This thesis examines the development of the political outlook of the German author and revolutionary politician, Ernst Toller. It begins by looking at Toller's early years and explains how his experience as a front-line soldier during the First World war transformed his views, causing him to reject the conservative-nationalist ethos he had grown up with and to become, in his own description, a revolutionary pacifist. It then looks at his involvement in the revolutionary events which took place in Bavaria at the end of the First World War, the so-called Räterepublik, examines how they affected his understanding of social and political reality and traces their artistic reflection in the plays he wrote in the following period. A recurrent theme in Toller's political thinking throughout the years of the Weimar Republic was the idea of an Einheitsfront, a defence block of workers' organisations, which he advocated as the only means of halting the rise of National Socialism. Unfortunately, Toller's appeals to the main workers' parties to form such a block went unheard, yet they are significant all the same in that they reveal the acute political insight of a man whom many of his contemporaries dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Interestingly, and a point often missed in studies of his politics, Toller abandoned the Einheitsfront after he went into exile in 1933 and came to favour instead the creation of a Volksfront a broad, cross-party anti-fascist coalition which the Soviet Union vigorously promoted all through the 1930s until the signing of the Stalin-Hitler Pact in 1940. Toller's support for this idea, in part a corollary of his support for the Soviet Union itself, had a profound impact on his political outlook in exile, and caused him to close his eyes to the repression suffered by the opponents of the Stalin regime both inside and outside Russia, and, most significantly, led him to ignore the nascent socialist revolution which flourished in Spain after the defeat of Franco's coup d'etat in 1936. This study examines in some detail, therefore, Toller's involvement in the Volksfront, redefines his attitude towards Communist Russia and shows how his efforts to suppress his revolutionary beliefs and to become instead a mere anti-fascist affected his creative spirit during his years of exile.

For almost sixty years the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933 and the events that followed have been the subjects of historical inquiry. The criminal trial against those accused of starting the fire was held before the German Supreme Court, the Reichsgericht. / This thesis examines the conduct of the Reichsgericht during the Reichstagsbrandprozess of September to December 1933. It shows that the trial was conducted by an independent but conservative Supreme Court which managed the proceedings according to its own historical antecedents and precedents. The evidence is based on published government documents and other primary and secondary sources.

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Bibliography: leaves 436-449 / 449 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept. of German, University of Adelaide, 1990

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The regulation of bankruptcy poses a dilemma to societies. It needs to address two problems at once: the first concerns the balance between debtor and creditor interests; the second pertains to the question between deterrence and continuity. Up to the present day there is much disagreement about the appropriate design of bankruptcy procedures. German states in the nineteenth-century found it impossible to agree on a common insolvency regime until the 1870s. This thesis investigates the legal as well as the social process of bankruptcy in a sample of towns and states in Germany between 1815 and 1870. It focused on non-Prussian legal systems in order to shed light on those alternative solutions to bankruptcy that were not ultimately adopted in the national bankruptcy code. Bankruptcy was a social process that could take place in court as well as out of court. Creditors and debtors had strong incentives to turn to extrajudicial settlement mechanisms. Where strong local corporate organisations for merchants existed, they facilitated settlements and rule-enforcement among its members out of the official court system. Those local clubs often played the role of an arbitrator. For long, bankruptcy regulation had been part of the mercantile self-administration. Legal harmonization and processes of state formation put an end to these practises. Simultaneously, an industrializing economy devised new organisational forms that were alien to the old legal framework. Toward the second half of the century, legal harmonization gained momentum; creditor protection became the focus of lawmakers while local communities and their interests no longer played a role. As German legislators built a national and universally shared legal framework, bankruptcy regulation ceased to be local and communal. This was to the liking of businessmen, who had long complained about legal fragmentation when trying to conduct business across different German regions.

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This thesis came into being as the result of a question innocently posed to me three years ago: Why do some towns in the Eastern Cape have German names? This thesis is not so much an answer to that question (which is answered in the following paragraphs) as an attempt to answer the questions that followed: Were the Germans really as benevolent and hard-working as much of the most readily available literature implies? Why did the military settlers leave and the peasant farmer settlers remain? What was the nature of relationships between the German settlers and other groups in the area? How did the German settlers see themselves? The existing literature provides the historic details, more or less, but not the context and explanations I sought. As such, I set out to find them and document them myself, addressing three main questions: 1. What was the (changing) nature of the German settlers' day-to-day lives between 1857 and 1919? 2. How was a German identity maintained/constructed within the German communities of the Eastern Cape between 1857 and 1919? 3. How did the Germans interact with other groups in the area? In answering these questions, I have also provided the necessary background as to why these settlers chose to come to South Africa, and why some of them left. I have limited this study to the period between 1857 and 1919 so as to include the First World War and its immediate aftermath, a time when enmity between Great Britain and Germany would have made life difficult for German descendants in the Union of South Africa. Introduction, p. 7.

The representation of a Stuttgart court festival in a fascinating book of prints has received no art historical attention. The cultural production of German lands in a complex and obscure time described by one historian as being particularly bereft of "textbook facts", has not elicited much scholarly interest. In the seventeenth century before confessional disputes within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation turned into armed conflict, small German territorial courts modelled themselves on and assumed the courtly style of the larger European courts. The Stuttgart baptism of 1616 presents an interesting case study of the use of a courtly spectacle by a secondary court at a time of great instability. The baptism festival served as a stage to display an alliance of some German Protestant princes that held a promise of international support for the Protestant cause. The Wurttemberg court commissioned lengthy texts and a large number of engravings to represent the event. This study will address the contributions made by printed images to the festival program. The key documents for this study are the texts which complement and at times diverge from the visual representation. The differences between the visual and textual material will serve to locate the function of the visual representation of a festival held at a time of impending conflict. The triumphal procession format of the engravings discloses a strategy of disenfranchisement of a powerful parliament while it serves to assert the rank of the court within and outside the German empire. The complex amalgams of imagery that are interspersed in the paper procession allude, I suggest, to the problems presented to the Wurttemberg court by an uneasy alliance of Protestant courts within the empire. The engravings served to encode references to problematic issues such as the survival of the Holy Roman Empire, the rights of Protestant territorial princes to form an alliance and the hopes for outside help for the Protestant cause. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate