Journal articles on the topic 'Symbolism in politics – Germany – History'

The article discusses the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects of the commemoration. The analysis touches upon such features of the subject as the genesis of historical politics, its connection with the process of legitimization of the political elite, the formation of national identity. It is important to delineate the demarcation lines between such key concepts as “symbolic politics”, “political use of the past”, “memory politics”, “historical politics”. The paper interprets various definitions of the basic conceptual and categorical apparatus. At the same time, within the framework of the article, the author considered several national cases (Russian, German and Belarusian), in which the practice of victimology is widely used as a basic narrative of legitimizing the political order and a tool for forming national identity, which, in turn, is not a consolidating basis for modern societies, due to a number of factors. Along with this, it is concluded that political symbolism, as a general phenomenon, and its particular form, historical politics, have firmly taken their place in the socio-political space and represent meta-narratives that have largely replaced the classical ideological doctrines of the modern era.

A contribution to memory studies, this work focuses on Poland’s Warmian-Masurian voivodeship. Before the war, this territory and the neighbouring Kaliningrad region of Russia comprised the German province of East Prussia. In this article, we strive to identify the essence, mechanisms, key stages, and regional features of the politics of memory from 1945 to the present. To this end, we analyse the legal regulations, the authorities’ decisions, statistics, and the reports in the press. We consider such factors as the education sector, the museum industry, the monumental symbolism, the oral and printed propaganda, holidays and rituals, the institutions of national memory, the adoption of memory-related laws, and others. From the first post-war years, the regional authorities sought to make the Polonocentric concept of the region’s history dominate the collective consciousness. This approach helped to use the postwar legacy impartially and effectively. However, the image of the past was distorted. This distortion was overcome at the turn of the 21st century to give rise to the concept of open regionalism. An effective alternative to nationalistic populism, open regionalism provides a favourable background for international cross-border cooperation.

The Quandary of 1492The year 1492 evokes a powerful symbolism.1The symbolism is most charged, of course, among peoples whose historical memory connects them directly to the forces unleashed in 1492. For indigenous Americans, Latin Americans, minorities of Latino or Hispanic descent, and Spaniards and Portuguese, the sense of connection is strong. The year 1492 symbolises a momentous turn in historical destiny: for Amerindians, the ruinous switch from independent to colonised history; for Iberians, the launching of a formative historical chapter of imperial fame and controversy; for Latin Americans and the Latino diaspora, the painful birth of distinctive cultures out of power-laden encounters among Iberian Europeans, indigenous Americans, Africans, and the diverse offspring who both maintained and blurred the main racial categories.But the symbolism extends beyond the Americas, and beyond the descendants of those most directly affected. The arrival of Columbus in America symbolises a historical reconfiguration of world magnitude. The fusion of native American and European histories into one history marked the beginning of the end of isolated stagings of human drama. Continental and subcontinental parameters of human action and struggle, accomplishment and failure, would expand into a world stage of power and witness. The expansion of scale revolutionised cultural and ecological geography. After 1492, the ethnography of the humanoid other proved an even more central fact of life, and the migrations of microbes, plants and animals, and cultural inventions would transform the history of disease, food consumption, land use, and production techniques.2In addition, the year 1492 symbolises the beginnings of the unique world ascendance of European civilisation.

The Sooro, the pillared entrance hall to the majority of palaces now existing in northern Cameroon, is an important index of political change in this region. The Spread of the Sooro: Symbols of Power in the Sokoto Caliphate traces the proliferation of sooroji from the time that Fulbe conquerors incorporated this region within the Sokoto caliphate in the early nineteenth century until Cameroon’s independence in 1960. The status of Fulbe rulers who conquered the region was not high enough to employ the political symbolism of the sooro, but the use of this building type spread quickly after German colonial borders separated northern Cameroon from the rest of the caliphate in 1901. Eventually the form expanded beyond the boundaries of the Fulbe and spread among non-Fulbe rulers. By explaining the changes in the form and political symbolism of the sooro, Mark DeLancey argues that it was a symbol of power spread in direct relation to the loss of real political power of rulers in colonial northern Cameroon.

Since tobacco smoking acquired important patriotic symbolism in nineteenth century, the history of tobacco sheds light on Hungarian nationalism. Hungarian tobacco growers found the Austrian tobacco tariff policy harmful to their interests, particularly when war disrupted the supply of American tobacco in potential export markets. Pushing for a different tariff, Hungarian patriots turned smoking into a marker of Hungarian patriotism. Tobacco symbolism was prominent during Hungary’s 1848 Revolution, not least because tobacco acquired revolutionary symbolism in Italy and Germany as well. The culture of patriotic tobacco corresponded to revolutionary national ideas in that it mostly transcended class barriers but excluded women.

