Journal articles on the topic 'Jewish (1939-1945) Germany Berlin'

Louis Hamilton (1879–1948) was a British national that lectured at various institutions of higher learning in Berlin from 1904–1914, and 1919–1938. During the Third Reich (1933–1945) Hamilton was accused of being half-Jewish and his continued presence at institutions of higher learning was considered undesirable. Hamilton like other foreign born academics was coerced to leave Germany because the Nazi educational system viewed them as being politically unreliable. Hamilton’s experiences are an illustration of what foreign academics suffered during the Third Reich. The purpose of this article is to shed new light on the fate of foreign academics in Nazi Germany. Although the fate of Jewish professors and students has been researched non-Jewish and non-Aryan instructors has been a neglected topic within the history of Nazism.

In Nazi Germany, integration into the community of the Volk, or exclusion and persecution, were determined by the regime's categories. As legal historian Michael Stolleis has noted, this new National Socialist terminology “quick[ly] penetrat[ed] … into the old conceptual world” of German jurisprudence and the country's court system. In line with the prescriptions of the political leadership of the Hitler state, bureaucrats of the Justice and Interior Ministries in Berlin drafted novel legislation that, once issued as new laws, judges, state attorneys, and lawyers readily interpreted and put into practice. With the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the main racial designations evolved around a tripartite terminology of “full Jews [Volljuden],” “Jewish mixed breeds [Mischlinge],” and “persons of German and kindred blood.” In accordance with paragraph 5 of the first supplementary decree to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 1935, state authorities classified any descendant “from at least three grandparents who [we]re racially full Jews” as Jewish. Paragraph 3 defined Mischlinge of the first degree, introduced as a novel legal category, as Jewish Mischlinge with two grandparents “who [we]re racially full Jews.” The supplementary decrees did not explicitly delineate the term “person of German blood”, but the main commentary of the Nuremberg Laws loosely tied this term to the “German Volk” as a community comprised of six basic races, including the Nordic and East Baltic ones.

This article deals with the biography of the elite Jewish-German sprinter, sports writer and left-wing political activist Alex Natan, „the fastest Jew in Germany“ (Alfred Flechtheim) during the 1920s. Hailing from an assimilated family of the Berlin Jewish-German middle class, Natan was for most of his active career a member of the bürgerlich sport movement, running for SC Charlottenburg Berlin. He achieved his greatest athletic success as a member of the club’s world-record equalling 4x100-meter relay squad in 1929. In addition to Natan’s athletic achievements, the article pays particular attention to his career as a left-wing sports journalist; his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance of civil servants in the Reich Vice Chancellery in 1933/34; his emigration to Britain in 1933; his four-year internment during World War II; the resumption of his journalistic career in the postwar period; and his support for the 1972 Munich Olympics. By focusing on his confrontations with Carl Diem and Karl Ritter von Halt, the article also engages with Natan’s vocal opposition to the rehabilitation after 1945 of sport functionaries who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

Abstract When Bessie Gotsfeld (1888-1962) founded the »Mizrachi Womenʼs Organization of America« (aka AMIT) in 1925, religious Zionist women in Europe also started to organize their work in several European countries. In 1928, Meir Berlin (later Meir Bar-Ilan), one of the leading rabbis of the Mizrachi movement, met in Vienna with Anitta Müller-Cohen (1890-1962), a prominent Zionist woman activist. After that meeting, Müller-Cohen joined the ranks of the Mizrachi movement and started to build up a »European League of Mizrachi Women«. Besides Germany, there were important local associations in Belgium, Great Britain and the Netherlands. The ambitious project of the European Mizrachi women caused a conflict with the WIZO, the biggest and most important organization of Jewish women, that escalated at the VIth World Congress of Zionist Women in Basel in 1931. The rise to power of National Socialism in Germany in 1933, challenged the developing Mizrachi Women’s League beyond their means and finally led to their destruction during the Shoah. In this paper, I trace the network of Jewish women who engaged with the Mizrachi Women’s League, and analyse their personal commitment. Additionally, the paper focuses on the different ideological backgrounds of Mizrachi women at a local and international level. Hence, the conflict between different Zionist women’s organisations, i. e. Mizrachi versus WIZO, gains center stage.

The emergence of the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) as the object of scholarly attention has been both surprising and rapid. In the decades since his early death while in exile in the United States, Cassirer never fell into complete oblivion. His works remained known to specialists in German intellectual history; his participation in a famous 1929 debate with Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland, one of the most iconic moments in modern Continental thought, made his name familiar to most students of modern philosophy. Yet Cassirer lacked the widespread recognition given to contemporaries such as Heidegger or Walter Benjamin, and his work never became the center of historical or philosophical study. This neglect stemmed, in part, from dismissal by his peers; as Edward Skidelsky explains in his new study, Rudolf Carnap found him “rather pastoral,” Isaiah Berlin dismissed him as “serenely innocent,” and Theodor Adorno thought he was “totally gaga” (125). The last few years, however, have seen the rise of a remarkable new interest in Cassirer in both Germany and the English-speaking world. Among this recent literature, Edward Skidelsky's and Peter Gordon's works lead the small “Cassirer renaissance” and offer the best English-language introduction to his thought. Both Gordon and Skidelsky ambitiously seek to relocate Cassirer at the forefront of modern German and European thought. Gordon goes as far as to call him “one of the greatest philosophers and intellectual historians to emerge from the cultural ferment of modern Germany” and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century (11). In making such bold statements, Gordon and Skidelsky clearly set their sights beyond the person himself; they aspire to highlight a central strand of thought that enjoyed a powerful presence in early twentieth-century Germany but fell into neglect in the postwar era. In doing so, they seek to reevaluate the nature and legacy of Weimar thought, its complex relationship with the period's unstable politics, and its relevance today.

