Bloxham examines the events and rhetoric surrounding the trial and premature release from custody of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Von Manstein was convicted of involvement in atrocities on the ...Eastern Front, yet his story aroused the sympathy of many in Britain, including influential politicians, who believed the Wehrmacht to be innocent of the crimes of Nazism. His trial also fell squarely into a period, the onset of the Cold War, when Britain was attempting to restore relations with West Germany. Pressure both from the nascent West German elite and from within the Conservative government (re-elected in 1951) and its foreign diplomatic corps ensured that a series of dubious legal devices would be used to accelerate the liberation of von Manstein at a time of negotiations about a German contribution to a Western European army. Similar contrivances abetted the early release of another field marshal, Kesselring, and a senior general, Falkenhorst. The releases, and the obfuscations of the soldiers' war-time records that were an essential part of justifying the releases, constitute a substantial British contribution both to the undermining of the process of war crimes trials and to the rewriting of the Second World War.
In a series of radio broadcasts, one of which is translated for the first time in this issue (pp. 21-34), Adorno and Becker claimed that modern education is profoundly inadequate. Their views on ...education draw heavily on Kant’s notion of Enlightenment as a process for the development of personal and social maturity and responsibility. As such, education cannot just be a training but must itself be a developmental process which takes into account not only social and political realities but also the complex psychodynamics involved in learning. However, Adorno and Becker arrive at a position that is close to self-contradictory, unable to solve the paradox inherent in the idea of an education that is at once authoritative and non-conformist. This might arise from their failure to reflect on the nature of their own dialogue, and it is suggested that friendship offers the social model of a dynamic relationship of the type they sought to articulate. Despite the fact that the discussion took place in 1969, in a climate of educational debate radically different from today’s, their work raises issues and poses questions of the profoundest importance 30 years on.
Examines official attitudes to Germans resident in these countries and external to them during and after the war. A particular concern is that of internment. (Abstract amended)
By the time the war started in 1939 there were some 70,000 or 80,000 refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in Great Britain and thousands more had passed through on their way to exile in ...other countries. Yet despite the inevitable impact of such massive immigration, Exile Studies were slow to start in this country. It is the intention of the present study to show the steps which led to the establishment of a national Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies in London and to give a description of the work of the Centre to date and of its plans for the future. (Original abstract - amended)
Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such ...thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists became increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist ideas, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demonstrates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, were more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.
After the 1989 breakdown of the communist system, 235 East Germans were interviewed three times during the two years following their transition to West Berlin. In moving to the west, the migrants had ...to deal with various stressors, among them the lack of social ties in their new environment. Fortunately, the number of their new friends increased steadily, and loneliness declined. These changes, however, differed between sexes and age groups. Men made more friends than women, in particular same-sex friends, whereas women knitted ties with both sexes. The young built larger networks than the intermediate age group. Loneliness emerged as an inhibiting factor in the bonding process. The study demonstrates how well these refugees coped with a social crisis. It also examines the roles that loneliness and social bonding played in the readjustment process.
A review essay on a book edited by Mitchell Ash & Alfons Sollner, Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Emigre German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933 (Washington, DC: German Historical ...Instit, 1996). Ash & Sollner's collection of essays investigate the cultural, intellectual, & emotional elements of the exiled emigre. Although recognized as not being part of the collection's project, it is argued that a text that posits change in terms of science must include a discussion of the preceding problematic issues that forced the change. Also, more discussion of anti-Semitism in relation to the migration of the emigres is desired. It is concluded that the influence on research & practice effected by the migration of German emigre scientists must endure further exploration. 10 References. J. W. Parker
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