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George Grosz's paintings and drawings of Berlin during the Weimar period demonstrate a complex matrix of tensions between nature and the urban experience. In his work, mechanization, sexuality, gender and animality are recurring themes that cue the viewer to the profound anxiety that modernity had unleashed a chaotic force into the city. Using an ecofeminist analysis, I show how the disorder of the city was imagined as a primordial human condition in which a previously disavowed connection to nature was suddenly foregrounded. Though Grosz's renditions of Berlin scenes are ironic, they also revel in the demise of social order. In this thesis, I argue that Grosz's art deploys the conceptual force of unmastered nature as a critical tool, at the same time showing how nature was integrated into the cultural fabric of urban life.

Rural society during the German National Socialist movement has been overlooked by most historians. Instead the urban elements are stressed. I have chosen to study the impact of National Socialism upon peasant families.Three major limitations exist for this project. First, only the peasant family itself is reviewed. Second, this project is concerned only with the years from 1925 through 1339. Third, this project limits its review to only that territory comprising Germany after World War I. This was done to allow for a more equal comparison of agricultural statistics.The construction of this project remains simple. Three major chapters exist. Chapter One reviews the Republic: its politics, economy, and the problems of the peasant family. The remaining chapters then review these problems as they were resolved by the National Socialists. Chapter Two reviews the family itself: family size, health, inheritance, and social status. Chapter Three reviews farm-management: production, mechanization, labor, and prosperity. Both chapters are divided into two parts: part one reviews the new policies; part two reviews the impact.The findings of this project were different than expected. I had expected to find minimum improvement in the condition of peasant families. Instead, I discovered that, in general, these policies failed in their objectives. The reasons for these failures differed. But much of the blame rests in faults of the laws themselves. Final results, however, were mixed. Farm-management improved slightly, but the family itself witnessed reduced health. The average family was not destitute, but neither did it prosper. / Department of History

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Zionism represents a turning point in the rise of the nation-state to its present near-ubiquity, a national movement which did not construct an identity concurrently with its embrace of nationalism, but reconstructed a diaspora to fit it. I explore how early Political Zionists, particularly Theodor Herzl, perceived both the push and pull of nationalism, and why they were drawn to adopt an ideology and political structure whose basic principles, I argue, were intrinsically hostile to Jews. I begin by examining the socialist Moses Hess as a forerunner and microcosm of later Zionism, arguing his work is underpinned by anxiety about social heterogeneity. The second chapter focuses on portrayals of diaspora, its contradictions and the ambivalence they caused towards less assimilated Jews, nonetheless used as models for national identity. I continue by investigating the countries Herzl looked to as partners on the world stage and models of nationhood, arguing his vision of nationhood was far broader than that of most nationalists and involved a recognised role among other nations. The fourth chapter concerns understandings of 'homeland' and the relationship between people and territory, concluding Zionism's effect is achieved, not just by inhabiting Palestine, but by public desire and effort to do so. I devote my final chapter to concepts of modernity, its perception as both paradoxical and inescapable, and how national historical narratives arrange history into a rational, linear structure. While Zionists left many presumptions of nationalism and modernity unchallenged, most importantly that both nation and state transcend political divides, my conclusion stresses those presumptions they accepted, those aspects they saw as inescapable, and those they pragmatically performed belief in, to achieve Gentile acceptance of Jewish nationhood. I surmise that it was this sense of inevitability, along with the difficulties of diaspora, which gave Jews reason to make displays of accepting the nation-state.

This thesis aims to show, how periodization and race converged vigorously during the nineteenth century. The research focuses mainly on the question of how nineteenth century historians viewed the transformation from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. For many scholars, the year 476 A.D. became associated with the fall of Rome. During the nineteenth century, historians elaborated two main arguments: 1) 'The Roman' emphasized the decline that had occurred after the fall of Rome. 2) 'The Teutonic' signified the rejuvenation which the German tribes had brought about in the decaying Empire. Although I relate to the 'Roman' argument, the heart of the discussion is devoted to the 'Teutonic' school that was supported not only by German but also by British or more accurately English historians. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to the theme of 'Community and Race'. In this part, I engage with the thematic question of how the historians of the second half of the nineteenth century constructed past and present communities through the concept of race. A close community or Gemeinschaft of English and German historians emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century. Based on the concept of Teutonic kinship, this community emphasized the notions of race and historical time, which actually invented a new sense of belonging. The English and the Germans were one, an almost indivisible community founded on a purported notion of race. Despite several national or particularistic inclinations, these nations had a common Teutonic past, which always bonded them together. Therefore, the historians 'imagined' a new ultimate transnational (racial) community of belonging. In the second part I study the theme of 'Time'. The linkage between the two parts is embedded in the idea of the Community as a 'Time Maker'. Namely, in what manner does the construction of a community by the historians defines the division of time. The chapter that links the two themes of 'Community' and 'Time' examines the writings of scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who underlined the Germanic invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. as the events that symbolized the fall of Rome and the end of Antiquity. This governing observation is connected directly with the racial Teutonic feelings that were prevalent among English and German historians. The discussion of it set the framework for the following chapters, which delve into the distinct periodization's of Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92) and John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927). These historians, who were in constant and close contact until the death of Freeman in 1892, reveal similarities as well as major differences in their historical writings. The main reason why they were chosen derives from the new periodization which they had adopted. Both of them devised a method that signified a departure from the accepted and almost 'sacred' division between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.