After achieving political power in January 1933, the Nazis began to plan and implement racial policies that would redefine the lives of ordinary men and women. Persistently promoted as health measures, many of the racial policies enacted would go on to have considerable and, in many cases, devastating consequences for the family sphere. This thesis examines one aspect of Nazi policy, the practice of genealogy. Re-envisioned and turned into a civic duty of the ‘responsible citizen,’ this one-time hobby forced Germans to reassess friendships, marriages and courtships. But why did genealogy gain such prestige under National Socialism? What objectives did the Nazis hope to achieve by weaving the practice into the fabric of central legislative measures? How did society react to obligatory family research? These questions are central to understanding how the Nazis were able to establish and maintain a system of inclusion and exclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft, or People’s Community. Dealing with these issues also offers the opportunity to define the all-consuming nature of Hitler’s regime more clearly. The requirement to perform genealogical research was the mechanism used by the regime to challenge the people’s sense of belonging to community in the family home. The gradual definition of work and social spaces along racial lines merely complemented pressures to achieve Aryan status more quickly. Many were forced to dedicate leisure time to writing to family members asking for genealogical information of relatives. Some also attended genealogical exhibitions and read books for family researchers to move their research forward. The growing importance and promotion of genealogy is equally important in understanding how the Nazis were able create a climate of fear for the Jews. For example, simple family research guides appeared in national newspapers and town halls and schools were frequently used to stage genealogical exhibitions. At the same time, the press documented the existence and progress of government institutions whose main remit was to collect and catalogue genealogical information of every inhabitant of Germany. It would have been difficult to leave the home and perform everyday tasks without being reminded of the growing radicalism in society. The highly publicised effort to accumulate and centralise genealogical information – as part of a programme to identify and control the nation’s Jewish population – was intended to dampen Jewish morale and feelings of security. Thus, exploring how genealogy was utilised and promoted in society, and also how ordinary men and women viewed and engaged with it, also allows this study to document anti-Semitic policies, as they evolved from limiting freedoms in social and economic spheres to state-sponsored murder.

My thesis asks whether cultural commemorations helped the GDR to build a distinct national identity, and examines the role of political and cultural actors involved in them. Covering different strands of German cultural heritage, the aims, implementations and outcomes of anniversary commemorations are investigated as a longitudinal series of case-studies: Schiller (1959); Kollwitz (1967); Beethoven (1970); and Luther (1983). Substantial evidence from largely unpublished sources exposes recurring gaps between the theory and practice of these commemorations, essentially attributable to manifest examples of agency by commemoration stakeholders. Each commemoration produced some positive legacies. But driven mainly by demarcation motives versus West Germany, the appropriation of these German cultural icons as socialist role-models to promote national identity was mostly unsuccessful in three commemorations. Kollwitz was the exception as the GDRˈs claimed linkage to her political life was already undisputed in both German states. These research results are both new and important. They address a gap in both memory studies and GDR history scholarship regarding the relationship between commemorations and national identity. Furthermore, the findings of agency offer an original contribution to historiographical debates, by enhancing a ˈconsensusˈ- /ˈparticipatoryˈ dictatorship model of the GDR in preference to a top-down totalitarian system.

This study considers the nature of the sacramental knowledge that was taught in the sixteenth-century catechisms of Martin Luther, Andreas Osiander, Peter Canisius, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Focusing on the sacraments of baptism, penance, and communion, this thesis seeks to present two principal arguments that are rooted in the indisputable fact that the catechisms were intended for a lay audience. Firstly, the knowledge imparted in sacramental instruction was too limited to delineate effectively along confessional lines, thereby raising questions about the extent to which catechisms can be viewed as tools by which to create fixed confessional identities. The second argument is that catechisms should be seen as facilitators of concord rather than division. The avoidance of complex sacramental doctrine suggests that catechisms were intended to help the laity live together. This does not suggest that there was an attempt to merge together doctrinal beliefs: each of the catechisms taught the elements of a Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed faith. Moreover, the German catechists were fiercely devoted to their respective confessions, as evidenced by their broader publications. However, in providing religious edification for the laity, the heat was taken out of these theological divisions.

