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The question of Russia’s European identity has traditionally been controversial. Usually, the country is either defined as belonging to Eastern Europe in a narrower sense or, contrarily, totally excluded from the concept of Europe. From the times of Czar Peter the Great (1689–1725), Russia acquired the unquestioned status of a European power; however, despite the "enlightened" reforms of Empress Catherine the Great (1762–1796), its society remained feudal, its economy backward and its government autocratic. Right up until its collapse, the Russian Empire was decidedly less urbanized and less advanced in agriculture in comparison not only with the West but also with East-Central Europe. ...
In 1875, the Liebig Extract of Meat Company began to distribute a series of pictures printed on small (11 x 7 cm), colorful, collectible cardboard cards along with its main product, Fleischextrakt. While not the first to adopt this advertising technique, Liebig quickly became the best-known purveyor of Sammelbilder. ...
The focus of this work, the debate about a body of law dealing with aristocratic issues, is not easy to summarize. This problem stems in part from a topic that historians who do not work on law might be forgiven for considering nonexistent; in part, it has to do with the indirect way in which Dorothee Gottwald engages with current trends in the historiography of nineteenth-century Germany. ...
The relationship between past and present has been the subject of controversial debates in historical research time and again. In 2013, to give a prominent example, Philip Alston in a review essay discussed the issue of "Does the past matter?" with regard to a debate on the origins of human rights. The debate was dedicated to the controversial question of "[h]ow far back can we trace the genealogy of today’s international human rights system". In this review, I would like to rephrase this question to ask instead to what degree the present matters for historical writing. Other than in the work of Alston, this is not meant as a question on the contingency and path-dependence of history, but rather as a reflection on how historians describe and evaluate the past and what role knowledge of the present may have in this context. ...
Since the turn of the millennium, historical research has become increasingly interested in knowledge-based societies and their cultures, not least medieval ones. Whereas legal historical medieval studies have joined the interdisciplinary discussion about the notion of order as well as that of law, the notion of knowledge, and especially that of legal knowledge, has not been in the focus of interest. This observation serves as the starting point for Stephan Dusil’s habilitation thesis, which he submitted in 2016 at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich and which is now available as a monograph. ...
Many historians of Britain (and indeed, many Britons) celebrate that nation's "splendid isolation" from what they often deem "the continent," a.k.a. Europe. Scholars ranging from J. D. B. Clark to Linda Colley frame the formation of the United Kingdom as a "modern" state and a "modern" nation over the course of the eighteenth century as a process either unique to the British Isles or one that occurred as a (more often than not, positive) reaction to political and religious developments occurring across the English Channel. Few of these historians acknowledge that from 1715 until 1837, the British monarch also was the elector (after 1806, king) of Hanover, and that for most of this period the interests of that electorate/kingdom played a significant role in British politics and foreign policy, just as Ireland and Scotland had while they were in personal union with England. Those who note this union refer to these rulers as "The Hanoverians" (as a bevy of titles of works on eighteenth-century Britain attest to), but by and large, they minimize any influence that the actual or ancestral homeland of these rulers had in Great Britain besides the bequeathing of their dynastic name or, more negatively, the involvement of a reluctant "Blue Water" power in "European" wars of little significance to her. ...
It is a rare and wonderful thing when a book of 383 pages leaves a reader wanting to read more, much more in fact. That is certainly the case with this intriguing collection of thirteen assorted essays on the Rhine economy from 1815 to the present, organized in six broad topical sections: origins, enterprises, sectors and clusters, infrastructures, transport, and environment. ...
