A History of Germany 1918 - 2020. Mary Fulbrook
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Название: A History of Germany 1918 - 2020

Автор: Mary Fulbrook

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9781119574248

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СКАЧАТЬ a continuation of the previous conflict and of the tensions arising from the reorganization of national borders in the attempted resolution of that conflict. Defeat in the Second World War was the precondition for the division of Germany – a division that was, however, also predicated on the new Cold War that had arisen between two superpowers that had largely been drawn into European affairs as a result of German aggression. It was the end of the Cold War, initiated by a crumbling Soviet Union, which was the precondition for the end of the division of Germany. From the 1990s onwards, processes of European integration and expansion were in large part both powered and shaped by united Germany, while in the twenty-first century it enjoyed growing visibility and respect in a global context. German history cannot be understood without reference to wider developments on an international stage.

      Finally, there are the key issues of political dissent and opposition and of patterns of political culture under given circumstances. It is important for regime stability that political dissent be contained within certain bounds and that it does not develop into broad, proliferating movements of opposition with mass followings. There are a variety of ways in which this containment may occur: through general satisfaction, for example, squeezing dissenters to a marginal fringe; through massive repression and intimidation, effectively excluding dissent from any articulate body politic; through isolation and limited toleration, allowing controlled ventilation of grievances; and in many other ways. The Weimar Republic was subjected to sustained assaults from a variety of quarters, from Left and Right; it ultimately fell prey to the latter, and its successor regime dealt exceedingly brutally with opposition from the former. The Third Reich itself was ultimately felled from without only because of lack of effective opposition from within. For much of the GDR’s history it proved possible to contain and isolate intellectual dissent. But for a variety of reasons, dissent was able to proliferate in East Germany in the course of the 1980s, providing the foundation for the broad-based pressures on the regime in the situation of crisis which was inaugurated by Hungary’s opening of the Iron Curtain and the ensuing flood of refugees in summer 1989. Clearly, again, no simple formula will adequately summarize the range of approaches, views and ideals of different groups of dissenters at different times. The character of dissent is affected by inherited cultural traditions as well as institutional and other structural circumstances. But it in turn can closely affect patterns of historical change. Thus, for example, the nonviolent dissent shaped under the protection of the East German Protestant churches in the 1980s played a key role in the ‘gentle’ pattern of the East German revolution and was a very different phenomenon from earlier ‘revolutionary’ movements in twentieth-century Germany.

      The subtitle of this book is The Divided Nation. Germans in the twentieth century have been ‘divided’ in at least three different, but interrelated, ways. Most obviously, Germany itself was divided after the war: what remained of Hitler’s defeated Reich became two German states, truncated parts of a German nation. The legacies of this division, though fading, are still evident in the united Germany of today. The division of Germany after the war was integrally related to the failure, before 1945, to resolve the problems and tensions of a divided society – tensions which by the end of 1932 had led to near civil war conditions and which Hitler’s enforced creation of a ‘national community’ merely exacerbated and displaced. Under Hitler, there were divisions between those accepted as ‘folk comrades’ and those rejected as ‘community aliens’; there were also divisions within people themselves, between public and private selves, between conformity and distance, in psychological compromises made in order to survive through a dictatorial regime. Finally, the consciousness of the century itself is divided: by the historical caesurae of 1933, 1945 and 1990. For those ousted from the new racially defined Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community) under Hitler, 1933 was the key turning point that irredeemably altered their lives. For those who СКАЧАТЬ