InSeptember 1950, Julius Meyer, head of the State Association of Jewish Communities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), sent a letter to the Finance Ministry inquiring about the current state of Jewish communal property. Throughout the immediate postwar years, he and other Jewish leaders had requested, though with little success, the return of Jewish property and assistance to rebuild Jewish sites. With the occupation now over, Meyer hoped that the newly formed East German state might be sympathetic to the needs of theGemeinde(a religious community of Jews). He noted that the Jewish community had “still not acquired its own property” since most of it remained “under the control of the state” or in the hands of those who had seized it during the Nazi program of “Aryanization.” Meyer also pointed out that the Gemeinde needed money to reconstruct the numerous synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that had been damaged duringKristallnachtand World War II. “We ask,” he explained, “that you take into consideration the fact that the Jewish community, because of the extermination policy of the fascist state, finds itself in a situation like no other religious community.”

Contrary to the previous political regime of the Slovak state (1939–1945), official policy had significantly changed in the renewed Czechoslovakia after the end of World War II, but anti-Jewish sentiments and even their brachial demonstrations somewhat framed the everyday reality of Jewish survivors who were returning to their homes from liberated concentration camps or hiding places. Their attempts to reintegrate into the society where they had used to live regularly came across intolerance, hatred and social exclusion, further strengthened by classical anti-Semitic stereotypes and prejudices. Desired capitulation of Nazi Germany and its satellites resulted also in the end of systematic Jewish extermination, but it did not automatically lead to a peaceful everyday life. This paper focuses on the social dynamics between Slovak majority society and the decimated Jewish minority in the first post-World War II years and analyses some crucial factors, particular motivations and circumstances of the selected acts of collective anti-Jewish violence in Slovakia. Moreover, the typological diversity of the specific collective atrocities will be discussed.

The actions, attitudes and experiences of German society between 1939 and 1945 played a crucial role in ensuring that the Second World War was not only ‘the most immense and costly ever fought’ but also a conflict which uniquely resembled the ideal type of a ‘total war’. The Nazi regime mobilised German society on an unprecedented scale: over 18 million men served in the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, and compulsoryVolkssturmduty, initiated as Allied forces approached Germany's borders in September 1944, embraced further millions of the young and middle-aged. The German war effort, above all in occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, claimed the lives of millions of Jewish and gentile civilians and served explicitly genocidal ends. In this most ‘total’ of conflicts, the sheer scale of the Third Reich's ultimate defeat stands out, even in comparison with that of Imperial Japan, which surrendered to the Allies prior to an invasion of its Home Islands. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 Allied forces had occupied almost all of Germany, with its state and economic structures lying in ruins. Some 4.8 million German soldiers and 300,000 Waffen SS troops lost their lives during the Second World War, including 40 per cent of German men born in 1920. According to recent estimates Allied bombing claimed approximately 350,000 to 380,000 victims and inflicted untold damage on the urban fabric of towns and cities across the Reich. As Nicholas Stargardt notes, this was truly ‘a German war like no other’.

In the years 1989–1944 two different wars against the Soviet Union were imposed upon Finland. During the Winter War of 1989–1940 Germany remained strictly neutral on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact&&Great Britain and France planned intervention in favour of Finland. When the second, so-called Continuation War broke out in the summer of 1041, Finland was co-belligerent of Germany, and Great Britain declared war on Finland in December 1941. De jure, however, Finland was never an ally of Germany, and at the end of the war, in the winter 1944–1945, the Finnish armed forces expelled the German troops from Lapland, which was devastated by the Germans during their retreat to Norway. Military service was compulsory for each male citizen of Finland. In 1939 the Jewish population of Finland numbered 1 700. Of these, 260 men were called up and approximately 200 were sent to serve at the front during the Winter War.

The aim of the article is the analysis of German policy in Reichsgau Wartheland, an area of western Poland annexed to Germany in the years 1939–1945. In scientific literature German rule in Warthegau with its capital in Poznań is often defined as ,,experimental training area of National Socialism”, where the regime could test its genocidal and racial practices, which were an emanation of the German occupation of Poland. The Nazi authorities wanted to accomplish its ideological goals in Wartheland in a variety of cruel ways, including the ethnic cleansing, annihilation of Polish intelligentsia, destruction of cultural institutions, forced resettlement and expulsion, segregation Germans from Poles combined with wide-ranging racial discrimination against the Polish population, mass incarceration in prisons and concentration camps, systematic roundups of prisoners, as well as genocide of Poles and Jews within the scope of radical Germanization policy and Holocaust. The aim of Arthur Greiser, the territorial leader of the Wartheland Gauleiter and at the same time one of the most powerful local Nazi administrators in Hitler‘s empire, was to change the demographic structure and colonisation of the area by the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans Volksdeutschen from the Baltic and other regions in order to make it a ,,blond province” and a racial laboratory for the breeding of the ,,German master race”. The largest forced labour program, the first and longest standing ghetto in Łódź, which the Nazis renamed later Litzmannstadt and the first experimental mass gassings of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe carried out from autumn 1941 in gas vans in Chełmno extermination camp were all initiated in Warthegau, even before the implementation of the Final Solution. Furthermore, some of the first major deportations of the Jewish population took place here. Therefore in the genesis of the of the Nazi extermination policy of European Jewry Wartheland plays a pivotal role, as well as an important part of ruthless German occupation of Polish territories.

No other country in the world suffered a greater measurable and verifiable loss of human and material resources than Poland during World War II in 1939-1945. According to the first approximation, the value of human and material losses inflicted to Poland by Nazi Germany amounts to 6.495 trillion US dollars of 2018.However, Poland never received war reparations from Germany. The article is a preliminary survey of the complex issue – conducted in an interdisciplinary way combining elements of legal, economic, and political analysis, because the topic belongs to the wide and multidisciplinary field of national and international security. Refuted in the article is an internationally popular myth that communist Poland unilaterally renounced German war reparations in 1953. Then the article discusses the global background of the topic in the 20th and 21st centuries – in particular, the case of Greece whose reparations claims Germany rejects like the Polish claims, and major cases of reparations actually paid: by Germany for World War I, by Germany to Israel and Jewish organizations for the Holocaust, by Japan for World War II – at 966 billion US dollars of 2018, the largest reparations ever – and by and Iraq for the Gulf War. The article concludes with a discussion of necessary further research with advanced methodology of several sciences, and of a possible litigation before the International Court of Justice – or a diplomatic solution to the problem of war reparations.

