Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

German Politics and Society

Vol. 21, No. 3, Issue 68 (Fall 2003)

Articles

• The Influence of Political Culture upon Cross-Cultural Misperceptions and Foreign Policy: The United States and Germany

  Stephen Kalberg

  The disagreement between Germany and the United States over the war in Iraq was massive. During the winter of 2002, many observers spoke of a long-term rift between these longstanding allies and a total loss of credibility on both sides. No one can doubt, regardless of recent healing overtures, that the German- American partnership has been altered and significantly weakened. It has suffered a blow far more damaging than those that accompanied past conflicts over, for example, Ostpolitik, the neutron bomb, the Soviet gas pipeline, the flow of high technology products to the Soviet Union, the imposition of trade sanctions in 1980 against the military government in Poland, the stationing in the late 1970s of middlerange missiles on German soil, and the modernization of shortrange missiles in 1989.

• Rauch ohne Feuer: Why Germany Lags in Tobacco Control

  Alice H. Cooper and Paulette Kurzer

  The puzzle explored in this article is why Germany, in spite of its superb record in environmental policy and health care, has systematically thwarted measures to reduce smoking rates. At this point, thousands of large-scale epidemiological findings demonstrate a relationship between smoking and disease. Moreover, unlike alcohol, there is no safe amount of smoking. Cigarettes kill, and smoking is the single largest source of preventable death in advanced industrialized states. By various estimates, tobacco kills 500,000 Europeans per year, including 120,000 Germans. Globally, in the years 2025 to 2030, smoking will kill 7 million people in the developing world and 3 million in the industrialized world. No other consumer product is as dangerous as tobacco, which kills more people than AIDS, legal and illegal drugs, road accidents, murder, and suicide combined.

• Political Science and Democratic Culture: Ernst Fraenkel's Studies of American Democracy

  Hubertus Buchstein

  Reflecting on his academic exile in the United States, the German political scientist Franz L. Neumann emphasized the cross-fertilization of ideas as a result of the confrontation of different scientific and political cultures. According to Neumann, the migration of hundreds of European academics to the United States led to a growing internationalization of the social sciences and a two-way learning process. The Europeans became accustomed to the practice of the American liberal democracy and learned to value its political culture; émigré scholars, on the other hand, brought with them a different academic Denkstil and contributed to a more critical self-under-standing of American democratic theory.

• The Return of Memory: New Discussions about German Suffering in World War II

  Eric Langenbacher

  Just ahead of three Harry Potter books, atop Germany's 2002 list of bestselling fiction, was G_nther Grass's novel Im Krebsgang, perhaps not so surprising, given the popularity of the country's latest Nobel laureate in literature. What was unexpected from this prominent leftist, however, was the content of the book, which described the sinking of a ship in the final months of World War II and the deaths of thousands of refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. Even more surprising was the media reaction in Germany and overseas. Almost every major newspaper and magazine, and many television networks, extensively and sympathetically covered the book and the ensuing discussion of the memory of German suffering during the final months and immediate aftermath of the Nazi regime.

• The Legacies of Memory: The Third Reich in Unified Germany

  Mark A. Wolfgram

  Both of the publications under review, Bill Niven's Facing the Nazi Past and Siobhan Kattago's Ambiguous Memory, reflect on the decade since German unification and ponder the extent to which the events of 1989 changed the way Germans reflect upon the legacy of the Third Reich. Did 1989 fundamentally change the way Germans encounter the Nazi past or are the continuities with the postwar years more pronounced? Both authors agree that the unification of the country had a more profound effect upon East Germans, as they were forced to integrate into the West German traditions of commemorating the past. With a decade's worth of additional public debates about the legacies of the Third Reich, it is now possible to reflect upon 1989 and its outcomes.

• Eastern German Film, 1945-2000

  Catherine Epstein

  How did film challenge official politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)? What happened to East German film culture after German unification in 1990? How has film treated the theme of unification? Two excellent studies provide intriguing answers to these and many other questions. In The Triumph of the Ordinary, Joshua Feinstein discusses films produced by the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), the official and only East German movie studio. As he demonstrates, DEFA made a variety of films that in one way or another questioned the official ideology of East Germany's ruling communist party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In That Was the Wild East, Leonie Naughton tells the sobering story of the dismantling of the eastern German film industry after unification.

• The Wende in GDR Research

  Thomas A. Baylis

  Peter Christian Ludz, for many years the Federal Republic's most influential analyst of East German affairs, broke something of a taboo in 1964 when he published an edited volume under the title Soziologie der DDR. As he related at the time, the government's Ministry of All-German Affairs declined to reprint the book for free distribution because of its unfortunate use of the three "forbidden initials" at a time when most writers still referred to the entity in question as the "SBZ" or, more simply, the "zone." GDR reviewers, for their part, complained that, in spite of its grudging recognition of at least the proper initials designating their state, the book was still a compilation of familiar imperialist calumnies against it.

• Emancipatory Entertainments: Gender in Weimar Mass Culture

  Sara Hall

  Since the 1980s, feminist scholars from a range of disciplines have challenged us to examine critically women's history in Germany between the world wars. The call has been for a more gender-specific account of Weimar citizens' roles as both the subjects and objects of social and cultural production. Atina Grossman, Patrice Petro, Katharina von Ankum, and others have provided illustrations of numerous ways in which the Weimar crisis in economic and political life was translated into a crisis of not just male but also female identity. Thanks to these scholars, we understand better how anxieties about unprecedented shifts in public life shaped the conditions under which the female population defined itself in both discourse and action.