Suchergebnisse

In Violence: A Modern Obsession, Professor Richard Bessel explores changing attitudes towards violence, focusing primarily on developments in twentieth-century Europe and North America. He does so by examining violent spectacle, political and revolutionary violence, the violence of war, violence and religion, as well as domestic violence, and then considers attempts to control violence and how it has been remembered and commemorated

This is a social history of Germany in the years following the First World War. Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of her armies had enormous economic, social, and psychological consequences for the nation, and it is these which Richard Bessel sets out to explore. Dr Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, by the return of the soldiers to civilian life and by the demobilization of the economy. He demonstrates how the postwar transition was viewed as a moral crusade by Germans desperately concerned about challenges to traditional authority; and he assesses the ways in which the experiences and memories of the War affected the politics of the Weimar Republic. This original and scholarly book offers important insights into the sense of dislocation, both personal and national, experienced by Germany and Germans after the First World War, and the damaging legacy of the War for German democracy.

The capture of power by Hitler and the nazi movement in 1933 was one of the great turning-points in modern history. Yet its significance is usually seen to rest less upon what occurred in 1933 than upon what happened later. This article is an attempt to integrate the history of the nazi capture of power into what followed from it by examining four themes: war, racism, violence and order. Each of these themes was central to what happened in 1933. The first world war cast a long shadow over the politics of Weimar Germany, and this helped to create a climate conducive to nazism; racism inspired nazi activists and acceptance of racist assumptions was generally widespread; violence, both in word and deed, characterized nazi politics and helped the nazis to consolidate power rapidly in 1933; and a (misplaced) desire for order drove many Germans — among both the èlites and voters — into the arms of the nazis. Thus these broad themes, which frame the history of the Third Reich generally, also frame the history of the nazi capture of power.