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25 results

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Decades of Reconstruction
  • Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War
  • Edited by Ute Planert, James Retallack
  • Published online:
    04 July 2017
    Print publication:
    13 June 2017
  • As wars and other conflicts increase on a worldwide scale, the alleged 'new wars' of the present day have taught that military victory does not necessarily result in a sustained state of peace. Rather, societies in conflict experience a 'status mixtus' - a transformative period that includes substantial changes in economy, politics, society and culture. Focusing on these decades of reconstruction in Europe and North America, this book examines the transformation of state systems, international relations, and normative principles in international comparison. By putting the postwar decade after 1945 into a long-term historical perspective, the chapters illuminate new patterns of transition between war and peace from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Experts in the field show that states and societies are never restituted from a 'zero hour'. They also demonstrate that foreign and domestic policy are intermixed before and after peace breaks out.

  • Mapping the Red Threat: The Politics of Exclusion in Leipzig Before 1914

  • James Retallack
  • Journal:
    Central European History / Volume 49 / Issue 3-4 / December 2016
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    18 January 2017, pp. 341-382
    Print publication:
    December 2016

  • Long before Adolf Hitler’s appearance clouded democracy’s prospects in Germany, election battles had provided a means to disadvantage “enemies of the Reich” in the polling booth. Such battles were waged not only during election campaigns but also when new voting laws were legislated and district boundaries were redrawn. Maps produced during the Imperial era informed voters, statesmen, and social scientists how the principle of the fair and equal vote was compromised at the subnational level, and new maps offer historians an opportunity to consider struggles for influence and power in visual terms. This article argues that local, regional, and national suffrages need to be considered together and in terms of their reciprocal effects. On the one hand, focusing on overlaps and spillovers between electoral politics at different tiers of governance can illuminate the perceptions and attitudes that are constitutive of electoral culture. On the other hand, using cartography to supplement statistical analysis can make election battles more accessible to nonspecialist audiences. Combining these approaches allows us to rethink strategies of political exclusion in Imperial Germany’s coexisting suffrage regimes. Focusing on Leipzig and its powerful Social Democratic organization opens a window on larger issues about how Germans conceived questions of political fairness in a democratizing age.

  • Digital History Anthologies on the Web: German History in Documents and Images

  • Kelly McCullough, James Retallack
  • Journal:
    Central European History / Volume 46 / Issue 2 / June 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 August 2013, pp. 346-361
    Print publication:
    June 2013

  • Initial public offerings (IPOs) in the dot-com world do not always turn out to be the darlings they are expected to be. Ask Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook's IPO in May 2012. But even successful new ventures often defy their founders' expectations. As we hope to suggest in the following report, German History in Documents and Images (GHDI)—a project that has put thousands of primary source texts, drawings, photographs, and maps on the internet, along with hundreds of pages of accompanying commentary—has drawn critical appreciation from specialists and nonspecialists alike, but it has also raised thorny questions about authorship, authority, and audience. Those questions concern the writing of history in general and the newer, more specific discipline of “history on the web.” Like the project itself, this report is the result of a collaboration among the GHDI project staff, which is based at the German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, D.C., and the GHDI volume editors, all of whom teach (or taught) German history at colleges and universities in North America. In the following pages, we will discuss the origins and early goals of the project, describe the challenges associated with the realization of a large, collaborative history project of this nature—whether in book or digital form—and reflect upon what we perceive as the promise and perils of digital history anthologies.

Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany
  • New Perspectives
  • Edited by Larry Eugene Jones, James Retallack
  • Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    28 September 1992
  • This collection of essays presents the work on Germany's stormy and problematic encounter with mass politics from the time of Bismarck to the Nazi era. The authors - sixteen scholars from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany - consider this problem from novel and sometimes surprising viewpoints. The history of elections, narrowly conceived, is abandoned in favor of a broader inquiry into roots of German political loyalties and their relationship to the historic cleavages of class, gender, language, religion, generation and locality. The essays not only present archival findings, but they also pursue more theoretical or conjectural paradigms, and raise questions. Collectively, the authors explore the twin problems of electoral politics and social dislocation with language that is intentionally familiar, inventive, and allusive all at once - in a sense reflecting the Germans' own unfinished search for political consensus and social stability.

  • 2 - Antisocialism and Electoral Politics in Regional Perspectivey

  • Edited by Larry Eugene Jones, Canisius College, New York, James Retallack, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Elections, Mass Politics and Social Change in Modern Germany
    Published online:
    05 January 2013
    Print publication:
    28 September 1992, pp 49-92

  • Summary

    ANTISOCIALISM AND REGIONAL HISTORY

    In this essay I explore the degree to which an alleged antisocialist consensus among Imperial Germany's elites was evident in the arena of electoral politics. This is the first of three items on my agenda. I am interested only tangentially in rehearsing the strengths and weaknesses of a general perspective - dominant in the mid-1970s - that emphasized the coherence and durability of right-wing attempts to contain the threat of Social Democracy. As this perspective came to dominate the field, it became de rigueur to argue that agrarian Junkers, heavy industrialists, and other elements of the educated or propertied Büürgerturn enjoyed fundamental, long-lasting agreement about the dangers of revolution. In part because the authors who supported this view produced such a mountain of scholarship, most readers still believe that Imperial German elites practiced “unanimous discrimination” against socialists, both at the polls and when defending unfair franchise laws. However, a survey of electoral politics conducted with instruments of a finer calibration reveals quite another landscape. Here rhetorical flourishes about the “red specter” all too often evaporate under the impact of momentary crisis, cynical calculation, and personal ambition. Local elites choose to engage the enemy on one front and refuse on another. They pursue ill-defined goals with limited resources, and they break off the battle before they achieve their ultimate goal. All this can be seen only when the antisocialist intentions of Imperial elites are considered together with the actual implementation of their plans, particularly at the local and regional levels.

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