At the Humboldt University of Berlin, German historian Alexander Korb defended, with the highest grade (summa cum laude), his doctoral thesis in historical studies ?In the Shadow of the World War II. Mass violence by the Ustasa against Serbs, Jews and Roma?. His radically new thesis are as follows: 1) in the State of Croatia (1941-1945) ?there was no genocide against the Serbs?; 2) clerical component (Croatian Catholic clergy and the Vatican) ?played no significant role? in the mass violence against the Serbs in the State of Croatia (1941-1945), so the forced catholicization of the Serbs was ?purely secular in character?. Korb, therefore, enters into absolute conflict with the vast majority of previous research papers and their conclusions. Korb?s theses are challenged from three aspects in this analysis: a) scientific and historical, b) linguistic and philosophical (definitionism theory) and c) political. Regarding scientific and historical aspects, Korb approached this problem one-sidedly, in a selective way, and from the very beginning drastically reduced i.e. excluded an enormous part of primary historical sources and scientific literature. He excluded all Serbian sources, including testimonies of Serbian survivors and victims, on the grounds that they were either ?Serbian nationalists? or ?Serbian communists?, then all testimonies of eye-witnesses from the opressors side - German Nazis and Italian Fascists - with justification that they are manipulated by ?Serbian nationalists? or ?Serbian communists?, as well as all primary historical sources and scientific literature which testify of the role of Croatian Roman Catholic clergy and the Vatican, on the basis that they are ?anti-clerical?. From linguistic and philosophical aspect, Korb?s argumentations clearly belong to the principle of ?usurpation of power over definitions and psychagogy? recognized by classical theory of concepts as a convenient redefinition, virtualization of reality and psychagogic establishment of the new ?real reality? in the minds of the target group through its internalization. Korb?s work is, therefore, rather relativistic linguistic and philosophical treatise clad in historical science than scientific study of history. As for the aspect of political science, it can be concluded that paradigm shift in social sciences and humanities in Germany, due to his indisputable efforts, obtained a new quality, a completely different level of arbitrary and virtual reflection of reality. Namely, these sciences are rapidly getting mutual and dominant ideological and political connotation.

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow in 1920 but raised in Berlin and London, arrived in New York in January 1945. Trained as an artist in London in the early 1950s, when he was already in his thirties, he decided to study art history at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), where he was educated by Jewish-German refugee art historians such as Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz, and Erwin Panofsky. This essay reconsiders Steinberg’s work, which is well-known for its unconventional and revisionist inter- pretations, through the lens of his academic formation and the legacy of German Kunstwissenschaft in postwar America. Taking into account unpublished material (including university course notes and papers and an abandoned dissertation on the afterlife of Romanesque art), I point out how Steinberg’s first scholarly works, while respecting the methodologies of his professors, at the same time tried to “resist” their heritage. His engagement with contemporary art, for example, led him to challenge the biases of his professors, sometimes to their annoyance, as was the case with his Ph.D. dissertation on Borromini’s church of San Carlino, which was contested by his adviser Richard Krautheimer. The essay argues that during the IFA years Steinberg had already developed some of the concepts that would characterize his later intellectual trajectory: the dialogue between Old Master art and contemporary experience, the emphasis on the beholder’s physical and psychological response to artworks, the epistemological reevaluation of subjectivity, the priority of visual data over texts, and the hermeneutical validity of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning. Through these means, Steinberg achieved a personal synthesis between historical investigation and criticism, anticipat- ing the rethinking of the methodological tradition in the 1960s and 1970s.

This story is about a kind of pilgrimage, which is connected to the course of events which occurred in Częstochowa on 22 September 1942. In the morning, the German Captain Degenhardt lined up around 8,000 Jews and commanded them to step either to the left or to the right. This efficient judge from the police force in Leipzig was rapid in his decisions and he thus settled the destinies of thousands of people. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939, the town (renamed Tschenstochau) had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and incorporated into the General Government. The Nazis marched into Częstochowa on Sunday, 3 September 1939, two days after they invaded Poland. The next day, which became known as Bloody Monday, approximately 150 Jews were shot deadby the Germans. On 9 April 1941, a ghetto for Jews was created. During World War II about 45,000 of the Częstochowa Jews were killed by the Germans; almost the entire Jewish community living there.The late Swedish Professor of Oncology, Jerzy Einhorn (1925–2000), lived in the borderhouse Aleja 14, and heard of the terrible horrors; a ghastliness that was elucidated and concretized by all the stories told around him. Jerzy Einhorn survived the ghetto, but was detained at the Hasag-Palcery concentration camp between June 1943 and January 1945. In June 2009, his son Stefan made a bus tour between former camps, together with Jewish men and women, who were on this pilgrimage for a variety of reasons. The trip took place on 22–28 June 2009 and was named ‘A journey in the tracks of the Holocaust’. Those on the Holocaust tour represented different ‘pilgrim-modes’. The focus in this article is on two distinct differences when it comes to creed, or conceptions of the world: ‘this-worldliness’ and ‘other- worldliness’. And for the pilgrims maybe such distinctions are over-schematic, though, since ‘sacral fulfilment’ can be seen ‘at work in all modern constructions of travel, including anthropology and tourism’.

