Selling the Mission: The German Catholic Elite and the Educational Migration of African Youngsters to Europe
In the aftermath of the Kulturkampf, involvement in the German colonial project provided an opportunity for German Catholics to demonstrate their patriotism. In particular, German Catholic missions sought to carve out a role for themselves in the education of African youngsters not just in the new overseas territories in Africa, but also in Germany itself. Prior to the First World War, a handful of youngsters, primarily from Cameroon, were thus educated by the Pallottine Mission at Limburg an der Lahn and by the Benedictine Mission at St Ottilien, near Munich. This article looks at the ways in which these African students were soon used both publicly and privately to promote Catholic missionary work at home in order to secure support from amongst the Catholic elite of Europe, both financial and political, for ventures abroad. This allows for an analysis of domestic missionary promotional practices as well as of evolving representations of colonial Africans during the Imperial period. The article considers public religious ceremonies (primarily baptisms), mission newspaper reports and fundraising tours in order to demonstrate that these African youngsters came to personify an image of the civilized African, who was devout, intellectually capable and hard-working; an image which offered a counterpoint to the more prevalent negative representations of blacks.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/1/30?rss=1
The Modernized Gretchen: Transformations of the ‚New Woman‘ in the late Weimar Republic
The ‘New Woman’ was an important part of the culture and society of Weimar Germany, both as a discursive figure and as social reality. However, the interdependencies between these two aspects—the ‘New Woman’ as a media phenomenon and as a lived reality—have not yet been investigated in depth. Using the example of the tabloid newspaper Tempo (1928–1933) and its interaction with its readership, this article sheds light on the ways in which Germans reconciled the ‘New Woman’ ideal with their own experiences at the end of the Weimar Republic. Most importantly, it shows the struggle of many readers to accommodate new ideas about ‘modern’ relationships between men and women at a time when traditional morals persisted in a rapidly deteriorating economic climate.
A number of scholars have pointed to a change in the media-driven construction of images of femininity in the late 1920s, with the modern, independent ‘New Woman’ making way for a more conservative ideal of motherhood and devotion. This article argues that this shift in the discourse on femininity did not reflect a change in the self-definition of German women. Rather, the interaction of Tempo’s female and male readers with the paper suggests that they tried to accommodate new concepts of modern femininity with persisting traditional ideas about women’s role in society, arriving at a hybrid type of ‘moderately modern’ womanhood. Thus, only the image of the ‘New Woman’ constructed in the media changed at the end of the 1920s, while the self-definition of German women remained relatively stable—even beyond 1933.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/1/52?rss=1
Intervening Against Tyrannical Rule in the Holy Roman Empire during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
This article focuses on interventions in the internal affairs of the territorial princes of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially when such interventions were justified by the need to protect persecuted mediate subjects. It aims to show how intervention against tyrannical rule was perceived and conceptualized by contemporaries, and to thereby add insights into the normative underpinning of the system of rule in the Empire. By analysing two case-studies in some detail, the interventions in Nassau-Siegen (1705–1707) and Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1714–1719), the article documents aspects of the mindset of statesmen and the public with regard to intervention, in order to discern normative judgements and perceptions. It is argued that perceived tyranny—in other words, the mistreatment of subjects through violence and violations of their recognized rights—could, in legal theory and in state practice, lead to military interventions. A discourse against tyranny and arbitrary rule is evident not only in public statements, but also in private comment. Interventions were largely justified legalistically given the high degree of juridification of the Empire’s political culture. But there was also the strong moral element of a duty to conform to and enforce notions of civilized and Christian conduct. While legal and moral incentives were sufficient to enable interventions against petty tyrants, these would have to coincide and combine with pressing politico-strategic interests in order to allow interventions against more substantial rulers. Such interventions were often deemed necessary in order to restore geopolitical stability.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/1/1?rss=1
The German Catholic Diaspora in the Second World War
This article analyses the impact exerted by the evacuation of civilians on the pastoral structures of Catholic dioceses in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the later years of the Second World War. It examines the religious lives of Catholic evacuees from these regions in other parts of Germany, such as Saxony and Thuringia, and also assesses how effectively their clergy were able to minister to them in these new surroundings. In so doing, this article contributes to historiographical debates concerning the role of religion in German society during the Second World War. Many excellent works claim that the later phases of the conflict witnessed a widespread return to religious faith on the home front. This article aims to challenge this historiographical assumption, by revealing the manifold ways in which Catholic life was profoundly disrupted by the evacuation of civilians during the last years of the war. Large numbers of evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia went for extensive periods without supervision by their clergy, and frequently displayed indifference towards religious matters. Rather than viewing the Catholic Church’s prominence in western Germany after 1945 as grounded in social developments under way during the war years, this article contends that it must be seen as the product of changed political circumstances in the later 1940s.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/33/1/80?rss=1