German Nationalism

Researchers have long questioned how debunked myths such as the blood libel – the notion that Jews used Christian blood in their ceremonies – were able to persist for so long. This essay explains the social function of such myths in one context by presenting a public debate on Judaism carried out in the pages of the two leading Christian periodicals of the early eighteenth century in Germany. One journal put forth the orthodox Lutheran viewpoint, the other that of “Pietist” reformers. Through these journals, a battle took place for control of the Lutheran church, and thus for much of public life in Protestant Germany. Because Pietists believed Jews to hold a special place in God’s plan, they sought to rehabilitate Jews to their Christian readers and to argue for better conditions for Jewish communities. Orthodox Lutheran leaders quickly identified Pietists’ “Jew-friendly” policies as an Achilles’ heel. To attack Pietists, the orthodoxy dredged up and re-publicized centuries-old anti-Judaic propaganda, negative images that the orthodoxy linked to Pietists. Representatives of the Lutheran orthodoxy thus deployed anti-Judaic stereotypes in order to shore up their own church-political hegemony. Through this media manipulation, the Lutheran state church was able to seed fear among Christian readers and to argue that Pietist reformers and Jews were pollutants that needed to be cleansed from church and society.

The  essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined  versions of the European Middle Ages from the nineteenth through the  twenty-first century, surveying examples from architecture, art,  literature, politics, and religion in Brazil, Britain, France, Germany,  Russia, and the United States.

In 2017, for the first time in the history of documenta, curator Adam Szymczyk made the decision to site the quinquennial in two locations: Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Szymczyk's intention was to "decentralize" documenta's Western European gaze, turning the exhibition into an opportunity to foreground Greco-German relations in the wake of Greece's debt crisis. This essay examines documenta 14 through the overlapping frames of education, ethno-nationalism, and wealth—three real-world currents made visible by not only the works of art chosen, but in the protracted controversy over the exhibition's budget shortfall, which reinscribed some of the very dynamics Szymczyk set out to critique with his curatorial decision to site half of documenta in Athens.

The book Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue in Politics and
Philosophy does present the readers with the expected level of critical analysis needed to revise Heidegger’s literature in contemporary philosophical research. Given the discoveries that Heidegger himself was associated with German nationalism through the rise of the Third Reich and during the Second World War, the academic space has brought into question the extent to which Heidegger should be taken seriously. Additionally, Heidegger’s work has grown in popularity with the French scene in the mid-20th century, as well as with contemporary Americans. The notion of whether or not his works should be taught continues to be present in lecture halls and contemporary literature on
German philosophy. Despite the concern towards the researchers that have built their academic careers on unpacking and clarifying Heidegger’s views, we must also address the theme of how we, as an academic community, should proceed
with integrating the works of Heidegger in the philosophical literature, particularly within the branch of phenomenology.
This book initially began as an exchange of correspondence between Gregory Fried and Emmanual Faye, which later on accepted commentaries from other scholars within the radar of Heidegger and phenomenological studies. The text contains a wide plethora of arguments both in favor and against allowing Heidegger to be read and discussed within academic circles, between researchers on one hand, as well as with students on the other. During my review and synthesis of the contributions to this text, I shall outline four primary areas of contextualizing Heidegger within the aforementioned theme: philosophical,
historical, political, and academic. The philosophical portion shall outline the charges and defenses of Heidegger within the text itself, isolated by the commentaries of the contributors. The historical portion is going to elaborate on the historical scenarios in which Heidegger himself operated, and the extent to which such historical phenomena have shaped his thoughts and writing style. Thirdly, the political discussion is going to clarify how Heidegger’s affiliations with German nationalism influenced not only the nationalistic culture of Germany in the 20th century, but also how this has inevitably lead to the accusations of antisemitism. Lastly, the academic section is going to explore the extent to which the earlier three sections justify either allowing or rejecting Heidegger’s works in contemporary research. Surely, all four aspects of the review are interwoven with each other, in some cases with such convergence that it is perhaps difficult to delineate between them. Since understanding Heidegger’s place within the philosophical space is already a difficult task, this process of correctly delineating
between the social contexts which are affected by him is also an obstacle towards maintaining ethical standards within contemporary research. As we shall see with the contributors of the texts, the priority of Heidegger scholars must be disambiguating his intentions and the contexts which were outside of his control, with events which Heidegger himself not only endorsed but supported one way or another.

