Siegfried Weichlein

The historiography of nationalism has traditionally dealt in the histories of states, party systems, high politics and social structures. By contrast, recent research has been characterized by a heightened emphasis on perceptions and attitudes. Following Benedict ...

The Weimar Republic was a democratic and a federal state. The Reich had significantly more powers than it had had in Prussian-dominated Imperial Germany. Not only the Reich, but also the Länder (states) were structured democratically. Neither the plans for a reorganization of the Reich nor those for ending the dualism between the Reich and Prussia came to fruition. The unitarian leanings of the democrats ran against the will of the democratic state governments to assert themselves. The 1920 Reich Finance Reform reversed the course of fiscal federalism by creating a nationwide centralized system of taxation replacing the older Länder tax codes. The Reich and the Länder shared revenues which put the Länder at risk in the crisis after 1930. A range of economic, social, and cultural dynamics changed Germany’s spatial order. No longer were the Reich’s financial administration and unemployment-insurance system oriented toward state borders. The same applied to transport areas and tariff z...

im Sinne der von Dieter Henrich etablierten „Konstellationsforschung“ eine Darstellung seiner Auseinandersetzungen mit anderen idealistischen Denkern wünschen können. Dies gilt insbesondere für das Verhältnis von Hegel zu Schelling. Der Einfluss, den Schellings frühe Schriften trotz aller Differenzen und beidseitiger Missverständnisse auf Hegel ausgeübt haben, wird nur am Rande behandelt; die in ihrer Wirkmächtigkeit nicht zu unterschätzende Kritik an der hegelschen „Logik“ wird weitgehend ausgeklammert. Dennoch kann Vieweg für sich in Anspruch nehmen, eine Biografie geschrieben zu haben, die Desiderate der gegenwärtigen Forschung in überzeugender Weise bedient. Für sich verbuchen kann die vorgelegte Biografie auch, in großem Umfang Quellenmaterial zusammengetragen zu haben, welches mit einer Vielzahl noch immer gängiger Irrtümer und Missverständnisse aufräumt.

L'A. examine l'appartenance religieuse dans le catholicisme de l'est du pays de la Hesse entre 1918 et 1933. L'etude sociologique commence par une etude de la population et du niveau social, puis suit la pratique religieuse concernant la participation a la messe et a la communion. L'article termine avec un regard sur les chiffres et la forme sociale du catholicisme dans cette region

William W. Hagen, German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation. cambridge: c ambridge u niversity Press. 2012. 482 pp. £19.99 (paperback). How are we to conceive of modern German history? For decades historians have addressed this question through the ‘vanishing point’ (Helmut Walser Smith) of twentieth-century dictatorship, particularly the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust. Explicitly or implicitly, this approach has provided the most powerful master narrative in the historiography of modern Germany. It has had both advantages and disadvantages. It has made a coherent narrative of German history possible and allowed for the integration of political, cultural and economic data into an overall explanatory framework. It has been flexible enough to give room to quite different representations. 1 The flipside has been that, epistemologically, it ran contrary to historical understanding and hermeneutics. It has held that a latter event was able to provide the reason for a ...

It is no exaggeration to say, that every century had (and has) its own Boniface. The memory of Boniface mirrors society and politics and the relationship between center and periphery as well as between the local and the global. During the 19th and the 20th centuries the politics of Saint Boniface was a powerful tool to refocus and rebrand Catholicism, its relationship to the society at large and to the papacy in Rome. There wasn't one Boniface to be remembered but rather many.

Hagen Schulzes Studie Staat und Nation in der europaischen Geschichte erscheint innerhalb einer von Jacques Le Goff herausgegebenen Reihe »Europa bauen«. Die Reihe ist ein Projekt verschiedener europaischer Verlage. Die jeweils diachronen Perspektiven der erschienen Uberblicksdarstellungen fuhren unter thematischen Gesichtspunkten durch die europaische Geschichte der letzten tausend Jahre. Innerhalb dieser dem Europagedanken verpflichteten Reihe besetzt Schulze das historiographische Kernthema der Staats- und Nationsbildung, zu dem er bisher schon mehrere Untersuchungen vorgelegt hat. Das Projekt Europa analysiert er in seinen einzelnen Bauelementen »Staaten«, »Nationen« und »Nationalstaaten«. Diese grosen Sachkapitel sind wiederum in sich gegliedert in nationale Geschichten von Staats-, Nations- und Nationalstaatsbildungen. Die typologisch vergleichende Perspektive, die Theodor Schieder in die neuere Nationalismusforschung eingefuhrt hat, kommt dabei etwas zu kurz. Die darstellerische Trennung in drei Strange ist sehr anschaulich, erschwert indessen die Analyse des Verhaltnisses von Staats- und Nationsbildung.

Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, Volume Two: Hoch- and Spatmittelalter. By Peter Dinzelbacher. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. 2000. Pp. 555. EUR88.40.) This is the first volume to appear in a planned six-part series on the history of religion in the German lands from antiquity through the modem era. Its declared goal is to examine the totality of religious behavior and experience during the high and later Middle Ages from a phenomenological and interdisciplinary perspective. The author, Peter Dinzelbacher, has consciously written neither a history of theological ideas nor a church history. Rather, by drawing on a wide range of sources including both Latin and vernacular verse and texts, painting, sculpture, and inquisition and visitation records, Dinzelbacher examines how religion affected daily life and attitudes. His presentation of hundreds of examples of (predominantly) late medieval religious life in Germany rests on two fundamental assumptions. First, "holiness" is not understood as the equivalent of moral sanctity, but rather as the numinous presence of unseen powers which could be associated with persons, places, rites, and objects. Second, late medieval religious life was characterized by a conflict between institutional religion (religion prescrite) on the one hand and the people's lived religious experience (religion vecue) on the other. Both assumptions lead to a problematic understanding of medieval religion, as I will argue below. In its sheer number of examples and source references, the book is exhaustive. A short historical overview of high and late medieval spirituality and piety is followed by the "phenomenological" section, which makes up most of the book. In it, Dinzelbacher examines first the transmission of religious beliefs through word and art; catechesis, preaching, biblical and other writings, painting, sculpture, drama, and music were all vehicles for religious indoctrination. The conceptual framework for religious experience is considered next: belief and practice played themselves out in a world of God(s), angels, saints, demons, and other supernatural beings. Dinzelbacher's phenomenological discussion then treats in turn the sacrality of particular places, times, deeds, words, and people. The author illustrates each of these topics with copious citations from an enormous range of textual and visual evidence. The book's greatest strength is precisely this impressive command of source examples dealing with late medieval religious life; interested researchers will find the volume a treasure trove of potential case studies. Unfortunately, the author's basic premises in his approach to this material lead to a distorted interpretation of late medieval religious experience. Though he is no doubt correct in positing a tangibly "sacral" element in late medieval ideas of the holy, Dinzelbacher takes this truth to an extreme, often equating religion with magic without explaining the broader context of his evidence or the self-understanding of late medieval believers. …

The Weimar Republic was a democratic and a federal state. The Reich had significantly more powers than it had had in Prussian-dominated Imperial Germany. Not only the Reich, but also the Länder (states) were structured democratically. Neither the plans for a reorganization of the Reich nor those for ending the dualism between the Reich and Prussia came to fruition. The unitarian leanings of the democrats ran against the will of the democratic state governments to assert themselves. The 1920 Reich Finance Reform reversed the course of fiscal federalism by creating a nationwide centralized system of taxation replacing the older Länder tax codes. The Reich and the Länder shared revenues which put the Länder at risk in the crisis after 1930. A range of economic, social, and cultural dynamics changed Germany’s spatial order. No longer were the Reich’s financial administration and unemployment-insurance system oriented toward state borders. The same applied to transport areas and tariff zones, which were oriented towards rationalization and optimization. The Heimat movement found the essence of the nation in an ethnically and culturally defined peoplehood, which brought it close to the völkisch movement. A sharp nationalism prevailed in the Heimat movement putting border regions more and more at the center of national imagination.

Nach 1949 verloren mehrere begriffliche Gegensatzpaare aus der klassischen Föderalismustheorie, die die Politik und den Diskurs darüber strukturierten, ihre maßgebliche Bedeutung. Dazu zählten der Gegensatz zwischen Föderalismus und Unitarismus, der Gegensatz zwischen Mehrheits-und Konsensdemokratie und auch derjenige zwischen der gesamtstaatlichen Ebene und den Ländern. Das Modell der Trennung von Ebenen und Kompetenzen, das schon im Kaiserreich zurückgetreten war, verlor immer mehr seine beschreibende wie auch normative Kraft. Stattdessen traten Koordination und Kooperation zwischen Bund und Ländern in immer mehr Bereichen in den Vordergrund. Das hatte Folgen für die bundesdeutsche Demokratie. Parallel zur Mehrheitsdemokratie im Bundestag bestanden Verhandlungssysteme im Föderalismus, die auch nichtstaatliche Akteure einschlossen. Verhandlungen, Kompromiss und Konsenssuche existierten neben Mehrheitsentscheidungen, die oft nur einen Zwischenschritt zu weiteren Verhandlungen darstellten. Umgekehrt basierte die demokratische Legitimität des politischen Prozesses nicht nur auf Wahlen und Mehrheitsentscheidungen, sondern auf permanenter Kooperation mehrerer Ebenen, wozu nach 1992 verstärkt die europäische Ebene hinzukam.

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Résumé/Abstract Le culte du missionnaire bénédictin anglais Boniface portait, aux 19ème et 20ème siècles, de nets références politiques. Boniface devint un saint politique, dont le culte reflétait un nouveau positionnement de l'Église catholique, à son intérieur comme vers l' ...