Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 50 | Spring 2012

Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 50 | Spring 2012 5 Preface FEATURES 9 National Socialism and the Search for International Order Mark Mazower 27 National Socialism and the Search for International Order: Comment Lutz Klinkhammer 39 Nationalism on the Margins: Silesians Between Germany and Poland, 1848-1945 Brendan Karch 57 Creating Killers: The Nazifi cation of the Black Sea Germans and the Holocaust in Southern Ukraine, 1941-1944 Eric C. Steinhart 75 Lessons from History? German Economic Experiences and the Crisis of the Euro Charles S. Maier GHI RESEARCH 93 Modernity Calling: Interpersonal Communication and the Telephone in Germany and the United States, 1880-1990 Clelia Caruso CONFERENCE REPORTS 109 The Cold War: History, Memory, and Representation Jula Danylow, Jasmin Heermann, Claudia Schumacher, Andreas Etges 114 Summer Seminar: Europe — Migration — Identity Jan Logemann 120 2011 Bosch Foundation Archival Seminar for Young Historians: American History in Transatlantic Perspective Mischa Honeck 124 The Transnational Signifi cance of the American Civil War: A Global History Katharina Wagner 131 Shifting Visions of Development: International Organizations, Non-Governmental Actors, and the Rise of Global Governance, 1945-1990 Samuel Misteli 137 Medieval History Seminar 2011 Jan-Hendryk de Boer 142 Uncertain Knowledge: Discourses and Practices of (Non-)Affi rmation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American History Sebastian Jobs 146 Transatlantic Tourism: American Visitors to Europe in the Long Twentieth Century Frank Schipper 150 “Trust, but Verify”: Confi dence and Distrust from Détente to the End of the Cold War Nadja Klopprogge and Emily Malkin 156 From Mass Murder to Exhibition: Museum Representations in Transatlantic Comparison Jacob S. Eder 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 50 | SPRING 2012 165 GHI NEWS 2011 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prizes 2011 Helmut Schmidt Prize New Publications by GHI Staff Library Report Staff Changes GHI Fellowships and Internships Recipients of GHI Fellowships GHI Research Seminar, Fall 2011 GHI Doctoral Seminar, Fall 2011 GHI Lecture Series, Spring 2012 GHI Calendar of Events 2012 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 50 | SPRING 2012 3 PREFACE This issue of the Bulletin presents the 25th Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute, delivered by Mark Mazower this past November. Speaking on “National Socialism and the Search for Inter- national Order,” Mazower examined the Nazis’ conception of a new international order against the backdrop of interwar international relations, especially the minority-rights regime administered by the League of Nations. Since minorities had been such a source of international confl ict in the interwar years, hardline Nazi thinkers argued that the Third Reich could pacify Europe by eradicating minorities and imposing hegemonic regional rule. Europe was to be stabilized by mak- ing each state ethnically homogeneous by expelling or exterminating minority populations. Even though the Nazi vision of a new order was, of course, rejected by the Allies, Mazower argues that its challenge to many of the assumptions of interwar internationalism had an impact on the postwar international order, which dropped minority rights protection, reestablished great power hierarchy, and sidelined international law. Lutz Klinkhammer’s comment raises the question to what extent Nazi ideas about a new international order were translated into political action. The Nazi domination of Europe, he argues, created an institutionalized state of confl ict that prevented the implementation of any rational project of a “new order.” Running the gamut between the two poles of collaboration and extermination, Nazi occupation policies were fl uid and divergent but ultimately simply destructive. The next two articles present the research of the most recent winners of the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize awarded annually by the Friends of the German Historical Institute. Picking up the theme of minority policies, Brendan Karch’s article “Nationalism on the Margins: Silesians between Germany and Poland, 1848-1945” explores how Upper Silesians resisted being assimilated into either the German or Polish nation. Far from being indiff erent to nation-building, Upper Silesians nurtured a political culture that embraced ethnic ambiguity and refused to adopt nationhood as the primary axis of identity. The long-term resilience of this political culture allowed Upper Silesians to avoid the ethnic cleansing that took place in other parts of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. Eric C. Steinhart’s “Creating Killers: The Nazifi cation of the Black Sea Ger- mans and the Holocaust in Southern Ukraine, 1941-1944” sheds light on the motivations of Holocaust perpetrators by examining how residents of Transnistria, a multiethnic region on the border between Romania and the Ukraine, were enticed to participate in the Holocaust. Since PREFACE 5 the local populations did not carry out any autonomous anti-Semitic