The Reformation of the Soundscape: Bell-ringing in Early Modern Lutheran Germany
Before the invention of megaphones, bells were the loudest and most far-reaching means of communication. Over the centuries, a cluster of practices had evolved around bell-ringing, which were called into question during the Reformation. In Germany, religious reformers attacked traditional beliefs in the special power of the bell sound and strove to reduce its meaning to a simple sign. But in the process of the formation of the Lutheran church on a territorial basis in the subsequent decades, a great variety of approaches towards the use of bells in a sacred context were developed that integrated some of the controversial traditions into Lutheran pious practice. This article traces these developments in the Holy Roman Empire from the 1520s until the end of the seventeenth century on the basis of church ordinances and sermons delivered at the inauguration of new bells. It reconstructs the transformation of the religious soundscape and its perception by contemporaries, thus contributing to the understanding of early modern confessional culture as well as to sensory history.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/4/525?rss=1
Women’s Honour and the Black Shame: Coloured Frenchmen and Respectable Comportment in the Post-World War I Occupied Rhineland
To protest against the postwar French deployment of ‘colonial soldiers’ in the occupied Rhineland, a lurid propaganda campaign depicted German women as victims of a sexualized ‘black shame’. While existing literature has queried how this discourse deployed tropes of race, gender and sexuality toward geopolitical and nationalist ends, historians have underestimated how victims of the ‘black shame’ also functioned as vehicles to cultivate classed standards of comportment. Portraying shameful sexual interactions between racialized aggressors and respectable women, this article suggests, raised ambiguous implications for traditional precepts of feminine virtue and sexual integrity. Against the disruptions of the Great War, the cultural spectre of the ‘New Woman’, and the charge of the ‘white shame’ that accused Rhenish women of interacting voluntarily or for payment with non-white men, the influential pamphlet of a middle-class women’s organization presented female victims’ unfailingly honourable behaviour in fraught contexts of sexual contact with racialized Others. Through a close analysis of the alleged crime scenes compiled in the Rhenish Women’s League’s Coloured Frenchmen on the Rhine, this article explores how the intimate interracial encounters represented in the text provided a script for articulating bourgeois norms of respectable feminine conduct, mobility and morality.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/4/546?rss=1
Surviving ‚Stunde Null‘: Narrating the Fate of Nazi Elite-School Pupils during the Collapse of the Third Reich
This paper considers the experiences of one particular, rarely discussed group of ‘war children’: former pupils of the most prominent type of Nazi elite school, the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten or ‘Napolas’. Drawing upon a variety of original testimonies, the paper explores the hardships and dilemmas that Napola pupils (often as young as 12 or 13) faced as the Second World War drew to a close, and the ways in which ex-pupils have attempted to present this aspect of their past in autobiographical memoir literature and personal recollections. Public attitudes have certainly influenced these former pupils’ self-presentation, and their personal narratives of victimhood. However, their narrations also seem to contain recurring themes that are specific to their status as former elite-school pupils, and that have interesting implications for the ways in which we might approach such testimonies, both historically and methodologically.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/4/570?rss=1