This book tells the story of Germany between the years 1914–1945 through the history of its sounds and noises. From the killing grounds of the Great War, passing through the roaring optimism of the 1920s, and up to the horrifying spectacle of the Nazis and the dreadful apocalypse of the Second World War, sound became the epitaph of an era that was mostly dominated by war and a global sense of crisis. Yaron Jean reconstructs and analyses these moments when sound and its meaning became history, and places them in a single study that provides a unique perspective on the history of modern Germany in one of its most turbulent centuries.

This book tells the story of Germany between the years 1914-1945 through the history of its sounds and noises. From the killing grounds of the Great War, passing through the roaring optimism of the 1920s, and up to the horrifying spectacle of the Nazis and the dreadful apocalypse of the Second World War, sound became the epitaph of an era that was mostly dominated by war and a global sense of crisis. Yaron Jean reconstructs and analyses these moments when sound and its meaning became history, and places them in a single study that provides a unique perspective on the history of modern Germany in one of its most turbulent centuries. Yaron Jean teaches history at Oranim Academic College of Education and Sapir Academic College, Israel. His research focuses on the relations between technology and human experience in twentieth-century Europe. He also researches the socio-technological legacy of Germany in non-European history.

An examination of what can be learned by looking at the journals and diaries of Jews living during the Holocaust. What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning. “This is a book that deserves to be read well beyond Holocaust studies. Goldberg’s theoretical insights into “life stories” and his readings of law, language and what he calls the “epistemological grey zone” . . . provide a stunning antidote to our unthinking treatment of survivors as celebrities (as opposed to just people who have suffered terrible things) and to the ubiquity of commemorative platitudes.” —Times Higher Education “Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg’s volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Amos Goldberg’s Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust is an important and thought-provoking book not only on reading Holocaust diaries, but also on what that reading can tell us about the extent of the destruction committed against Jews during the Holocaust.” —Reading Religion “Amos Goldberg’s work offers an innovative approach to the subject matter of Holocaust diaries and challenges well-established views in the whole field of Holocaust studies. This is a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust and after.” —Guy Miron. Author of The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary “This is an important contribution to trauma studies and a powerful critique of those who use the “crisis” paradigm to study the Holocaust.” —Dovile Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

This book introduces German Sound Studies using a transdisciplinary approach. It invites readers to auralize space by describing characteristically German soundscapes in the long twentieth century, including the noisy city of the early 1900s, the sounds of East and West Germany, and hip-hop soundscapes of the millennium.

Na de formatie van de NSDAP in de jaren '20 werden verschillende vormen van geluid (stem, ruis, stilte, populaire muziek) en mediatechnologieën (radio- en luidsprekersystemen) ingezet voor hun politieke programma. Vanuit de historisch invalshoek van het stedelijke 'soundscape' van Düsseldorf, onderzoekt de auteur de productie en receptie van deze geluiden en technologieën. Nazi Soundscapes brengt in kaart hoe het politieke bestel de stedelijke ruimte en identiteitsformatie van burgers door middel van geluid beïnvloedt. Het geeft een kritisch perspectief op zowel visuele als auditieve manieren van controle en discipline, in het bijzonder bij uitsluiting en geweld tijdens het nationaal-socialisme (1933-1945).

During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear, Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and knowledge production. She foregrounds the archival presence of individual speakers and positions their recorded voices as responses to their experiences of colonialism, war, and the journey from Africa to Europe. By engaging with the recordings alongside written sources, photographs, and artworks depicting the speakers, Hoffmann personalizes speakers from present-day Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Congo. Knowing by Ear includes transcriptions of numerous recordings of spoken and sung texts, revealing acoustic archives as significant yet under-researched sources for recovering the historical speaking positions of colonized subjects and listen to the acoustic echo of colonial knowledge production.

The emphasis of this book is on the human experience that binds together the history of the two World Wars: v.2. The peoples' experience -- The cultural experience -- The moral experience -- Reflections.

For most of his life, Ernst Jünger, one of Europe's leading twentieth-century writers, has been controversial. Renowned as a soldier who wrote of his experience in the First World War, he has maintained a remarkable writing career that has spanned five periods of modern German history. In this first comprehensive study of Jünger in English, Thomas R. Nevin focuses on the writer's first fifty years, from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler's Third Reich. By addressing the controversies and contradictions of Jünger, a man who has been extolled, despised, denounced, and admired throughout his lifetime, Ernst Jünger and Germany also opens an uncommon view on the nation that is, if uncomfortably, represented by him. Ernst Jünger is in many ways Germany's conscience, and much of the controversy surrounding him is at its source measured by his relation to the Nazis and Nazi culture. But as Nevin suggests, Jünger can more specifically and properly be regarded as the still living conscience of a Germany that existed before Hitler. Although his memoir of service as a highly decorated lieutenant in World War I made him a hero to the Nazis, he refused to join the party. A severe critic of the Weimar Republic, he has often been denounced as a fascist who prepared the way for the Reich, but in 1939 he published a parable attacking despotism. Close to the men who plotted Hitler's assassination in 1944, he narrowly escaped prosecution and death. Drawing largely on Jünger's untranslated work, much of which has never been reprinted in Germany, Nevin reveals Jünger's profound ambiguities and examines both his participation in and resistance to authoritarianism and the cult of technology in the contexts of his Wilhelmine upbringing, the chaos of Weimar, and the sinister culture of Nazism. Winner of Germany's highest literary awards, Ernst Jünger is regularly disparaged in the German press. His writings, as this book indicates, put him at an unimpeachable remove from the Nazis, but neo-Nazi rightists in Germany have rushed to embrace him. Neither apology, whitewash, nor vilification, Ernst Jünger and Germany is an assessment of the complex evolution of a man whose work and nature has been viewed as both inspiration and threat.

This volume looks at Canadian women’s experiences of, and contributions to, the world wars through objects, images, and archival documents. The book tells the stories of women who worked as civilians, served in the military, volunteered their time, and grieved lost loved ones, through thematically organized vignettes. The authors place these personal narratives of individual woman, and their related material culture, in the wider context of the world wars while demonstrating that the experience of living through global conflict was as individual as a woman’s particular circumstances. Drawing from the collections of the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and other public and private collections in Canada, Material Traces of War brings largely unknown material culture collections to public view and draws attention to the untold stories of women and war.

Historians have often employed the concept of civil society, an intermediary realm between the family and the state, to analyse nineteenth-century Europe and North America. They have concentrated on voluntary associations, the press and public meetings, the constituent elements of Jürgen Habermas's 'public sphere', in doing so overlooking a central element of nineteenth-century civil society: property and its disposition, whether within the family or in the marketplace. This book examines the place of property in the society of south-western Germany during property's nineteenth-century golden age. It analyses the culture of property ownership and property transactions within families, among business partners and competitors, and among creditors and debtors. The work considers the boundaries of property, outlining relationships between neighbouring property owners, and showing how property ownership helped shape social distinctions between men and women, Christians and Jews, the upper and lower classes, the sane and the insane, and between honourable and dishonourable actions. It traces the development of property relations and property transactions from the end of the Napoleonic era to the eve of the First World War. The book's conclusion compares conditions in south-western Germany with those elsewhere in Europe and North America, and considers changes in property relations occurring in Germany during the age of total war and in the post-1945 period in the light of structures and developments in the nineteenth century. Based on extensive documentation from civil court records, Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany presents its results through the recounting of intriguing, sometimes bizarre, but always revealing stories of legal disputes. A reconsideration of the nature of civil society, an analysis of nineteenth-century social development and social conflict, a study of the nature and action of the law in everyday life, the book is also an ironic and bemused look at the past human condition.