The main question of this thesis originated from the following observation: during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876-1909) - especially after the 1880s - the German armament firms (GAFs) obtained a monopoly position in the Ottoman military market and maintained their position for decades. Based upon this observation the question of this thesis is: How did the Germans manage to get this status and protect it for decades, in particular, in a quite competitive market, where the American, British, and the French firms had been dominant for years? This thesis, which has fundamentally relied on multi-national archival research, does not seek the answer with reference to the ordinary theory of supply and demand but in the realm of the inter-personal relations and the personal influence of some influential personalities/statesmen who somehow intervened themselves into the war business from both sides (i.e. the Ottoman Empire and Germany). In the line with this argument, the principal aim of this thesis is to examine the impact of the non-commercial factors of the arms trade on the GAFs’ successful war business in the Ottoman military market. For that purpose throughout the dissertation the acts and doings of Bismarck; Kaiser Wilhelm II; Von der Goltz Pasha and the other German military advisors who were employed in the Ottoman Army; Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Ottoman bureaucrats/officers will be discussed within the context of their contribution to the German armament firms’ successful war business in the Ottoman market.

The Battle of the Sambre was the last large-scale set-piece battle of the Great War. The German army was determined to hold a defensive line incorporating the Mormal Forest and the Sambre-Oise canal, hoping to buy time for a strategic withdrawal to the Meuse and thereby negotiate a compromise peace. This thesis analyses the battle at the operational and tactical levels: the BEF was no longer striving for a breakthrough – sequential ‘bite and hold’ was now the accepted method of advance. The difference between plan and reality is examined, highlighting the levels of tactical competence of units engaged and also the role of the Royal Engineers, whose tasks involved devising improvised bridging equipment to facilitate the crossing of the waterway. The competence of brigade and battalion commanders is examined: some proved capable of pragmatic flexibility in the face of stubborn enemy resistance and were able to adapt or even abandon original plans in order to ensure ultimate success. It was a decisive victory for the BEF, which irrevocably crushed the will of the German defenders, leading to the pursuit of a demoralised, broken and beaten army, whose means of continued resistance had been destroyed, and thus expedited the armistice.

This dissertation argues that the idea of a German Menace was not simply a product of concerns about the defence of the British Isles, but rather it was born out of the mentality of British imperialism. Over the period 1896-1903, imperial antagonism between Germany and Britain, in various contexts around the globe, inspired the popular perception of the German Menace as a distinctly imperial threat. Where the established historiography locates the beginning of the Anglo-German rivalry within the development of the naval armaments race after 1904, this study traces the British fear of Germany much earlier and, crucially, much further away from the shores of the North Sea. The Dreadnought Race was a product of pre-existing anxieties; this thesis will explain the context of imperial anxiety out of which the coherent concept of the German Menace developed. It reveals how specific imperial crises informed British popular beliefs and how the stereotypes of German covetousness, autocracy and efficiency coalesced to form a powerful force in British society and politics that had reached its peak by 1903. By 1903 Germany was widely regarded as a menace to the British Empire.

Les DD-peptidases sont des enzymes impliquées dans la synthèse de la paroi bactérienne. Elles sont aussi appelées "Penicillin Binding Proteins" (PBPs) car elles forment des acyl-enzymes stables avec des antibiotiques de type beta-lactames comme la pénicilline, la stabilité de ces complexes étant à l'origine de l'effet antibiotique. Certaines bactéries sont résistantes aux b-lactames grâce à la production de beta-lactamases, capables d'hydrolyser ces antibiotiques jusqu'à 10E8 fois plus rapidement que les PBPs selon un mécanisme impliquant deux étapes, d'acylation puis de désacylation. Il est généralement accepté que les beta-lactamases ont évolué à partir d'une PBP ancestrale en intégrant au site actif un mécanisme catalytique efficace pour la réaction de déacylation. L'objectif de cette thèse s'inscrit dans la compréhension des mécanismes d'évolution de la catalyse enzymatique au niveau moléculaire. Nous tenterons de reproduire un mécanisme évolutif en créant in vitro une activité b-lactamase à partir d'une DD-peptidase. La protéine de départ pour ce travail est la PBP-A de Thermosynechococcus elongatus, appartenant à une nouvelle famille de PBPs homologue aux beta-lactamases de classe A. L'analyse biochimique de cette protéine suggère que c'est une DD-peptidase, et une approche rationnelle par substitution d'un résidu dans le site actif de PBP-A a permis d'augmenter la vitesse de désacylation de l'acyl-enzyme formé avec la pénicilline d'un facteur 90. L'analyse des structures 3-D de PBP-A sauvage et mutante laisse ouverte la question de savoir comment évoluer cette PBP en beta-lactamase. Ainsi, pour l'évolution dirigée de cette protéine, deux banques ont été construites par approches aléatoire et semi-rationnelle. Il a été possible de sélectionner par "phage display" des enzymes améliorées pour la réaction d'acylation. L'obtention de mutants améliorés pour l'acylation ou la désacylation constitue des premiers pas vers l'évolution de PBP-A en beta-lactamase.