The volume under review contains the published proceedings of a conference held in 2009 with the challenging title, "Merowingische Monetarmünzen und der Beginn des Mittelalters". These Merovingian "Monetarmünzen" are a distinctive group of coins of which less than 10 000 are currently known. Quite suddenly, in the late sixth century, this type of gold coinage appears, with the name of a moneyer ( monetarius ) on the obverse and the place name on the reverse (presumably, but not necessarily in all instances, the mint). Thus, over a thousand moneyers and 722 place names are recorded, many only attested once or twice. In the late 7 th c. these coins slowly give way to a system based on the silver penny/denier, no longer showing names of moneyers. Who were these moneyers? What was their relationship with the court and the kings? To what ends were those coins produced, and how were they used in daily commerce? Why are so many different mints attested? These questions have occupied scholars for several generations now. However, Jarnut and Strothmann have added a new perspective: in how far are these coinages and the associated monetary policy a continuation of late Roman practices, or do they represent something altogether different and can, therefore, be understood as an expression of a fundamentally altered society that could be termed medieval? ...
In the last thirty years, the study of the Late Roman period has intensified and has spawned a whole new branch of study commonly known now as Late Antiquity. Within this field there are now research journals dedicated exclusively to the theme, regular congresses now convene on the same and scholarly articles and books are produced at a rate annually that makes it a herculean task to keep up with it all. Within such a historiographical framework is the Germanic invasion and settlement in Western Europe by a wide variety of tribes. Discussions on the nature and impact continue without abatement, as an example the recent works by Heather, Ward-Perkins, Goffart and others demonstrate that considerable divergence of interpretation still abound and will so for a long time. ...
In a year of many anniversaries – the death of Charlemagne 814, Council of Constance 1414, Congress of Vienna 1814, the outbreak of World War 1914 – it was appropriate to remember Bouvines 1214 for, as Pierre Monnet and Claudia Zey note in their Introduction (p. 9–15), it marked an important event in Franco-German relations with which all these events are in one way or another bound up. These two authors attach much importance to Georges Duby and his study of the battle, making it clear that the book is not about a single event, but concerned to contextualize and set it in the longue durée, hence the timespan of the title. ...
In Johannes Fried’s The Middle Ages, the author makes his case for an alternative interpretation of the medieval period as much more sophisticated than commonly thought, writes Ignas Kalpokas. The book intricately traces how ideas and systems of thought that we now consider quintessentially modern European ways of life, thinking and culture stemmed from this time period.
Over the last few years the boom in Rathenau-studies has continued. The latest addition to the list is Lothar Gall’s biography, which was published last year. Reading Gall’s biography makes it understandable why Rathenau’s life has remained such a popular subject. As a multi-facetted polyglot and business man, as an active and critical commentator of political events and contemporary trends and as an early victim of violent anti-Semitism, he remains a focus for study and research. ...
Published in good time for the 2014 "Karlsjahr", marking 1200 years since the emperor’s death, Johannes Fried’s latest book is intended to make specialist scholarship on Charlemagne accessible to a broad audience. Judging by the impressive sales figures, it has admirably fulfilled that purpose. That is not however to say that it is an anodyne synthesis of current research. The picture of the Frankish ruler it provides is very much the author’s own, as he himself emphasises, so there is little danger that it might be lost to sight amongst the many other biographies currently available. ...
Johannes Fried saves the programmatic aim of his book for the last chapter, but I’ll begin with it: unlike their counterparts in China or India or really any other center of historical civilizations, Europe has a particular disdain neither for its oldest period nor for the most recent but for the middle age (507). Some, and Fried chooses his countryman Immanuel Kant as their chief, regard the middle ages as an age lacking in the beauty of the ancient world and without the dedication to reason that his modern counterparts share. He holds Gothic architecture in particular contempt (506). Just as bad, Fried notes, are those who would romanticize the middle ages, ignoring the truly radical thought of characters like Meister Eckhart and William of Ockham, whose philosophical explorations set the stage for the most radical thought of what Kant would regard as his own era’s Enlightenment (508). In his masterful book titled simply The Middle Ages, Fried begins with Boethius and wends his way to Machiavelli in a campaign against such dismissals and such flattening accounts, telling a tale of political thought and philosophical exploration and most importantly of complexity at every step, a journey through Western Europe’s middle millennium that encourages the reader to think of the period as a truly fruitful period of intellectual, political, and social transformation. ...
