Karla O Poewe
Karla Poewe is a socio-cultural anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1976. She has conducted both fieldwork and archival research in Zambia 1973-1975, Namibia 1981-1983, 1985, South Africa 1987-1991, and since the 1990s in Germany. Her research interests range from the problems of economic development, religion, and kinship to surviving extreme conditions and the complex dynamics of war. In 2006, she published her book on the development of National Socialism, which shows how Nazism was a political religious force intent on replacing the Judeo-Christian tradition. Currently, she is working on post-World War II German refugees. As well, she gave a paper in France (2011) entitled "Sigrid Hunke’s 'Allahs Sonne': The SS-Paradigm, Völkisch Nazism, and Arabic Islam."
Poewe was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), East Prussia (now part of Russia). Following the August 1944 bombing of that city her family fled. She experienced a few years of life in the Russian and the British Zones before arriving in Canada 1955.
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QUESTION
Is it important to understand Nazism and the lives of Nazi survivors after the Second World War? The answer is yes. As I show in my paper:
" … although the overlapping Nazi cliques to whom Hunke, her family, and her cohorts belonged became a minority in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany, they maintained their elite status by creating a new religious milieu, establishing new publishing firms or academies, participating in journalistic and historical revisionism, and landing high positions in the press and press related ministries in Bonn."
Poewe was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), East Prussia (now part of Russia). Following the August 1944 bombing of that city her family fled. She experienced a few years of life in the Russian and the British Zones before arriving in Canada 1955.
________________________________________
QUESTION
Is it important to understand Nazism and the lives of Nazi survivors after the Second World War? The answer is yes. As I show in my paper:
" … although the overlapping Nazi cliques to whom Hunke, her family, and her cohorts belonged became a minority in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany, they maintained their elite status by creating a new religious milieu, establishing new publishing firms or academies, participating in journalistic and historical revisionism, and landing high positions in the press and press related ministries in Bonn."
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Books by Karla O Poewe
The last chapter returns the reader to the notion that rhetoric imitates life and nature, because nature has assigned to every emotion a look, tone of voice, and bearing of its own. It thereby invites readers to free themselves from secular lock-ins and, instead, heed happenings, including religious ones while doing science. Implied is an attitude toward science, religion, and the world that Charles Taylor describes as "open secularism" where religion and non-religion are treated the same while respecting the necessity of their respective freedoms.
Much current research is informed by Foucault’s discourse model based on speech forms and the assumption that power is in the discourse itself. The concreteness of human beings, their actions, the mentors and institutions that shape them, or the worldviews that hold them captive, are ignored. Another approach is necessary to get at the global entanglements and continuation of Nazism precisely because it is a political religion that most people want to forget. Metaphorically speaking, the approach is like peeling an onion.
The paper is an assessment of a book, which does not ring true. Sigrid Hunke, claiming to be a scholar of religions, wrote a best-seller published in 1960 with the curious title, Allah’s Sun over the Occident: Our Arabic Heritage. According to Hunke, she wrote the book to defend Arabic Islam against Western prejudices. But initial archival research showed her to have been a committed SS-intellectual and defender of the Germanic exemplar in the 1940s. Why then this post-WWII transformation into a human rights advocate with an affinity for a politico-religious minority that, furthermore, is held up as a model worthy of emulation?
Here the metaphor of peeling the onion is useful because I cut, as it were, into the flow of the paper with text boxes that contain commentaries about the methods and concepts that guided me in uncovering a deception. More importantly, and beyond this, the reader is taken to the core of the Nazi worldview and to Hunke’s mentors who devised their own methods and concepts to construct it – methods and concepts to which Hunke remained loyal in all her works.
Leading scholars in the fields of religion and anthropology discuss the thought patterns and religious traditions of charismatics throughout the world. By examining believers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the contributors provide a comprehensive overview of a charismatic tapestry that appears to transcend national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries.
In her introduction, Karla Poewe describes how believers attempt to integrate mind, body, and spirit, thereby providing for a more holistic religious experience. Poewe points out that charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism have suffered from academic biases in the past; this book is one of the first to place the charismatic experience in an academic framework."
