Making friends : refugees and volunteers in Germany

In September 2015, Germany – and Austria, let’s not forget – opened its borders for tens of thousands of refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who were stranded on the Serbian-Hungarian border, or in Hungary itself, a country that did not want those refugees to stay. A conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, decided to allow refugees to enter Germany, fully aware that many of them would stay in the long run. Full of euphoria, thousands of Germans went to train stations to welcome refugees, they went to refugee camps to donate water, food, cloths or teddy bears for children, they volunteered to support refugees in dealing with the authorities, teaching them German, or organizing trips to zoos and theaters for children. Germany had another Sommermärchen

(Not) narrating the history of the Federal Republic : reflections on the place of the new left in West German history and historiography

This article offers a critical engagement with narratives of the Federal Republic and with the role that the radical, extra-parliamentary left played within such narratives from the late 1960s into the 1970s. The article first discusses success stories of the Federal Republic that highlight the country's democratic achievements, as well as more critical accounts that focus on the emergence of a neoliberal regime of governmentality. In both accounts, the radical left plays a pivotal role, either because the left contributed to the democratization of the Federal Republic, or because it helped transform capitalism into its current neoliberal form. The article then challenges such narratives by suggesting an interpretation of the alternative left during the 1970s as a space for experimentation, and by highlighting the open-endedness of such experiments. Gaining a sense for this sort of experimentation means that the alternative left can be embedded neither in a narrative of successful democratization nor in one of neoliberal transformation. Finally, the article examines the urban revolts of 1980-1981, in particular ones that took place in West Berlin. Activists in these revolts celebrated the exuberant intensity of the moment but cared less about future changes. The challenge here is to understand the intensity of a moment that cannot be embedded in a narrative with a clear outcome. The article thus presents perspectives on the history of the Federal Republic that defy easy integration into any narrative framing

Spiritual politics : new age and new left in West Germany around 1980

In the late 1970s, an increasing number of West German “alternative” leftist authors and activists turned to spiritual ideas. A milieu that had once been characterized by what Timothy Scott Brown called a “scholarly-scientific imperative” now turned to magic and mystics, fairy tales and stories about American Indians. The article explores this turn to spirituality within the “alternative left” in West Germany around 1980. Drawing on a close reading of several books, mostly published by Munich’s famous left-wing publisher Trikont Dianus, the article argues that fairy tales, myths and accounts of American Indian shamans promised a deeper and more holistic understanding of the world that was beyond the grasp of rational scientific thinking, including Marxism. This holistic understanding of the world provided the basis for a form of politics focused on living in harmony: in harmony with one self, not least in a bodily sense; in harmony with nature and the universe; and in harmony with the community and the past, which is why authors began to reevaluate notions of Heimat (homeland), a notoriously right-wing concept. For leftists tired of the confrontational and often violent politics of the 1970s, such ideas proved appealing. The article suggests to understand the fascination with spiritualism as part and parcel of a moment when old, confrontational forms of politics were rapidly loosing appeal and were replaced by a politics concerned with questions of self-hood. Spiritual politics were, to quote Michel Foucault, part of the struggles that attacked “not so much ‘such and such’ an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique, a form of power”, namely a power that determined “who one is”

Mit der Technik tanzen : Technokörper im Berlin der frühen Neunziger Jahre

The article investigates how technology, especially music, was used to produce specific bodies in the Berlin Techno scene after the fall of the wall. It argues that dancing was a mode of appropriating technology, as not only music but also visual effects affected bodies. The article describes three configurations of the techno body: the desiring body, the exhausted body, and the connected body. Rather than seeking to u n- veil the naïveté of a search for liberated bodies, the article suggests that Techno allowed protagonists to experiment with the body and thereby to produce new and exciting bodies. In that sense, the article traces the potentialities of using technologies to affect and produce historically specific bodies

Spaces for feeling differently : emotional experiments in the alternative left in West Germany during the 1970s