In Charlemagne, Johannes Fried offers a new account of the life of the Frankish king and emperor, one of the most influential figures in European history. Although the limited surviving resources from the period make the book more of an in-depth account of the socio-political context of Charlemagne’s reign rather than a strict biography, Sara Perley welcomes this as a well-researched and engaging read that will foster curiosity about both Charlemagne and this lesser known period of history.
Wilhelmine Germany enjoyed something of an economic miracle that enabled men from modest backgrounds to become wealthy and influential. Among these was Carl Duisberg, who rose as the son of a modest ribbon weaver in Barmen to head the Bayer chemical works and later the massive German chemical trust I. G. Farben. Like others of his generation, Duisberg was the beneficiary of an excellent scientific education and the opportunities opened up by a rapidly expanding economy. In this massive and definitive biography of the man, Werner Plumpe explores Duisberg’s life as an industrial entrepreneur to uncover the role of the individual manager in the creative-destructive dynamics of capitalism, drawing on his own extensive knowledge of German entrepreneurship and industrial relations in the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. ...
As Bernhard Jussen correctly stresses in his introduction to this essay collection, we do not need to rediscover kingship. Kings and queens have always been favorite subjects for historians--at least, one might add, as far as medieval and early modern history are concerned. But even for the premodern period, kingship has rarely been studied in long-term perspective. This lacuna is all the more striking as kingship, existent in one form or another since ancient times, seems ideally suited to such a study. A history of kingship--prescinding from specific rulers--would bring to light the very characteristics of this form of rule. Moreover, as kingship was a highly visible and politically relevant phenomenon, and thus comparatively well represented in the sources, such an approach would also allow insights into general social, political, and cultural developments. Jussen's essay collection, in filling the gap, strives for both goals. It does so in a form that, at least in the German context, is innovative. The book combines the characteristics of a single-author volume and essay collection in the sense that each chapter follows clear rules and--with some exceptions--the same structure, though written by different authors. In addition, the strict chronological order, with each of the twenty-six chapters focusing on one particular date and source, and the respective headlines in the form of general questions (for example, "How to Depose a King"), point beyond the scope of the chapter and at the same time make the process of historical analysis visible to the reader. ...
The 900th anniversary of the death of Emperor Henry IV (7 August 2006) occasioned several special colloquia (in Cologne, Speyer, Goslar) and publications in celebration of the so-called "Year of the Salians" . While several scholarly publications and exhibits also appeared with specific focus on Henry IV himself, the present volume contains the papers given at a colloquium held at the University of Cologne (26–30 September 2006), which accordingly focused on the Salian dynasty’s history in the lower Rhine region. Prof. Dr. Tilman Struve (emeritus professor at the University of Cologne), who has spent much of his career studying the Salian house during the Investiture Struggle, lends his considerable expertise to framing this collection of disparate essays. ...
This study explores the development of the concept of administratio between the early Merovingian period and the late ninth century. The author’s thesis is that administration lost its original connotation of authority delegated by and exercised on behalf of the state, and that this signals the loss of an abstract awareness of the commonwealth in the early medieval period. In the fifth century the idea of administratio as public powers derived from a higher authority was still in place, but soon thereafter this conception vanished (p. 2–3). Yet when in 814 Louis the Pious became emperor, the original meaning of administratio seemed to get a revival – or, should one say, a new lease of life? Hardly, for only in Italy and Aquitaine was there any awareness left of public service as an abstract concept (p. 7–37). North of the Alps, those in charge did not understand such abstract concepts referring to "Staatlichkeit", as is shown by the fact that the authority of the Carolingian mayors of the palace was never called administratio, even though, in the original meaning of the word, the mayoral office was a clear case of delegated power (p. 16–18). ...
