Grenzen strukturieren nicht nur die Ordnung von Landschaft und Herrschaft, sondern auch von Gesellschaft. Als soziale Konstrukte vereindeutigen sie Zustände, öffnen aber auch Räume für Aushandlungen ...und Überschreitungen. In der Moderne dienten praktische und metaphorische »Grenzgänge« dazu, Beziehungen, die Verhältnisse gesellschaftlicher Teilsysteme und die Reichweite von Normen zu klären. Die Beiträger*innen schauen auf die Denkfigur des »Grenzgangs«, die es ermöglicht, zentrale Fragen moderner Gesellschaften zusammenzudenken: Gewaltvolle Identitätskämpfe, der Umgang mit funktionaler Differenzierung und mit der Fragilität von Werten und Wissen offenbaren sich als Praktiken, mit denen Grenzen gezogen, überquert oder ausgehandelt wurden.
Introduction Merziger, Patrick; Kessel, Martina
The Politics of Humour,
12/2011
Book Chapter
Narratives of the twentieth century usually focus on ‘big issues’: war, violence, and ethnic cleansing; the Holocaust; the conflict between democratic and authoritarian politics; or the development ...of nationstates and empires. So far, despite an immense literature on humour and the comical in general, humour and laughter have not figured high on historians’ agendas for this century.¹ But humour is an important means to negotiate identity and belonging, and in the twentieth century, comics and funny magazines sold extremely well while cheerful radio shows and films attracted a huge audience both in democratic and authoritarian societies. Using humour as a
Through the lens of advice literature, letters and autobiographical documents, this article examines the construction of middle–class masculinity in nineteenth–century Germany. Between the end of the ...eighteenth century and the fin–de–siècle gender debates, masculinity was paradoxically configured. On the one hand, manhood was said to be relational, that is notions of the masculine were related to notions of the feminine. On the other hand, the concept of the ‘whole man’ encompassed aspects gendered both as female and as male, thus inviting visions of a society without women. This paradoxical construction became the site of discussions, projections and contestations: women used the figure of the whole man in order to voice their desires or criticise male claims to dominance and control, but it frequently also served as the basis for male self–descriptions. In the course of the nineteenth century, notions of integral masculinity became ever more precarious since the sociable, well–rounded, artistically inclined man propagated in the first half of the nineteenth century was increasingly superseded by the ‘soldier of work’ which gave the fin–de–siècle gender debates a particular urgency.
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The politics of humour Kessel, Martina; Merziger, Patrick
The politics of humour,
c2012, 20111231, 2012, 2011-12-31, 2012-01-30
eBook
The Politics of Humouroffers an intriguing look at how entertainment helped everyday people make sense of the turmoil of the twentieth century.
Laughing about Death? Martina Kessel
Between Mass Death and Individual Loss,
07/2008
Book Chapter
In 1915, the journalist Peter Scher published a collection entitledKampf und Lachen(Fighting and Laughter).¹ Scher worked for Simplicissimus, one of the best-known satirical journals in Wilhelmine ...Germany.² He did not explain and did not need to explain the connection he evoked between fighting and laughter. During the First World War, every print medium carried jokes that dealt with the hardships of war and rendered the Allies ridiculous;³ countless joke collections, ranging from just a few to several hundred pages, periodicals likeSimplicissimusorDie lustigen Blätter,well-established newspapers like theVossische Zeitung,which included an additional “funny page”
