This is a study of rural social relationships in the eastern Prussian provinces during the Weimar Republic. Using the province of Pomerania as its primary example, Baranowski assesses the ...contributions of rural elites, particularly Junker landlords and Protestant clergymen, to the rise of National Socialism in a region where the rural electorate’s attraction to the Hitler movement became crucial to the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Making extensive use of archival and published documents from the eighteenth century, this book argues that the public sphere in eighteenth-century Prussia was a conservative realm that was deeply ...invested in methods of social control.
Reframing the German War of 1866 as a civil war, Making Prussians, Raising Germans offers a new understanding of critical aspects of Prussian state-building and German nation-building in the ...nineteenth century, and investigates the long-term ramifications of civil war in emerging nations. Drawing transnational comparisons with Switzerland, Italy and the United States, it asks why compatriots were driven to take up arms against each other and what the underlying conflicts reveal about the course of German state-building. By addressing key areas of patriotic activity such as the military, cultural memory, the media, the mass education system, female charity and political culture, this book elucidates the ways in which political violence was either contained in or expressed through centre-periphery interactions. Although the culmination of Prusso-German state-building in the Nazi dictatorship represented an exceptionally destructive outcome, the solutions developed previously established Prussian-led Germany as one of the most successful states in recovering from civil war.
Der Berliner Historiker Wolfgang Neugebauer schildert, wie vom Mittelalter bis heute das Wissen von der preußischen Geschichte und unser Bild von Preußen entstanden. Auf Grundlage einer reichen, ...nicht zuletzt handschriftlichen Quellenbasis kann Neugebauer zeigen, dass das Interesse an Preußen aus der Gesellschaft selbst, insbesondere aus dem Bildungsbürgertum kam. Die politisch-nationalistische Instrumentalisierung des Preußen-Themas hingegen erweist sich als ein erstaunlich spätes Phänomen. Über die Gelehrten hinaus geraten Geschichtsvereine und Laienhistoriker, Publikationskulturen und Zeitschriftennetze der jeweiligen Epoche in den Blick - Geschichtsschreibung wurde als gesellschaftliche Veranstaltung betrieben. So geht dieses Buch mit seinem weiten Horizont über die klassische Wissenschaftsgeschichte hinaus über zu einer umfassenden Wissensgeschichte Preußens und zeigt exemplarisch, wie historisches Wissen im gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang entsteht. How is historical knowledge generated, how does it evolve over the centuries? - A case study of Prussia and its regions reconstructs the genesis of historical knowledge from the late Middle Ages to the turn of the 21st century. It is based on numerous, mostly manuscript sources which enlighten the historical, political and cultural background.
In Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture, Daniel Riches investigates seventeenth-century Brandenburg-Swedish relations to present an image of early modern diplomacy driven by ...interpersonal networks grounded in their members' educational backgrounds, intellectual and cultural interests, religious convictions, and personal connections.
What is the role of language in human cognition? Could we attain self-consciousness and construct our civilisation without language? Such were the questions at the basis of eighteenth-century debates ...on the joint evolution of language, mind, and culture. This book highlights the importance of language in the social theory, epistemology, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. While focusing on the Berlin Academy under Frederick the Great, this study situates the Berlin debates within a larger temporal and geographical framework. It argues that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of all forms of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion rather than a feature of the so-called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’. Enlightenment authors of different persuasions investigated whether speechless human beings could have developed their language and society on their own. Such inquiries usually pondered the difficult shift from natural signs like cries and gestures to the artificial, articulate words of human language. This transition from nature to artifice was mirrored in other domains of inquiry, such as the origins of social relations, inequality, the arts and the sciences. By examining a wide variety of authors—Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others—this book emphasises the open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.
David L. Ellis analyzes the connections between political conservatism and Prussia's neo-Pietist religious revival, especially in Brandenburg and Pomerania, in the years surrounding the revolution of ...1848.