This article traces the deep cultural and experiential foundations that animated Christian Democratic Europeanism between the mid-1940s and the birth of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s. It shows how the language of Europeanness, generated in a period of multiple and intense crisis, congealed around symbolisms of Christianity and spirituality. More specifically, it connects the post-Second World War Christian Democratic vision of Europe to the 1920s German-Catholic articulation of theAbendland(the Christian West), understood as a supranational and symbolic space alternative to the Soviet Union and the United States and imbued with anti-materialist, anti-socialist and anti-liberal principles. The argument here is that, in mutated form and in context of the Cold War, this view sustained the political reconstruction of Western Europe after the horrors of the Second World War, the ‘European’ thought and language of Christian Democracy and the commitment to the project of European integration.

This article examines the politics of wine making in Alsace in the two decades after the region returned to French rule in 1918. During these years Alsatian wine makers worked to transform their wines to meet the tastes of French drinkers, following five decades of producing wine for German consumption. As wine makers grappled with the question of how to secure the future of their industry, Alsatian wine became emblematic of the most contentious aspects of Alsace's reintegration into France. The introduction of new laws on viticulture raised the question of what was French about wine, the wine industry's woes symbolised the difficulties of Alsace's economic reintegration and wine became an emblem for often fierce wrangling over identity and belonging in the recovered region. This article traces this process and argues that while wine became a symbol of the complications of reintegration, its importance in understandings of French national culture equally allowed it to offer a solution to the problems that return to France caused for Alsace's wine industry in the interwar years. In this way, this case study of the politics of wine making in Alsace is suggestive of wine's broader power as a symbol of national belonging.

RESUMENLa historia del cristianismo no se entiende sin el complejo fenómeno mariano. El culto mariano ha afianzado la construcción de identidades colectivas, pero también individuales. La figura de la Virgen María estableció un modelo de conducta desde cada contexto histórico-cultural, remarcando especialmente los ideales de maternidad y virginidad. Dentro del imaginario católico, la Europa contemporánea ha estado marcada por la formación de una cultura aparicionista que se ha generadoa partir de diversas apariciones marianas que han establecido un canon y un marco de interpretación que ha alimentado las guerras culturales entre secularismo y catolicismo.PALABRAS CLAVE: catolicismo, Virgen María, cultura aparicionista, Lourdes, guerras culturales.ABSTRACTThe history of Christianity cannot be understood without the complex Marian phenomenon. Marian devotion has reinforced the construction of collective, but also of individual identities. 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AbstractThis article investigates the potential influence of the newly formed Imperial Germany on Transylvanian Saxon politics. The Saxons were German-speaking settlers with long traditions of local autonomy and political privileges within the kingdom of Hungary. From the early eighteenth century, Saxon politics had been defined by its relations to Hungary and to the Habsburg monarchy as a whole. Under the dualist system set up in the 1867 Compromise, the Hungarian government exerted control over Transylvania. The unification of Germany in 1871 introduced a new factor into Saxon politics since there was a clear territorial subject for the indistinct notions of pan-German cultural, religious (Lutheran), and historical affinities. The issue of Saxon administrative and political autonomy, eventually removed by the Hungarian government in 1876, forms a case-study of Saxon politics and the place of Germany within it. There was a spectrum of responses, not simply increased German nationalism amongst Saxons, and the article traces the careers of Georg Daniel Teutsch, Jakob Rannicher, and Guido Baussnern to highlight the diversity within the Saxon camp. From the perspective of Imperial Germany, diplomatic considerations such as regional stability outweighed any possible intervention in Hungarian domestic matters. Moreover, the German public remained largely indifferent to appeals for support.

ABSTRACT:This article examines the political and social tensions of late Ottoman Haifa through the history of the Hejaz Railway and a particular monument, the ‘Exalted Column’ (Sütūn-u ʿĀlī), a monument erected in 1903 to commemorate the beginning of Ottoman construction on the Haifa railway branch. By first establishing the use of railways and railway architecture as a means of exerting state power in a comparative and local perspective, the railway structures in Haifa are analysed in the context of that city's other monumental buildings. This then leads to a discussion of theSütūn-u ʿĀlīas a celebration of Ottoman authority and modernity, and of the developing Ottoman–German alliance. The symbolism of the column's iconography is shown to reflect a variety of problems that the Ottoman state faced in Haifa at the turn of the twentieth century.