ESTICA: Editoriale culturale, politice, recenzii (7 Octombrie 2014) http://www.estica.eu/article/revolutia-conservatoare-germana-si-mostenirea-sa/ În perioada dintre Primul război mondial şi stabilirea celui de-al Treilea Reich, criza economică, politică şi socială care a lovit subit Germania -rezultat al înfrângerii acesteia în războia dat naştere unei mişcări cunoscute sub numele de "Revoluţia Conservatoare" sau şi mai bine cunoscută drept "Mişcarea Revoluţionară Conservatoare", iar membrii acesteia erau denumiţi fie "revoluţionari conservatori" fie "neoconservatori".

This book was written by Leslie Blau (Blau László). It is a translation of the English "Bonyhad: A Destroyed Community" printed by Blau in 1994 (New York, New York). This translation into Hebrew was edited by Reuven Chaim Klein in 2010. It has yet to be published.ג

The Erlöserkirche at Bad Homburg was built between 1903 and 1908 at the instigation of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It combines a neo-Romanesque exterior with Norman-Sicilian mosaics inside. Both were "Germanic" to the emperor, and the church embodied his all encompassing claim to the tradition of the medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Alternatively, the contemporary Byzantinist Ernst Gerland pointed to a Byzantine origin of the Norman-Sicilian models (and thus subtly contradicted the "pan-Germanic" myth). This "Byzantine" reading has prevailed ever since, but does not stand up to scrutiny. It only serves to obscure the "pan-Germanic" concept of the church. This contribution restores the "Germanic" understanding and makes the point that the latter must be acknowledged in order to make proper sense of the church's art and architecture, but also in order to face (rather than to downplay and conveniently forget) the racist-chauvinist character of German imperialism.

The book opens with the author's vivid description of her life in a traditional family in Lithuania in the 1920s and 1930s, her studies at the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kovno, and the dramatic turn in Gitta’s life as a result of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940. Only a few days before the first gruesome massacres of the Lithuanian Jews, Gitta and her family are expelled from their home by the Soviets. Although they escape the claws of the murderous Nazis and Lithuanians, their destiny takes them to the terrifying banks of the Arctic Ocean.

Gitta’s account of life in Siberia is an extraordinary description of her confrontation with the brutal climate and the flinty Soviet authorities -- but also of an establishment of a Jewish community which, with enormous effort, attempted to reconstruct the spiritual-communal life it had known in Lithuania. The kingpins of this new Jewish community were Gitta’s father and the mother of her future husband, who taught the youth Hebrew, organized daily prayers, constructed Jewish calendars and initiated other activities.

Sixteen years later, following the long-awaited release from Siberian exile, the author and her husband (my father) in Vilna attempt to gain permission to immigrate to Israel. When their struggle runs into a brick wall, they express their longing for the Jewish homeland by naming their children with Jewish names and teaching them the Hebrew language openly. After thirteen years of tedious efforts, their stubborn struggle succeeds in triumph. The book ends with their landing in the Promised Land.

As the editor of this work, I have added to the memoirs a research wrapping of relevant footnotes and a professional article at the appendix dealing with the deportation of the Lithuanian Jews, based on NKVD documents that I uncovered at the special archives in Vilna. This extensive research material complements the author's memoirs from a scientific perspective and reveals for readers and researchers quite a fascinating piece of Jewish history that has disappeared until now into the shadow of Holocaust stories.

Unlike many other publications on Nazi culture, this book is not primarily about what has been called "the Nazification of the arts," based upon state-supported use of the arts  for propaganda, a curtailment of freedom in art criticism, and the political and legal Gleichschaltung, "the forcing into conformity" under a hierarchical, dictatorial leadership (Führerprinzip) of all aspects of the various branches of national and local government, the civil service, education, public finance, business, the professions, and the arts.  To complement earlier studies of Gleichschaltung, the essays in this anthology explore the underlying beliefs of the Nazi racist state as they were developed and propagated in various fields of artistic activity.

This article (in Russian) draws parallels between the ideologeme of the Russian world and the 'German world' as it was constructed by the idealists in the 19th century. I argue that phenomenology of the Russian world of the early 21st century is similar to the phenomenology of the German world of the 19th century. Both started with the liberal theories, but then quickly got militarized. Both employed language as a means of soft-power networking  and then moved to moral values as a pretext for military attacks against neighbors. Both were designed with help of the Churches. Both seem to end up in one place.

A review of Kimberly A. Smith, ed, The Expressionist Turn in Art History (2014), a selection of articles and translations from "expressionist art historians". With some methodological scruples on identifying art historians with art movements.

