Great War defined themselves and their manhood through their defense of the homeland. They often looked down on captured soldiers as potential deserters or cowards—and when they themselves fell into enemy hands, they were forced to cope with the stigma of surrender. This book examines the legacies of surrender and shows that the desire to repair their image as honorable men led many former military prisoners toward an alliance with Adolf Hitler and Nazism after 1933. By drawing attention to the shame of captivity, this book does more than merely deepen our understanding of German soldiers' time in British hands. It illustrates the ways that popular notions of manhood affected soldiers' experience of captivity, and it sheds new light on perceptions of what it means to be a man at war.