Between 1934 and 1936 various organisations of the French left joined forces to create the Popular Front, an alliance borne of an antifascist imperative. After winning the May 1936 legislative elections, and in a climate of growing opposition from conservative and far right forces, the left-wing coalition came to power. By the end of 1938, the Popular Front had collapsed and the right was back in power. During this period (1934-1938), the right and far right repeatedly challenged the left-wing alliance‟s legitimacy and attacked its constituent political parties. This conflict between left and right intensified France‟s political and social tensions and polarised French politics and French society into supporters and opponents of the Popular Front. This thesis examines the role of the right within the context of the Popular Front and seeks to answer the following question: how did the right act in response to the Popular Front between 1934 and 1938? The thesis focuses on the Moselle, a border département returned to French sovereignty after forty-seven years under German domination (1871-1918). By 1934, the Moselle had developed a distinctive political character sympathetic to the right and hostile, or at best indifferent, to the left. By drawing parallels between Parisian and Mosellan events and using new archival material, the thesis demonstrates the originality of the Popular Front in the Moselle, and the responses of the local, and essentially Catholic and particularist, right. No scholarly work has yet examined the conflict between the right and the left within the context of the Popular Front in the Moselle. This thesis demonstrates how the département's distinctive historical, social, linguistic, cultural, political and religious context shaped the Popular Front and the right‟s responses to it.

It is the thesis of this paper that there have been certain situations when historical research had an important bearing on the choices statesmen made and the policies they pursued. This will be illustrated by focusing on a group of historians known as revisionists and analyzing the impact of their work on one particular event, Britain's reaction to the re-militarization of the Rhineland.

The thesis attempts to set sources broadly representative of the range of British attitudes to Germany and the Germans - from Spender, Low, Maxse and Dillon, to Bowse, Namier, Vansittart, Gollancz and Barraclough in a framework informed by multidisciplinary theory. There are five main themes: the classification of attitudes; the analysis of content; the identification of a relatively constant British self-image; the potential for attitudinal dilemmas and cognitive dissonance inherent in that self-image; national character as a concept and as a descriptor. Although dealt with in this order the themes interrelate. For example, the first phase of content analysis [chapters 4 to 8], where the emphasis is on the way in which sources differ, anticipates the discussion in chapter 10 of the differences in their approaches to the modal distribution of cultural and individual characteristics in Germany; the classificatory model proposed as an alternative to the Idealist-Realist dichotomy in chapter 2 [and 'tested' in a brief case study in chapter 3] is consistent with the definition of the self-image and facilitates discussion on cognitive dissonance. It is proposed that a classificatory system based on an Idealist-Realist dichotomy with respective pro and anti-German sub-sets does not adequately highlight the nuances and ambiguities which often informed group or individual attitudes toward Germany. It is argued that such a system cannot readily deal with the views of realists who were ideologically neutral [i. e. not ideologically anti-German] in their definition of Germany as the enemy, of idealists who were ideologically opposed to Germany, or of others who were equivocal. An alternative model is offered in the form of partially congruent parallel continuums of competition and cooperation, travelling in opposite directions in relation to respective minimum and maximum positions. In chapters 4 to 8 the content analysis of sources focuses on their different perceptions of Germany and the Germans: whether they made distinctions between Germans - and what form such distinctions took - or regarded them as 'all of a kind.' It is argued that underlying expressed attitudes to Germany and the Germans from the British side was a notion of self, incorporating two main components: a pragmatic component defining Britain as a material competitor in a competitive world, and an ideological component defining a package of traits and values associated with the cultural condition 'being British. ' The ideological component of the self-image was commonly validated and served as an assessment instrument for making judgements on Germans. It is argued that the intellectual and psychological need to maintain a consistent relationship between expressed attitudes and declared values, particularly when the values were central to the self-image, led to the use of dissonance reducing mechanisms. The ways in which one national culture may reasonably be said to differ from another, and the methodological requirements for tenable cross-cultural analysis, are explored through critical consideration of the concept 'national character.' A theoretical framework is devised for the critical analysis of the views presented by the sources on the national character of the Germans. This framework relates their perception of modal structure [unimodal, bimodal, multimodal] to their level of commitment - positive or negative - to propositions on cultural homogeneity, differential sharing, the causal autonomy of situational factors, the significance of international cultural influences, the innate nature of characteristics, and concern for methodological rigour. An image of the configurations and features in the German cultural profile is formulated. Recognition of the partial and provisional nature of this image, and discussion of what it omits and lacks in terms of texture, is used to demonstrate the deficiencies of the Schwarzweissmalerei approach to Germany and the Germans.

