Preliminary Programme

Wed 30 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 31 March
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 1 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 2 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 30 March 2016 16.30 - 18.30
O-4 POL24 Establishing the Nazi Dictatorship: New Approaches to the Formative Period of the Third Reich
Aula 12, Nivel 1
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Constantin Iordachi
Organizer: Richard Wetzell Discussant: Constantin Iordachi
Robert Beachy : Instrumental Homophobia? The Nazi Crackdown on “Sexual Perversion”
This paper considers the timing of anti-homosexual policies and legislation in the first years of the Third Reich. Hitler’s seizure of power is often depicted as the beginning of a sweeping campaign against gay men and women. Certainly Germany’s homosexual “establishment” was quickly shut down. The last ... (Show more)
This paper considers the timing of anti-homosexual policies and legislation in the first years of the Third Reich. Hitler’s seizure of power is often depicted as the beginning of a sweeping campaign against gay men and women. Certainly Germany’s homosexual “establishment” was quickly shut down. The last gay and lesbian journal issues appeared in March 1933. The most popular bars and clubs – those frequented by “slumming” tourists – were shuttered about the same time. By summer the gay rights organizations had disbanded.

However, Nazi officials were largely indifferent to Berlin’s gay bar culture during the first years of the Third Reich. The vast majority of the 100 or more homosexual venues went undisturbed well into 1935. Only after the SS eliminated the SA leadership in the summer of 1934 and murdered Ernst Roehm, who was openly homosexual himself and Hitler’s closest associate, did Nazi officials begin a concerted crackdown. In 1935 Himmler introduced a more draconian version of Paragraph 175, the German anti-sodomy statute, and in 1936 the Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion.

What explains the timing of the new law and the office created to help enforce it? Perhaps Roehm’s position as SA leader averted disaster before 1934, and his absence facilitated increased persecution after? Certainly official Nazi rhetoric since the early 1920s had always condemned “sexual perversion.” These statements were always paired, however, with anti-Semitic rants blaming Jewish sexologists and especially Magnus Hirschfeld for poisoning German culture with filth and effeminacy. The polycratic character of Nazi rule and Roehm’s rivalries with Himmler and the Wehrmacht leadership offer a partial explanation for Roehm’s demise and for the increased persecution of homosexuals. Another surprising factor for the Nazis’ apparent ambivalence towards “masculinist” homosexuals, namely Roehm and his ilk, might have been a grudging tolerance conditioned by the culture of the Weimar Republic. This paper will thus consider the historical contingency of the Nazi campaign against homosexuality, and the myriad factors that influenced that campaign. (Show less)

Norman Domeier : The Rise of National Socialism and the International Press
The role of the international press during the rise of Nazism and in the early phase of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1935 is still not well researched, even though this is the time of the high-profile Hitler interviews conducted by foreign journalists, in which the Fuehrer presented himself ... (Show more)
The role of the international press during the rise of Nazism and in the early phase of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1935 is still not well researched, even though this is the time of the high-profile Hitler interviews conducted by foreign journalists, in which the Fuehrer presented himself to the world public to achieve particular effects and purposes. This paper will examine the role of foreign correspondents who worked in Berlin. What kinds of contacts did they have with the Nazi Party and state ministries such as the propaganda ministry and the German foreign office? How did they cooperate with these agencies? What kinds of conflicts arose? Which kinds of partnerships were foreign correspondents willing to enter into with one another but also with leading Nazis in order to score journalistic scoops? How did their reporting deal with tensions and conflicts between competing state and party offices in the polycratic Nazi regime? Did their reporting contribute to the stabilization or destabilization of the regime? How critical and how sympathetic were foreign correspondents towards the regime? (Show less)

Richard Wetzell : Science, Ideology, and Nazi Racial Policy: Conflicts over Racial Theory during the Formative Period of the Third Reich, 1933-1935
This paper will argue that the foundations of Nazi racial policy were far more controversial and contested during the early phase of the regime than has usually been recognized. While it is often suggested that German “racial scientists” (physical anthropologists, eugenicists, and human geneticists) readily and quickly provided scientific legitimacy ... (Show more)
This paper will argue that the foundations of Nazi racial policy were far more controversial and contested during the early phase of the regime than has usually been recognized. While it is often suggested that German “racial scientists” (physical anthropologists, eugenicists, and human geneticists) readily and quickly provided scientific legitimacy for Nazi racial policy, in fact the field of racial science was characterized by competing racial theories, which were championed by competing state and party agencies seeking to assert control over Nazi racial policy. Precisely because so many racial scientists were indeed eager to hitch their wagon to the Nazi regime, this diversity of competing theories led to serious academic and political conflicts, which demonstrate that Nazi racial policy was not the realization of a consistent ideological blueprint but the product of improvisation amid a series of conflicts over science, ideology, and policy.

