Suchergebnisse

Machine generated contents note: MICHAEL GEYER -- Introduction: The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany -- PART 1 -- Intellectuals and the Politics of Culture in the German Democratic Republic -- DIETRICH HOHMANN -- An Attempt at an Exemplary Report on H. FRANK TROMMLER -- German Intellectuals: Public Roles and the Rise of the Therapeutic -- DOROTHE DORNHOF -- The Inconsequence of Doubt: Intellectuals and the Discourse on Socialist Unity -- SIMONE BARCK, MARTIN A LANGERMANN, -- AND SIEGFRIED LOKATIS -- The German Democratic Republic as a "Reading Nation": Utopia, Planning, Reality, and Ideology -- KATIE TRUMPENER -- La guerre est finie: New Waves, Historical Contingency, and the GDR "Rabbit Films" -- DRVID BATHRICK -- Language and Power -- PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON -- Syntax of Surveillance: Languages of Silence and Solidarity -- LOREN KRUGER -- Wir treten aus unseren Rollen heraus: Theater Intellectuals and Public Spheres -- ALEXRNDER KLUGE -- It is a Mistake to Think That the Dead Are Dead: Obituary for Heiner Miiller -- PART 2 -- Intellectuals in Transit: Toward a Unified Germany -- DIETRICH HOHMANN -- The Consequences of Unification According to H. PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON -- Soundtracks: GDR Music from "Revolution" to "Reunification" -- ANDREAS GRAF -- Media Publics in the GDR: Unification and the Transformation of the Media, 1989-1991 -- KONRA D JARAUSCH -- The Double Disappointment: Revolution, Unification, and German Intellectuals -- MITCHELL G. ASH -- Becoming Normal, Modern, and German (Again?) -- ANDREAS HUYSSEN -- Nation, Race, and Immigration: German Identities After Unification -- JOHN BORNEMAN -- Education After the Cold War: Remembrance, Repetition, and Right- -- Wing Violence -- MICHAEL GEYER -- The Long Good-bye: German Culture Wars in the Nineties -- RLEXANDER KLUGE -- The Moment of Tragic Recognition with a Happy Ending

AbstractThe discussion of the hand-made and hand-written cookbook of Ruth Bratu, who was evacuated from Prague in a Kindertransport in 1939, leads to a wide-ranging exploration of what we expect and what we can know about the cookbook. It discusses its recipes as well as Ruth Bratu's use of the cookbook's pages for handwritten notes about the 1941/42 political gatherings of exiles of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic in London. Above all, it is a reflection on Alltagsgeschichte, the use of a single document as a vehicle of historical interpretation, and not least the sensory recognition that this cookbook evoked for the author.

Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the "middle." That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the "primacy of foreign policy," that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: "Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern," in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: "Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen." But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?