No description available.

No description available.

The history of the Weimar Republic has most commonly been written from the vantage point of its ultimate failure. Recent trends in historiography have shown that the first German democracy was by no means doomed from the start. Instead, contemporary sources convey a very varied picture of optimistic and pessimistic diagnoses of the times. At the centre of these diagnoses often stood the idea of “crisis” which contained the notion of an open yet problematic future. This thesis aims to investigate the use of sickness metaphors in political and related public discourses. More specifically, it analyses in which contexts these have been used, which semantic forms can be found, to which political points of view they can be attributed, and finally which purpose they served within political and journalistic controversies of the times. The main body of the thesis consists of three parts (ch. 2-4). Following the introduction, Part II is a methodological outline concentrating on the main relevant theoretical approaches: discourse analysis, the history of basic concepts, the Cambridge School of political ideas, and metaphorology. Furthermore it pays special attention to the history and use of the concept of “crisis”, both in its contemporary form and its use within historical writing.

Les évènements géologiques de surface, comme le volcanisme ou les séismes, sont le fruit d'une dynamique qui vise à dissiper la chaleur interne de notre planète. Dans le manteau terrestre, les roches sont déformées plastiquement dans des conditions extrêmes de pression, de température et de vitesse de déformation. Malgré les récentes avancées expérimentales, il est impossible de reproduire de telles conditions de déformation en laboratoire. C'est pourquoi nous proposons, dans ce travail de thèse, une approche numérique, basée sur la modélisation multi-échelle de la plasticité, des conditions du laboratoire à celles qui caractérisent le manteau terrestre. Nous avons choisi d'appliquer cette méthode à MgO, phase importante du manteau inférieur.À partir des propriétés de cœur des dislocations, nous avons utilisé la théorie des double-décrochements afin de décrire la mobilité d'une dislocation isolée en fonction de la température et de la contrainte. Nous avons ensuite implémenté, dans un code de Dynamique des Dislocations (DD), les paramètres de mobilité des différents défauts afin de décrire le comportement collectif des dislocations lors d’essais numériques de déformation. Les résultats montrent que les propriétés mécaniques de MgO dépendent fortement de la pression et de la vitesse de déformation. / Surface geological events, like volcanos and earthquakes, are due to the internal dynamics of the Earth which tends to release its internal heat. Inside the Earth's mantle, solid rocks are plastically strained under extreme conditions of pressure, temperature and strainrate. In spite of recent experimental progress, it is still impossible to reach such conditions of deformation. This is why we propose an alternative approach, based on the multi-scale modeling of plasticity, from the laboratory conditions to the Earth's mantle. We have choosen to apply our model to magnesium oxide which is a phase present in the lower mantle.From core properties, we modeled a dislocation thermally activated mobility law based on the kink pair theory. Then, we have incorporated it inside a Dislocation Dynamics code to describe the collective behaviour of dislocations throughout numerical strain experiments. Here we show that MgO mechanical properties depends significantly on pressure and strainrate.