Spring 2017 The German Society of Pennsylvania Bulletin of the German Historical Institute | 60 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Spring 2017 1607 NEW HAMPSHIRE AVE NW WWW.GHI-DC.ORG WASHINGTON DC 20009 USA [email protected] German Historical Institute Washington DC Fellows and Staff For further information, please consult our web site: www.ghi-dc.org Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig, Director History of knowledge; German social and cultural history; Jewish history; history of religion and religiosity; historical education; educational media and digital humanities PD Dr. Axel Jansen, Deputy Director History of the United States; history of science Stefan Böhm, Administrative Director Dr. Elisabeth Engel, Research Fellow North American history; race and empire; modern colonialism; Atlantic and transnational history; postcolonial studies; history of capitalism Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Dr. Matthew Hiebert, Research Fellow Washington DC Digital history and digital humanities; transnational intellectual history and literary movements; Editor: Richard F. 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Jewish history and culture; modern European history; history of media and communication; For editorial comments or inquiries, please contact intellectual history; history of knowledge the editor at [email protected] or at the address below. Dr. Ines Prodöhl, Research Fellow Global history, cultural and economic history, civil society For further information about the GHI, please visit our Dr. Anne Clara Schenderlein web site www.ghi-dc.org. German Jewish history; migration and transnationalism; everyday life and consumption; memory and emotion For general inquiries, please send an email to [email protected]. Dr. Richard F. Wetzell, Research Fellow and Editor German Historical Institute Modern European and German history; intellectual and cultural history; legal history; 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW history of science and medicine; history of sexuality Washington DC 20009-2562 Dr. Thomas L. Hughes, Senior Visiting Research Fellow USA Dr. Robert Gerald Livingston, Senior Visiting Research Fellow Phone: (202) 387-3355 Sarah Beringer, Research and Press Coordinator Fax: (202) 483-3430 Anna Maria Boß, Head Librarian © German Historical Institute 2017 Christoph Bottin, IT/Systems Manager All rights reserved Anita Brown, Library Associate Kathryn Deschler, Library Associate ISSN 1048-9134 Susanne Fabricius, Foreign Language Assistant Heike Friedman, Program Coordinator, GHI West Bryan Hart, Program Offi cer (Fellowships) and Webmaster Sally Hudson, Administrative and Research Assistant Insa Kummer, Project Editor Mary Lane, Administrative Associate Alexa Lässig, Social Media Coordinator David B. Lazar, Senior Editor Elisabeth Mait, Library Associate Dr. Kelly McCullough, Project Manager Lemlem Meconen-Anderson, Assistant to the Director Dr. Atiba Pertilla, Project Associate Jörg Schröder, Deputy Administrative Director Melanie Smaney, Receptionist Dr. Mark Stoneman, Editor Dr. Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, Editor Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 60 | Spring 2017 3 Preface FEATURES 5 Benchmark Europe: Liberalism and Cultural Nationalism in the United States, 1900-1930 Adelheid von Saldern 25 Liberalism and Cultural Nationalism in the United States, 1900-1930: A Comment Thomas Bender 31 1990: An Epochal Break in German History? Martin Sabrow 43 No Man’s Land: The Soviet Occupation of Junker Estates in Poland’s New Western Territories, 1945-1948 Katharina Matro 69 Arnold Toynbee and the Problems of Today Jürgen Osterhammel 89 Historians in the Political Arena in Germany: Ample Opportunity and the Ambivalence of Soft Knowledge Paul Nolte 101 German Jewish “Enemy Aliens” in the United States during the Second World War Anne Schenderlein CONFERENCE REPORTS 117 Industrial Decline and the Rise of the Service Sector? How Did Western Europe and North America Cope with the Multifaceted Structural Transformations since the 1970s? Jörn Eiben 125 Migration and Knowledge Lisa Gerlach 131 Creating Spatial Historical Knowledge: New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally Matthew Hiebert 141 Restricting Knowledge: Channeling Security Information in Recent History Keith R. Allen 147 GHI NEWS 2017 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize New GHI Staff Publications Staff Changes Raimund Lammersdorf (1961-2017) GHI Fellowships and Internships Recipients of GHI Fellowships GHI Research Seminars and Colloquium, Fall 2016 GHI Calendar of Events GHI Library 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 60 | SPRING 2017 PREFACE This issue of the Bulletin opens with the thirtieth Annual Lecture of the German Historical Institute, delivered last fall by Adelheid von Saldern (University of Hannover). Her lecture, titled “Benchmark Europe: Liberalism and Cultural Nationalism in the United States, 1900-1930,” examines the role of the so-called quality magazines in American liberal cultural nationalism — including the search for authentic American art and literature — and as transatlantic media- tors who sought to construct a transatlantic network among cultural elites in an era of rising anti-Americanism in Europe. In his com- ment on the lecture, Thomas Bender (New York University) reminds us that, unlike most European countries, the United States did not have a national culture supported by state institutions; instead, American national culture was largely the product of commerce. The next feature, by Martin Sabrow (Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam), presents the lecture he delivered at the GHI’s German Unifi cation Symposium last fall. Examining the question whether the year 1990 represents an epochal break in German history, Sabrow challenges the depth of the rupture and makes a strong case that growing temporal distance has relativized the break of 1990. As regular readers know, every November the Friends of the GHI award the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in German history completed at a North American university. In this issue, this year’s prize winner, Katharina Matro, presents an overview of her dissertation on the “Soviet Occupation of Junker Estates in Poland’s New Western Territories, 1945-1948.” While most recent studies of postwar central Europe have focused on cit- ies, Matro examines the important transformations that took place in the countryside, focusing on the former landed estates of the Prussian nobility in Western Pomerania, where from mid-1945 to mid-1948 three groups — remaining Germans, arriving Poles, and Soviet military authorities — had to negotiate the return of war-torn lands to agricultural cultivation in a situation in which it remained unclear who owned the land. The next two articles present lectures delivered at the January 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). The fi rst, “Arnold Toynbee and the Problems of Today,” is the 2017 Toynbee Prize Lecture, delivered by Jürgen Osterhammel (University PREFACE 3 of Konstanz), a former member of the GHI’s Academic Advisory Board, on the occasion of accepting the 2017 Toynbee Prize. In this lecture, Osterhammel, whose recent book The Transformation of the World presented a global history of the nineteenth century, embeds his assessment of the work of Arnold Toynbee in a set of wide- ranging and incisive refl ections about the emergence of global his- tory and the challenges facing its practitioners. Paul Nolte’s article “Historians in the Political Arena in Germany” presents a lecture he delivered as part of an AHA panel co-organized by the German Historical Institute. In this piece, Nolte (Free University of Berlin) draws on his own experiences as a public intellectual, a member of public advisory panels as well as informal political advisory circles to analyze and critically refl ect on the role of historians in the public sphere in contemporary Germany. Our fi nal feature article presents the research of GHI Research Fellow Anne Schenderlein on “German Jewish ‘Enemy Aliens’ in the United States during the Second World War.” This article investigates and analyzes the little-known but disturbing story of German Jewish refugees’ classifi cation as “enemy aliens” during World War II, and how the refugees and refugee organizations responded to and negotiated this discriminatory treatment in their newly adopted country. The “Reports” section of the Bulletin reports on the GHI’s recent conferences and academic events, which ranged from a series of panels on “migration and knowledge” to a conference on the use of digital mapping technology to create “spatial historical knowledge,” and from the history of knowledge restrictions imposed by national security agencies to the economic history of “industrial decline and the rise of the