Water Culture And Politics In Germany And The American West
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Author : Susan C. Anderson,Bruce H. Tabb Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers Page : 328 pages File Size : 51,8 Mb Release : 2001 Category : History ISBN : STANFORD:36105029666877
Water, Culture, and Politics in Germany and the American West by Susan C. Anderson,Bruce H. Tabb Pdf
Germany and the American West share a keen interest in water ecology, an interest grounded in ideas about the place of nature in cultural identity. This volume provides examples of the ways that German and American cultural and environmental traditions have influenced attitudes about water usage and conservation. It investigates the connections between our changing notions of nature and the varied metaphors with which we represent water. The essays explore how images of water probe the boundaries between culture and nature, reflect fears of disease and sexuality, support concepts of collective identity, and help shape the ways we think about resource management.
Germany's Nature by Thomas Lekan,Thomas Zeller Pdf
Germany boasts one of the strongest environmental records in the world. The Rhine River is cleaner than it has been in decades, recycling is considered a civic duty, and German manufacturers of pollution-control technology export their products around the globe. Yet, little has been written about the country's remarkable environmental history, and even less of that research is available in English. Now for the first time, a survey of the country's natural and cultural landscapes is available in one volume. Essays by leading scholars of history, geography, and the social sciences move beyond the Green movement to uncover the enduring yet ever-changing cultural patterns, social institutions, and geographic factors that have sustained Germany's relationship to its land. Unlike the American environmental movement, which is still dominated by debates about wilderness conservation and the retention of untouched spaces, discussions of the German landscape have long recognized human impact as part of the "natural order." Drawing on a variety of sites as examples, including forests, waterways, the Autobahn, and natural history museums, the essays demonstrate how environmental debates in Germany have generally centered on the best ways to harmonize human priorities and organic order, rather than on attempts to reify wilderness as a place to escape from industrial society. Germany's Nature is essential reading for students and professionals working in the fields of environmental studies, European history, and the history of science and technology.
Antisemitic Elements in the Critique of Capitalism in German Culture, 1850-1933 by Matthew Lange Pdf
This volume examines selected works of German literature from Gustav Freytag to Joseph Goebbels in relation to ethical, socio-economic, and political texts from the economic «take off» period in the middle of the nineteenth century up to the rise of National Socialism and investigates two aspects of anti-Semitic anti-capitalistic representations contained therein. First it traces how the Jews gained the dubious distinction of being the inventors, even embodiment, of capitalism and elaborates on negative traits assigned to both of them. Second it examines how representations of specifically Jewish capitalists were instrumentalized both to discredit laissez faire and simultaneously to assist in the definition of a specifically «German» socio-economic ethos.
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Germany is a key test case for the burgeoning field of environmental history; in no other country has the landscape been so thoroughly politicized throughout its past as in Germany,and in no other country have ideas of 'nature' figured so centrally in notions of national identity. The essays collected in this volume — the first collection on the subject in either English or German — place discussions of nature and the human relationship with nature in their political co texts. Taken together, they trace the gradual shift from a confident belief in humanity ’s ability to tame and manipulate the natural realm to the Umweltbewußtsein driving the contemporary conservation movement. Nature in German History also documents efforts to reshape the natural realm in keeping with ideological beliefs — such as the Romantic exultation of 'the wild' and the Nazis' attempts to eliminate 'foreign' flora and fauna — as well as the ways in which political issues have repeatedly been transformed into discussions of the environment in Germany.
Toys, Consumption, and Middle-class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 by Bryan Ganaway Pdf
Drawing on a variety of techniques from history, anthropology and literary criticism the author argues toy consumption helped adults negotiate the transmission of middle-class values regarding modernity, technology, gender roles and nationalism to their children. Practices of consumption permitted self-fashioning from above and below; women used their control over childhood to insert themselves into political debates about the future shape of the nation at a time when they lacked the vote. Although the project to build a middle-class utopia via shopping never succeeded, millions of Germans happily bought toys at Christmas and birthdays showing their faith in the ability of modern society to make the world a better place. To understand why ordinary consumers made these choices, the book draws on a variety of sources including periodicals, trade journals, advertisements, pedagogical literature, memoirs, and toys.