pogroms, pre-existing anti-Semitism was not a major factor. Instead, joining the militia and participating in the mass killings of Jews con- stituted a key way in which local male residents could demonstrate their “Germanness” to the SS, thus positioning themselves to reap the mate- rial rewards being off ered to those qualifying as Volksdeutsche. Charles Maier’s article “Lessons from History? German Economic Experiences and the Crisis of the Euro” is based on the lecture he delivered on the occasion of receiving the 2011 Helmut Schmidt Prize in German-American Economic History. In this lecture, Maier eluci- dated the current crisis by reexamining three sets of episodes from twentieth-century German history: the post-World War I infl ation and the defl ation of the early 1930s; the protracted confl ict over German reparations; and the post-1945 Marshall Plan. Addressing the current crisis, Maier suggests that the Europeans will have to uncouple the short term from the long term by combining a short-term moratorium on debt payments with a long-term resolution of the debt problem. Germany’s role will require generosity and imagination. In the section on GHI research, Research Fellow Clelia Caruso presents her research project on the role of the telephone in interpersonal communication in Germany and the United States from 1880 to 1990. While research on the telephone oft en assumes that the device by itself brought about major changes in social relations, Caruso argues that the technological characteristics of the telephone did not predetermine its usage or its interpretation. Instead, over the course of the century aft er 1880, numerous alternative usages of the telephone were imagined or implemented. The project therefore explores the shift ing usage and interpretations of the telephone in order to assess how this new tool of communication both refl ected and shaped modern society. This issue’s conference reports once again refl ect the great diversity of the topics examined at the Institute’s conferences and workshops, ranging from medieval history to the history of the Cold War; from the history of migration to the representation of the Holocaust in museums; and from the American Civil War to transatlantic tourism. This spring the German Historical Institute celebrates its 25th anniversary. Please take a look at the special anniversary supplement that is being issued simultaneously with this Bulletin and please join us for some of the pub- lic events that will mark this anniversary year. As always, please consult our homepage at www.ghi-dc.org for our calendar of upcoming events. Hartmut Berghoff (Director) and Richard F. Wetzell (Editor) 6 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 50 | SPRING 2012 Features Features GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE SEARCH FOR INTERNATIONAL ORDER 25TH ANNUAL LECTURE OF THE GHI, WASHINGTON DC, NOVEMBER 10, 2011 Mark Mazower COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Foreign policy has always lain very close to the heart of historians’ concerns with the Third Reich. The argument that began at Nurem- berg over responsibility for the origins of the Second World War necessitated a consideration of Nazi foreign policy goals. And it was perhaps the peculiarities of the trial’s charge sheet, in particular the charge of a conspiracy to wage aggressive war which dictated that historians would subsequently devote enormous attention to trying to elucidate how far the Reich had been driven by the Führer’s own personal ideological concerns and how far by wider and perhaps more traditional concerns and worldviews. Three conjoined issues were in- volved: fi rst, how far Hitler set the foreign policy agenda; second, how far geographically this agenda went: Eastern Europe; Europe; the world?; and third, how far back in time it was established: whether purely opportunistically; in the late 1930s; in the early 1920s; or perhaps even, if Fritz Fischer was to be believed, back in the First World War. The entire debate was really about two things above all: how German Hitler really was in his aspirations; and how far the Third Reich had been playing by, or departing from, the European rules of the game in international aff airs. Both were matters of abiding concern to anyone anxious for the stability of post-1945 Western Europe, and West Germany’s place within it. If the entire debate has lost much of its urgency today, it is because we no longer share those anxieties. But we now have other anxieties and other concerns, and these prompt me to revisit the issue of Nazism and its vision of international aff airs and to situate it somewhat diff erently. For we can now see, more clearly I think than was evident during the Cold War, that during the entire debate German foreign policy in the Third Reich era was being judged against an implicit yardstick of how a “normal” major European power could be expected to behave. For A.J.P. Taylor, committed to an avowedly realist model of international relations, that yardstick was a traditionalist diplomatic vision of the pursuit of the national interest in the context of the struggle for mastery in Europe.

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