The First World War And German National Identity

An innovative study of the impact of the wartime alliance between Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on German national identity.

An innovative study of the impact of the wartime alliance between Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on German national identity.

War Land on the Eastern Front is a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of their encounter with Eastern Europe. It presents an 'anatomy of an occupation', charting the ambitions and realities of the new German military state there. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, it reveals how German views of the East changed during total war. New categories for viewing the East took root along with the idea of a German cultural mission in these supposed wastelands. After Germany's defeat, the Eastern front's 'lessons' were taken up by the Nazis, radicalized, and enacted when German armies returned to the East in World War II. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius's persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

This book shows that German national identity has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world but also due to domestic developments such as recent dynamics of collective memory, Germany has re-emerged as a confident nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.

As part of the Paris peace settlement imposed on a defeated Germany after the First World War, the inhabitants of three German borderland regions were to decide whether they wished to remain part of Germany. Plebiscites were held during 1920 and 1921 in areas of mixed ethnicity: Germans and Danes in Schleswig, Germans and Poles in the districts of Allenstein and Marienwerder and in Upper Silesia. In this work, T. Hunt Tooley examines the German attempt to influence the outcome in Upper Silesia in March 1921?within the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade the national states involved to make such attempts. We see the first international effort of a defeated Germany, acting through the new Weimar government, to face issues concerning the definition of the new national state, of citizenship, and of what it meant to be German. ø National Identity and Weimar Germany thereby contributes to our understanding of the Weimar period, which has been intensely scrutinized for clues to its fall and the consequent rise of Nazism. Seeing Upper Silesia as a laboratory for the question of German self-identity, Tooley also provides the valuable corrective that Silesians often voted as much in response to local and contingent issues as in response to ethnic identification.

This original study examines the interrelationship between the construction of national identity and the transformation of political thought in Germany before the First World War. During the decade or so before the war, the German Empire was challlenged openly by both left and right for the first time since the 1870s. Paradoxically, however, this pre-war crisis of Germanys system of government occurred during a period of increasing nationalism, which created a solid cross-party basis of support for the Empire as a nation-state. This pioneering study argues that Wilhelmine debates about the reform of the German Empire can only be understood in the context of a broader discussion and comparison of European and American political regimes which took place in Germany after the turn of the century. In such contemporary debates about a German Sonderwag, France remained a principal point of reference because French-style parliamentarism had come to be viewed as the main alternative to German constitutionalism. By analysing Wilhelmine depictions of the Third Republic, Dr Hewitson revises accepted interpretations of German politics and nationalism.

Wittlinger takes a fresh look at German national identity in the 21st century and shows that it has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world and recent domestic developments, Germany has re-emerged as a nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.

How did German intellectuals react to unification and how have they conceived the country's national identity and its new interantional position? This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider development of German political thought since the Second World War - while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers. Muller explains why many intellectuals reacted defensively to unification and why unification plunged the Left in particular into a major crisis that has yet to be overcome. He analyses the responses of Gunter Grass, Jurgen Habermas and others of the so-called 'sceptical generation', who broke with the tradition of the illiberal interwar intellectuals and reinvented themselves as a 'democratic elite' who sought to transform political culture after the War - and tried to do so again after 1989. He discusses the German idea of 'constitutional patriotism' as well as the anti-nationalism of the 'generation of 1968', and provides the first full-scale analysis of Germany's 'New Right'.Written clearly and elegantly, this book assesses the acrimonious debates about the future of the nation-state and public memory in Germany and offers more general reflections on the role intellectuals can play in post-totalitarian societies. Jan-Werner Muller is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He has held a senior visiting fellowship at the Remarque Institute, New York University and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.