What happened to Jews in areas annexed to Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1941? In what ways was their persecution similar or different from that of Jews in the old Reich? What do we learn about the Nazi regime more generally by examining anti-Jewish policies in the annexed areas? This elegant volume explains how the unique demographic, economic, and social situation in each area annexed to the Third Reich played out in antisemitic policies. For some areas, such as Memel, Eupen-Malmedy, and Alsace, it offers the first overview of the persecution of Jews in a particular area. In other locations, such as Austria and East Upper Silesia, the volume presents a stellar overview of areas of the Final Solution that scholars have already well documented. But as the editors' introduction underscores, the real strength of the volume is that it examines the cases together. This, in turn, reinforces insights into some of the fundamental dynamics of the Final Solution, including the role of local initiative and the transfer of Nazi persecution practices from one area to another.
Zeitgeschichte in Germany has now been focusing for some time on the 1970s and 1980s, and has produced a substantial number of studies on the period "after the boom" (Lutz Raphael/Anselm DoeringManteuffel). By contrast, the history of the (West) German historical profession is still lagging behind and remains by and large confined to the first two postwar decades. What makes this gap even more problematic is the fact that most of the existing historiographical texts have been written by historians at the very center of the new developments during the 1970s, most notably Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, or by sympathetic observers such as Georg Iggers. Thus the critical evaluation of these decades remains a historiographical desideratum. The present volume, a Gedenkschrift for the late Wolfgang J. Mommsen, constitutes a step in the right direction. ...
Rezension zu: Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Olaf Mörke, Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds. Wege der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65. Geburtstag. Historische Forschungen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007. 656 pp. EUR 78.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-428-12394-0.
The volume consists of eight essays with a precise focus: the study of the "dynamics of social exclusion" as reflected in data available for 1994 to 1996, when a detailed survey of a sample of households in EU countries, the "European Community Households Panel," was conducted. On the basis of these data, the authors document the extent and prevalence of poverty generally and specifically in regard to particular risk groups defined in terms of age, health and personal circumstances (young adults, lone parents, people with sickness or disability and retirees).[1] The analysis was carried out for five countries: Austria, Germany, Greece, Portugal and the United Kingdom, which were taken to be representative of the extremes of EU membership: north and south; wealthy and poor; large and small. The essays discuss income poverty (measured as incomes at 40, 50 or 60 percent of median incomes) as well as housing problems, access to basic necessities like food and utilities, access to consumer durables and social interactions. The essays document not only that the extent of poverty varies between countries--a well-known fact--but also that its causes and effects continue to differ even in an increasingly united western Europe. Austria had the lowest proportion of the population in poor households (17 percent--compared to 18 percent in Germany, 21 percent in the United Kingdom and Greece, and 24 percent in Portugal). While sickness and disability were likely to impoverish individuals in all the countries studied, this was particularly true of Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom (that is, northern Europe); retirement was more likely to result in income poverty in the south. The north-south divide was less relevant for parents; single income households with children were particularly likely to suffer from income poverty in the United Kingdom, Germany and Portugal. Poverty was more likely to be persistent than merely a brief phase in the life cycle. Persistence rates of income poverty were around 80 percent in Greece and Britain, above 70 percent in Portugal and above 60 percent in Germany and Austria. But the effects were rather different. In the United Kingdom, high persistence rates of income poverty coincided with low persistence rates (34 percent) of amenities deprivation, whereas the persistence of necessities deprivation was relatively low in Greece at 39 percent. The volume was conceived as a contribution to policy decision-making in the aftermath of the 2000 Lisbon Declaration, which focused (among other things) on poverty and encouraged member states to set more concrete targets for dealing with social exclusion. Some member states did so; Britain, for example--a country where income poverty was particularly likely to result in deprivation of basic necessities--vowed to abolish "poverty" by 2020. The volume is a treasure-trove of data and empirical analysis; it makes essential, though at times rather trying, reading for anyone interested in the extent of social exclusion, and the likelihood of falling into or escaping from it. It also provides ample proof--if any were needed--that governments seeking to combat social exclusion have to set different priorities, because they are not attacking the same phenomenon. Unfortunately, the empirical as well as the more conceptual contributions reveal some of the approach's and the book's shortcomings.