The article explores emotional practices amongst West German alternative leftists during the 1970s. It argues that leftists engaged in various forms of emotional practices that would allow them to produce feelings they missed in capitalist society. The article interprets these feelings as emotional experiments to feel differently that sometimes succeeded in the sense that they produced the desired feelings, but could also fail. These attempts to produce different feelings were based on a specific emotional knowledge about capitalism, that is an understanding of how capitalism, and specifically capitalist spatial arrangements, produced, regulated and restricted feelings. The emotional knowledge facilitated a variety of experiments that would yield the feelings that leftists missed so dearly under capitalism. The article focuses, first, on a variety of consciousness-raising and therapy groups where people tried to build new intimate relationships, and, second, on demonstrations and festivities that constituted temporal zones of exuberance. In both cases, changing spatial settings was a crucial element for producing different feelings

Feeling at home in lonely cities : an emotional history of the West German urban commune movement during the long 1970s

‘We want to live together, not alone.’ Thus read the title of a 1984 book about ‘communes today’, as the subtitle put it.1 Loneliness: this is what an increasing number of urban critics since the 1960s across the political spectrum considered an effect of modern cities, in particular of the newly built high-rise buildings at cities’ outskirts such as Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin. Commentators depicted cities as monotonous ‘desserts of concrete’, places that were characterized by a dearth of social interaction, by isolation and loneliness.2Michael Ende’s famous children’s book Momo, published in 1973, for example told the story of an old and beautiful city being torn down by the ‘grey gentlemen’, easily decipherable as representatives of modern, rational capitalism, only to be replaced by uniform buildings

The contemporary self in German History

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the self became important for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions

En route vers la liberté ? Trois récits de réfugiées musulmanes en Allemagne

Cet article, qui s’appuie sur les récits de vie de trois femmes arrivées à Berlin après avoir fui l’Afghanistan et la Syrie, conteste la validité des représentations des réfugiées comme des victimes de cultures patriarcales devant être sauvées et libérées. Il montre au contraire que ces femmes, luttaient déjà pour leur liberté dans leurs pays d’origine, et que l’expérience de l’exil a même été un moment d’empowerment pour certaines d’entre elles. À l’inverse, la situation de réfugiée en Allemagne peut présenter des situations de disempowerment pour ces femmes.Examining the life stories of three female refugees from Afghanistan and Syria now in Berlin, this article challenges narratives that portray women fleeing from these countries as victims of patriarchal cultures who are in need of liberation and rescuing. The article shows instead how these women were already struggling to liberate themselves in their countries of origin, and how the experience of fleeing itself could be empowering. It is, by contrast, the status of being a refugee in Germany that can be disempowering

Feeling like a child : dreams and practices of sexuality in the West German Alternative Left during the long 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s are popularly known as a “time of sexual challenge to the prudery, hypocrisy and stolid family conservatism dominating the post-war Fifties’ world.”1 Scholars have often depicted these years as an era of sexual liberalization or even, especially in the context of the student revolts around 1968, as a time of sexual revolution.2 In West Germany, the focus of this article, premarital sexual relations became a new norm, as a 1971 study by the Hamburg sexologists Hans Giese and Volkmar Sigusch noted.3 Behavior surveys of this period found that the number of male students between the age of twenty and twenty-two without coital experience decreased from 49 percent in 1966 to 28 percent in 1981; among female students, the change was even more dramatic, as the numbers fell from 54 percent to 18 percent.4 The introduction of the pill in 1961 untied heterosexual sexuality and reproduction to a hitherto unknown degree. Though this did not cause a sexual revolution, it made [End Page 219] talking about both sexual pleasures and contraception easier.5 More generally, sexuality became more visible in the public sphere, not least through an increase in the availability of pornography.6 At the same time, people were encouraged to talk openly about their sexuality and sexual problems in therapeutic contexts

Ingrid's Boredom

A key historical framework for study of the effects of literature on children's emotional development in the century up to 1970 Employs a literary perspective, offering readers an historical context for the processes in childhood of acquiring practical knowledge Provides an excellent reference point for courses that include the history of emotions, cultural studies, and child development, at both undergraduate and graduate levels Explores broad questions of children's socialization and the acquisition of practical emotional knowledge in the modern period Addresses the realm of children's studies through a historical as well as literary lens, allowing areas like developmental and child psychology to benefit from the historical and cultural contex