Tag Archives: history

Hot Off the Presses – New Book Releases

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Newly released titles from Berghahn’s history and anthropology lists:

The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture, edited by Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg and Simon Shaw-Miller

Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present, edited by Christopher H. Johnson, Bernhard Jussen, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher

A Social History of Europe, 1945-2000: Recovery and Transformation after Two World Wars, Hartmut Kaelble

Two Sides of One River: Nationalism and Ethnography in Galicia and Portugal, António Medeiros

The Golden Chain: Family, Civil Society and the State, edited by Jürgen Nautz, Paul Ginsborg, and Ton Nijhuis

The fantasy of a historical source

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Michaela Bank’s Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women’s Rights and Nativism, 1848-1890 has just been released by Berghahn. The second volume in our new series Transatlantic Perspectives, it focuses on the challenges faced by three German-American feminists not only with the US women’s rights movement itself but also within their own ethnic community. In the following post, the author recounts the discovery of a seemingly significant event while undertaking her research.

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When I first spent long days in libraries and archives to find out more about German-American women’s participation in the US women’s rights movement I stumbled over an extensive report of a German women’s rights convention that took place in 1868 near Boston. Reading the report, which had been published in a German-language paper by Karl Heinzen, who was one of the rather more radical political editors of the time, I found the presented ideas clear and expressed in sharp language. To give an example, here is what one female speaker is recorded as having said to the audience:

“I predict that, if women are granted the right to vote, the political party that seeks to limit the freedom of social life by moral police and seeks to expand the authority of the clerics by religious coercion will be significantly strengthened. What it has not achieved so far, it will conceivably achieve now with the help of American women who are generally more dependent on the representatives of religion than American men. This party’s goal will be achieved if those women’s additional votes are not made powerless by a pull in the opposite direction. And who shall and will provide this pull? Only the German women!”

Such an openly aggressive opposition to the US-American women’s rights movement among German-American women struck me as rather exceptional. I was thrilled as this convention report was a marvelous source for my study on German-American women, nativism and women’s rights in this period, and so I continued to dig deeper into the sources to find out more about it. How did the grand ladies of the US-American movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and other prominent advocates of women’s rights, react to this opposition?

…Yet, not all paths in historical research lead to success: I could not find any records of the Roxbury convention anywhere. Then, a few weeks later, I found a short note revealing that Karl Heinzen’s report had actually been a fictional one. Suddenly the shockingly clear and sharp language made sense to me.

Although a fantasy, it remained a fascinating report for me because it illustrated pointedly what a group of German-Americans interested in reform politics thought of the women’s rights movement and why conflict arose so often between the two groups. As I discovered, only a few German-American women were willing to stand up and raise their voice strongly and even aggressively. Such were the women who could endure the tension between their ethnic community, which was often at odds with the US-American women’s rights movement because of its nativist and prohibition stances, and the women’s rights movement that they wanted to be a part of. The efforts of Clara Neymann, Mathilde Wendt, and Mathilde Franziska Anneke for an idea of equal women’s rights are special – special, because they were not at all common while still being powerful and influential. In the end, I was still more than happy that I had found the report of the fictional convention even if it was just a „Hirngespinst“ – a pipe-dream – as a newspaper article called it.

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 Michaela Bank received her doctoral degree in American Studies from Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany in 2009. She was a fellow in the graduate research training group “Public Spheres and Gender Relations” funded by the German Research Foundation from 2005 to 2008. From 2008 to 2010 she was a Lecturer of American History and Gender Studies at Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main.

 

An Excerpt from A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading

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Note: Berghahn recently published Ranjan Ghosh’s A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, an exploration of the relationship between history and theory. Here the author talks about the origins for the section on dust that appears in the book.

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Dust
I suffer from a dust allergy. If I’m really careful, it wouldn’t affect my life in any significant way. For what, after all, are allergies? A few crustaceans managing to live out their lifespan because a gourmet friend of mine suffers from a seafood allergy. Compared to that exchequer, my allergy has almost no exchange value. I can joke about it, although, only in the way a bald stand-up comedian can joke about his hair or lack thereof. For the truth is this: my relationship with dust has affected the way I have done history.

