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.