"Criminal Law in the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia

This article deals with the material criminal law in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In the branch of the criminal law during the period of the Nazi-Occupation, the most changes (compared to other branches of law during this period) were implemented. The criminal law valid on the area of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was considerably complicated and unclear. There were some reasons for it. One of them was the fact, that the rules of the criminal law were not codified in any single legal enactment. The second reason was the exist-ence of two legal orders, which were valid simultaneously in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the substitution of the territoriality principle by the personality principle. Over the years, the use of the taken over Czechoslovakian rules of criminal law had been increasingly reduced for the benefit of the German criminal law and of the hearing of torts and delicts before the German courts in the Protectorate."

The purpose of this essay was to show how Nationalism was not, as many people assume now, a force which flowed inevitably to militarization. Nationalism was a powerful 'geist' of the age that possessed many characteristics we would associate with the left and the right.

This is an investigation into the idea of a link between literature and nation-building, proposed by Benedict Anderson, Timothy Brennan,  Salman Rushdie, and Salman Rushdie. This paper utilizes their ideas to interpret well-known Grimms' Fairy Tales in light of emergin German Nationalism

The genocidal war waged by the Nazis has long influenced our understanding of German nationalism. Scholars have argued that the Third Reich was a direct result of German nationalism, which had been antisemitic, racist, militaristic, and anti-democratic from its beginnings. However, as this chapter will highlight, there was never a singular form of German nationalism, especially during the Weimar period. It is certainly true that conservatives and right-wing extremists used this virulent version of German nationalism to attack the Weimar Republic, its supporters, and the post-war international order. Yet German nationalism was not simply the domain of the political right. The supporters of the republic crafted their own form of German nationalism to help them popularize the new political system. Challenging the arguments of their opponents, these republicans insisted that there were no inherent contradictions between democracy and Germany, internationalism and nationalism, and Jews and Germans. They created a version of German nationalism that was democratic, peaceful, and more inclusive. Multiple and opposing German nationalisms therefore existed in the Weimar era.

Overall, Botany Bay: where Histories Meet like the best kind of historywriting, shows that things could have been different and that there is no inevitable path to the present. Nugent shows us that what we understand as history, and thus the here and now as well, is only one possible, and highly contested, version of events and meaning. I look forward to Maria Nugent's future work with an eye to an international audience.

1 Einleitung Bis in die späten 1990er Jahre hinein herrschte in der Sprachwissenschaft Einvernehmen darüber, daß fremdwortpuristische 1 Aktivitäten in Deutschland mit dem von Hitler 1940 ausgesprochenen Verbot der Verdeutschung und Ersetzung von Fremdwörtern und dem daraus schließlich resultierenden Untergang des Allgemeinen Deutschen Sprachvereins (ADSV) geendet hätten. Laienlinguistische Fremdwortkritik 2 gab es seitdem zwar durchaus, doch war sie seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges laut von Polenz (1999, 287) für die Mehrheit der (west)deutschen Bevölkerung nur von untergeordnetem Interesse: Die durchaus geäußerte öffentliche Kritik am Überhandnehmen von Anglizismen […] im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland wurde ohne erkennbare Wirkung registriert: extreme Verdeutschungsvorschläge wurden als Randerscheinungen belächelt oder verspottet.

This review article scrutinizes recent research into, and disputes about, continuities from European colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth century to the Holocaust and to the Nazi conquest in Eastern Europe. Five different versions of this colonial paradigm of Holocaust and Nazi history are considered: Jürgen Zimmerer's argument about a particular German continuity from the pre-WWI genocide in Africa to the Nazi genocide; the notion of a European archive of colonial knowledge used by the Nazis to legitimize or obfuscate their own programmes of subjugation and annihilation; the focusing on settler colonialism as a crucial model of Nazi expansion; the idea of specific East European colonial continuities from the Middle Ages to the Third Reich; and Dirk Moses's suggestion to analyze the Holocaust as ‘subaltern genocide’. Eventually, the review leads to an ambivalent assessment of the explanatory potential of the colonial paradigm.

This book details the history of the Jewish community in the Hungarian town of Bonyhád.It begins in the 18th century and describes the events leading the Holocaust as seen from the eyes of Hungarian Jewry. It then describes various personal stories from the Holocaust. Afterwards, the book describes the re-building of the Jewish community in post-World War Two Communist Hungarian and the eventual decline of the community through emigration.