My mother, whose mythical bedtime stories first introduced me to history as a child, was a historian. Her specialisation was numismatics but she eventually gave up teaching history to take over curatorship of the university museum. She was also diagnosed with asthma — a disease for which dust is an enemy — and she suffered especially during the dusty Indian winter months. I subsequently grew up with a psychosomatic hatred for dust: a maid cleaned our house twice a day and I became the subject of much teenage laughter in school, holding, as I did, a hankie to my nose at all times.

Now, why do I say all this? My book, A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, has a section on dust. When I first read Carolyn Steedman’s fine book, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (it was published exactly a year after my mother’s death), I was overcome by several strong emotions. Primary among them was a sense of despair. Like my mother who would wheeze at the mention of a furry animal or sandstorm, I read Steedman’s book literally out of breath. My sense of despair came from the realisation that I would never be able to work in an archive — that I would never have a career in dust.

My Lover’s Quarrel is, in that sense, also a quarrel with dust, my private trope for history, the past and the future, beyond the biblical from where we come to where we go.

There is a living, buoyant ligature between a historian and the archival milieux where one encounters the recorded past as much as a ‘history of loss’, where the dust rests as no mere squalid accretions but animated particles that can waft into the historian with differential vibrations….Dust speaks; dust makes us aware of a past that is absent and present at the same time, a temptation to the historian’s reconstructionist desires and a reminder of his or her affiliation to grounded evidence. In a kind of sensory encounter with the past, dust, as a materiality, awaits mediation, conjuring up the ‘presence’ of the past. (102)

My book combines South Asian history with the continental philosophies of history. But my accusative finger is at dust and my physiological condition, which has prevented me from being a ‘proper’ historian. I’ve written on textbooks and pamphlets, and their unique semantics of a propagandist historicising, but I’ve always had to take the help of someone, a kind acquaintance at the library, often my wife or father, to first wipe the dust away from their pages before I could examine them.

That has also become my shorthand for doing history: wiping the dust. In that there is much romance and representation, and of course, always, always, a new reading.

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Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Bengal, India. Featuring lectures and a panel discussion on the book, Lover’s Quarrel will be launched on September 21 at the University of North Bengal.

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

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Newly released titles from Berghahn’s history list:
Hitler’s Plans for Global Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims, Jochen Thies, with a Foreword by Volker R. Berghahn
The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone
Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere, edited by Christian J. Emden and David Midgley
Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography, edited by Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller
Charismatic Leadership and Social Movements: The Revolutionary Power of Ordinary Men and Women, edited by Jan Willem Stutje

Newly released paperbacks from Berghahn’s history list:
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses, edited by Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase
Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989, edited by Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake
Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Belinda Davis, Wilfried Mausbach, Martin Klimke, and Carla MacDougall


Interview with the Author – Britta McEwen, author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934

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Britta McEwen is author of Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact, and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900-1934, published earlier this year by Berghahn. Her work uncovers the transformation of sexual knowledge from the realm of specialized medical science to that of social reform for the wider populace. Here she discusses her work, some of the challenges she faced in writing about some of the key historical figures, and how she would utilize her apple pie making skills if she weren’t a historian.

1. What drew you to the study of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century?

I actually got into this field through architecture!  Vienna has these amazing public housing projects from the interwar period, and as I investigated them I learned that they were intended for a new kind of people – upright, moral, hardworking small families.  This seemed to entail a new sexual system, starting with birth control at the very least.  That, combined with a well-timed read of Isabel Hull’s “Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,” made me think that there was a story to tell in Vienna’s early twentieth century about attitudes towards sex.

2. Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research to the time you completed the book?

On of my assumptions at the beginning of my project was that science was always a liberating voice vis-à-vis sexuality.  While scientific discourse was used to challenge Church teachings about sex, I found that many authors in the early twentieth century were actually using melodramatic language, rather than scientific language, to express the call to sexual and social justice.  At first I thought this was just a trick to popularize complex ideas, but as I went on I came to believe that melodrama offered people writing about sex a way to talk about ignorance, shame, and consequences in a way that would be convincing to a wide audience.

3. What aspect of writing this work did you find most challenging?  Most rewarding?

I’ll answer that one by combining the questions and talking about what was both challenging AND rewarding…  some of the historical characters I met in my research were so very colorful and compelling that they threatened to overshadow the “knowledge” they sought to impart.  Here I’m thinking of Wilhelm Reich, Johann Ferch, and above all, Hugo Bettauer.  Bettauer became a personal hero of mine as I wrote, which made it difficult to really focus on his journalism, rather than his person, for the book.  In another world, I think I would have ditched the reams of research I had collected and simply written about Bettauer’s humanism and his outrageous career.

