Two Worlds Become One: A ‚Counter-Intuitive‘ View of the Roman Empire and ‚Germanic‘ Migration
The Roman Empire and barbaricum were inextricably linked throughout the Roman Iron Age. By late antiquity, Germanic-speaking trans-Rhenan areas were inundated with imperial influence. Migration was two-way and in various forms, all of which, including large-scale ‘folk movement’, were normal: part and parcel of the imperial frontier’s dynamics. The counter-intuitive conclusion is drawn from this that the relationship between the existence of a formal frontier and significant migration is quite the opposite of the one we have grown used to imagining. The collapse of the frontier took with it the mechanisms for migration. Therefore I have to modify my 2007 epigram that ‘the end of the Roman Empire produced the Barbarian Invasions and not vice versa’. The end of the Roman Empire put an end to the barbarian migrations. This conclusion helps us contribute more responsibly to modern debate on migration. It also contributes to a discussion of the formation of Germany. The end of migration changed the political dynamics of the regions between Rhine and Baltic. The latter became more inward-facing and from these, eventually, emerged ‘Germany’.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/4/515?rss=1
Between Waterberg and Sandveld: An Environmental Perspective on the German-Herero War of 1904
When German colonial officials and settlers arrived in the colony of Southwest Africa around the turn of the twentieth century, they were faced with dry, unknown, and often dangerous surroundings. This article provides an environmental perspective on the history of the German occupation of the colony. It highlights the widespread scarcity of water in the territory, which impacted and often impeded attempts to survey and develop the territory and to control its population. The article describes the halting and underfunded efforts of the German administration to create legible landscapes, and it pays particular attention to German warfare and violence in the Herero War of 1904. The genocidal scale of German atrocities in the war has by now been well documented, but the role of the Southwest African environment has not yet received the in-depth attention it deserves. German soldiers fighting in the arid and unexplored landscapes of the colony struggled with constant supply shortages and were plagued by disease. Suffering the dire conditions of desert warfare, the soldiers often referred to the environment as their main adversary and viewed their human enemies as part of the generally hostile surroundings. This mindset helped to produce a pervasive indifference to human suffering among the German soldiers and, ultimately, a de-humanization of the Hereros. The article’s focus on colonial landscapes and on German responses to their natural surroundings adds an environmental and place-specific perspective to the attempts at reconstructing the course of the German-Herero War.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/4/533?rss=1
Journalistic Statesmanship: Protecting the Press in Weimar Germany and Abroad
From August 2013, a new, controversial ancillary copyright law (Leistungsschutzrecht) permitted German publishers to charge online news aggregator, such as Google for displaying article snippets. Implementation remains contested, but this is not the first time that new technology has prompted Germans to seek intellectual property rights in news. In August 1927, a German delegation successfully pushed through its compromise resolution on the legal protection of news during a Conference of Press Experts at the League of Nations. The resolution foresaw protection for news before publication, but allowed national governments to regulate news after publication. This left space for Germany to promulgate a national law on news that Germans hoped would become a model for others. This article uses the Conference of Press Experts to argue that German approaches to media, technology and law developed from the intersection between national and international concerns. In contrast to other scholars’ focus on the press as a national phenomenon, the article shows that the international spotlight enabled a temporary cooperation between two groups often at odds during the Weimar Republic: the press and government officials. Officials saw law as a form of soft power to raise Germany’s international profile, while the semi-official news agency, Wolff, aimed to counter domestic competition and stop radio listeners eavesdropping on its news. Yet, bureaucrats and the media only cooperated effectively on the international stage. In domestic discussions after the conference, consensus swiftly disintegrated. This interplay between national and international imperatives remains key for media policy today as well as in interwar German history.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/4/559?rss=1
On Forced Migrations: Transnational Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany
This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argues that a nationally oriented, highly selective public narrative of the forced migrations soon emerged in the Federal Republic, a narrative that stressed German suffering, relativized German crimes, and, crucially, elided differences among the forced migrants as well as between them and the rest of the West German population. The narrative had various useful societal functions, at least in the short term, but in the longer term it imposed significant costs on West Germany, both domestically and internationally. These costs related not only to foreign relations, especially vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, and to memory politics, but also to even wider challenges that contemporary Germany continues to face. These include the ongoing attempts to reconcile the reality of the Federal Republic as a multi-ethnic society of large-scale immigration with the myth of Germanness as an ethnically homogeneous and exclusive category, a myth that the post-1945 public narrative of German forced migrants helped to uphold.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/4/599?rss=1