Danish archaeology in the shadow of the swastika, 1933-1945 With Hitler’s takeover in 1933 and the emergence of the National Socialist regime, Prehistoric archaeology in Germany was strengthened, both on the economical and the scholarly level. Prehistoric archaeologists entered into a Faustian bargain with the new government, and arguing the presence of Germanic peoples outside the borders of the Third Reich, they legitimated the Nazi “Drang nach Osten”. With the Fuhrer’s lack of interest in German prehistory, the fight for control of this field became a matter between two organisations, the Ahnenerbe, which was attached to Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and the competing Reichsbund für Deutsche Vorgeschichte under NSDAP’s chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg’s “Amt Rosenberg” (Figs. 1-2). When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Ahnenerbe appeared as winner of the fight over the German prehistory. However, the archaeological power struggles continued in the conquered territories until the end of the war.Immediately after the Nazi takeover in 1933, leading staff members of the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, such as Mouritz Mackeprang, Poul Nørlund, and Johannes Brøndsted (Figs. 3-4) dissociated themselves from the political development south of the border. However, in the course of time, and in conformity with the official Danish accommodation policy towards Germany in the 1930s, the opposition changed their attitude into a more neutral policy of cultural adjustment towards Nazified German colleagues.The Danish government’s surrender on the 9th of April 1940 meant a continuing German recognition of Denmark as a sovereign state. From the German side, the communication with the Danish government was handled by the German ministry of foreign affairs in Berlin, and by the German legation in Copenhagen. Denmark was the sole occupied country under the domain of the ministry of foreign affairs, and from the beginning of the occupation it became a regular element in the policy of the ministry to prevent other political organs within the Nazi polycracy to gain influence in Denmark. Not until the appointment of SS-Gruppenfuhrer Werner Best (Fig. 5) as the German Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark in November 1942, the SS and the Ahnenerbe got an opportunity to secure their influence in Denmark. However, due to the chilly attitude in the Danish population towards the German culture propaganda, practiced mainly through the German Scientific Institute in Copenhagen, and the gradual worsening of the political conditions following the resignation of the Danish government on the 29th of August 1943, the Ahnenerbe, led by Wolfram Sievers (Fig. 6), was never firmly established in Denmark. The one result of Ahnenerbe’s influence in Denmark worth mentioning was the effort by the Kiel Archaeologist Karl Kersten (Fig. 7) to prevent German destruction of prehistoric Danish (Germanic) relics. Kersten began his work in 1940 and was met from the start with aversion from the National Museum in Copenhagen, which regarded the activities of the Ahnenerbe-archaeologist as German interference with Danish conditions. Yet, in time the work of the Kiel archaeologist was accepted and recognised by the muse- um, and he was officially recognized by the Danish state when in 1957, Kersten was made Knight of Dannebrog.Less successful than the Ahnenerbe rival was the prominent Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth (Fig. 8) and the efforts by Reichsbund für Deutsche Vorgeschichte to gain influence on the Danish scene of culture politics. One of Reinerth’s few successes in occupied Denmark was a short contact with two Danish archaeologists, Gudmund Hatt and Mogens B. Mackeprang (Figs. 9-10). However, the connections with the RfDV-leader do not seem to have been maintained, once the Danish government had ceased to function from the 29th of August 1943.During the occupation, around 300 listed burial mounds and an unknown number of prehistoric relics below ground level were destroyed or damaged due to construction projects carried out by the German occupants (Figs. 11-12). The complaints about the damage put forward by the National Museum were generally met by understanding in the German administration and in the Bauleitung (construction department), whereas the Wehrmacht had a more indifferent approach to the complaints. As opposed to this, the Danish museums managed to get through the war with no damage or German confiscations worth mentioning, thus avoiding the fate of museums, collections, and libraries in countries such as France, Poland, and the Soviet Union.Lars Schreiber PedersenÅrhusTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Abstract Between 1933 and 1939, Ludwig Simon and his family avidly photographed their daily life. At first glance, their photo albums contain undistinguishable documentation of conventional family routines, including leisure activities at home, encounters with relatives, and vacations away from the city. Yet a closer look shows that many of the photographs in this collection can be read as contemplative responses to the intensifying exclusion of Jews in the Third Reich. The article focuses on photographs that were (repeatedly) taken in two major locations: on the Alps, during vacations, and by the family home in Bingen am Rhein, which Ludwig left when he moved to Berlin in the 1920s. I argue that these photographs manifest an enduring endeavour to reflect critically on the tensions between Jewish belonging and estrangement in the new Germany. Constantly engaged in a dialogue with the (private and public) visual memory of the time—from restaging photographs of previous years to appropriating the visual iconography of German nationalism—the Simon family photographers recurrently negotiated the perspective of the outcasts at home. In analysing these strategies of photography, and of the arrangement of individual photographs within the collection, this article reads them within the paradigm of exile photography. As the Simon family collection demonstrates, the extension of this paradigm to cases of ‘exile-at-home’ enriches our understanding of the German-Jewish experience under National Socialist rule.

AbstractAfter a promising start on the German stage, Jewish actor Herbert Grünbaum left Germany overnight in 1939 and settled in Palestine. The article takes his emigration as the starting point for the examination of his role as director and actor in the nascent Cameri Theatre. Grünbaum’s experiences in Palestine eventually resulted in his surprising departure in 1953. Although not a communist, Grünbaum chose to join the Volksbühne in East Berlin, one of the leading theatres of the GDR. In the late 1950s, in the wake of growing tension between the powers controlling the divided city, Grünbaum left the Volksbühne to become a member of the celebrated Schiller-Theater in West Berlin. Taking Grünbaum’s turbulent career as a case study, this article raises broader questions concerning the experiences of German émigré actors in Israel (primarily at the Cameri Theatre), especially those who ultimately chose to leave Israel and the Hebrew theatre behind, and return to the German stage.

