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German Historical Institute London Bulletin Vol 26 (2004), No. 2

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German Historical Institute London Bulletin Vol 26 (2004), No. 2 German Historical Institute London Bulletin Volume XXVI, No. 2 November 2004 CONTENTS Seminars 3 Annual Lecture 5 Speaking of Europe Channel Crossing: Common European Tasks and Challenges (Richard von Weizsäcker) 6 Article The Ideology of Self-Destruction: Hitler and the Choreography of Defeat (Bernd Wegner) 18 Review Articles The Secularization of 1803 (Derek Beales) 34 Jewish Refugees and Human Rights in the Age of Global War (Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann) 43 Victims of Bombing and Retaliation (Nicholas Stargardt) 57 Book Reviews Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisations- geschichte und Geopolitik (Helmut Walser Smith) 71 Valentin Groebner, Ungestalten: Die visuelle Kultur der Gewalt im Mittelalter (Len Scales) 74 (cont.) Contents Michael Kaiser and Andreas Pecarˇ (eds.), Der zweite Mann im Staat: Oberste Amtsträger und Favoriten im Umkreis der Reichsfürsten in der Frühen Neuzeit; Anette Baumann, Peter Oestmann, Stephan Wendehorst, and Siegrid West- phal (eds.), Reichspersonal: Funktionsträger von Kaiser und Reich (Joachim Whaley) 82 Wolfgang Behringer, Im Zeichen des Merkur: Reichspost und Kommunikationsrevolution in der Frühen Neuzeit (Beat Kümin) 91 Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco–Prussian War: The German Con- quest of France 1870–1871 (Alaric Searle) 98 Paul Julian Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945 (Wolfgang U. Eckart) 103 Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin: Politik, Kultur und Emo- tionen im Kalten Krieg (Belinda Davis) 107 Conference Reports Political Cartoons as Historical Sources (Matthias Reiss) 111 Luxury and Integration: Material Court Culture in Western Europe, Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries (Karsten Ploeger) 117 Noticeboard 126 Library News Timothy Reuter Library 137 Recent Acquisitions 139 2 SEMINARS AT THE GHIL AUTUMN 2004 9 Nov. PROFESSOR STEFAN BERGER (Glamorgan) Remaking National Histories in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, 1945 to the Present Stefan Berger is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Co-Director of the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan. His main research interests are German and West European history since 1800, labour history, historiography, and historical theory. His latest book is Inventing the Nation: Germany (2004), and he is currently working on a project on ‘Britain and the GDR, 1949–1989’, funded by the British Academy. 30 Nov. PROFESSOR KAREN HAGEMANN (Glamorgan) Citizens and Soldiers: Masculinities in Politics and War in the Period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars Karen Hagemann is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Centre for Border Studies at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. Her research interests focus on modern German and European his- tory and gender history from the eighteenth to the twentieth cen- turies. Her most recent books in the fields of the history of the mil- itary, war, and the nation include Manly Valour and German Honour: The Nation, Military, and Gender during the Period of Prussia’s Anti- Napoleonic Wars (2002) and Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (2004). 7 Dec. DR THOMAS BRECHENMACHER (Rome) Pope Pius XI, Eugenio Pacelli, and the Persecution of Jews in Germany, 1933 to 1938: New Vatican Sources Thomas Brechenmacher has been Wissenschaftlicher Assistent at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich since 1999. His research interests include the history of political Catholicism and the Papal States, and the history of the Jews in Europe. Since February 2003 he has been working on documents from the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI, recently released by the Vatican Archives, for the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn and the German Historical Institute in Rome. (cont.) 3 Seminars 14 Dec. PATRICK BAHNERS (Frankfurt/Main) Macaulay’s Machiavellian Moment: 1827 and the Whig Interpretation of History Patrick Bahners has been an editor on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1989, and chief editor of the Feuilleton section since 2001. One of his main interests is British and German historiogra- phy in the nineteenth century. At present he is writing a commen- tary on Jacob Burckhardt’s lectures on the age of the Counter- Reformation for a new edition of Burckhardt’s works. Seminars are held at 5 p.m. in the Seminar Room of the GHIL. Tea is served from 4.30 p.m. in the Common Room, and wine is available after the seminars. 