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This book tells the story of German cities' metamorphoses from walled to defortified places between 1689 and 1866. Using a wealth of original sources, the book discusses one of the most significant moments in the emergence of the modern city: the dramatic and often traumatic demolition of the city's centuries-old fortifications and the creation of the open city.
In the early modern period, all German cities were fortified places. Because contemporary jurists have defined 'city' as a coherent social body in a protected place, the urban environment had to be physically separate from the surrounding countryside. This separation was crucial to guaranteeing the city's commercial, political and legal privileges. Fortifications were therefore essential for any settlement to be termed a city. This book tells the story of German cities' metamorphoses from walled to de-fortified places between 1689 and 1866. Using a wealth of original sources, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 discusses one of the most significant moments in the emergence of the modern city: the dramatic and often traumatic demolition of the city's centuries-old fortifications and the creation of the open city.
Using the ecosystem concept as his starting point, the author examines the complex relationship between premodern armed forces and their environment at three levels: landscapes, living beings, and diseases. The study focuses on Europe's Meuse Region, well-known among historians of war as a battleground between France and Germany. By analyzing soldiers' long-term interactions with nature, this book engages with current debates about the ecological impact of the military, and provides new impetus for contemporary armed forces to make greater effort to reduce their environmental footprint.
German Home Towns is a social biography of the hometown Bürger from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth centuries. After his opening chapters on the political, social, and economic basis of town life, Mack Walker traces a painful process of decline that, while occasionally slowed or diverted, leads inexorably toward death and, in the twentieth century, transfiguration. Along the way, he addresses such topics as local government, corporate economies, and communal society. Equally important, he illuminates familiar aspects of German history in compelling ways, including the workings of the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic reforms, and the revolution of 1848. Finally, Walker examines German liberalism's underlying problem, which was to define a meaning of freedom that would make sense to both the "movers and doers" at the center and the citizens of the home towns. In the book's final chapter, Walker traces the historical extinction of the towns and their transformation into ideology. From the memory of the towns, he argues, comes Germans' "ubiquitous yearning for organic wholeness," which was to have its most sinister expression in National Socialism's false promise of a racial community. A path-breaking work of scholarship when it was first published in 1971, German Home Towns remains an influential and engaging account of German history, filled with interesting ideas and striking insights—on cameralism, the baroque, Biedermeier culture, legal history and much more. In addition to the inner workings of community life, this book includes discussions of political theorists like Justi and Hegel, historians like Savigny and Eichhorn, philologists like Grimm. Walker is also alert to powerful long-term trends—the rise of bureaucratic states, the impact of population growth, the expansion of markets—and no less sensitive to the textures of everyday life.
Terezín, as it was known in Czech, or Theresienstadt as it was known in German, was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Terezín was the last ghetto to be liberated, one day after the end of World War II. The Last Ghetto is the first in-depth analytical history of a prison society during the Holocaust. Rather than depict the prison society which existed within the ghetto as an exceptional one, unique in kind and not understandable by normal analytical methods, Anna Hájková argues that such prison societies that developed during the Holocaust are best understood as simply other instances of the societies human beings create under normal circumstances. Challenging conventional claims of Holocaust exceptionalism, Hájková insists instead that we ought to view the Holocaust with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prison society of Terezín produced its own social hierarchies under which seemingly small differences among prisoners (of age, ethnicity, or previous occupation) could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half years of the camp's existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages and on empathetic reading of victim testimonies, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis and highlighting the key issues of responsibility, agency and its boundaries, and belonging.
The book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political and cultural responses to the arms race of the 1980s.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.
A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.
This book makes a valuable contribution to debates on redress for historical injustices by offering case studies from nine countries on five continents. The contributors examine the problems of material restitution, criminal justice, apologies, recognition, memory and reconciliation in national contexts as well as from a comparative perspective. Among the topics discussed are the claims for reparations for slavery in the United States, West German restitution for the Holocaust, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge's mass murders in Cambodia and the struggles of the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand. The book highlights the diversity of the ways societies have tried to right past wrongs as the demand for historical justice has become universal.