Zusammenfassung 1919-1945 William Mulligan, The Creation of the Modern German Army. General Walther Reinhardt and the Weimar Republic, 1914 1930 (Alexander Kranz) Élise Julien, Paris, Berlin. La mémoire de la guerre 1914-1933 (Stefan Martens) Christoph Frilling, Elly Beinhorn und Bernd Rosemeyer – Kleiner Grenzverkehr zwischen Resistenz und Kumpanei im Nationalsozialismus (John Zimmermann) Medien im Nationalsozialismus. Hrsg. von Bernd Heidenreich und Sönke Neitzel (Martin Kutz) Richard J. Evans, Das Dritte Reich, Bd 3: Krieg (Hans-Erich Volkmann) Colin D. Heaton and Anne-Marie Lewis, Night Fighters. Luftwaffe and RAF Air Combat over Europe, 1939-1945 (Horst Boog) Edith Petschnigg, Von der Front aufs Feld. Britische Kriegsgefangene in der Steiermark 1941-1945 (Rüdiger Overmans) Donald Caldwell and Richard Muller, The Luftwaffe over Germany. Defense of the Reich (Horst Boog) Günther K. Weiße, Geheime Nachrichtendienste und Funkaufklärung im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Deutsche und alliierte Agentenfunkdienste in Europa 1939-1945 (Anja Werner) Corinna von List, Frauen in der Résistance 1940-1944 (Elisabeth Bokelmann) Karen Holtmann, Die Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein-Gruppe vor dem Volksgerichtshof. Die Hochverratsverfahren gegen die Frauen und Männer der Berliner Widerstandsorganisation 1944-1945 (Winfried Heinemann) Johann Christoph Allmayer-Beck, Militärakademie – Kriegsschule – Fahnenjunker-Schule: Wiener Neustadt 1938-1945 (Martin Moll) Tvrtko P. Sojčić, Die »Lösung« der kroatischen Frage zwischen 1939 und 1945 (Holm Sundhaussen) Howard D. Grier, Hitler, Dönitz, and the Baltic Sea. The Third Reich´s Last Hope, 1944-1945 (Alexander Kranz) Christian Möller, Das letzte Aufgebot der deutschen Luftwaffe. Der Einsatz mit leichten Schulflugzeugen vom Typ Bücker Bü 181 als Nachtschlächter und Panzerjäger bei Kriegsende 1945 (Horst Boog) Hans Dieter Borchardt, Rückzugsgefechte in der Lazarettstadt Bad Dürrheim. Gefechte der 19. Armee mit den frz. Truppen Ende April 1945 in und um Bad Dürrheim (Detlef Vogel) Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik. Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes und Moshe Zimmermann (Winfried Heinemann) Christian Plöger, Von Ribbentrop zu Springer: Zu Leben und Wirken von Paul Karl Schmidt alias Paul Carell (Jan Erik Schulte)

This article is the story of Fella Feige Drut, who was born in Rovno, Ukraine in 1923 and who in 1939, at the age of 16, was arrested by the Gestapo in Würzburg, Germany because she was Jewish. She survived six years in various concentration camps and work camps, eventually ending up in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Here, she gave birth to a daughter. Her ordeal and that of her close family members are reconstructed using documents from the International Tracing Service’s (ITS) archive and from other sources. Unlike many of her co-religionists, whose family life ended during the Nazi years (1933-1945), Fella Feige Drut was able to live on. Her resolve manifested itself in her fight for compensation from the German government for herself and her daughter, despite the bureaucratic hurdles placed in her way, and her resolution to leave Germany and to build a new life in the USA.

Rebecca Pates and Maximilian Schochow, ed., Der “Ossi:” Mikropolitische Studien über einen symbolischen Ausländer (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013)Reviewed by René WolfstellerLisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2010)Reviewed by Gregory BaldiStephen J. Silvia, Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)Reviewed by Volker BerghahnEgbert Klautke, The Mind of the Nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851-1955 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013)Reviewed by David FreisDamani J. Partridge, Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex and Citizenship in the New Germany (Bloomington: Indiana Universtiy Press, 2012)Reviewed by Myra Marx FerreeMoshe Zimmermann, Deutsche gegen Deutsche: Das Schicksal der Juden, 1938-1945 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2008; Hebrew trans., Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2013)Reviewed by Noga WolffZara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Reviewed by Volker ProttStefan Berger and Norman La Porte, Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR, 1949-1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010)Reviewed by Meredith Heiser-Duron

The origin of gastrology as an independent field of internal medicine began in the second half of the 19th century. The so-called “Polish gastrological school” of the first half of the 20th century was composed of, among others: Edward Korczyński, Walery Jaworski, Antoni Gluziński, Józef Wacław Grott, Ludwik Justman, Wilhelm Rubin, Anastazy Landau, Antoni Tuchendler and Leon Plockier (vel Plockier, Płocker, Płockier). Dr. Antoni Tuchendler, after graduating from the University of Dorpat, trained at the Charitè Clinic in Berlin. He worked in Warsaw and was a member of the prestigious Warsaw Medical Society. Before the outbreak of the war, Dr. Leon Plocker worked at the Czyste Jewish Hospital in Warsaw. In 1939 he took part in the defensive war and was taken prisoner by the Germans. In 1940 both doctors were forcibly relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. From 1942, Dr. Plocker hid after the so-called on the Aryan side under the false name of Konstanty Szustowski. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising as the commander of one of the field hospitals. The article is devoted to the fate of two of the above-mentioned doctors: Antoni Tuchendler and Leon Plocker. The first one dealt with the etiology and diagnosis of habitual constipation, the second focused his scientific work on issues related to the stomach cancer.

