Suchergebnisse

Through the lens of advice literature, letters and autobiographical documents, this article examines the construction of middle–class masculinity in nineteenth–century Germany. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the fin–de–siècle gender debates, masculinity was paradoxically configured. On the one hand, manhood was said to be relational, that is notions of the masculine were related to notions of the feminine. On the other hand, the concept of the 'whole man' encompassed aspects gendered both as female and as male, thus inviting visions of a society without women. This paradoxical construction became the site of discussions, projections and contestations: women used the figure of the whole man in order to voice their desires or criticise male claims to dominance and control, but it frequently also served as the basis for male self–descriptions. In the course of the nineteenth century, notions of integral masculinity became ever more precarious since the sociable, well–rounded, artistically inclined man propagated in the first half of the nineteenth century was increasingly superseded by the 'soldier of work' which gave the fin–de–siècle gender debates a particular urgency.

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich