Research on rap music in Germany has focused on questions of transnationalism, ethnicity and gender. This chapter advances studies of German rap through an analysis of the rap song and music video “Ich bin Schwarz” (I am Black, 2016) by the popular female rap duo SXTN. Drawing on intersectional, feminist, and hip-hop studies scholarship, we conduct a close reading of the visuals, lyrics, and signifying practices that are mediated in the cultural text. We argue that “Ich bin Schwarz” promotes a new version of a self-empowered, humorous, and unapologetic Black female German identity by remixing the popular German music genre Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), subverting racist and sexist imaginations of Afrodiasporic womanhood, and continuing hip-hop’s political legacy against right-wing extremism in Germany. Ultimately, “Ich bin Schwarz” contributes to a growing body of performances in rap music and larger popular culture that destabilise white-dominated notions of German national identity.

This chapter examines the War Department’s role in the formation of US policy toward the European war and the growing crisis in the Pacific between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941. This chapter argues that the War Department played a pivotal role in shaping American policy and actions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, but in different ways. In the Atlantic, the War Department was a primary impetus within the Roosevelt administration for increasingly interventionist policies. It consistently pushed President Roosevelt to act and influenced the politics of his decision-making at several crucial junctures. The War Department provided the crucial nexus between the executive branch, Congress, and outside pressure groups as the US moved toward war. In the Pacific, the War Department pressed for a firm stand against Japan but helped muddle Far Eastern policy by working to undermine the State Department’s more cautious stance. This bureaucratic warfare made it difficult to foster consensus around US deterrence actions and contributed to worsening relations between Washington and Tokyo, setting the stage for the Pacific War.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

Religious ideas have been largely absent in the literature on the welfare state. Instead, class-interest based, rational efficiency, and institutional explanations have dominated. The absence of religious ideas is not a peculiarity of welfare state research but is paralleled by a treatment of ideas as ephemeral to politics in general. The introductory chapter reviews the literature on ideas and politics and the literature on the influence of ideas on welfare policy in particular. It shows why ideas could not play a role in the welfare state literature till today and proposes a solution: to integrate ideas into the study of welfare state evolution. The chapter creates an analytical framework for the study of evolving religious ideas and their impact on welfare state formation and reform in Italy and Germany. It engages with the weaknesses and strengths of both welfare state theory and the new ideational turn literature and introduces a theory of ideational competition. The chapter concludes with a short descriptive outline of the book and the following chapters.

Here we will see how a virtuous cycle of ideational competition led to the formation of the world’s first welfare state in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the first part, we will follow nation building and industrialization in nineteenth-century Germany. Industrialization and the confessional cleavage produced a specific political constellation in which the growth of a pauperized working class not only led to a political conflict between capital and labor but also reinforced the existing confessional cleavage between Protestants and Catholics. In the second part, we will see how the cleavages led to a specific cycle of ideational competition between the dominant political forces of the German Empire (Catholicism, conservative Protestantism, liberal Protestantism, and socialism). In the second half of the nineteenth century, they all started to develop modern social security ideas. The development of these ideas paved the way to the formation of the world’s first welfare state. This chapter looks closely at the evolution of German Catholic social thinking, developing from antiquated medieval social ideas to one of the most sophisticated Catholic social security ideologies at the end of the century. The third part of the chapter gives an account of the making of Bismarck’s social security legislation in the 1880s.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.

This chapter establishes and problematizes the category of “survivor” and the ways in which its meaning changed over the postwar decades. The definition of survivors is “unstable,” and includes diverse groups, not just those who lived through the camps or ghettos, but also those in exile or hiding. The chapter discusses how trauma affected not just survivors, but also their children and grandchildren, in complex ways. It analyzes the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust affected family life and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, as well as the (re)construction of Jewish communal life.

During the 1920s Jewish organizations in the USA developed a strategy for guarding the global security of Jews. The strategy was based on economic assistance, international diplomatic pressure, and emigration. The Nazi accession to power fundamentally upset that strategy.

This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.

This chapter offers a political and institutional history of the “most expensive endeavor of restorative justice” ever undertaken, though even this monumental effort pales in comparison with the damage inflicted by the Nazis. Focusing on Germany with an eye toward pan-European developments, it traces the procedures and eligibility, as well as efforts to block, both the restitution of lost property and reparations for past suffering. Restitution and reparations were initially conceptualized broadly, though, over time, Jewish victims became prominent among the recipients. Other Nazi victim groups (e.g., Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, etc.) sometimes faced even greater obstacles to legal recognition and successful claims. The chapter emphasizes the challenges faced by all surviving Nazi victims – Jews and non-Jews alike – in claiming due restitution for their suffering and the grievous harm inflicted on them during the Third Reich.

Using examples from Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, this chapter discusses how Jewish leaders were chosen, how these organizations changed over time, the dilemmas they faced, and how decisions were made regarding cooperation or negotiations with Nazis, often on the basis of “preventing something worse.”