HIS 8202-031, Topics in European History: Modern Germany 1848-1949

Summer 2003 Session III

Dr. Johnson

Description: This graduate seminar will examine some of the principal interactions between society, politics, and culture that have shaped modern Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the period 1848-1949. The Germans played a central role in the recurring crises of European development during this period, from the liberalism and radicalism of the 1848 Revolution to the imperialism and racism that produced two World Wars and genocide; we will focus on these crises' causes and consequences.

Coursework will include one short oral report and two medium-length papers; there will be no final examination.

Reading will include the following major works in paperback editions that have been ordered for the university bookstore, plus some outside readings (including some on-line sources) for reports:

Martel, Gordon, ed. Modern Germany Reconsidered (Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 1992) [now somewhat old but still one of the better sets of essays available]

Hahn, Hans J. The 1848 Revolutions in German-speaking Europe (Longman, 2001) [the crisis that helped set the political pattern of modern Germany]

Chickering, Roger. Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) [the second great crisis we will discuss]

Allen, William S. The Nazi Seizure of Power (Franklin Watts, 1984) [a classic case-study of our third crisis period & a great example of the use of oral history]

Mason, Tim (ed. Jane Caplan). Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge University Press, 2003) [essays by one of the masters of modern German history, very useful for understanding the National Socialist regime and German society]

Klemperer, Victor. Language of the Third Reich: LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii), A Philologist's Notebook (Continuum International Publishing, April 2002) [a classic work of deep insight into the Nazi mind, published in its original form in 1946 by a Jewish German scholar who had survived both anti-Semitism and the bombing of Dresden]

Tent, James F. Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and De-Nazification in American-Occupied Germany (University of Chicago Press, 1983) [OK, not a classic, but still of interest for comparison with ongoing American democratization efforts elsewhere]