4. To what extent do you think the book will contribute to debates among academics within the field?

Although one of the arguments of my book is that Vienna was a special site for the production and distribution of sexual knowledge in the early twentieth century, I think it would be interesting to see comparative work done on this issue.  How unusual were places like Vienna, Paris, and Berlin?  What made them unique?  I also wonder if books like mine will help dispel the belief that there was only one sexual revolution.  Finally, the debate in the German-speaking world about the “repressive” sexual regimes of the twentieth century is really heating up, and I think books like mine will help contextualize what sexual “liberation” meant to different historical actors.

5. If you weren’t a historian, what would you have done instead?

Although I am a hardly an entrepreneur, I do think I might have been able to run a public space.  Lord knows I waitressed enough to know a good cup of coffee when I see it, and I make a mean apple pie.  So some days I fantasize about running a bookstore specializing in science fiction and mysteries, where you could get something sweet to eat and sit all day (just like in Vienna), reading and gabbing.  I imagine it to be the kind of place with a bad pun in the title and a standing feminist knitting circle – come to think of it, the kind of place that could be lampooned on “Portlandia.”

Britta McEwen teaches European History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hot Off the Presses- New Book Releases

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New in print from Berghahn:
After The History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and beyond Foucault, edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog

Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies, by Nitzan Ben Shaul

Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919-1939, by Michael Wildt, translated from German by Bernard Heise

Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places, edited by Glenn Bowman

Happy Bastille Day- A Brief History of the Holiday and French Revolution Resources from Berghahn

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Most national days celebrate about what you would expect a national day to celebrate. Some, like the national days of the United States, Albania, and Haiti mark the signing of a declaration of independence from a colonial power. Other countries, like much of Africa, choose to remember the day the colonial power actually left. Countries like Germany and Italy celebrate unification. Others are a little quirkier, like Austria which celebrates its declaration of neutrality and Luxembourg which honors the Grand Duke’s birthday. A handful of countries such as the United Kingdom and Denmark have no national holiday. But few countries can top France for the sheer coolness of their national day which commemorates the day an angry mob stormed a prison. Continue reading →

Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us

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Graduate school ruins your ability to view anything related to your topic of study with an unacademic eye. This is fine if your topic doesn’t come up every day like, say, Byzantine art, but when you choose something that crops up often, like the influence of American music on Continental youth culture in the 1950s, it means you’ll be mentally revising your thesis every time you hear “Johnny B. Goode.” I’m reminded of this phenomenon every Olympiad because I wrote my master’s thesis on sports in Nazi Germany, using the party’s sports policy up until the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a window into their ideas about race and its intersection with political priorities before the war. The fast-approaching 2012 Olympics already have me mentally revising my thesis (something I’m sure I’ll be doing on my death bed), but the most recent issue of our journal Critical Survey has me wondering if I didn’t miss an altogether more interesting topic- sports and gender. Continue reading →

Interview with the Editor- Gemma Blackshaw, Co-Editor of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

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Gemma Blackshaw, along with Sabine Wieber, is one of the editors of Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness  in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In her own contribution to the volume, she discusses the work and life of Viennese author and poet and Peter Altenberg. Here, she answers questions about her research and herself.

1. What drew you to Peter Altenberg as a topic?
A caricature of Altenberg was chosen as the poster image for the Madness & Modernity exhibition I curated with Leslie Topp and Sabine Wieber, which looked at the relationship between mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna circa 1900 (Wellcome Collection, London and Wien Museum, Vienna, 2009-10). It was a last-minute addition to the exhibition, gratefully received from the Neue Galerie Museum for Austrian and German Art in New York, and I had little time to research its history. I touched upon Altenberg’s own experience of what was termed ‘nervous disorder’ in the accompanying catalogue in an essay on the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who painted Altenberg’s portrait in 1909, and made a mental note to follow up what seemed to me to be an intriguing set of questions: was Altenberg as ‘mad’ as he appeared in the caricature; did an answer to that question even matter; what were the circumstances of his being institutionalised; what was the value and the differences in being represented, and representing yourself, as ‘mad’? These questions formed the starting point of a long research journey which became so compelling a trail that I produced not only this essay but also a documentary film collaboration with artist and filmmaker David Bickerstaff titled Altenberg: The Little Pocket Mirror. Continue reading →