Discipline relationships are consensual adult relationships between submissive and dominant partners who employ authority and corporal punishment. This population uses social media to discuss the private nature of their ritualized fantasies, desires, and practices. Participants of these relationships resist a sadomasochistic label of BDSM or domestic abuse. I conducted in-depth interviews and narrative analysis of social media to explore experiences and identities of people in discipline relationships. The sample includes social media bloggers and past and present participants in discipline relationships. I compared explanations participants give for wanting and participating in discipline relationships. I combine identity theory, constructionism, post-structuralism, and critical feminism as an analytic frame to understand this practice sociologically. I found gender differences in the media format and communication style of participants, but the ritualized expressions for discipline relationships remain consistent regardless of gender. The social process of community identification for participants includes coming out, educating others and “inviting in.” The online community provides a forum for relationship negotiation techniques, and encouraging the embrace of non-normative sexual identity. Participants use social media to form a nascent social movement that resists normative views of sexuality and relationships in the dominant culture.

In 1945, the Ruhr pits faced enormous gaps in the workforce as a result of wartime losses and pre-war difficulties in recruiting young labour. Regenerating the workforce was the key to reviving Ruhr coal production and thus to German and Western European economic recovery. Between 1945 and the onset of the coal crisis in 1958, the Ruhr mines were to hire over a million men. Using archival materials, private papers, contemporary printed sources and interviews, the thesis analyses the measures undertaken to win new labour for the Ruhr and the attempts to turn the newcomers into productive and settled miners. After an introductory section, the study looks at the degree to which workforce regeneration was achieved in the pre-currency reform era. The underlying theme is that the pre-1948 economy proved in many ways to be an uncontrolled economy. Despite the enormous priority given to the task, the British initially failed to rebuild the workforce. With US help, they achieved a breakthrough in 1946-47, but the enterprise remained extremely costly and inefficient. These problems resulted from weaknesses inherent in any controlled economy but also from tensions and contradictions in British and later Bipartite rule. The second half of the thesis considers the policies of the 1948-58 period and argues that they were just as unsuccessful in regenerating the mining workforce. Neither a stable nor a compliant workforce was created and in desperation the industry began to turn to foreign labour. One reason for failure was the Federal Government's slowness in responding to the mines' need for housing investment. Another reason was that the established management style in the Ruhr mines alienated many newcomers. The employers' attitudes to management, integration and the labour market were stuck in a pre-war mould. This study contributes to our understanding of a number of different features of the reconstruction, notably the origins and limitations of the 'economic miracle', the impact of and response to the enormous population mobility after the war and the hopes and fears with which Germany's bourgeoisie entered the post-war era. Ultimately, however, the theme running through the study is the enormous and unique challenge that faced any organisation trying to create a stable and productive workforce in the mines.

