Elections, Mass Politics, and Social
Change in Modern Germany: New
Perspectives
Publications
of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., vol. 4.
New York and
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (Paperback ed. 2002) Pp. xiii,
418.
Edited by
Larry
Eugene Jones and James Retallack
Abstract
This collection of essays presents the most recent work on Germany's stormy and problematic encounter with mass politics from the time of Bismarck to the Nazi era. The authors—sixteen scholars from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany—consider this problem from novel and sometimes surprising viewpoints. The history of elections, narrowly conceived, is abandoned in favor of a broader inquiry into roots of German political loyalties and their relationship to the historic cleavages of class, gender, language, religion, generation and locality. The essays not only present archival findings, but they also pursue more theoretical or conjectural paradigms, and raise new questions. Collectively, the authors explore the twin problems of electoral politics and social dislocation with language that is intentionally familiar, inventive, and allusive all at once—in a sense reflecting the Germans' own unfinished search for political consensus and social stability.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Political Mobilization and
Collective Identities in Modern German History, Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack
Part I. Electoral Politics in an Authoritarian Regime
1. Interpreting Wilhelmine elections: national issues,
fairness issues, and electoral mobilization, Brett Fairbairn
2. Antisocialism and electoral politics in regional
perspective: the Kingdom of Saxony, James
Retallack
3. The liberal power monopoly in the cities of
imperial Germany, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
4. Reichstag elections in the Kaiserreich: the
prospects for electoral research in the interdisciplinary context, Peter Steinbach
Part II. Gender,
Identity, and Political Participation
5. Women, gender, and the limits of political history
in the age of “mass” politics, Eve
Rosenhaft
6. Gender and the culture of work: ideology and
identity in the world behind the mill gate, 1890–1914, Kathleen Canning
7. Serving the Volk,
saving the nation: women in the youth movement and the public sphere in Weimar
Germany, Elizabeth Harvey
8. Modernization, emancipation, mobilization: Nazi
society reconsidered, Jill Stephenson
Part III. Local
Dimensions of Political Culture
9. Democracy or reaction? The political implications
of localist ideas in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, Celia Applegate
10. Communist music in the streets: politics and
perceptions in Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic, Richard Bodek
11. Weimar populism and National Socialism in local
perspective, Peter Fritzsche
12. Political mobilization and associational life:
some thoughts on the National Socialist German Workers’ Club, Roger Chickering
Part IV. The National
Perspective: Continuities and Discontinuities
13. 1918 and all that: reassessing the periodization of recent German history, Stuart T. Robson
14. Generational conflict and the problem of political
mobilization in the Weimar Republic, Larry
Eugene Jones
15. The social bases of political cleavages in the
Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, Jürgen W. Falter
16. The formation and dissolution of a German national
electorate: from Kaiserreich to Third Reich, Richard Bessel
Index
This information is provided by the Department of History at the
University of Toronto.
All contents (c) 2001-2003 James
Retallack and the University of Toronto.
Photo by Pam Fulford.
All rights reserved.
Last Updated: 25 April 2003.