In the decades before the Second World War, popular musical theatre was one of the most influential forms of entertainment. This is the first book to reconstruct early popular musical theatre as a ...transnational and highly cosmopolitan industry that included everything from revues and operettas to dance halls and cabaret. Bringing together contributors from Britain and Germany, this collection moves beyond national theatre histories to study Anglo-German relations at a period of intense hostility and rivalry. Chapters frame the entertainment zones of London and Berlin against the wider trading routes of cultural transfer, where empire and transatlantic song and dance produced, perhaps for the first time, a genuinely international culture. Exploring adaptations and translations of works under the influence of political propaganda, this collection will be of interest both to musical theatre enthusiasts and to those interested in the wider history of modernism.
A fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume that explains what street trees tell us about humanity's changing relationship with nature and the cityToday, cities around the globe are planting ...street trees to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, as landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann explains, this is not a new phenomenon. In her eye-opening work, Dümpelmann shows how New York City and Berlin began systematically planting trees to improve the urban climate during the nineteenth century, presenting the history of the practice within its larger social, cultural, and political contexts.A unique integration of empirical research and theory, Dümpelmann's richly illustrated work uncovers this important untold story. Street trees-variously regarded as sanitizers, nuisances, upholders of virtue, economic engines, and more-reflect the changing relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in urban environments. Offering valuable insights and frameworks, this authoritative volume will be an important resource for years to come.
After the end of National Socialism, the young West German political science saw itself as the vanguard of German democratization. In West Berlin in particular, political scientists such as Ernst ...Fraenkel, Ossip Flechtheim and Otto Heinrich von der Gablentz were especially enthusiastic at the German School of Politics. They saw themselves as "preachers of democracy" in postwar Germany. This study examines how these actors transferred their pluralistic theories of democracy into practical political education. Thus, at the intersection of the history of ideas, institutions, and biographies, it contributes to the question of how West German democracy succeeded after 1945.
From his first visit to Berlin in 1916, Hitler was preoccupied and fascinated by Germany's great capital city. In this vivid and entirely new account of Hitler's relationship with Berlin, Thomas ...Friedrich explores how Hitler identified with the city, how his political aspirations were reflected in architectural aspirations for the capital, and how Berlin surprisingly influenced the development of Hitler's political ideas.
A leading expert on the twentieth-century history of Berlin, Friedrich employs new and little-known German sources to track Hitler's attitudes and plans for the city. Even while he despised both the cosmopolitan culture of the Weimar Republic and the profound Jewish influence on the city, Hitler was drawn to the grandiosity of its architecture and its imperial spirit. He dreamed of transforming Berlin into a capital that would reflect his autocracy, and he used the city for such varied purposes as testing his anti-Semitic policies and demonstrating the might of the Third Reich. Illuminating Berlin's burdened years under Nazi subjection, Friedrich offers new understandings of Hitler and his politics, architectural views, and artistic opinions.
In the 1880s Europeans grabbed vast swaths of the African continent, using documents, not guns, as their weapon of choice. Steven Press follows a paper trail of questionable contracts to discover the ...confidence men who exploited a loophole in international law to assert sovereignty over lands, and whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa.
The colonial past through objects of sound
The Berlin Sound Archive ( Lautarchiv ) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the ...20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions.
With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. The book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories.
Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Kennedy and the Berlin Wall tells the full story of the Berlin Crisis that riveted international attention and brought the world to the brink of nuclear warfare as Soviet and American tanks opposed ...each other on the streets of Berlin. Drawing on the author's own experience as an American diplomat in Germany during the period, as well as on recently opened Soviet, East German, and American archives, Smyser tells the story of how the fate of a city affected national politics as well as geopolitics. This compelling mix of documentary resources and direct experience of diplomatic negotiations makes the book unique. The author has a keen sense of the critical moment and draws incisive portraits of the politicians and diplomats involved in this drama—most importantly, the two main actors, Kennedy and Khrushchev, but also DeGaulle for the French, Macmillan for the British, and Konrad Adenauer for the West Germans, as well as such critical career diplomats as Dean Rusk and Andrei Gromyko.
In one of the most iconic images from World War II, a Russian
soldier raises a red flag atop the ruins of the German Reichstag on
April 30, 1945. Known as the Victory Banner, this piece of fabric
has ...come to symbolize Russian triumph, glory, and patriotism.
Facsimiles are used in public celebrations all over the country,
and an exact replica is the centerpiece in the annual Victory
Parade in Moscow's Red Square. The Victory Banner Over the
Reichstag examines how and why this symbol was created, the
changing media of its expression, and the contested evolution of
its message. From association with Stalinism and communism to its
acquisition of Russian nationalist meaning, Jeremy Hicks
demonstrates how this symbol was used to construct a collective
Russian memory of the war. He traces how the Soviets, and then
Vladimir Putin, have used this image and the banner itself to build
a remarkably powerful mythology of Russian greatness.
Contents: From the ashes of defeat to the needs of a new empire -- "The intellectual bodyguard" : the professors of Friedrich Wilhelm University -- State and university: finance, control and academic ...freedom -- The structural model "modern research university" in national and international comparison -- Students' relationships to professors, finances, and the social order -- Minorities, women, privilege, and subculture -- The public sphere and political culture -- The university in public opinion, issues and movements of the day -- The university and World War I : preparing, fighting, and struggling to recover -- A tarnished model among world adaptors.
