Helmut Walser Smith
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3676628 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Helmut Walser Smith |
| NOMBRES | Helmut Walser |
| APELLIDO | Smith |
| FIRMA | SMITH H W |
| AFILIACIONES | Vanderbilt University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 8 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1991 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Collective Memory in Europe
Trauma, Religion, and Spirituality in Germany during the First World War
Time, Place, and Religion
This essay tries to contextualize a very popular nineteenth-century literary genre – Dorfgeschichten , village tales – from the standpoint of a historian. 1 It considers two of the most widely read exemplars of the genre – Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten and Alban Stolz’s Kalender für Zeit und Ewigkeit , and places them in relation to a third: Johann Peter Hebel’s Rheinisches Schatzkästlein . The essay argues that it makes sense…
The Long Shadow of Jean Bodin
Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between th…
Norton, Robert E. The Crucible of German Democracy
Literature in Weimar Germany
Peter Gay dashed off Weimar Culture: Insider as Outsider in six months during the electrifying year of 1968; the Weimar Republic was, after all, as close to him as the late seventies and early eighties are to us.1 He had grown up with its protagonists, and history and memory still cross-dissolved in his reconstruction of the period. His was, then, a very personal and specific Weimar—the Weimar of Gustav Stresemann and Friedrich Meinecke, Harry Gr…
Detlev Peukert und die NS-Forschung (=Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 31)
Detlev Peukert, as readers of this journal know, was one of the most prolific German historians of the post-war era, even if his work was tragically cut short by AIDS in 1990, just before turning forty. Working in both a scholarly and a public vein, he wrote major works in modern German history on social policy, Communists, youth and resistance to fascism. He also wrote a string of extremely influential articles, like the ‘The Final Solution from…
Same-Sex Male Love and Patriotic Sacrifice in Prussia
This essay takes the death of the soldier poet Ewald von Kleist in 1759 as the starting point to explore how the language of same-sex male love animated early Prussian patriotism. It probes the ambiguous character of the love that inhered in the amorous friendship of Kleist with the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, and suggests that their passionate letters show more than just the effusions common to the epistolary genre. It then argues that the…
Monuments, Kitsch, and the Sense of Nation in Imperial Germany
This article shows how the material culture of nationhood can reveal a different perspective on the problem of nationalism. Using simple time graphs and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the article considers temporal and spatial dimensions of “nation objects” in an effort to understand the allusive phenomenon of banal, everyday national identity. Specifically, it brings together quantitative evidence for the pervasiveness of veterans monumen…
Todesraum
This article looks at the mass destruction that raged Europe from 1914 to 1945. The trauma of 1918, Germany's defeat and dissolution, would not stop haunting nationalist Germans until the Third Reich collapsed; many Germans took the legend of the stab in the back as a matter of fact, according to which a Jewish-communist conspiracy had betrayed the national cause and sold out the otherwise victorious army. This article further traces the Holocaus…
The Three Horseman of the Holocaust
This article traces the three main issues which dominated Hitler's regime in Germany during the Holocaust. Two interpretive traditions have, since Hitler's day, commanded scholarly efforts to understand the Holocaust. One emphasizes ideas, recounting the intellectual history of anti-Semitism and the aims and political actions of those gripped by its poisoned talons. Paired with this approach is the conviction that history is made by human beings'…
The Place of German Modernism
This article focuses on German modernism. It traces the growth of German nationalism within the larger context of European nationalism. The question pulls in two directions. First, it points toward the problem of how German modernism ought to be situated in literary and art history. No doubt the simplest, most efficient answer is that German modernism finds its place within the larger setting of European modernism. The larger European context can…
Generations
This article traces the revolutions that raged Germany during the 1960s. This later part of the decade saw involvement of all and sundry in revolutions. The ‘Sixties’ — as a set of associations included greater autonomy of youth, anti-imperialist and anti-war activism, leftist aspirations to political revolt, sexual revolution, and women's emancipation. ‘1968’, in particular, functions as a myth, fostered by the participants in rebellion, their d…
Authoritarian State, Dynamic Society, Failed Imperialist Power, 1878–1914
This article focuses on statehood, society, and the failed imperialist powers that continued to rampage Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A social history of German politics is given in this article. It begins with analyzing the meaning of Kaiserreich and emphasizing its inner logic, and endogenous social and political processes. This article concentrates on the relationship between state, society, and democracy, and arg…
The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History
The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History is a multi-author survey of German history that features syntheses of major topics by an international team of scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this text places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the d…
Origins of Modern Germany
This article traces the origins of German history; the outcome the Western Federal Republic of 1949–1989, curiously similar to the Eastern Franconian Empire of Ludwig the German emerging with the treaty of Verdun, and the unified Germany at the second half of the twentieth century. Early modern Germans had a wide number of varying and partly contradictory ideas about the relation of empire, nation, and fatherland. This article traces the establis…
Piety, Power, and Powerlessness
An examination of eligion and religious groups that prevailed in Germany during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form the essence of this article. Many citizens of the Wilhelminian Empire believed they were seeing an increasing decline in the importance of religion. This view was also shared by scholars at the time including August Comte and Max Weber. Not only Weber and his contemporaries held this view; subsequent generations of sociologi…
Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. (1932–2008)
at seventy-six years of age on December 17, 2008, succumbing to complications of melanoma. With his passing, the history profession loses a historian of modern Germany whose archival research and revisions of received wisdom permanently altered our understanding of how the Third Reich came to power
The Continuities of German History