Introduction Nun habe ich Euch genug geschrieben, diesen Brief wenn sei [sic] lesen würden, dann würde ich den Genickschuß bekommen.Now I have written you enough, this letter if they would read it, I would get the neck shot. (M., all translations from German sources and quotations by the author) When the German soldier Otto M. wrote these lines from Russia to his family on 3 September 1943 during the Second World War, he knew that his war letter would not be subject to the National Socialist censorship apparatus. The letter contains, inter alia, detailed information about the course of the war on the front, troop locations, and warnings about the Nazi regime. M., as he wrote in the letter, smuggled it past the censorship via a “comrade”. As a German soldier, M. was a member of the Volksgemeinschaft—a National Socialist concept that drew a “racist and anti-Semitic borderline” (Wildt 48)—and was thus not socially excluded due to his status. Nevertheless, in the sentence quoted above, M. anticipates possible future consequences of his deviant actions, which would be carried out by “them”—potentially leading to his violent death. This article investigates how social and societal exclusion is brought forth by everyday media practices such as writing letters. After an introduction to the thesis under discussion, I will briefly outline the linguistic research on National Socialism that underlies the approach presented. In the second section, the key concepts of agency and dispositif applied in this work are discussed. This is followed by two sections in which infrastructural and interactional practices of exclusion are analysed. The article closes with some concluding remarks. During the Second World War, Wehrmacht soldiers and their relatives could not write and receive letters that were not potentially subject to controls. Therefore, the blunt openness with which M. anticipated the brutal sanctions of behavioural deviations in the correspondence quoted above was an exception in the everyday practice of war letter communication. This article will thus pursue the following thesis: private communication in war letters was subject to specific discourse conditions under National Socialism, and this brought forth excluding agency, which has two intertwined readings. Firstly, “excluding” is to be understood as an attribute of “agency” in the sense of an acting entity that either is included and potentially excludes or is excluded due to its ascribed agency. For example, German soldiers who actively participated in patriotic service were included in the Volksgemeinschaft. By contrast, Jews or Communists, to name but a few groups that, from the perspective of racist Nazi ideology, did not contribute to the community, were excluded from it. Such excluding agencies are based on specific practices of dispositional arrangement, which I refer to as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Secondly, excluding agency describes a linguistic practice that developed under National Socialism and has an equally stabilising effect on it. Excluding agency means that agents, and hence protagonists, are excluded by means of linguistic mitigation and omission. This second reading emphasises practices of linguistic construction of agency in interaction, which is described as interactional exclusion of agency. In either sense, exclusion is inextricably tied to the notion of agency, which is illustrated in this article by using data from field post letters of the Second World War. Social exclusion, along with its most extreme manifestations under fascism, is both legitimised and carried out predominantly through discursive practices. This includes for the public domain, on the one hand, executive language use such as in laws, decrees, orders, court hearings, and verdicts, and on the other hand, texts such as ideological writings, speeches, radio addresses, folk literature, etc. Linguistic research on National Socialism and its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion has long focussed on the power of a regulated public use of language that seemed to be shaped by a few protagonists, most notably Hitler and Goebbels (Schlosser; Scholl). More recent works, however, are increasingly devoted to the differentiation of heterogeneous communities of practice, which were primarily established through discursive practices and are manifested accordingly in texts of that time (Horan, Practice). Contrary to a justifiably criticised “exculpation of the speakers” (Sauer 975) by linguistic research, which focusses on language but not on situated, interactional language use, such a perspective is increasingly interested in “discourse in National Socialism, with a particular emphasis on language use in context as a shared, communicative phenomenon” (Horan, Letter 45). To understand the phenomenon of social and societal exclusion, which was constitutive for National Socialism, it is also necessary to analyse those discursive practices of inclusion and exclusion through which the speakers co-constitute everyday life. I will do this by relating the discourse conditions, based on Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Confessions 194), to the agency of the correspondents of war letters, i.e. field post letters. On Agency and Dispositif Agency and dispositif are key concepts for the analysis of social exclusion, because they can be applied to analyse the situated practices of exclusion both in terms of the different capacities for action of various agents, i.e. acting entities, and the inevitably asymmetrical arrangement within which actions are performed. Let me first, very briefly, outline some linguistic conceptions of agency. While Ahearn states that “agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (28) and thus conceives agency as a potential, Duranti understands agency “as the property of those entities (i) that have some degree of control over their own behavior, (ii) whose actions in the world affect other entities’ (and sometimes their own), and (iii) whose actions are the object of evaluation (e.g. in terms of their responsibility for a given outcome)” (453). Deppermann considers agency to be a means of social and situational positioning: “‘agency’ is to capture properties of the subject as agent, that is, its role with respect to the events in which it is involved” (429–30). This is done by linguistic attribution. Following Duranti, this analysis is based on the understanding that agency is established by the ascription of action to an entity which is thereby made or considered accountable for the action. This allows a practice-theoretical reference to Garfinkel’s concept of accountability and identifies agentive practices as “visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical purposes” (7). The writing of letters in wartime is one such reflexive discursive practice through which agents constitute social reality by means of ascribing agency. The concept of semantic roles (Fillmore; von Polenz), offers another, distinctly linguistic access to agency. By semantic roles, agency in situated interaction is established syntactically and semantically. Put simply, a distinction is made between an Agent, as someone who performs an action, and a Patient, as someone to whom an action occurs (von Polenz 170; semantic roles such as Agent, Patient, Experiencer, etc. are capitalised by convention). Using linguistic data from war letters, this concept is discussed in more detail below. In the following, “field post” is considered as dispositif, by which Foucault means a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus [dispositif]. The apparatus [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. (Foucault, Confessions 194) The English translation of the French “dispositif” as “apparatus” encourages an understanding of dispositif as a rather rigid structure. In contrast, the field post service of the Second World War will be used here to show how such dispositifs enable practices of exclusion or restrict access to practices of inclusion, while these characteristics themselves are in turn established by practices or, as Foucault calls