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"Exploring the history of the gas mask in Germany from 1915 to the eve of World War II, Peter Thompson traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies such as the gas mask produced new relationships to danger, risk, management, and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction. Recounting the apocalyptic visions of chemical death that circulated in interwar Germany, he argues that while everyday encounters with the gas mask tended to exacerbate fears, the mask also came to symbolize debates about the development of military and chemical technologies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He underscores how the gas mask was tied into the creation of an exclusionary national community under the Nazis and the altered perception of environmental danger in the second half of the twentieth century. As this innovative new history shows, chemical warfare and protection technologies came to represent poignant visions of the German future"--

Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Author's Note -- Prologue: The Russian Unicorn -- PART I: RESISTANCE (1854-1914) -- 1. The Doomed Dynasty -- 2. The Sons of Simbirsk -- 3. The Distorting Mirror -- 4. The Young Madmen -- 5. The Calamitous Kaiser -- 6. The Accidental Terrorist -- 7. The Dress Rehearsal -- 8. The Romantic Assassin -- 9. The Kerensky Ascent -- PART II: REVOLUTION (1914-1917) -- 10. The Damn Fool Thing -- 11. The Iron Hurricane -- 12. The Great Retreat -- 13. The Flashes of Lightning -- 14. The February Revolution -- 15. The End of Tsarism -- 16. The Return of the Exiles

AbstractIn April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model (PM) has emphasized how the various 'filters' can lead to news reports misrepresenting the vested political and economic interests that underpin US foreign policy. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the implications of the PM for media operations in another key dimension of capitalism: financial markets. Traders require timely and accurate information about changing market conditions. However, financial news announcements influence investor perceptions and sometimes trigger trading activity that reflexively changes the market conditions being reported. The interdependency of financial reporters, traders and analysts means that financial news production cannot be adequately understood in terms of how the PM filters distort media representations of markets. This article aims to critically analyse how financial news/information does not merely represent financial reality but reflexively constitutes it. The analysis will also highlight which aspects of financial news production are consistent with the PM as well as those that contradict it.

This paper puts the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 into its historical and economic context. It points out that the developments which led to the demise of communism were not restricted to the Soviet Bloc but part of a longer-term crisis of the global economy. Using Kondtratieff's theory of Long Waves in capitalist developments, this paper shows how the end of the long post-war boom in around 1974 represented the top of the Kondtratieff wave and that the primary recession of 1979-82 and the deflationary policies carried out in order to restore capitalist profitability at that point also laid the ground for the undermining of the Soviet Bloc economies. 1989 is therefore seen as the consequence of the shift to global financialisation of the economy which necessitated a competitive catch-up policy in the form of Perestroika, the corollary of which was a readiness on the part of the Soviet Union to let Eastern Europe go its own way. The period since 1989 in Germany is presented as one in which the major party of the Centre-Left, the SPD, was forced to tack to the neo-liberal wind but which left the space for the PDS/Linke to profile itself as a left alternative. The current crisis, which the author contends will issue into a long Kondtratieff depression lasting until around 2020, means that social and economic priorities will shift away from the market and back towards the re-establishment of the primacy of politics over the market. This will put Die Linke in a strong position to represent the disadvantaged and force the SPD back towards a more leftist position. The end result, the author contends, will be a realignment of the Left into a solid block on the basis of the changed demography of a reunited Germany and a global economic crisis.