Daniel Siemens

Die Leipziger Journalistenausbildung in der Ära Ulbricht

Vorspann Die Universität Leipzig war das Zentrum der akademischen Journalistenausbildung in der DDR. Die Fakultät für Journalistik, umgangssprachlich auch „Rotes Kloster“ genannt, sollte die ostdeutschen Massenmedien mit ebenso gut ausgebildeten wie linientreuen Fachleuten versorgen, die geeignet waren, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Konsens zu stiften oder zu stärken. Die Autoren können zeigen, wie groß der Konformitätsdruck war, der auf den - nicht selten idealistischen - Studenten lastete, wie wichtig SED und Staatssicherheit das Thema Journalistenausbildung nahmen und wie komplex sich die politisch-sozialen Beziehungen gestalteten, in deren Zentrum die Fakultät für Journalistik stand.

Explaining crime Berlin newspapers and the construction of the criminal in Weimar Germany

In the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, well-known journalists working for leading newspapers regularly covered the proceedings of the criminal court in Berlin-Moabit. In seeking sensational news as well as stories about everyday life in the metropolis, the court provided them with insights into contemporary urban problems such as unemployment, political struggle, gender-based conflict, and crimes of passion. The court and the journalistic coverage of its activities are historically important because they were a locus of legal and social conflicts intermingled with popular entertainment and mass media. This article sheds light on the engagement of the press with criminal trials in Weimar Berlin. By examining material never previously discussed, it claims that, contrary to what is generally believed today, German public opinion did not on the whole accept the idea that criminals could be categorized as a genetically inferior social class. In fact, most crime reporters — who reflected and formed public opinion — argued that the psychological problems of overstrained individuals and inferior living conditions were responsible for most crimes. Offenders were therefore considered as unfortunate ‘ordinary men’, or, more generally, as ‘victims of society’. Some journalists even claimed that crimes passionelles were the result of society’s oppression. This article goes on to argue that the extreme popularity of these reports shows that the journalists’ perspective on criminality met with the approval of contemporary readers and accorded with common views on crime. As part of the larger discourse on ‘victimization’ so important to the Weimar period, this journalistic coverage of the court can help us understand the unique role the criminal played as a central symbol of the German press and public.

Gegen den „gesinnungsschwachen Stimmzettelträger“: Emotion und Praxis im Wahlkampf der späten Weimarer Republik

Warum beteiligten sich Nationalsozialisten in der spaten Weimarer Republik an Wahlen zu Parlamenten, die sie zugleich als Forum fur Partikularinteressen grundlegend ablehnten? Eine Antwort liegt im performativen Charakter des Wahlkampfes und seinen Emotionen. Er sollte die eigenen Anhanger in Kampfesstimmung versetzen und sie zugleich disziplinieren, weitgehend unabhangig vom tatsachlichen Ausgang der Wahl. Dieses Vorgehen war charakteristisch fur die nationalsozialistische Massenmobilisierung, es reichte jedoch weit daruber hinaus. Es handelte sich um ein zentrales Element eines neuen Politikstils der Zwischenkriegszeit, in dem bedingungsloser Aktivismus als Ausweis von Fuhrungsqualitat glorifiziert wurde und in dem Parlamentarismus und Demokratie zunehmend als Gegensatze begriffen wurden.