Prior to the late 1960s, German history textbooks lacked coverage of Poland and depicted Germany's eastern neighbor with negative images. The 1970s and 1980s, however, witnessed positive changes to the contents of German school textbooks—particularly with respect to their descriptions of Poland and German-Polish relations. How and why did Germany promote a more reflective view of history and correct negative descriptions of the Poles in German history textbooks between the 1970s and 1980s? This article addresses this question by focusing on the influence of Brandt's Ostpolitik and on the activities of the German-Polish History Textbook Commission. The article also shows how contemporary conservative reaction was not powerful enough to reverse these positive changes to German history textbooks.

Over the last two decades, noticeable progress has been made towards a more complete understanding of the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. The older emphasis on the ‘high politics’ of Bismarck and his successors has given way to a much more differentiated picture of a political system in constant flux as it attempted to cope with the complexities of a rapidly industrializing society. Old orthodoxies concerning the weakness of German liberalism have been subjected to new examination and scholars have become increasingly aware of the potential of powerful interest groups to challenge as well as to buttress the Establishment. The overall effect of this general advance in the historiography of the Second Empire has been to direct attention away from the motives of individual decision-makers, at least at the ‘high-political’ level, and to investigate the structural constraints on the formulation of policy. Despite certain recent attempts to reinstate a more personalistic approach, it seems clear that no future history of late nineteenth-century German politics can afford to neglect these developments.

At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) is typically portrayed as only allowing its citizens to travel within the ‘Eastern bloc’. It has passed largely unremarked upon that from 1961 to 1989, however, tens of thousands of GDR citizens travelled to Cuba, with thousands of these journeys taking place on trade union-owned cruise ships. This article investigates the implications of this largely ignored phenomenon. Accompanying these cruises was wealth of symbolism, and the tensions within this symbolism allow us to explore the peculiar global vision constructed by GDR elites, which has hitherto been largely obscured by the depiction of the GDR as a parochial, autarchic state. Cuba was part of what was known as the “socialist world system”, the collection of socialist states across the world who shared the same, socialist, societal structures. Communist theorists supposed that these societies were on a path of objective convergence, and that tourism would further this process. At the same time, Cuba was exoticized as a site of radical, southern difference and consumerist pleasure. These conflicting visions were ever present in the literature surrounding cruises to Cuba, but as time went on, the latter vision gained prominence.

The symbol of apocalypse contains strong political connotations linked to eschatological expectations: the faith in a divine intervention on the course of history has often generated social instability, outbreaks of violence, and ideological claims.This article aims to demonstrate as the overlap between apocalyptic symbolism and political phenomena is still ongoing, even assuming new critical implications in connection with recent geopolitical dynamics on a global scale.The detection of the apocalyptic trends is supported by a historical premise, a brief summary of theoretical perspectives, and three study cases: the presence of messianic aspects in US imperialism, the influence of the doctrine of the Hidden Imam in the Iranian politics during the Ahmadinejad presidency, and the use of apocalyptic prophecies in the Islamic State’s propaganda

Writing in 1965 in Britain Looks to Germany, Donald Cameron Watt concluded:Perhaps the biggest successes scored by the Education Branch lay in the programme of exchange visits at all levels, in the discovery and encouragement of a new generation of teachers in Germany.…and most imaginatively of all in the opening up of the Wilton Park Centre to which leaders of opinion in Germany came for short residential courses on British democratic practice. Politicians, journalists, teachers, academics, trades unionists mingle together in these courses, and so valuable did the centre appear to German opinion that it was German initiative and German financial contribution which helped to preserve it in its present form when a niggardly Treasury and a disastrously unimaginative Foreign Secretary threatened to abolish it. Its impact on German life and on the political elites of West Germany has been incalculable.

When a hymnbook is placed outside its more expected hymnological environment and put in a wider contextual framework, particularly a political one with significant diplomatic aspects, a better appreciation is gained of the hymnbook and the circumstances of its compilation. Critically, the complexity and progressive transparency of hymn transmission from one country to another is also revealed. This article focuses on Prussian diplomat Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen and his Gesang-und Gebetbuchs (1833). A primary source for several translators, notably Catherine Winkworth (1827–1878), the hymnbook directly affected the movement of many hymns from Germany to England, Scotland, and Australia.

Ruff, Mark Edward. The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)McDougall, Alan. Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement 1946-1968 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)