The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. By investigating how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power, The Conquest of Nature explores how over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. From Frederick the Great of Prussia to Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century to Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900, to the Nazis who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East, this groundbreaking study shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has often come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.
This book offers a thorough examination of the novels of Irmtraud Morgner (1933-1990), one of the most talented, compelling and overlooked writers within East German feminist and avant-garde circles. Using a combination of theoretical approaches - including Adorno's aesthetic theories and Bakhtinian analyses of dialogism and the carnivalesque - the author traces Morgner's engagement with postmodernist aesthetic strategies back to her efforts, beginning in the early 1970s, to pose questions about effective political practices. Morgner's work sheds new light on the fraught relationship between GDR intellectuals and the state, a hotly debated topic that marks most recent attempts to understand literary culture in the German Democratic Republic. Situating Morgner's fiction at the intersection of postmodern and feminist theory, this study also offers new evidence for viewing literature from the GDR as significantly more complex and aesthetically interesting than has been previously assumed.
Unmasking Hitler by Klaus L. Berghahn,Jost Hermand Pdf
Among the many studies on German National Socialism that have appeared in the last forty to fifty years, one aspect has seldom been treated in detail: the cultural representations of Adolf Hitler from the late 1920s to the present. This book focuses on the image of Hitler in literature, photography, historiography, film, philosophy, theatre, and comic books by major artists and scholars such as Ernst Ottwalt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Bertolt Brecht, John Hearfield, Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Chaplin, Theodor W. Adorno, Heiner Muller, and George Tabori.
From Cosmology to Ecology by Eric Paul Jacobsen Pdf
This book traces the development of the monist world-view in Germany from the Age of Goethe to the 1920s. Originally a core idea in the philosophy of Spinoza, monism, the idea of a universe of one substance that is both mind and matter, inspired many German thinkers from Goethe to Fechner, especially the infamous social Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. This study contrasts Haeckel's monism with the more benign monist world-views of his predecessors and of his socialist and left-liberal contemporaries and followers, above all Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche.
This study comprises an analysis of public spheres in National Socialist Germany. It investigates where and under what circumstances resistance to Hitler's regime was possible. The author focuses on the space of the crypto-public - defined as a politicized private sphere - as a potential realm for anti-state activism. Based on the activities of four organizations operating in Germany between 1933 and 1944 - the Jewish Cultural Association Berlin, the Kreisau Circle, the White Rose, and the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organization - she analyzes how this social locus functioned to foster resistance to National Socialism. She examines the artifacts of these groups - leaflets, pamphlets, politico-economic treatises, and theater performances - in order to establish models of crypto-public spaces and evaluate their possibilities and limitations as sites of resistance.
Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Hitler's autobahn was more than just the pet project of an infrastructure-friendly dictator. It was supposed to revolutionize the transportation sector in Germany, connect the metropoles with the countryside, and encourage motorization. The propaganda machinery of the Third Reich turned the autobahn into a hyped-up icon of the dictatorship. One of the claims was that the roads would reconcile nature and technology. Rather than destroying the environment, they would embellish the landscape. Many historians have taken this claim at face value and concluded that the Nazi regime harbored an inbred love of nature. In this book, the author argues that such conclusions are misleading. Based on rich archival research, the book provides the first scholarly account of the landscape of the autobahn.
The 1990s saw the appearance of many new works that have redefined and embellished the canon of Holocaust literature. While many of these works have quickly become classics, some have raised new questions about the processes of canonicity. This study concentrates particularly on works in German by Jewish Holocaust survivors written and published approximately fifty years after the fateful cataclysm, focusing on such crucial issues as genre and testimony. Despite the long shadow cast by the Holocaust on subsequent generations, the author shows that narratives on the Holocaust have continued to thrive, offering inventive interpretations of questions that have been thought to defy explanation.
