Germany S Rude Awakening

Germany's Rude Awakening depicts the rise and fall of censorship in the age of the Brothers Grimm and Prince Metternich. Focusing on the Grimm's homeland of Hesse-Cassel, Frederik Ohles illustrates how censorship first awakened to the challenge posed by new political forces and literary forms, then lost its effectiveness as more and more Germans read and wrote what they wanted, finding ways to evade both censors and police. Ohles examines actual practices, looking beyond the legislation of the German Confederation and the pronouncements of Prince Metternich. He explores the effects of the laws on the censors' work, analyzes the political influence of Prussia and Austria on the Principality of Hesse (situated at the crossroads of the German Confederation), and interprets the results of censorship on literature, politics, the book trade, and public and private life. In telling the story of a momentous struggle between old and new views of politics and literature, he shows that while censorship became a public issue in eighteenth-century Germany, it failed as a policing institution. Ohles's extensive research includes police archives, early issues of the bookdealers' gazette published in Marburg, recollections of the Brothers Grimm, the Hessian collection of artistic and scholarly memoirs, and travelers' accounts. The result is a work that will appeal to specialists in nineteenth-century German history and literature as well as historians of censorship, publishing, and German political culture. It also complements current historical debates about communications, public culture, and the modernization of bureaucracy.

Vividly reconstructing the political ideas of the Brothers Grimm, Jakob Norberg transforms our image of history's most famous folklorists.

Many accounts of German unification focus on war, diplomacy and Bismarck and on the crucial ten years up to 1871. John Breuilly, in addition to paying attention to those issues extends the analysis back to 1800. He also takes into account social, economic and cultural developments, bringing to the reader's attention recent research, much of it in German. In particular, the book argues that one should see unification as just one possible outcome of the German situation, the result of rapid shifts in the relative power of different European states and of underlying changes which made nationality a more vital force in politics.

Imperial Germany's governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors, but still not broad enough to prevent the literary community from challenging and subverting many of the social norms the state was most determined to defend. This study is the first systematic analysis in any language of state censorship of literature and theater in imperial Germany (1871-1918). To assess the role that formal state controls played in German literary and political life during this period, it examines the intent, function, contested legal basis, institutions, and everyday operations of literary censorship as well as its effectiveness and its impact on authors, publishers, and theater directors.

As Europe finds itself once again caught between two superpowers – the USA and a rising China – little has been written about a relationship that will have a profound influence on the international order: the relationship between the People's Republic of China and Germany. In Germany and China, leading international relations expert Andreas Fulda looks critically at the increasingly interdependent relationship between the two countries. Drawing on examples from politics, industry, development aid and technology sectors and academia, the book explores how successive governments from Helmut Kohl to Angela Merkel have pursued ever-closer ties to China in the interests of short term economic gain. Fulda explores the danger of this increasing entanglement not just for Germany, but for Europe and the international world order.