At one extreme of the spectrum of racial theories were the Nordic theories of Hans F.K. Günther, whose Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes had been published in 1922 and quickly became influential in Völkisch circles. At the other extreme of the spectrum were the dynamic conceptions of race propounded by Karl Saller and Friedrich Merkenschlager, who insisted that races were affected by both genetic and environmental factors and therefore never something absolute. Since races were malleable, Saller and Merkenschlager thought it made sense to speak of a “German race” that was in the process of being formed. For quite some time, it was unclear whether any particular school of racial thought was going to prevail or whether a variety of opinions might continue to exist. One reason for this uncertainty was that both extremes of the spectrum could be seen to offer advantages and disadvantages. To be sure, the notion of Nordic superiority was a staple of the Völkisch movement, but translated into policy it was also potentially divisive because a policy of Aufnordung (nordification)would inevitably categorize a great many members of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) as second-class citizens in racial terms. With regard to the dynamic conception of race, on the other hand, a case could be made that adopting an approach that recognized a “German race” offered the enormous political advantage of making Rasse and Volk congruent. But the notion of a German race could also be considered problematic because it might be taken to include Jews and Gypsies.

The proposed paper will examine key conflicts over “racial mixing” and over the notion of a “German race” to illuminate the complex and contested relationship between science, ideology and Nazi policy in the early phase of the Nazi regime, from 1933-1935. The conclusion will suggest that such conflicts persisted and even flared up in the context of wartime racial policy in occupied Europe. (Show less)

Will Wilson : “Measured by the Size of the Keg of Free Beer”: Working-Class Dissent and the Politics of Public Celebration in Nazi Germany
This paper takes carpenter Georg Elser’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life at the annual 9 November ceremony in 1939 as a starting point to examine the political expression of working-class dissent in the festival culture of the Nazi dictatorship. How did workers respond to thoroughgoing attempts by the regime ... (Show more)
This paper takes carpenter Georg Elser’s failed attempt on Hitler’s life at the annual 9 November ceremony in 1939 as a starting point to examine the political expression of working-class dissent in the festival culture of the Nazi dictatorship. How did workers respond to thoroughgoing attempts by the regime to recreate working-class festivity as a symbolic and material expression of both the ‘factory community’ and the racialized ‘national community’? What do their actions suggest about the limits of political engagement of workers in relation to both the regime and their workplace? In addressing these questions, this paper draws on a variety of empirical sources ranging from newspapers, German archival records of municipal police reports, state and party reports, and the ‘Germany reports’ compiled by the Social Democratic Party in exile. On the conceptual level, the analysis builds on Alf Lüdtke’s notion of “self-assertion” (Eigen-Sinn) as well as ‘carnival theory’, with its conceptual emphasis on subversion and disruptive acts of resistance, to examine working-class opposition expressed in public celebration during the Third Reich. Beginning with the spectacular reworking of 1 May, the traditional labour holiday, the Nazis sought, with considerable success, to rework working-class festivity as a unifying affirmation of ‘national labour’ devoid of conflicting class interests. Thus, public celebration in the Third Reich constituted a site of reconciliation and reinforcement considerably more frequently than it did one of contestation and subversion; consequently, opposition to the authoritarian Nazi state broadly defined consisted of a range of activities and attitudes limited to a minority of Germans, among them workers. Public celebration and ceremony provided workers and agents of the political left with a subversive vehicle to oppose particular Nazi policies that in some way adversely affected their lives through both violent and non-violent acts of solidarity. This festival-related expression of dissent assumed an array of material and symbolic forms ranging from early violent confrontations between National Socialists and their political opponents as socialist and communist groups trespassed on NSDAP, SA and SS parades celebrating the ‘Nazi revolution’ to more prevalent acts of passive resistance including attendance at funeral ceremonies for comrades killed by the Nazis, graffiti, distribution of pamphlets at festive events, absenteeism from organized workplace celebrations and rallies and alcohol-related confrontation.
Even if these subversive festive protestations by workers failed as a direct challenge to the Nazi regime, they did serve as notification to the Nazis of the limits to which workers, individually or collectively, were prepared to tolerate the revaluation of industrial work and public life in accordance with the political and ideological norms and aims of the Third Reich. Whatever their motivations, an undetermined number of German workers acted to preserve and affirm their subjective identities shaped in large part by social democratic values associated with organized labour against attempts by the Nazis to objectify political subjectivities, reconstructing them in accordance with the imagined Volksgemeinschaft. Hence the politics of cultural dissent are an important contribution to the understanding of the contestation of power in Nazi Germany. (Show less)



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