Focusing on the ideological contradictions inherent in the German alliance with Japan during World War II, this book analyses German discourse about Japan from the distinct yet intricately connected standpoints of the German-Japanese historical relationship, the scientific and pseudo-scientific presentation of Japan in Germany, and German fictional depictions of Japan. The volume examines the historical relationship between Germany and Japan in the light of their alliance. It also traces the origins and development of the image of Japan in Nazi Germany. Through non-fiction texts, the points of emphasis, friction, and outright contradiction are discovered between Nazi ideology and an alliance with Japan as they were discussed both publicly and privately in Germany at the time. Finally, by examining fictional depictions of Japan and the Japanese under the Nazis, the work reveals the means by which fiction addressed these ideological issues and incorporated the historical and non-fictional arguments of its contemporaries. This book looks carefully at its connection to other historical, political, racial, and ideological thought of the time.
Author : Thomas M. LEKAN,Thomas M Lekan Publisher : Harvard University Press Page : 343 pages File Size : 41,6 Mb Release : 2009-06-30 Category : History ISBN : 9780674040076
Imagining the Nation in Nature by Thomas M. LEKAN,Thomas M Lekan Pdf
One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from "crass materialism" to the German homeland. Lekan's examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the "green" Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene. This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Nature's Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885-1914 2. The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914-1923 3. The Landscape of Modernity in theWeimar Era 4. From Landscape to Lebensraum: Race and Environment under Nazism 5. Constructing Nature in the Third Reich Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Sources Acknowledgments Index Writing squarely within the idiom of the 'invented tradition' and the 'imagined nation,' Thomas Lekan argues that in the wake of belated unification and at a time of rapid industrialization, the German landscape came to be seen as a touchstone of national identity. He questions the idea that those engaged in landscape preservation were simply 'antimodern,' and he challenges both scholars who have seen a straightforward continuity from pre-1933 preservationist sentiment to Nazism and those who have made exaggerated claims for the Third Reich as the progenitor of modern green politics. This is a welcome contribution to the literature on local and national identity, joining works by Celia Applegate and Alon Confino, and on the environmental history of modern Germany. Both scholarly and original, Imagining the Nation in Nature is an impressive achievement. --David Blackbourn, Harvard University This important and timely book contributes to our understanding of German identity as well as to modern concepts of environmentalism and nature. Lekan's valuable contribution elucidates the modern, technocratic, and therapeutic vision of preservation that linked Weimar and the Third Reich. His analysis of Nazi bio-nature is significant and thought-provoking. --Alon Confino, University of Virginia
Beamte, Ingenieure und Wissenschaftler des Russischen Reiches und später der Sowjetunion planten die Ausweitung und Modernisierung der Bewässerungssysteme und des Baumwollanbaus in Zentralasien. Die Studie, die das heutige Usbekistan und Turkmenistan untersucht, betont die diskursiven und politischen Kontinuitäten über die Zäsur von 1917 hinweg. Einer der zentralen Topoi war die Umwandlung von ›toten‹ Steppen und Wüsten in ›blühende Oasen‹. Der high modernism erreichte seinen Höhepunkt in den Nachkriegsjahrzehnten. Seit den 1970er Jahren entwickelte sich eine Öko-Kritik an der sowjetischen Modernisierung, die in der Perestrojkazeit an Fahrt aufnahm. Letztendlich trugen die ökologischen und ökonomischen sowie sozialen Folgewirkungen der wachstumsfixierten Modernisierung zum Zusammenbruch des kommunistischen Regimes bei. Officials, engineers and scientists in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union envisaged the expansion and modernization of irrigation systems and cotton growing in Central Asia. Focusing on the region of today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, this book highlights the continuities in discourse and policies beyond the historical divide of 1917. One of the central topoi was the transformation of 'dead' lands into 'blossoming oases'. High modernism policies hit their peak in the post-war decades. From the 1970s, an ecological critique evolved which gained momentum in the Perestroika period. Ultimately, the grave ecological, economic and social consequences of the growth-fixated modernization contributed to the downfall of the Communist regime.
