Staging The Nation Representations Of Nationhood And Gender In Plays Images And Films In Postwar West Germany 1945 1949

Moeller conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the past after the Second World War. He demonstrates the 'selective remembering' that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans.

Cultural Studies have been preoccupied with questions of national identity and cultural representations. At the same time, feminist studies have insisted upon the entanglement of gender with issues of nation, class, and ethnicity. Developments in the wake of German unification demand a reassessment of the nexus of gender, Germanness and nationhood. The contributors to this volume pursue these strands of the cultural debate in German history, literature, visual arts, and language over a period of three hundred years in sections devoted to History and the Canon, Visual Culture, Germany and Her "Others," and Language and Power. Contributors: L. Adelson, A. Taylor Allen, K. Bauer, R. Berman, B. Byg, M. Denman, E. Frederiksen, S. Friedrichsmeyer, E. Kaufmann, L. Koepnick, B. Kosta, S. Lefko, A. M.O'Sickey, B. Mennel, H. M. Müller, B. Peterson, L. Pusch, D. Sweet, H. Watt, S. Zantop.

Robert G. Moeller is the first historian of modern German women to use social policy as a lens to focus on society's conceptions of gender difference and "woman's place." He investigates the social, economic, and political status of women in West Germany after World War II to reveal how the West Germans, emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, viewed a reconsideration of gender relations as an essential part of social reconstruction. The debate over "woman's place" in the fifties was part of West Germany's confrontation with the ideological legacy of National Socialism. At the same time, the presence of the Cold War influenced all debates about women and the family. In response to the "woman question," West Germans defined the boundaries not only between women and men, but also between East and West. Moeller's study shows that public policy is a crucial arena where women's needs, capacities, and possibilities are discussed, identified, defined, and reinforced. Nowhere more explicitly than in the first decade of West Germany's history did, in Joan Scott's words, "politics construct gender and gender construct politics." This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.

How gender factored into politics and society in the United States and East and West Germany in the aftermath of World War II. Gender and the Long Postwar examines gender politics during the post–World War II period and the Cold War in the United States and East and West Germany. The authors show how disruptions of older political and social patterns, exposure to new cultures, population shifts, and the rise of consumerism affected gender roles and identities. Comparing all three countries, chapters analyze the ways that gender figured into relations between victor and vanquished and shaped everyday life in both the Western and Soviet blocs. Topics include the gendering of the immediate aftermath of war; the military, politics, and changing masculinities in postwar societies; policies to restore the gender order and foster marriage and family; demobilization and the development of postwar welfare states; and debates over sexuality (gay and straight).

Newsreel cinema and television not only served as an important tool in the shaping of political spheres and the construction of national and cultural identities up to the 1960s. Today's potent televisual forms were furthermore developed in and strongly influenced by newsreels, and much of the archived newsreel footage is repeatedly used to both illustrate and re-stage past events and their significance. This book addresses newsreel cinema and television as a medium serving the formation of cultural identities in a variety of national contexts after 1945, its role in forming audiovisual narratives of a »biopic of the nation«, and the technical, aesthetical, and political challenges of archiving and restaging cinematic and televisual newsreel.

Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.