Full Cups, Full Coffers: Tax Strategies and Consumer Culture in the Early Modern German Cities
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the excise taxes (Ungeld) paid by town residents on the consumption of beer, wine, mead and brandy represented the single most important source of civic revenue for many German cities. In a crisis, these taxes could spike to 70–80% of civic income. This paper examines civic budgets and ‘behind-the-scenes’ deliberations in a sample of towns in southern Germany in order to illuminate how decisions affecting consumer taxes were made. Even during the sobriety movements of the Reformation and post-Reformation period, tax income from drinkers remained attractive to city leaders because the bulk of the excise tax burden could easily be shifted away from privileged members of society and placed on the population at large. At the same time, governments had to maintain a careful balance between what they needed in order to govern and what the consumer market could bear, for high taxes on drinks were also targeted in many popular revolts. This led to nimble politicking by those responsible for tax decisions. Drink taxes were introduced, raised, lowered and otherwise manipulated based not only on shifting fashions and tastes but also on the degree of economic stress faced by the community. Where civic rulers were successful in striking the right balance, the rewards were considerable. The income from drink sales was a major factor in how the cities of the Empire survived the wars and other crises of the early modern period without going into so much debt that they lost their independence.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/1/1?rss=1
Reconsidering the ‚Unpolitical German‘: Democratic Renewal and the Politics of Culture in Occupied Germany
A long-standing thesis has it that modern Germany’s educated bourgeoisie identified with cultural ideals to the detriment of its political formation. Fixated on the realm of ideas, the ‘unpolitical German’ deferred to real-world authority, paving the road to National Socialism. While émigré scholars gave an influential version of this diagnosis, parallel concerns shaped debates within occupied Germany. On its unsettled political-cultural field, educated elites grappled with how to assess the national cultural heritage in the wake of Nazism, war and Holocaust. Most sought refuge in a compensatory cultural identity, while a vocal minority demanded a purifying break with all tradition. This article focuses on an overlooked third grouping and their equivocal position, which reworked an elitist cultural patrimony into one cornerstone of a counter-elitist political vision. On the one hand, they agreed a focus on things spiritual had fed political quiescence; on the other, they saw embedded in German Kultur a specific and rich way of thinking about freedom. After 1945, they sought neither to jettison nor to revive this cultural tradition but to extract the liberating potential at its heart and bring the latter to bear on politics, as a resource for democratic renewal. Various loosely linked clusters of intellectuals pursued this project through cultural-political journals and in a new type of association, the Kulturbund. This article explores the conditions of their novel rearticulation of received frameworks of cultural and political meaning in the years after 1945 and reflects on its resonance in West and East Germany after 1949.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/1/53?rss=1