Suchergebnisse

Hauptbeschreibung: Warum haben die deutschen Soldaten im Zweiten Weltkrieg so verbissen gekämpft, selbst als die Niederlage schon absehbar war? Und wie konnte es geschehen, dass so viele gewöhnliche Soldaten einen verbrecherischen Krieg unterstützten? Die Antwort liegt nicht nur im Antisemitismus oder im Befehlsgehorsam der Deutschen, sondern in ihrer Sehnsucht nach Gemeinschaft und in der Erfüllung dieser Sehnsucht inmitten massenhafter Gewalt und massenhaften Todes. Im Schnittfeld der neueren Kultur-, Geschlechter- und Militärgeschichte angesiedelt, zeigt dieses Buch, wie das mythische Leitbi

Beiträge über Männerbilder und Männerideale im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, die sich vorwiegend mit Vereinswesen und Soldatentum beschäftigen. Befreiungskriege, Turnbewegungen, Studentenverbindungen und Jugendbewegung liefern vielfältiges Material, das sehr kenntnisreich analysiert wird. Kriegskameradschaft und Jugendkultur der 50er Jahre sind weitere Themen. Die private Männerwelt ist durch einen erstaunlichen Aufsatz über die Vaterrolle innerhalb des Bürgertums um die Jahrhundertwende abgedeckt, die durchaus Bestandteile heutiger Wunschvorstellungen enthielt. Kulturgeschichtlich hochinteressant. (3)

AbstractHegemonic masculinity in Nazi Germany, as well as in many militarized societies around the globe, meant physical, emotional, and moral "hardness." The ideal man, embodied by the soldier, was tough and aggressive, in control of his body, mind, and psyche. He did not hesitate to sacrifice life and limb on behalf of the Fatherland, or to subordinate his individuality under the command of a conformist group of comrades. Whereas many scholars have already stressed these features of hegemonic masculinity, this article argues that the act of soldiering provided men with a male identity that was ultimately not defined by the repudiation, but ratherintegration, of what was (and is) often coded as feminine. In the social practice of male interaction, diversity and flexibility were needed, thus allowing for the display of femininely coded behavior like affection, tenderness, empathy, caring, and tolerance toward emotional breakdowns and moments of weakness in their midst. Thanks to its inclusive nature, such "protean" masculinity enabled different types of soldier-men to establish male identities; it also allowed them to switch among different emotional and moral states without losing their manliness. Yet, this was true only if the predominance of hardness was respected. Eventually, protean masculinity integrated diverse men and diverse emotional and moral conditions into a fighting unit, and, in the case of the Third Reich, into a genocidal society.

Scholarship is not only about gaining new insights or establishing accurate knowledge but also about struggling for political impact and for market shares – shares of public or private funds, of academic jobs, of quotations by peers, and of media performances. Timothy Snyder'sBloodlandsfights for recentring contemporary European history.1No longer, his new book implies, should the centre of that history be Germany, which initiated two world wars and engaged with three genocides; even less should the centre be Western Europe, which historians for long have glorified as the trendsetter of modernity; and the Soviet Union, or Russia, does not qualify as 'centre' anyway. Introducing 'to European history its central event' (p. 380) means to focus on the eastern territories of Europe, the landsbetweenGermany and Russia, which, according to Snyder, suffered more than any other part from systematic, politically motivated, mass murder in the twentieth century. The superior victimhood of the 'bloodlands' is a numerical one. Fourteen million people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the territories of what is today most of Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic States did not become just casualties of war but victims of deliberate mass murder. Indeed, this is 'a very large number' (p. 411), one that stands many comparisons: ten million people perished in Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the Nazi death camps, which were located within the 'bloodlands'), 165,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust (p. ix), and even the number of war casualties most single countries or territories counted in the Second World War was smaller.