4 THE 2004 ANNUAL LECTURE Always good neighbours—never good friends? Britain, Germany, and Europe 1949–2001 will be given by PROFESSOR A. J. NICHOLLS Emeritus Fellow, St Antony’s College, Oxford on Friday, 5 November, at 5 p.m. at the German Historical Institute 5 SPEAKING OF EUROPE CHANNEL CROSSING COMMON EUROPEAN TASKS AND CHALLENGES* by Richard von Weizsäcker My first experience of Channel crossing was in 1937. At that time Nazi Germany was an ever growing European threat. The mood in Britain vis-à-vis Germans was more than strained. My host, a country doctor in Wiltshire, was advised by his neighbours that he would, as usual, be very welcome with his family for holiday tea parties, but only without that seventeen-year-old boy from Germany. He felt, however, that hospitality to a young foreigner, wherever he comes from, took priority over the danger of a temporary alienation from good old neighbours. Ten years passed. We all know the course of history. Then, after the war, Robert Birley, Director of Education in the British Zone and later headmaster of Eton College, and Lilo Milchsack, wife of a prominent Düsseldorf businessman, created the Königswinter Conferences, something unique in European bilateral relations. British habits of political debate and parliamentary encounter had more influence on the atmosphere of a newly emerging second democracy on German soil than any kind of American so-called re- education or French Gaullism. The Germans, on the other hand, were heading for a Channel-crossing Europe. Among my friends and gen- erational colleagues there was no doubt whatsoever that Europe could not come into being without Britain. We had difficulty in understanding the deeply rooted sense of British distance from Europe. Even less could we anticipate an exclusion of Britain by France, its long-standing partner, in 1963. Against all the odds, dur- * This lecture by the former President of the Federal Republic of Germany is the second in the series ‘Speaking of Europe’, organized annually by the German Historical Institute London. Co-funded by the Körber Foundation, it was given on 28 April 2004 at the Institute of Directors in London. 6 Common European Tasks and Challenges ing a very different period of history, such feelings survived strong- ly during the last half century. In the long run, I hope, they may prove not to be condemned to complete irrelevance. But is it madness to believe in a pro-European Channel crossing right now? At present, Europe is at a historical crossroads. Within a few days the EU will be enlarged from fifteen to twenty-five mem- bers. Will this make the Channel narrower or wider? And what about the draft of a European constitution? Is this not going to solidify the famous fog in Channel, whose main raison d’être is to isolate the Continent? Is Britain to become a strong European co-leader, or just a looker-on, legally inside, but mentally outside? How is the key question in a referendum going to be formulated? ‘The UK in or out of Europe?’ Let me try, for a moment, to get away from media head- lines and to deal with our present challenges, not with enthusiasm or pessimism, but rather more soberly. The EU is heading for its largest expansion ever, by seventy-five mil- lion people and one third of its territory, but only five per cent of the present GDP. In other words, a large part of Europe with low living standards and widespread unemployment will join us. Originally, a one-by-one regatta method for the process of enlargement was in- tended. It would have been highly preferable economically, but proved to be politically unattainable. The new entity looks over- loaded and fragile. In the meantime, however, most of the new mem- bers have been working hard to transform their former COMECON economies so that they comply with the rules and habits of the EU. They have had to cope with some 80,000 pages of our acquis commu- nautaire, the EU’s body of treaties, laws, and regulations which binds all the member states together. Some of the new members have gone through a daring process of hard economic exposure to market con- ditions. You may have heard about the Polish Minister Leszek Balcerowicz who has been proposed for the Nobel Prize in Economics because of his success in transforming a ‘fish soup into a goldfish bowl’. Simultaneously, some of the old EU members, espe- cially the larger ones such as France and Germany, Italy and Spain, are struggling less successfully, suffering from jams in their domes- tic, economic, and social reforms. In the UK at present we are wit- nessing a growing debate on economic migrants. In Germany the focus is on the emigration of entrepreneurs who are leaving the coun- 7 Speaking of Europe try in order to find places for investment with lower job costs. Jacques Delors, former President of the European Commission, pre- dicted that it will be at least two decades before an enlarged Europe has learned to stand and move. Once more, we need an enormous amount of conviction and patience. We are obsessed by our daily difficulties which look insurmount- able. But from the outset, European co-operation and integration had to be seen in a long-term, historical perspective. So far, the turning points have been 1945 and 1989. The first, in 1945, was at the end of what General de Gaulle called the ‘thirty years war of our century’.
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