This thesis unfolds from the observation that, in the years immediately following the defeat of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication. It explores the implications of the radio's dominance as a medium that both crosses and helps to define the boundaries of nation and region, as well as 'public' and 'private' space during a time when the upheavals of war and occupation were restructuring both the physical space of Germany as well as its political and symbolic spaces. It examines the practices of everyday broadcasting from the Allied-controlled radio stations in the western zones of occupied Germany to show how within the radio programmes, the diverse experiences of radio listeners were able to from part of a larger narrative of 'Germanness' at a time when Germany did not exist. Chapters explore the embedding of the radio within the every mental landscape of Germany, as well as within the private space of the home. It is argued that, in maintaining the relationships between the outside public world and the safe world of the home, the radio not only represented a means of remembering a collective German past, but also one of the primary places for the negotiation of new German identities in the present. Further chapters explore the ambiguities in the visions of these spaces produced by the radio. The production of private space is examined through a discussion of women's programming, showing the way that such programmes structured the debate surrounding women's position in society around their use of the scarce resource of time. A close examination how radio programming addressed the wider space of Germany shows how by imbuing the everyday visions of the broadcast region with the symbols of Heimat, radio programmes created a vision of Germany that at once embraced modernity and gave the impressions of maintaining a link with a usable past.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to present a rounded picture of British efforts to obtain information on German science and technology, both military and civilian, after the Second World War. This endeavour was conducted for numerous reasons - to secure some form of reparations, to improve defence capabilities for any future conflict, and to ensure that Germany possessed no lasting scientific war potential - and in various ways - the examination of laboratories and factories, the confiscation of equipment and documents, and the interrogation of experts. In some cases, these same experts were detained, brought to Britain, and occasionally offered work at government research establishments or private companies, in order to exact long-term benefit for Britain from the occupation of Germany. Unsurprisingly, an endeavour of this nature encountered difficulty from multiple quarters, including public opposition in Britain, conflict with other initiatives, such as reconstruction, in Germany, and competition with foreign powers, most notably the Soviet Union. As a result, this thesis sits at the intersection between various fields of historical inquiry. It incorporates elements from the history of intelligence, such as the necessarily secretive nature of many of the exploitation operations and the involvement of high-level intelligence bodies in the direction of the programme; from diplomatic history, not least how exploitation was affected by the reconfiguration of Britain's status on the world stage as it was steadily eclipsed by the United States and the Soviet Union; from the history of science, as the programme encompassed some of the most significant technological developments of the period, including the atomic bomb, the jet engine and guided missiles; and from military history, both because the first units and individuals concerned with the initiative were military and because many of the most valuable spoils removed from Germany were of a warlike nature. Ultimately, though, the narrative presented in this thesis is primarily concerned with British policy - policy towards occupied Germany, science and technology, and the nascent Cold War - and how this evolved throughout, and was shaped by, the deeply transformative period surrounding the end of the Second World War. The story of the British exploitation of German science and technology is, therefore, a crucial, but thus far understudied, facet of Britain's adjustment to the new post-war era in 1945.

The 12 March 1938 was not only the beginning of Nazi rule in Austria; it was also the end of a six-year struggle by a significant minority of Austrians to maintain Austrian independence against very considerable odds. This study has sought to refocus attention on the role of the Dollfuß Government 1932–34 in attempting to prevent a Nazi takeover, and to reassess the state of current scholarship on the reasons for its collapse. In this regard, this thesis sets out to re-examine the behaviour and motivations of Dollfuß in particular, and the Christian Socials in general, during the period in question, as well as to document and clarify the key strategies of the Austrian leadership in dealing with the twin threats of Austrian and German National Socialism. Its overall conclusion is that there is a pressing need to modulate the historical narrative of the Dollfuß era to reflect more accurately what actually occurred. This thesis seeks to prove that despite the extreme pressure that it was under from Nazi Germany, the Dollfuß government and its mainstay, the Christian Socials, used all realistic means at their disposal to keep the Nazis from the centres of power while maintaining Austrian independence. It investigates why Dollfuß refused to publicly co-operate with the Social Democrats, but was apparently willing to enter into a deal with the National Socialists, and what this tells us about his anti-Nazi stance. It also considers the question of whether the traditional focus on the breakdown of democracy, as a key cause of the collapse of the Austrian state in 1938, is useful in understanding of the period.