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German history



  • Cracking Stasi Puzzles is Key to Some Germans Finding the Truth

    by Katja Hoyer

    With an informant for every 90 citizens, the East German secret police left behind 16,000 sacks of shredded documents. Can information technology help reconstruct a record of what happens when a government commits to spying on its own citizens? 



  • Will Ukraine Be the Death of German Pacifism?

    by Stephen Milder

    The real transformation wrought in Europe by the Russian invasion isn't the return of war (which was certainly present in the 1990s) but the turn of Germany away from a post-fascist pacifist posture to a potential remilitarization. 



  • The Complicated History of Germany's Christmas Markets

    It's unclear when medieval Germany's winter markets became affixed to nostalgic ideas of Christmas. But they've been adopted by ruling classes to offer prescriptive visions of class hierarchy, religion, and even Nazism. 



  • Take Calls for a "Fourth Reich" Seriously

    by Gavriel Rosenfeld

    The concept of a new German Reich emerged almost immediately after the fall of Hitler, and reflected the incomplete effort to remove the far-right from German politics as well as the growth of an international authoritarian movement. 



  • The Disturbing Truth: What's Behind the German Coup

    by Annika Brockschmidt

    Like January 6, the German coup reflects the radicalization of a significant portion of the affluent "bourgeois center" of the society, making a reckoning with the sources of far-right allegiance particularly urgent. 



  • The Nazi use of Legalism to Consolidate Power and Eliminate Democracy

    by Christopher R. Browning

    Hitler's lesson after a token prison sentence for organizing a coup attempt was to work to seize power through legal means with the support of ideologically sympathetic courts. Non-MAGA conservatives appear to be missing important lessons. 



  • Dangerous as the Plague: The History of Moral Panics over Queer "Seduction"

    by Samuel Huneke

    From the perspective of the post-Obergefell US, this year's politicized attacks on LGBTQ people—particularly as threats to the nation's youth—seem like a sudden reversal. But such attacks have a long and miserable history that has shadowed movements for queer freedom at every turn. 



  • The Beginnings of Queer Citizenship in West Germany

    by Samuel Clowes Huneke

    An emerging gay activist culture in West Berlin in the 1970s made substantial gains in building cultural spaces and expanding tolerance, but struggled to build political solidarity out of sexual identity amid other social divisions.



  • Was Forgetting the Holocaust a Pillar of West German Rebuilding?

    Harald Jähner's book contents that the West German public's view of the nation's recent past grew darker as the years passed, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, a mood of adventurousness and liberation was widespread – at the cost of avoiding discussions of atrocity.



  • Remember, too, the Victims Nazis Singled Out for their Politics

    by Adam J. Sacks

    A German organization dedicated to the remembrance of left-wing victims of the Nazis has had its charitable status revoked. While the history of Nazism's persecution and murder of Jews and other groups is rightly commemorated, Nazism's violence against the political left has been obscured.