Mass Culture in Imperial Germany, 1871 - 1918 PDF Download

Author: Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Duitsland
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Author: Matthew Jefferies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137085304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
It has often ben suggested that artists and writers in Germany's imperial era shunned social engagement, preferring instead apolitical introspection. However, as Matthew Jefferies reveals, whether one looks at the painters, poets and architects who helped to create an official imperial identity after 1871; the cultural critics and reformers of the later 19th century; or the new generation of cultural producers that emerged in the years around 1900, the social, political and cultural were never far apart. In this attractively illustrated book, Jefferies provides a lively introduction to the principal movements in German high culture between 1871 and 1918, in the context of imperial society and politics. He not only demonstrates that Germany's 'Imperial culture' was every bit as fascinating as the much better known 'Weimar culture' of the 1920s, but argues that much of what came later has origins in the imperial period. Filling a significant gap in the current historiography, this study will appeal to all those with an interest in the rich and diverse culture of Imperial Germany.

Author: James Retallack
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019160710X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The German Empire was founded in January 1871 not only on the basis of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's 'blood and iron' policy but also with the support of liberal nationalists. Under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany became the dynamo of Europe. Its economic and military power were pre-eminent; its science and technology, education, and municipal administration were the envy of the world; and its avant-garde artists reflected the ferment in European culture. But Germany also played a decisive role in tipping Europe's fragile balance of power over the brink and into the cataclysm of the First World War, eventually leading to the empire's collapse in military defeat and revolution in November 1918. With contributions from an international team of twelve experts in the field, this volume offers an ideal introduction to this crucial era, taking care to situate Imperial Germany in the larger sweep of modern German history, without suggesting that Nazism or the Holocaust were inevitable endpoints to the developments charted here.

Author: Volker Rolf Berghahn
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845450113
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of German society in this period, providing a broad survey of its development. The volume is thematically organized and designed to give easy access to the major topics and issues of the Bismarkian and Wilhelmine eras. The statistical appendix contains a wide range of social, economic and political data. Written with the English-speaking student in mind, this book is likely to become a widely used text for this period, incorporating as it does twenty years of further research on the German Empire since the appearance of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's classic work.

Author: Sven Oliver Müller
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The German Empire, its structure, its dynamic development between 1871 and 1918, and its legacy, have been the focus of lively international debate that is showing signs of further intensification as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Based on recent work and scholarly arguments about continuities and discontinuities in modern German history from Bismarck to Hitler, well-known experts broadly explore four themes: the positioning of the Bismarckian Empire in the course of German history; the relationships between society, politics and culture in a period of momentous transformations; the escalation of military violence in Germany's colonies before 1914 and later in two world wars; and finally the situation of Germany within the international system as a major political and economic player. The perspectives presented in this volume have already stimulated further argument and will be of interest to anyone looking for orientation in this field of research.

Author: Matthew Jefferies
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 9781403904218
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
It has often ben suggested that artists and writers in Germany's imperial era shunned social engagement, preferring instead apolitical introspection. However, as Matthew Jefferies reveals, whether one looks at the painters, poets and architects who helped to create an official imperial identity after 1871; the cultural critics and reformers of the later nineteenth century; or the new generation of cultural producers that emerged in the years around 1900, the social, political and cultural were never far apart. In this attractively illustrated book, Jefferies provides a lively introduction to the principal movements in German high culture between 1871 and 1918, in the context of imperial society and politics. He not only demonstrates that Germany's 'Imperial culture' was every bit as fascinating as the much better known 'Weimar culture' of the 1920s, but argues that much of what came later has origins in the imperial period. Filling a significant gap in the current historiography, this study will appeal to all those with an interest in the rich and diverse culture of Imperial Germany.

Author: Alon Confino
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807860840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
All nations make themselves up as they go along, but not all make themselves up in the same way. In this study, Alon Confino explores how Germans turned national and argues that they imagined the nation as an extension of their local place. In 1871, the work of political unification had been completed, but Germany remained a patchwork of regions with different histories and traditions. Germans had to construct a national memory to reconcile the peculiarities of the region and the totality of the nation. This identity project, examined by Confino as it evolved in the southwestern state of WArttemberg, oscillated between failure and success. The national holiday of Sedan Day failed in the 1870s and 1880s to symbolically commingle localness and nationhood. Later, the idea of the Heimat, or homeland, did prove capable of representing interchangeably the locality, the region, and the nation in a distinct national narrative and in visual images. The German nationhood project was successful, argues Confino, because Germans made the nation into an everyday, local experience through a variety of cultural forms, including museums, school textbooks, popular poems, travel guides, posters, and postcards. But it was not unique. Confino situates German nationhood within the larger context of modernity, and in doing so he raises broader questions about how people in the modern world use the past in the construction of identity.

Author: Volker Rolf Berghahn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description

Author: Christian Davis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117971
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
An exploration of anti-Semitic behaviors in the German empire in the pre-WWI period

Author: John Phillip Short
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146823X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Magic Lantern Empire examines German colonialism as a mass cultural and political phenomenon unfolding at the center of a nascent, conflicted German modernity. John Phillip Short draws together strands of propaganda and visual culture, science and fantasy to show how colonialism developed as a contested form of knowledge that both reproduced and blurred class difference in Germany, initiating the masses into a modern market worldview. A nuanced account of how ordinary Germans understood and articulated the idea of empire, this book draws on a diverse range of sources: police files, spy reports, pulp novels, popular science writing, daily newspapers, and both official and private archives. In Short's historical narrative-peopled by fantasists and fabulists, by impresarios and amateur photographers, by ex-soldiers and rank-and-file socialists, by the luckless and bored along the margins of German society-colonialism emerges in metropolitan Germany through a dialectic of science and enchantment within the context of sharp class conflict. He begins with the organized colonial movement, with its expert scientific and associational structures and emphatic exclusion of the "masses." He then turns to the grassroots colonialism that thrived among the lower classes, who experienced empire through dime novels, wax museums, and panoramas. Finally, he examines the ambivalent posture of Germany's socialists, who mounted a trenchant critique of colonialism, while in their reading rooms workers spun imperial fantasies. It was from these conflicts, Short argues, that there first emerged in the early twentieth century a modern German sense of the global.