Papers by Karla O Poewe
eighteenth century onward should be a straightforward empirical question
examined with historical methods based on archival documents,1
original publications, insights, judgments of truth, and awareness of
moral or existential bias of both the researcher and the researched. In
the “Indologiestreit” between Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) and Reinhold
Grünendahl (2012) published in this Journal, however, the question about
the Nazification of Indology is overshadowed by Edward W. Said’s
political-literary narrative.2 Why? What is Said’s mesmeric reproach of
British and French depictions of the “Orient” all about? And why does it
haunt the arguments of Adluri and Grünendahl? More curiously, why
does Said omit German Indologists from his indictment of Western
imperial power, sexual, and biblical fantasies of the “Orient”?3
The Arguments
In his paper entitled “Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Schatten postorientalistischer
De/Konstruktion” (The History of Science in the Shadow of
Postorientalist De/Construction, 2008), Reinhold Grünendahl contrasts
what he considers to be a competent factual history of German Indology,
namely that of Ernst Windisch (1917 and 1920), with its opposite constructionist
literary work
The last chapter returns the reader to the notion that rhetoric imitates life and nature, because nature has assigned to every emotion a look, tone of voice, and bearing of its own. It thereby invites readers to free themselves from secular lock-ins and, instead, heed happenings, including religious ones while doing science. Implied is an attitude toward science, religion, and the world that Charles Taylor describes as "open secularism" where religion and non-religion are treated the same while respecting the necessity of their respective freedoms.
Much current research is informed by Foucault’s discourse model based on speech forms and the assumption that power is in the discourse itself. The concreteness of human beings, their actions, the mentors and institutions that shape them, or the worldviews that hold them captive, are ignored. Another approach is necessary to get at the global entanglements and continuation of Nazism precisely because it is a political religion that most people want to forget. Metaphorically speaking, the approach is like peeling an onion.
The paper is an assessment of a book, which does not ring true. Sigrid Hunke, claiming to be a scholar of religions, wrote a best-seller published in 1960 with the curious title, Allah’s Sun over the Occident: Our Arabic Heritage. According to Hunke, she wrote the book to defend Arabic Islam against Western prejudices. But initial archival research showed her to have been a committed SS-intellectual and defender of the Germanic exemplar in the 1940s. Why then this post-WWII transformation into a human rights advocate with an affinity for a politico-religious minority that, furthermore, is held up as a model worthy of emulation?
Here the metaphor of peeling the onion is useful because I cut, as it were, into the flow of the paper with text boxes that contain commentaries about the methods and concepts that guided me in uncovering a deception. More importantly, and beyond this, the reader is taken to the core of the Nazi worldview and to Hunke’s mentors who devised their own methods and concepts to construct it – methods and concepts to which Hunke remained loyal in all her works.
Leading scholars in the fields of religion and anthropology discuss the thought patterns and religious traditions of charismatics throughout the world. By examining believers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the contributors provide a comprehensive overview of a charismatic tapestry that appears to transcend national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries.
In her introduction, Karla Poewe describes how believers attempt to integrate mind, body, and spirit, thereby providing for a more holistic religious experience. Poewe points out that charismatic Christianity and Pentecostalism have suffered from academic biases in the past; this book is one of the first to place the charismatic experience in an academic framework."
eighteenth century onward should be a straightforward empirical question
examined with historical methods based on archival documents,1
original publications, insights, judgments of truth, and awareness of
moral or existential bias of both the researcher and the researched. In
the “Indologiestreit” between Vishwa P. Adluri (2011) and Reinhold
Grünendahl (2012) published in this Journal, however, the question about
the Nazification of Indology is overshadowed by Edward W. Said’s
political-literary narrative.2 Why? What is Said’s mesmeric reproach of
British and French depictions of the “Orient” all about? And why does it
haunt the arguments of Adluri and Grünendahl? More curiously, why
does Said omit German Indologists from his indictment of Western
imperial power, sexual, and biblical fantasies of the “Orient”?3
The Arguments
In his paper entitled “Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Schatten postorientalistischer
De/Konstruktion” (The History of Science in the Shadow of
Postorientalist De/Construction, 2008), Reinhold Grünendahl contrasts
what he considers to be a competent factual history of German Indology,
namely that of Ernst Windisch (1917 and 1920), with its opposite constructionist
literary work
The town of Werdau is in Saxony, Germany. The Chapter is based on archival research of my past with Irving Hexham who is my husband and has always been my fellow researcher.
The town of Werdau is in Saxony, Germany. The Chapter is based on archival research of my past with Irving Hexham who is my husband and has always been my fellow researcher.
Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, DGB). According to Hauer, his movement was the essence of National Socialism. Because some contemporary scholars try to distance Hauer’s scholarship and the DGB from National Socialism, this paper
reviews existing literature about the Hauer phenomenon. It does so in light of the authors’ research in the Federal Archives of Koblenz and Berlin and the German Literature Archive
in Marbach. Hauer’s personal development and determination to further Nazism are traced. Together, the literature review and Hauer’s view of religion show that his religious thought and his Nazi politics are inseparable.