Stephan Malinowski

Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Europeanization through Violence? War Experiences and the Making of Modern Europe

Unlike the more ambivalent transnational concepts of ‘Americanization’ and ‘Globalization’, the increasingly popular term ‘Europeanization’ is generally used to describe unambiguously positive processes of political, socio-economic and cultural integration within the institutional framework of the European Union.1 Peaceful forms of cross-cultural encounters, shared values, free trade, transnational exchanges of ideas, a culture of compromise, and increasing inter-state cooperation are, or so it seems, at the heart of what we commonly perceive as ‘Europeanization’; a transnational process that culminated in the EU, a realm of peace and prosperity in which the demons of a nationalist past have become history.2

Eine Million Algerier lernen im 20. Jahrhundert zu leben. Umsiedlungslager und Zwangsmodernisierung im Algerienkrieg 1954–1962

«One million Algerians learn to live in the 20th century» Resettlement camps and forced modernization in the Algerian War 1954–1962 One of the most astonishing characteristics of the Algerian War of Independence against France is the combination between military struggle against insurrection and civil reform projects. One special aspect of this war allows us to identify the fusion of these two elements: French resettlement policy. The French army violently forced up to three million people to leave their villages. Afterwards, they were reassembled in especially built camps, called «camps de regroupement». At the beginning, these measures were purely military. But they were quickly developed and became a massive rural development program. The promise of a fast global modernization of all areas of life should transform the inmates of the camp into loyal supporters of the project of a French Algeria. The «camps de regroupement» can be described as laboratories of modernization in which apparently contradictory elements were combined in a singular and unique way. Among these elements: development aid, an extremely rigid population control and different apparently totalitarian measures of social engineering.

Wie zivil war der deutsche Adel? Anmerkungen zum Verhältnis von Adel und Zivilgesellschaft zwischen 1871 und 1933

Der Versuch, den Begriff Zivilgesellschaft zu definieren, ist vor mehr als zehn Jahren mit der Ubung verglichen worden, einen Pudding an die Wand zu nageln (Brumlik 1991). Seither wurden weiterhin emsig defmitorische Nagel aller Farben und Grosen eingeschlagen, strittig bleibt allerdings, wieviel der begehrten Masse an diesen Haltevorrichtungen kleben geblieben ist. Der Versuch, einen Begriff, der zwar eine lange Geschichte besitzt, dessen Renaissance jedoch eher politische als analytische Grunde zu haben scheint, fur die Geschichtswissenschaft fruchtbar zu machen, erhoht die Gefahr begrifflicher Unscharfen noch weiter.