Suchergebnisse

This work explores the making of British policy toward Germany in the aftermath of its defeat in the Great War. It shows how British pressures on Germany during the formative months of the new republic were crucial in debilitating the German Revolution and the faltering Weimar democracy

The Weimar Republic was a turbulent and pivotal period of German and European history and a laboratory of modernity. 'The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic' provides panoramic view of German history from 1918 to 1933, offering an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the fascinating history of the Weimar Republic.

This paper contributes to the debate on the causes of unemployment in interwar Germany. It applies the Layard-Nickell model of the labour market to interwar Germany, using a new quarterly data set. The basic model is extended to capture the effects of the tariff wage under the Weimar Republic and the Nazis. The estimated equations suggest that demand shocks, combined with nominal inertia in the labour market, were important in explaining unemployment. In addition real wage pressures due to the political processes of wage determination were a major influence on unemployment. Negative demand shocks appear to have been initially domestic and to have started before the impact of the World Depression. Both negative developments on the demand side of the economy and pressures coming from the supply side raised unemployment in the slump. In the recovery the wage policies of the Nazis and the revival of demand both contributed to the fall in unemployment. The mutual reinforcement of these factors may help to explain the severity of the interwar cycle in Germany. It also serves to emphasize the close connection between political and economic processes in this important episode in macroeconomic history.

The perception of the Weimar Republic as the high-point of 'classical modernity' in which all areas of society were permeated by a fatal sense of crisis has been revised as an explanatory model in recent historiography. Historians have returned to this period with a new sense of the openness of the crisis environment, particularly in areas of social and cultural history. Male homosexuality emerged as a central theme of Weimar social and cultural crisis as it became possible for homosexual men to imagine an identity and a 'life' for the first time. These men began to understand their lives as a continuum in terms of their sexuality and to express their lives in writing. The discourse of masculinist homosexuality, which emerged during the first decades of the 20th century, was used by some homosexuals as a means to self-identification and self-validation in the open environment of post-war early Weimar. However, this speculative framework of masculine comradeship and warrior ethos became less and less tenable as the internal contradictions as well as the socio-political pressures of the Republic increased. The paper explores the internal tensions between homosexuality and masculinist identity in two literary works from the Weimar Republic, Max René Hesse's Partenau and Thomas Mann's 'Mario and the Magician'.