them, procedures (Foucault, Discourse). An important and potentially enlightening notion related to dispositif is that of agencement, which in turn is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari and was further developed in particular in actor-network theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). What Çalışkan and Callon state about markets serves as a general description of agencement, which can be defined as an “arrangement of heterogeneous constituents that deploys the following: rules and conventions; technical devices; metrological systems; logistical infrastructures; texts, discourses and narratives …; technical and scientific knowledge (including social scientific methods), as well as the competencies and skills embodied in living beings” (3). This resembles Foucault’s concept of dispositif (Foucault, Confessions; see above), which “denotes a heterogeneous ensemble of discursive and nondiscursive elements with neither an originary subject not [sic] a determinant causality” (Coté 384). Considered morphosemantically, agencement expresses an important interrelation: in that it is derived from both the French agencer (to construct; to arrange) and agence (agency; cf. Hardie and MacKenzie 58) and is concretised and nominalised by the suffix -ment, agencement elegantly integrates structure and action according to Giddens’s ‘duality of structure’. While this tying aspect certainly contributes to a better understanding of dispositional arrangements and should therefore be considered, agencement, as applied in actor-network theory, emphasises above all “the fact that agencies and arrangements are not separate” (Çalışkan and Callon) and is, moreover, often employed to ascribe agency to material objects, things, media, etc. This approach has proven to be very fruitful for analyses of socio-technical arrangements in actor-network theory and practice theory (Çalışkan and Callon; Gherardi). However, within the presented discourse-oriented study on letter writing and field post in National Socialism, a clear analytical differentiation between agency and arrangement, precisely in order to point out their interrelation, is essential to analyse practices of exclusion. This is why I prefer dispositif to agencement as the analytical concept here. Infrastructural Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In the Second World War, writing letters between the “homeland” and the “frontline” was a fundamental everyday media practice with an estimated total of 30 to 40 billion letters in Germany (Kilian 97). War letters were known as field post (Feldpost), which was processed by the field post service. The dispositif “field post” was, in opposition to the traditional postal service, subject to specific conditions regarding charges, transport, and above all censorship. No transportation costs arose for field post letters up to a weight of 250 grams. Letters could only be sent by or to soldiers with a field post number that encoded the addresses of the field post offices. Only soldiers who were deployed outside the Reich’s borders received a field post number (Kilian 114). Thus, the soldiers were socially included as interactants due to their military status. The entire organisation of the field post was geared towards enabling members of the Volksgemeinschaft to communicatively shape, maintain, and continue their social relationships during the war (Bergerson et al.). Applying Foucault, the dispositif “field post” establishes selection and exclusion mechanisms in which “procedures of exclusion” (Discourse 52) become manifest, two of which are to be related to the field post: “exclusion from discourse” and “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). Firstly, “procedures of exclusion ensure that only certain statements can be made in discourse” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73). This exclusion procedure ought to be implemented by controlling and, ultimately, censoring field post letters. Reviews were carried out by censorship offices (Feldpostprüfstellen), which were military units independent of the field post offices responsible for delivery. Censorship initially focussed on military information. However, “in the course of the war, censorship shifted from a control measure aimed at defence towards a political-ideological review” (Kilian 101). Critical remarks could be legally prosecuted and punished with prison, penitentiary, or death (Kilian 99). Hence, it is assumed that self-censorship played a role not only for public media, such as newspapers, but also for writing private letters (Dodd). As the introductory quotation from Otto M. shows, writers who spread undesirable information in their letters anticipated the harshest consequences. In this respect, randomised censorship—although only a very small proportion of the high volume of mail was actually opened by censors (Kilian)—established a permanent disposition of control that resulted in a potentially discourse-excluding social stratification of private communication. Secondly, the dispositif “field post” was inherently exclusive and excluding, as those who did not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft could not use the service and thus could not acquire agentive capacity. The “scarcity of speaking subjects” (Spitzmüller and Warnke 73) was achieved by restricting participation in the field post system to members of the Volksgemeinschaft. Since agency is based on the most basic prerequisite, namely the ability to act linguistically at all, the mere possibility of exercising agency was infrastructurally restricted by the field post system. Excluding people from “agency-through-language” means excluding them from an “agency of an existential sort” (Duranti 455), which is described here, regarding the field post system, as infrastructural exclusion of agency. Interactional Exclusion of Agency in Field Post Letters In this section, I will elaborate how agency is brought forth interactionally through linguistic means on the basis of data from a field post corpus that was compiled in the project “Linguistic Social History 1933 to 1945” (Kämper). The aim of the project is an actor-based description of discursive practices and patterns at the time of National Socialism, which takes into account the fact that society in the years 1933 to 1945 consisted of heterogeneous communities of practice (Horan, Practice). Letter communication is considered to be an interaction that is characterised by mediated indexicality, accountability, reflexivity, sequentiality, and reciprocity (Dang-Anh) and is performed as situated social practice (Barton and Hall). The corpus of field letters examined here provides access to the everyday communication of members of the ‘integrated society’, i.e. those who were neither high-ranking members of the Nazi apparatus nor exposed to the repressions of the fascist dictatorship. The corpus consists of about 3,500 letters and about 2.5 million tokens. The data were obtained by digitising letter editions using OCR scans and in cooperation with the field post archive of the Museum for Communication Berlin (cf. sources below). We combine qualitative and quantitative methods, the latter providing heuristic indicators for in-depth hermeneutical analysis (Felder; Teubert). We apply corpus linguistic methods such as keyword, collocation and concordance analysis to the digitised full texts in order to analyse the data intersubjectively by means of corpus-based hermeneutic discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). However, the selected excerpts of the corpus do not comprise larger data sets or complete sequences, but isolated fragments. Nevertheless, they illustrate the linguistic (non-)constitution of agency and thus distinctively exemplify exclusionary practices in field post letter writing. From a linguistic point of view, the exclusion of actors from action is achieved syntactically and semantically by deagentivisation (Bernárdez; von Polenz 186), as will be shown below. The following lines were written by Albert N. to his sister Johanna S. and are dated 25 June 