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Author: Karrin Hanshew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-08-20
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1107017378
DOWNLOAD EBOOKKarrin Hanshew examines West German responses to 1970s terrorism to explain why the experience had lasting significance for German politics and society.
Author: Jennifer M. Kapczynski
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2022-02-07
Total Pages: 279
ISBN-13: 0472132911
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow postwar West German democracy was styled through word, image, sound, performance, and gathering
Author: Brian M. Puaca
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9781845455682
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholarship on the history of West Germany's educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture? This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.
Author: Peter C. Caldwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-03-14
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 0192570528
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDemocracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state, focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-1989). The volume argues that the welfare state informed and altered basic questions of democracy and its relationship to capitalism. These questions were especially important for West Germany, given its recent experience with the collapse of capitalism, the disintegration of democracy, and National Socialist dictatorship after 1930. Three central issues emerged. First, the development of a nearly all-embracing set of social services and payments recast the problem of how social groups and interests related to the state, as state agencies and affected groups generated their own clientele, their own advocacy groups, and their own expert information. Second, the welfare state blurred the line between state and society that is constitutive of basic rights and the classic world of liberal freedom; rights became claims on the state, and social groups became integral parts of state administration. Third, the welfare state potentially reshaped the individual citizen, who became wrapped up with mandatory social insurance systems, provisioning of money and services related to social needs, and the regulation of everyday life. Peter C. Caldwell describes how West German experts sought to make sense of this vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. Coming from backgrounds in politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy, they sought to conceptualize their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies.
Author: Pepijn Corduwener
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-08-25
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 1134996330
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe current perception of democratic crisis in Western Europe gives a renewed urgency to a new perspective on the way democracy was reconstructed after World War II and the principles that underpinned its postwar transformation. This study accounts for the formation of the postwar democratic order in Western Europe by studying how the main political actors in France, West Germany and Italy conceptualized democracy and strove over its meaning. Based upon a wide range of librarian and archival sources from these countries, it tracks changing conceptions of democracy among leading politicians, political parties, and leaders of social movements, and unveils how they were deeply divided over key principles of postwar democracy – such as the political party, the free market economy, representation, and civic participation. By comparing three national debates on the question what democracy meant and how it should be institutionalized and practiced, this study argues that only in the 1970s conceptions of democracy converged and key political actors accepted each other as democrats with similar conceptions of democracy. This study thereby deconstructs the myth of the quick emergence of one consensual Western European model of democracy after 1945, demonstrates that its formation was a long and contentious process in which national differences were often of crucial importance, and contributes to an enhanced understanding of the historical roots of the current sentiment of democratic crisis.
Author: Martin Klimke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-09-04
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 0691152462
DOWNLOAD EBOOKUsing previously classified documents and original interviews, The Other Alliance examines the channels of cooperation between American and West German student movements throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and the reactions these relationships provoked from the U.S. government. Revising the standard narratives of American and West German social mobilization, Martin Klimke demonstrates the strong transnational connections between New Left groups on both sides of the Atlantic. Klimke shows that the cold war partnership of the American and German governments was mirrored by a coalition of rebelling counterelites, whose common political origins and opposition to the Vietnam War played a vital role in generating dissent in the United States and Europe. American protest techniques such as the "sit-in" or "teach-in" became crucial components of the main organization driving student activism in West Germany--the German Socialist Student League--and motivated American and German student activists to construct networks against global imperialism. Klimke traces the impact that Black Power and Germany's unresolved National Socialist past had on the German student movement; he investigates how U.S. government agencies, such as the State Department's Interagency Youth Committee, advised American policymakers on confrontations with student unrest abroad; and he highlights the challenges student protesters posed to cold war alliances. Exploring the catalysts of cross-pollination between student protest movements on two continents, The Other Alliance is a pioneering work of transnational history.
Author: Robert Goodrich
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2022-12-07
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 1469665557
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDemocracy in Crisis explores one of the world's greatest failures of democracy in Germany during the so-called Weimar Republic, 1919–33—a failure that led to the Third Reich. For more than a decade after World War I, liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, social democracy, Christian democracy, communism, fascism, and every variant of these movements struggled for power. Although Germany's constitutional framework boldly enshrined liberal democratic values, the political spectrum was so broad and fully represented that a stable parliamentary majority required constant negotiations. The compromises that were made subsequently alienated citizens, who were embittered by national humiliation in the war and the ensuing treaty and struggling to survive economic turmoil and rapidly changing cultural norms. As positions hardened, the door was opened to radical alternatives. In this game, students, as delegates of the Reichstag (parliament), must contend with intense parliamentary wrangling, uncontrollable world events, street fights, assassinations, and insurrections. The game begins in late 1929, just after the U.S. stock market crash, as the Reichstag deliberates the Young Plan (a revision to the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I). Students belonging to various political parties must debate these matters and more as the combination of economic stress, political gridlock, and foreign pressure turn Germany into a volcano on the verge of eruption.
Author: Devin O. Pendas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-09-24
Total Pages: 235
ISBN-13: 1108915957
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPost-war Germany has been seen as a model of 'transitional justice' in action, where the prosecution of Nazis, most prominently in the Nuremberg Trials, helped promote a transition to democracy. However, this view forgets that Nazis were also prosecuted in what became East Germany, and the story in West Germany is more complicated than has been assumed. Revising received understanding of how transitional justice works, Devin O. Pendas examines Nazi trials between 1945 and 1950 to challenge assumptions about the political outcomes of prosecuting mass atrocities. In East Germany, where there were more trials and stricter sentences, and where they grasped a broad German complicity in Nazi crimes, the trials also helped to consolidate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship by legitimating a new police state. Meanwhile, opponents of Nazi prosecutions in West Germany embraced the language of fairness and due process, which helped de-radicalise the West German judiciary and promote democracy.
Author: Martin Conway
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-06-14
Total Pages: 376
ISBN-13: 0691204594
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.
Author: Maria Mitchell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2012-10-04
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0472118412
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA pioneering exploration of the origins of German Christian Democracy in the context of 19th- and 20th-century politics and religion
