Donna Harsch

Book Review: Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock ’N’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany, Berghahn: Oxford, 2007; xviii + 277 pp., 20 illus.; 9781571815323, £53.00 (hbk)

death. This construction did allow for more ready access to collaborating groups, however, and enabled many thousands of Jews to exit the ghetto and find sanctuary in the forest. Epstein, through considered use of survivor testimony, highlights the difficulties and tragedies encountered by those involved in this difficult operation. The ultimate betrayal of the Minsk underground movements by the post-war Soviet hierarchy is meticulously explored by Epstein as, again employing a mix of testimonies, she exposes, compares and analyses the various myths. The idea under Soviet ideology that one was guilty until shown to be innocent, and the concept, therefore, that if one survived the German occupation it must have been as a result of collaboration, created tragedy upon tragedy. Epstein deals thoroughly with this fraught topic and demonstrates how misconception, suspicion and deception all conspire to create inaccuracy and injustice. Epstein has produced an extremely engaging and useful work; it contains both new information and analysis, and it bravely confronts politically sensitive issues surrounding the period, the events, and their immediate aftermath, which are often conveniently ignored.

Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany (review)

urbanization in the shaping of German bourgeois domesticity reappears in a new light. The German women assigned to inspect the homes of Eastern Europe assumed an almost timeless quality to German household habits as a quality of the Germanic race, and hence were puzzled when the rural households of ethnic Germans in the East didn’t resemble those of the Berlin bourgeoisie. To accommodate discoveries on the Eastern front, Nazi inspectors had to revise their conception of domesticity as an intrinsic dimension of the German race, learning rather to understand it as a teachable dimension of the race. An especially strong element of Reagin’s argument is her claim that domesticity cut across regional and confessional divides in the bourgeoisie and in the bourgeois women’s movement, creating a unity that fractured only under the crises of Weimar. Yet one might wonder if the unity she stresses in the nineteenth century tells the whole story. Recent literature has begun to emphasize the importance of conflict and diversity amongst bourgeois reform movements, as well as the importance of international organization for those movements. Likewise, much recent research into the private has explored the resistance of individuals to normative pressures and the failure of the nation to fully colonize the private. Reagin gives us a very convincing picture of the normative pressures on private domestic organization and of the public relevance of those domestic norms. Yet another generation of research will be able to build on her work to examine the tensions and overlaps between the public and the private, as well as between the national and the international. Altogether Reagin’s study is extremely well researched and broadly conceived. Its transnational chapters in particular provide new insight into the formations—and transformations—of German national identity, making it necessary reading for any scholar grappling with the problem of the German bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (review)

northern France, stealthy dogs smuggled goods across borders, while a noble canine elite, the St. Bernards, saved errant winter Alpine travelers. Showing just how intertwined animal and human lives were, one woman kept the show bear that mauled her husband to death, explaining that it was all that she had left of him. In part two of The Discovery of France, Robb depicts the full discovery and the beginnings of the irreversible transformation of the French countryside. Increasingly porous to accumulating, interlocking, and collective economic, social, cultural, and economic forces, old France gave way to new. It was altered by roads, canals, rail lines, and, yes, Robb’s beloved bicycle, whose decisive triumph over the nation’s countryside was put on display with the first Tour de France in 1903. The Republic came to town and village in yet other ways with the investment of individual capital and the growth of industry. Burgeoning commerce stirred innovation, opportunity, and ambition in one place, while drying up old capillaries of trade in another, which accounted for the evacuation of many areas and explains why “thirty-six departments, representing forty percent of France’s surfaces, have fewer inhabitants than they did a century and half ago.” Public schooling, universal conscription, the spread of money and the market, and visits by successful city cousins accelerated rural emigration. Increased opportunities, larger appetites, and multiplied imaginations set the rural in motion. As rural France was systematically explored, mapped, inventoried, and surveyed, its wilderness, once typified by untamed horses, bulls, and wolves, vanished, and its inhabitants were integrated body and mind into the economy and the politics of a modern nation. As turn of the century regional writers wrote obituaries of old and beloved rural France, so, as Robb points out, Parisians of the Third Republic began to clean themselves and their streets up. Imitating the aristocracy of old, the middle class began to promenade their dogs along the boulevards, while affording their idle strutting canine companions with an ambulance service, cemetery, and an advocate of their own, the newly created Antivivisectionist Society. So Turcot and Robb teach us about the transformations of Paris and France. And whether we take ourselves to be descendants of the self-conscious flàneur or children of the old peasantry, we know that we all belong to modern society, and are offspring of a very profound and recent revolution in how we walk, travel, and think.