Populating the Greater Germanic Empire

In 1943, when the German military campaign was decisively weakened after the Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad, Werner Daitz, a long-time economic adviser of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), published his book Lebensraum und gerechte Weltordnung: Grundlagen einer Anti-Atlantikcharta, literally Living Space and Just World Order: Fundamentals of an Anti-Atlantic Charter. Since the beginning of the Second World War, Daitz had been engaged in a propaganda campaign for what he referred to as ‘völkische Großraumwirtschaft’, that is large-scale economic planning based on völkisch ideas. Daitz predicted the advent of a new world order with the hegemony of the declining British Empire and the United States displaced by a united Europe, which was to derive its superior stability and power from the fact that, under German rule, its political borders would perfectly align with its biological and cultural settlement areas. An empire could only survive, Daitz lectured, if its territorial reach coincided with the natural ‘living space’ of its peoples. The principles of a people’s community, defined as the ‘small-scale living space of a given people’ (Kleinlebensraum des Volkstums), also remained valid for the ‘greater living space of the family of peoples’ (Großlebensraum der Völkerfamilie). In 1943, linking the future stability of Nazi expansion to the Germanization of conquered lands, as Daitz did, was no longer only a theoretical proposition but informed German policies on the ground. This was certainly not lost on the Polish government in exile. In a study under the telling title Quest for German Blood, it accused the Germans of a large-scale de-nationalization and forced assimilation campaign that was aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the Polish people. And it was certainly not lost on one of the first scholars of Nazi crimeswhenhe connected, for example, the ban on French teaching and the compulsory introduction of German in Luxemburg schools to the mass killings of Jews in the East. For Raphael Lemkin in his magisterial study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944 in American exile, these were two aspects of one policy: the ‘destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed... [and] the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’, for which he coined the term genocide. We have started with these contemporary observations because they demonstrate what, we argue, would increasingly be lost later on in the otherwise extensive historiography of Nazi Germany: the close link between territorial expansion and what Hitler, in his seminal speech after the defeat of Poland, had called the quest for ‘a new ethnographic order’ in Europe. It is precisely at this point that this special issue steps in. All four contributions start from the premise that the notions of Lebensraum and Volksgemeinschaft need to be analysed as interrelated and interdependent notions pointing to the inner core of what drove the entire Nazi project. In doing so, this special issue is an intervention in a debate that has often failed to pay attention to this close nexus. It seems that the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft became relevant primarily for historians who were interested in understanding the regime’s early years and its attempt to strengthen its grip on power while, by contrast, studies dealing with the idea of Lebensraum do so in the context of German expansionist ideology, politics and military occupation after the outbreak of war. In a way, it might come as no surprise that the explanatory power of Volksgemeinschaft as an analytical term seemed to be limited to the time before the war, given that the signatory crimes of the Nazi regime, ranging from

'Sword and plough': settling Nazi stormtroopers in Eastern Europe, 1936-43

ABSTRACT Most histories of the National Socialist stormtroopers (SA) come to a close with the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934. For the remaining eleven years of National Socialist rule, the stormtroopers are usually regarded as a peripheral ‘nostalgic drinking companionship’ of early Nazi activists who, apart from their involvement in the persecution of the Jews, did not wield much influence. In contrast to such views, this article argues that the SA remained an important mass organization in the Third Reich that not only helped to stabilize the Nazi regime within the boundaries of the German heartlands but also contributed importantly to German expansionist policies from 1935 onwards. My argument is developed in three stages. First, I assess the SA’s contribution to the German settlement movement in the 1930s that was originally concerned with the ‘inner colonialism’, the population transfer within the existing borders of the German Reich in order to stimulate agriculture and economy in disadvantaged German regions, in particular in the northern and eastern provinces. Second, I concentrate on the analysis of the plans and initiatives of the so-called ‘commissioner of the SA Chief of Staff for the placement of new farmers and matters of ethnicity’ between 1938 and 1942. In a third and final part, I discuss these plans and the actual developments in the light of the expansionist Nazi policies of de- and reterritorialization during the war years, advanced in particular by the SS. Although the SA’s extensive pre-war ambitions in ‘Germanization’ suffered a serious backlash with the outbreak of the war, it still contributed in important ways to the formation of the Volksgemeinschaft in the occupied territories.

Der Held der Prärie

Martin Weidinger analysiert den amerikanischen Westernfilm von seinen Anfangen bis in die Gegenwart. Sein Anspruch ist, im Film inszenierte gesellschaftspragende Mythen vom „Westen“ in ihrer Bedeutung fur die amerikanische Kultur aufzuzeigen. Weidingers besonderes Augenmerk gilt der Konstruktion von Geschlecht. Leider bietet die Untersuchung nur wenig Neues: Der Autor bleibt allzu oft gangigen Stereotypen verhaftet; die Komplexitat der amerikanischen Gesellschaft im 20. Jahrhundert kommt zu kurz.