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Board games can be used by cultural historians to gain insights into the values of different cultures. Many modern games have been based on the theme of teaching moral values of the cultures that produce them. One game of moral values however, stands out as the most infamous board game of all time. The game from Germany, “Juden Raus!” (Jews Out!) depicts the policy of racial hatred that defines the Nazi era. It was designed as a family board game that simulates the start of the persecution against the Jewish people of that era. As to the surprise of the producer of the game he had miscalculated: heavily criticized by the Nazis, the announced “bestseller” flopped, even before it was properly marketed.
“Juden Raus!” (Dehors les Juifs!) – le jeu de pions le plus infâme de l’histoire

Les jeux de pions peuvent être utilisés par les historiens de la culture pour mieux comprendre les valeurs de différentes sociétés. Nombre de jeux modernes sont basés sur l’enseignement des valeurs morales des cultures qui les produisent. Cependant, il est un jeu de ce type qui se présente comme le plus infâme des jeux de pions de tous les temps. Le jeu allemand “Juden Raus!” (Dehors les Juifs!) illustre la politique de haine raciale qui définit l’époque nazie. Il fut conçu comme un jeu de pions familial destiné à encourager la persécution contre le peuple juif à cette époque. Mais l’éditeur avait fait un mauvais calcul: rudement critiqué par les Nazis, le succès annoncé était voué à l’échec avant même que le produit ne soit commercialisé normalement.
“Juden raus!” – Das infamste Brettspiel aller Zeiten

Kulturgeschichtlich betrachtet eröffnen Brettspiele Einblicke in die Wertvorstellungen verschiedener Kulturen. Viele Spiele der Neuzeit wurden in moralisierender Absicht entworfen. Ein Spiel, das Wertvorstellungen transportiert, sticht allerdings als wohl infamstes Negativbeispiel hervor. „Juden raus!“, ein Spiel aus dem Deutschland der Nazizeit, stellt die damalige antisemitische Rassenpolitik dar. Es wurde als Familienspiel konzipiert, das den Beginn der Verfolgung und Vertreibung der Juden aus Nazideutschland thematisiert. Erstaunlicherweise ging das Kalkül des Produzenten nicht auf: Heftig von Seiten der Nationalsozialisten kritisiert, wurde der avisierte “Verkaufsschlager”, ehe er noch richtig auf den Markt kam, zum Ladenhüter.

Das letzte Mitgliederverzeichnis des Deutschen Klubs datiert vom 30. September 1939 und wurde am 7. Oktober 1939 von Obmann Alfons Langer an Gauleiter Josef Bürckel übersandt. Die Angaben zu den 924 Männern umfassen jeweils den akademischen Grad, den Beruf wie auch Mitgliedschaften in der NSDAP und anderen NS-Organisationen.

Images of ancient Sparta are irrepressible in Western thought. A powerful model of excellence in the middle ages and Renaissance, in the Enlightenment and French Revolution Sparta was invoked by radical thinkers as a model for the creation of an ideal republic. Since the 19th century Sparta has been viewed as the opposite of liberal and industrial democracies: shunned – or hailed – as the model for 20th century totalitarian and militaristic regimes such as the Third Reich. Intelligence analysts in the United States used Sparta as an analogy to predict the performance of the Cold War Soviet Union. But positive views of the Spartans flourish in contemporary democratic culture and digital media, most strikingly in popular fiction, graphic novels and film.

This book is the first to focus exclusively on Sparta’s impact in modern times. Eleven international experts take readers across ten centuries from the 12th century Renaissance to 21st century digital culture. Exploiting hitherto untapped sources, from medieval political tracts to declassified CIA documents and YouTube video clips, they reveal many previously unknown aspects of Sparta’s impact on modern politics and culture.

This is an attempt at mapping the course of Bombay Talkies' transition from oriental silents to the social genre, while studying the influence of British imperialist imaginary in the cinemas of colonial India, as well as the specific German alliance that benefited Bombay Talkies in its formative years. Starting with The Light of Asia in 1925, almost a decade before its inception, to 1954 when the studio shut down. 2

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

Using the work of the late Peter Hart as a template this article examines the various claims made about County Cork in this period in Irish History. The article specifically examines the Dunmanway killings and the subsequent departure of some of the local Protestant community, and provides statistical and documentary evidence in detail as to what happened during the revolutionary period. The article concludes that while there was some native Protestant flight from Cork during this period it is dwarfed by the sudden removal of the huge British military industrial complex from the county between January and May 1922. The article shows that Nationalism was the key driver of the War in Cork, and that the struggle was far more nuanced than previously suggested.

