Thesis advisor: Judith Bookbinder / The Nazis arranged an exhibition of "degenerate" art (Entartete Kunst), shown in Munich in 1937 to insult and degrade artists who are recognized today as some of the most talented artists of the twentieth century. The success of the exhibition affected each artist in a different manner. Many fled Germany and ventured to the United States while others unwilling to leave their homeland suppressed their creative impulses for a life of fear and psychological torture in Germany. The horrific and irreversible effects on the German artists and culture can only be adequately discussed in the context of the time period preceding the exhibition. The movement toward abstraction and expression in art clashed with the rise of Nazi aesthetics to culminate in the exhibition of "degenerate" art. The lives of three artists Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann and Oskar Schlemmer are detailed in this paper. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Fine Arts. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This thesis investigates the background, activities, and motivations of German women who provided administrative support for Nazi institutions and agencies of the Third Reich. It compares women who specifically chose to serve the Nazi cause in voluntary roles with those who took on such work as a progression of established careers. Using a variety of sources, including post-war testimony in criminal cases, it shows how much they knew about the repressive and genocidal aspects of the regime and evaluates the role that ideology, as against other factors, played in their loyalty to their employers. Secretaries, SS-Helferinnen (SS female auxiliaries) and Nachrichtenhelferinnen des Heeres (female communication auxiliaries of the army) held similar jobs: taking dictation, answering telephones, and sending telegrams. Yet their backgrounds differed markedly. While secretaries were habitually recruited on the basis of their prior experience and competencies, the Helferinnen predominantly volunteered, sometimes motivated by ideology and the opportunity to serve their country, sometimes enticed by the prospect of foreign travel or the lure of the uniform. The thesis sheds light on these women's backgrounds: their social status, education, career patterns. It seeks to explain the situations and motives that propelled them into their positions and explores what they knew about the true nature of their work. These women often had access to information about the administration of genocide and are a relatively untapped resource. Their recollections shed light on the lives and work of their superiors, the mundane tasks that contributed to the displacement, deportation and death of millions of people across Europe, and the extent to which information about these atrocities was communicated and comprehended. Attention is paid to the specific role played by gender amongst perpetrators of the Holocaust. The question of how gender intersected with National Socialism, repression, atrocity and genocide forms the conceptual thread linking the separate chapters on these three groups of women who had varied backgrounds and degrees of initial commitment to Nazi ideology.

Revised Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Salzburg, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-269).

Revised Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Salzburg, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-269).

Thesis--Universität Wien, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-146) and index.

Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 431-470).

This dissertation, “Louis Douglas and Jonny spielt auf: Performing Blackness in Interwar Germany,” traces the reception of traveling and expatriate Black American performers in Germany during the interwar period and the cultural productions made by Germans in response to this interaction with the New Negro Renaissance. The performances of Black Americans challenged German views of the European colonizer and the colonized Other. Blackness played an important role in altering conceptions of race and culture during one of the greatest transitions in modern Germany, framed by the extraordinarily open and heterogeneous aesthetic of the Weimar era on one end and the harsh racial stratification of the Nazi regime on the other. Black arts provided a deeply decentering experience, forcing Germans to reassess their conceptions of Black people. Chapter One offers a theory of Black performance that explores how blackface minstrelsy became the referent for Black performance in the twentieth century. Chapter Two examines satirical magazines which introduced working and middle class Germans to Black people in the period between the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Chapter Three reveals how the first Black American traveling revue, The Chocolate Kiddies, altered German conceptions of Black identity through performances that highlighted the importance of the Great Migration and the performance culture of Harlem. Chapter Four introduces Louis Douglas, a Black American performer who helped to bring Josephine Baker to Europe, and created a revue designed to present Black Americans to French and German audiences. Chapter Five explores how Louis Douglas developed a persona of the modern Black dancer in Germany following Baker’s return to France. Chapter Six examines Ernst Krenek’s blackface “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf as an exemplary German appropriation of the Black American male body showing how Krenek’s opera created a transnational discourse on the modern Black American man.

In 1948 post-war Berlin, a mother, whose son was stolen from her during the war, implicates the woman that the Nazis gave him to in a Soviet spy ring, but soon realizes that her son's adoptive mother might be able to give her son a better life than she can and her actions put him in mortal danger.

This thesis analyses the radicalisation of the bürgertum in a single Bavarian town, Hof-an-der-Saale, in the five years after the First World War. It is bookended by two important and enormously different elections. In the first of these – the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly – the bürgerliche districts of Hof voted almost entirely for the German Democratic Party, a left-liberal, pro-Republican party that called for a parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, rights for women, a renunciation of German militarism and a close collaboration with the Social Democrats. But just five years later, in the Reichstag elections of May 1924, these very same districts cast their votes for the Völkisch Block, a cover organisation for the then-banned Nazi Party. Within half a decade, then, Hof's bürgerliche milieu had switched its allegiance from a party of left-liberal democrats to the most radical nationalists in German history. Why did this dramatic and disturbing electoral turnaround occur? In an effort to answer this question, this thesis offers a detailed study of the narratives and discourses that circulated within Hof's bürgerliche milieu during this five-year period. It uses newspaper editorials, the minutes of political meetings, electoral propaganda, the documents of civic associations and commercial organisations, the Protestant newsletter and a range of other sources in an effort to reconstruct what Hof's Burghers thought, said and wrote between these two elections. What happened between January 1919 and May 1924 to transform Hof's bürgerliche inhabitants from Democrat into Nazi voters, and how did this startling change manifest itself at the level of discourse and political culture?

Univ., Diss. u.d.T.: Reuleaux, Nele: Das Problem der Entdifferenzierung zwischen Tätern und Opfern des Nationalsozialismus im Konzept der intergenerativen Traumatransmission--Hannover, 2005.