Moritz Föllmer

Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930–1945*

Was Nazism collectivistic? At first glance, the answer to this question seems obvious. Countless statements by leaders and minor spokesmen of the Nazi movement and regime made it abundantly clear to Germans that they needed to subordinate their personal desires and interests to the Volksgemeinschaft (national community). “In our nation the priority is not on the individual and what benefits him but on the common good, the Volk and Germany. We are responsible to future generations.” This random quote could have figured in many speeches, tracts, or newspaper articles; it is here taken from a letter by the Swabian high school senior Hans B. to his half-sister Freia Eisner, who had emigrated to France. Evoking his personal commitment and sacrifice, Hans added, “These are no phrases! This is the way I feel and think! I have been with the Nazi movement since 1930 and have vouched for it with my blood when I was knocked down by a Communist gang in front of my house.”1 On the basis of similar statements, as well as a by now familiar variety of institutions and practices, a number of historians have recently emphasized the collectivistic character of the Third Reich’s ideology and practice. Without defining the term explicitly, they draw on a widespread sense of “collectivism” as an order that requires the subordination of individuals to a collective good, however defined. For instance, Claudia Koonz has argued that Nazism had an ethic of its own. Rather than simply being immoral, it had a specific morality distinguished from liberal morality by “a deeply anti-liberal collec-

The Subjective Dimension of Nazism

The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reichs most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reichs modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female ‘help’ within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a ‘Nazi subject’ than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitlers movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.

The culture of ‘crisis’ in the Weimar Republic

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography.

Cities of Choice: Elective Affinities and the Transformation of Western European Urbanity from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s

This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing ones surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, but came under pressure by New Left activists, whose emphatically different elective affinities led them to create alternative spaces such as communal apartments and squatted houses. In so doing, they reinvigorated urban life, but also diluted their initial political project and triggered a conservative counter-reaction.

Nationalismus, Konsum und politische Kultur im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit

Nationalism, Consumption and Political Culture in Interwar Europe This review article provides an overview of some recent work on the cultural history of interwar Europe as well as some general reflections on the interpretation of a period that has often been reduced to a plethora of deficiencies. Studies on nationalism from Hungary to Spain, on consumer culture in France or Germany, and on political culture from the comparatively stable Netherlands to Stalinist Moscow converge in bringing out the heterogeneous, open-ended and productive character of the 1920s and even the 1930s - decades that point not only to the Second World War but also to post-war developments. Such a perspective can also explain why extremist movements and dictatorships were legitimate outcomes of this complex modernity, while having to employ unprecedented violence to bring this modernity under control.

Reviving the longue durée [Review of: J. Guldi, D. Armitage (2014) The History Manifesto]

Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible.

Urban Societies in Europe since 1945: Toward a Historical Interpretation

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban historys classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

Der Feind im Salon. Eliten, Besatzung und nationale Identität in Nordfrankreich und Westdeutschland 1914-1930

This article analyses how economic and administrative elites in the Department Nord and the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf experienced and interpreted the challenge of occupation. In both cases, the enemy intruded into factories and government buildings as well as into private spaces. Industrialists and higher civil servants reacted by clinging to their group identities and bourgeois attitudes, which were strengthened rather than weakened as a result of the war and its aftermath. At the same time, tensions arose over the definition of patriotic behaviour. After the end of the occupations, the official politics of memory in both France and Germany had trouble covering these tensions retrospectively and creating a consensus. While in comparative perspective the similarities between both cases prevail, the occupation of the Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf took place in the context of a deep cultural, social, and political crisis and therefore was interpreted in radical nationalist terms already paving the road to Nazism. 127 Vgl. Föllmer, »Volkskörper« (wie Anm. 116); ders., »Volksgemeinschaft« (wie Anm. 116).