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Wehrmacht’s military campaign in Russia (Russlandfeldzug) a few days earlier. Vor den russ. Gefangenen bekommt man einen Ekel, d.h. viele Gefangene werden nicht gemacht.One gets disgusted by the Russian prisoners, i.e. many prisoners are not made. (N.) In the first part of the utterance, “mitigation of agency” (Duranti 465) is carried out using the impersonal pronoun “man” (“one”) which does not specify its referent. Instead, by means of deagentivisation, the scope of the utterance is generalised to an indefinite in‑group of speakers, whereby the use of the impersonal pronoun implies that the proposition is valid or generally accepted. Moreover, the use of “one” generalises the emotional expression “disgust”, thus suggesting that the aversive emotion is a self-evident affect experienced by everyone who can be subsumed under “one”. In particular, this includes the author, who is implicitly displayed as primarily perceiving the emotion in question. This reveals a fundamental practice of inclusion and exclusion, the separating distinction between “us”/“we” and “them”/“the others” (Wodak). In terms of semantic roles, the inclusive and generalised formal Experiencer “one” is opposed to the Causative “Russian prisoner” in an exclusionary manner, implicitly indicating the prisoners as the cause of disgust. The subsequent utterance is introduced by “i.e.”, which marks the causal link between the two phrases. The wording “many prisoners are not made” strongly suggests that it refers to homicides, i.e. executions carried out at the beginning of the military campaign in Russia by German troops (Reddemann 222). The depiction of a quasi-universal disgust in the first part establishes a “negative characterization of the out-group” (Wodak 33) which, in the expressed causal relation with the second phrase, seems to morally legitimise or at least somehow justify the implied killings. The passive form entirely omits an acting entity. Here, deagentivisation obscures the agency of the perpetrators. However, this is not the only line between acting and non-acting entities the author draws. The omission of an agent, even the impersonal “one”, in the second part, and the fact that there is no talk of self-experienceable emotions, but war crimes are hinted at in a passive sentence, suggest the exclusion of oneself as a joint agent of the indicated actions. As further data from the corpus indicate, war crimes are usually not ascribed to the writer or his own unit as the agents but are usually attributed to “others” or not at all. Was Du von Juden schreibst, ist uns schon länger bekannt. Sie werden im Osten angesiedelt.What you write about Jews is already known to us for some time. They are being settled in the East. (G.) In this excerpt from a letter, which Ernst G. wrote to his wife on 22 February 1942, knowledge about the situation of the Jews in the war zone is discussed. The passage appears quite isolated with its cotext in the letter revolving around quite different, trivial, everyday topics. Apparently, G. refers in his utterance to an earlier letter from his wife, which has not been preserved and is therefore not part of the corpus. “Jews” are those about whom the two agents, the soldier and his wife, write, whereas “us” refers to the soldiers at the front. In the second part, agency is again obscured by deagentivisation. While “they” anaphorically refers to “Jews” as Patients, the agents of their alleged resettlement remain unnamed in this “agent-less passive construction” (Duranti 466). Jews are depicted here as objects being handled—without any agency of their own. The persecution of the Jews and the executions carried out on the Russian front (Reddemann 222), including those of Jews, are euphemistically played down here as “settlements”. “Trivialization” and “denial” are two common discursive practices of exclusion (Wodak 134) and emerge here, as interactional exclusion of agency, in one of their most severe manifestations. Conclusion Social and societal exclusion, as has been shown, are predominantly legitimised as well as constituted, maintained, and perpetuated by discursive practices. Field post letters can be analysed both in terms of the infrastructure—which is itself constituted by infrastructuring practices and is thus not rigid but dynamic—that underlies excluding letter-writing practices in times of war, and the extent to which linguistic excluding practices are performed in the letters. It has been shown that agency, which is established by the ascription of action to an entity, is a central concept for the analysis of practices of exclusion. While I propose the division into infrastructural and interactional exclusion of agency, it must be pointed out that this can only be an analytical distinction and both bundles of practices, that of infrastructuring and that of interacting, are intertwined and are to be thought of in relation to each other. Bringing together the two concepts of agency and dispositif, despite the fact that they are of quite different origins, allows an analysis of exclusionary practices, which I hope does justice to the relation of interaction and infrastructure. By definition, exclusion occurs against the background of an asymmetrical arrangement within which exclusionary practices are carried out. Thus, dispositif is understood as an arranged but flexible condition, wherein agency, as a discursively ascribed or infrastructurally arranged property, unfolds. Social and societal exclusion, which were constitutive for National Socialism, were accomplished not only in public media but also in field post letters. Writing letters was a fundamental everyday media practice and the field post was a central social medium during the National Socialist era. However, exclusion occurred on different infrastructural and interactional levels. As shown, it was possible to be excluded by agency, which means exclusion by societal status and role. People could linguistically perform an excluding agency by constituting a division between “us” and “them”. Also, specific discourses were excluded by the potential control and censorship of communication by the authorities, and those who did not suppress agency, for example by self-censoring, feared prosecution. Moreover, the purely linguistic practices of exclusion not only constituted or legitimised the occasionally fatal demarcations drawn under National Socialism, but also concealed and trivialised them. As discussed, it was the perpetrators whose agency was excluded in war letters, which led to a mitigation of their actions. In addition, social actors were depreciated and ostracised through deagentivisation, mitigation and omission of agency. In extreme cases of social exclusion, linguistic deagentivisation even prepared or resulted in the revocation of the right to exist of entire social groups. The German soldier Otto M. feared fatal punishment because he did not communicatively act according to the social stratification of the then regime towards a Volksgemeinschaft in a field post letter. This demonstrates how thin the line is between inclusion and exclusion in a fascist dictatorship. I hope to have shown that the notion of excluding agency can provide an approach to identifying and analytically understanding such inclusion and exclusion practices in everyday interactions in media as dispositional arrangements. However, more research needs to be done on the vast yet unresearched sources of everyday communication in the National Socialist era, in particular by applying digital means to discourse analysis (Dang-Anh and Scholl). Sources G., Ernst. “Field post letter: Ernst to his wife Irene. 22 Feb. 1942.” Sei tausendmal gegrüßt: Briefwechsel Irene und Ernst Guicking 1937–1945. Ed. Jürgen Kleindienst. Berlin: JKL Publikationen, 2001. Reihe Zeitgut Spezial 1. M., Otto. 3 Sep. 1943. 3.2002.7163. Museum for Communication, Berlin. Otto M. to his family. 16 Sep. 2020 <https://briefsammlung.de/feldpost-zweiter-weltkrieg/brief.html?action=detail&what=letter&id=1175>. 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1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.