[2] The book's very advantage--providing a precise research agenda--is also a drawback. With its focus on three years, and on the life-cycle rather than more stable factors such as ethnicity, occupation or regional origin, the volume presents a particular image of the risk (and duration) of deprivation, which may be more or less comprehensive for different countries. The narrow temporal focus makes one wonder whether measuring poverty's "persistence" of poverty makes much sense for such a relatively short time. Such doubt is enhanced when considering some of the oddities in the results: how did households that remained poor in the United Kingdom manage to get their hands on consumer durables? (The same question could be asked for the sudden increase in access to necessities in Greek households.) Illustrating the empirical findings with more concrete examples would have been helpful, particularly when they are counterintuitive, for instance the statement that patterns of poverty in eastern and western Germany were converging in spite of the continuing divergence in unemployment patterns. Another question--admittedly suggested by events of the last several years--is whether ethnicity, regional origins or occupations are not more important in determining the extent and duration of social exclusion than life cycle. These factors were not, and partly could not be, measured on the basis of the data used, but have moved to the center of policy debates today. This matter relates to another issue the book does not address: who is to blame for poverty, and what roles have governments and the European Union assumed in determining poverty patterns and trends? Have past policy choices--for instance, cutting benefits; increasing "flexibility" in labor markets; encouraging the emigration of jobs (such things the European Union is frequently accused of doing)--made a difference? Is combating poverty a serious policy agenda, or merely window-dressing to make the "reforms" that were key to the Lisbon agenda for modernizing the EU more palatable? Europe seems to be facing an internal contradiction between the agenda of competition and privatization (which results in higher access costs to essential services for "low value" customers) and the agenda of abolishing poverty. This contradiction is partly sustained by U.K. data. Which element is and should be more important to the European Union or national governments is hotly debated, but of course serious contributions to the debate require a comprehensive review of the present state of affairs through the type of careful studies of which this volume is an excellent example.
The articles in this volume represent anthropological approaches to the study of external and internal boundaries in Europe. The authors raise fascinating methodological and empirical questions by approaching European societies from the perspective of a discipline usually working on the basis of greater cultural distance between scholars and the objects of their research. Moreover, the volume tackles a subject usually understood as a political project and a political problem, E.U. Europe, in an original non-political-science perspective. The volume's case studies are all based on bottom-up views of Europe, with fieldwork the methodology of choice. The first articles focus on institutions. Cris Shore and Daniela Baratieri's article focuses on the ambivalent results of attempts by European schools, which cater mainly to Eurocrats in Brussels and Luxemburg, to replace nationalism with a sense of European identity or nationhood, while Gregory Feldman discusses Estonian programs for the integration of Russian-speakers and Davide Però addresses the position of Italy's left-wing parties and public to the "new immigration." While these essays argue that "Europe" may not be as destructive to national (institutional) boundaries or the nation state as is often supposed, the next block of articles tackles migration across boundaries in a more conventional perspective, focusing on particular immigrant groups. Helen Kopnina discusses Russians in London and Amsterdam, while Christina Moutsou focuses upon immigrants in Brussels and Jacqueline Waldren examines Bosnians in Mallorca. To me, the case study of Turkish migrants in West Berlin by Sabine Mannitz is particularly intriguing, because it uses the peculiar experience of a lesson on Jews' fate in the Holocaust in which the teacher cast immigrants as permanent outsiders in Germany to explore pupils' sense of boundaries, and the East-German West-German divide appeared to loom much larger for immigrants than that between foreigners and Germans. The last section focuses on concrete and contested boundaries in European states and towns: William F. Kelleher, Jr. discusses Northern Ireland, Greek towns are the focus of Venetia Evergeti and Eleftheria Deltsou's article and South Tyrol is examined by Jaro Stacul. The volume makes for diverse and diversifying reading, and can only be highly recommended to anyone interested in innovative perspectives on the fate of the European project.