Der 1908 gegründete Deutsche Klub war zeit seines Bestehens der einflussreichste deutschnationale Verein Österreichs und mit Beginn der 1930er-Jahre ein wichtiges Refugium für die – am 19. Juni 1933 verbotene – NSDAP. Dieser Beitrag versteht sich als Bestandsaufnahme zur Sozialstruktur und Mitgliederentwicklung des Klubs und damit auch als Ergänzung zur Monografie, in deren Rahmen einige der hier behandelten Aspekte nur angeschnitten werden konnten.  Er ist chronologisch aufgebaut und analysiert mittels soziodemografischer Daten (Berufsstruktur) wie auch Vereinsmitgliedschaften die ideologische Ausrichtung des Vereins in seiner rund 30-jährigen Geschichte.

“Anthroposophy and Ecofascism” has sparked a debate within Scandinavian humanist circles, with some authors like Peter Normann Waage lining up to defend anthroposophy as a harmless variant of humanism. 1 While we are encouraged by this long overdue debate, we are troubled by the degree of historical naiveté it has revealed. Waage’s perspective seems to represent a view that is fairly widespread among educated and well-intentioned people. We hope that we can contribute to a more accurate view of the political implications of anthroposophy by correcting several of the misconceptions exemplified by Waage’s reply.

Terror in Ireland, 1916–23 is the fifth Trinity College Dublin History Workshop publication. Edited by Professor David Fitzpatrick, who also contributes a chapter, this well-presented volume publishes research from 14 undergraduate and postgraduate students, doctoral researchers and established historians.

The book examines British and Irish violence (mainly the latter) from the 1916 Easter Rising through the Civil War. The terms ‘terror’ and ‘terrorist’ are loosely, often selectively, applied. According to Fitzpatrick, ‘Terrorists are those who perpetuate any form of terror; Terrorism implies a sustained and systematic attempt to generate terror’ (p. 5). This conceptualisation is not so much taut as tautological. It is difficult to envisage military or quasi-military activity that does not induce terror among combatants and an affected civilian population. Brian Hanley’s compelling first chapter exposes the problems in Fitzpatrick’s construct. Hanley notes that even under current US State Department categorisations, IRA attacks on Bloody Sunday (21 November 1920) and at Kilmichael (28 November 1920) cannot be defined as terrorist (p. 11). Nevertheless, two chapters are devoted to Bloody Sunday and one to Kilmichael.

Throughout the collection republican forces are often ‘Irish terrorists’ or simply ‘the terrorists’. Their British opponents are not similarly identified, suggesting that the words have a pejorative rather than descriptive function. Drawing upon the work of the late Peter Hart (who died in 2010 at the age of 46), whose analysis ‘called into question the morality and sincerity of the republican movement’, the editor asserts that republicans set out ‘to threaten and marginalize “deviants” within the community that the terrorists claim to represent’ (p. 6). Their suspicions were ‘based on categorical assumptions’ (p. 4). As the volume is dedicated to Hart’s memory, Fitzpatrick is intent on defending his reputation from ‘outraged readers’ for whom ‘the integrity of the revolutionaries from 1916–21 was an article of faith’ (pp. 4, 6). The ‘article of faith’ formulation is carefully chosen.

...... For more.... click on title, go online, or download attached PDF

Review includes separate responses from Editor, David Fitzpatrick (p.19), and Eve Morrison (pp.20-26, author of chapter on Peter Hart's treatment of the Kilmichael Ambush of 28 November 1920.)

See also:
Reply to Professor David Fitzpatrick and to Dr Eve Morrison’s response to criticism of Terror in Ireland 1916-1923 (plus consideration of Dr Brian Hanley on 'The Good Old IRA'), http://www.academia.edu/1994527/

"For most historians dealing with the history of National Socialism after the Second World War, ›Volksgemeinschaft‹ was more or less a meaningless parole of the Nazi Party’s notorious propaganda. But since some dozen years, ›people’s community‹ (Volksgemeinschaft) has risen to a central narrative explaining how German society has functioned during the Nazi regime. Historians did start to look for the processes and interactions between ordinary Germans as a way to reconstruct the mechanisms how the Third Reich’s social order became manifest in their doing. This article retraces the winding road of historiographical conceptualization of ›Volksgemeinschaft‹
since the very beginning of German contemporary history as a scientific reconsideration of the Nazi regime in the early 1950s. It describes the generational conditioning of the first ›historians‹ view on their topic as well as the transformation of perspective on it whilst the methodological and theoretical shift of historiography in the last thirty years, better known as ›cultural turn‹. Thereby the text argues for an extended concept of history as a historical social science, which besides the principles of social stratification takes into account the individual’s agenda and adoption of society’s norms and values. From this it follows the proposal to make use of the sociological theories of action and social roles for further research on the consistency of Nazi Germany’s society – according to the mostly unheard plea of M. Rainer Lepsius for a sociologization of both the two German dictatorships in 20th century history."