Dolores L. Augustine

The socialist: "silicon ceiling": East German women in computer science

Up until the fall of the Wall in 1989, the Communist regime of East Germany promoted policies of gender equality in education and in the work force, but these policies fell far short of creating true equality of opportunity for women in information technology. In terms of sheer numbers, women came much closer to achieving equality in East German universities than was the case in the capitalist West, making up half or more of students in software-related majors. The East German social state was, moreover, set up in such a way that women could readily combine motherhood and a career. None the less, there was pervasive discrimination against women in hiring and promotion. Moreover, gendered thinking molded the day-to-day work experiences and professional lives of women in the information technology workforce in more subtle ways.

Learning from War: Media Coverage of the Nuclear Age in the Two Germanies

“Theirs was another world”1—nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke’s famous pronouncement about the incommensurability of past and present—encapsulates how many historians approach the utopian visions of an atomic future and the Manichean worldview of the early Cold War. The contradiction between the threat of total obliteration and optimistic thoughts of a better future based on nuclear technologies has been explained by some historians as resulting from mass manipulation and government propaganda, in particular in connection with the American “Atoms for Peace” program, announced in a speech given by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower on December 8, 1953.2 Historian Joachim Radkau argues that the idea of a brighter future through nuclear technologies— heralded under the banner of the “Atomic Age”—was appealing to Germans because it offered an alternative to the misbegotten and discredited world created by the Nazis.3

Conclusion: One World, Two Worlds, Many Worlds?

The idea of countering the threat of nuclear war with the establishment of “one world government” gained popularity after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by 1950 succumbed to the realities of the Cold War. The world was seemingly split in two, a democratic-capitalist West squaring off against a Communist world. These and other divisions contributed to differing views of the emerging nuclear age. Developing nations were charting a course between East and West, exploring their options, including the creation of a nonaligned movement, and developing their own perspectives on the nuclear age. The perspective of members of the “nuclear club” and of countries with nuclear power was different from that of their nonnuclear neighbors. Superpowers saw the world differently than did “mere” great powers, not to mention small countries. Were these differences reflected in popular media depictions of nuclear power and nuclear war? Did commonalities or differences prevail? Do the magazines analyzed in this volume fall into categories? But popular media were by no means mere receptors of structural forces. Rather, they actively molded popular perceptions of the nuclear age. How did they portray the nascent nuclear age, and thus encourage their readers to see the changing world, and did this happen in nationally or regionally specific ways?

Review: Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800—1870, Indiana University Press: Bloomington; 2006, xiv + 292 pp.; 0253347343,

German culture in the nineteenth century. Here, the author poses the crucial question of ‘Why Bach?’, given that he had long been considered boring and unmelodious by the German public. The answer she provides is that Mendelssohn, in staging the Passion, invented a new spirit of the age, one that featured a new image of religion and of Protestantism in particular. The process of Bach becoming a national icon was a slow one: musical expertise was needed, which could not be taken for granted – in contrast to other cultural practices such as reading or writing. Yet, although neither the German nor other European publics seemed prepared for this, the conditions were set for an eventual and lasting triumph of the Passion. Enlightenment now came to be regarded as superficial, and the public was looking for a new depth – one that could be found, Mendelssohn suggested, in Bach’s music. Religious music was being cut off from liturgy and gained a new, secular, and yet, in a different sense, ‘sacral’ meaning. These two books have certainly filled a gap in cultural history. While the questions posed by the authors may not always appear original, their answers transcend in certain respects the results of previous research and elaborate a more complex and, especially in Ther’s case, more ‘European’ picture. The strong emotional and suggestive character to music assumed by Ther’s book is not unexpected, but Ther describes its development and social impact in a very convincing way. From this point of view, Applegate’s book represents a valuable complement to Ther’s work, because the author challenges precisely the assumption about music’s ‘natural’ power and deconstructs the cultural meaning of one particular work of art. Ultimately, however, one is left wondering how far historical interest in music, at least in the way presented here, can really offer a fresh approach and allow for new questions to be posed. Research on nationalism, so fruitful back in the 1990s, could definitely benefit from some fresh impetus, but it still has to be proven that historical investigation of music can provide this and actually bring us further, rather than filling in some smallish, perhaps obvious gaps and illustrating basic approaches to cultural history with yet more examples.

39.95 (hbk):

In many respects, Hamburg and Berlin represent two societal models at work in Wilhelmian Germany. Hamburg and the other Hanseatic cities, Lubeck and Bremen, have traditionally been thought to represent bourgeois society as it might have been in Germany as a whole: self-assured, liberal, and antiaristocratic. Historians are generally in agreement with Richard J. Evans in his assertion that “neither the economic activity nor the social world nor finally the political beliefs and actions of the Hamburg merchants corresponded to anything that has ever been defined, however remotely, as ‘feudal.’” Berlin, on the other hand, was dominated by the imperial court and the aristocracy, which, it is said, seduced and fatally weakened not only the business elite of the capital, but in fact the most influential segment of the German bourgeoisie as a whole.