This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and n…
Anti-semitic violence as reenactment
At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Aby Warburg became interested in the atavistic—how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to…
Sensationalizing the Jewish Question
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
“Darwinism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause for Nazi ideology.” This is the thesis of Richart Weikart's important, scholarly, controversial, but narrowly conceived book. Put more strongly, but within the parameters of Weikert's argument: No Darwin, no Hitler
The Butcher's Tale
In 1900, in a small country town in the eastern reaches of the German Empire, a German boy is found frozen beneath the ice. He has been brutally murdered, the blood drained from his dismembered body. The crime resembles traditional blood libel accusations against the Jews. When a Jewish butcher is accused of committing the murder, the town explodes in an anti-Semitic fervour. Using vast amounts of previously undiscovered material, Helmut Walser S…
Exclusionary Violence
For a Differently Centered Central European History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds came into contact, they also came int…
Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870
Monuments, Kitsch, and the Sense of Nation in Imperial Germany
This article shows how the material culture of nationhood can reveal a different perspective on the problem of nationalism. Using simple time graphs and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the article considers temporal and spatial dimensions of “nation objects” in an effort to understand the allusive phenomenon of banal, everyday national identity. Specifically, it brings together quantitative evidence for the pervasiveness of veterans monumen…
Religion and Conflict
Rahel Straus, a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe, begins her memoir of childhood in the 1890s with a story of her experience in a Simultanschule for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls. She does not, as one might expect, complain about “Christian” anti-Semitism. Rather, she notes that when conflicts arose, they were typically between Protestants and Catholics
For a Differently Centered Central European History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Discourse of Usury
Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the ess…
The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich
Historians of the Second German Kaiserreich have increasingly identified the Catholic milieu as a tightly woven subculture easily as dense and symbolically rich as the social-democratic milieu. But while we have detailed and excellent studies on the alternative culture of the workers, we still know comparatively less about the Catholic milieu: its literature, its patterns of reading and ideological dissemination, its complex world of popular beli…
Socialism and Nationalism in the East German Revolution, 1989-1990
Sensationalizing the Jewish Question
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
Socialism and Nationalism in the East German Revolution, 1989-1990
Religion and Conflict
Rahel Straus, a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe, begins her memoir of childhood in the 1890s with a story of her experience in a Simultanschule for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls. She does not, as one might expect, complain about “Christian” anti-Semitism. Rather, she notes that when conflicts arose, they were typically between Protestants and Catholics
The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich
Historians of the Second German Kaiserreich have increasingly identified the Catholic milieu as a tightly woven subculture easily as dense and symbolically rich as the social-democratic milieu. But while we have detailed and excellent studies on the alternative culture of the workers, we still know comparatively less about the Catholic milieu: its literature, its patterns of reading and ideological dissemination, its complex world of popular beli…
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds came into contact, they also came int…
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
German Nationalism and Religious Conflict
The German Empire of 1871, although unified politically, remained deeply divided along religious lines. In German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, Helmut Walser Smith offers the first social, cultural, and political history of this division. He argues that Protestants and Catholics lived in different worlds, separated by an "invisible boundary" of culture, defined as a community of meaning. As these worlds came into contact, they also came int…
Kulturprotestantismus und Politik
Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870
The Discourse of Usury
Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the ess…
Datenatlas zur religiosen Geographie im protestantischen Deutschland. Von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg
Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914
I. INTRODUCTION The Fate of Nathan. Helmut Walser Smith (Vanderbilt University) and Chris Clark (Cambridge University) II. OUTLINES The Religious Divide: Piety in Nineteenth-Century Germany Lucian Holscher (University of Bochum) Religion, Religious Community and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Wolfgang Altgeld (University of Wrzburg) The Christian State and the Jewish Citizen in Nineteenth-Century Prussia Christopher Clark (Cambridge U…
The Butcher's Tale
In 1900, in a small country town in the eastern reaches of the German Empire, a German boy is found frozen beneath the ice. He has been brutally murdered, the blood drained from his dismembered body. The crime resembles traditional blood libel accusations against the Jews. When a Jewish butcher is accused of committing the murder, the town explodes in an anti-Semitic fervour. Using vast amounts of previously undiscovered material, Helmut Walser S…
Exclusionary Violence
For a Differently Centered Central European History
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Idea of a Protestant Monarchy in Britain 1714-1760
Sensationalizing the Jewish Question
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
“Darwinism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause for Nazi ideology.” This is the thesis of Richart Weikart's important, scholarly, controversial, but narrowly conceived book. Put more strongly, but within the parameters of Weikert's argument: No Darwin, no Hitler
Anti-semitic violence as reenactment
At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Aby Warburg became interested in the atavistic—how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to…
The Continuities of German History
This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and n…
Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. (1932–2008)
at seventy-six years of age on December 17, 2008, succumbing to complications of melanoma. With his passing, the history profession loses a historian of modern Germany whose archival research and revisions of received wisdom permanently altered our understanding of how the Third Reich came to power
Todesraum
This article looks at the mass destruction that raged Europe from 1914 to 1945. The trauma of 1918, Germany's defeat and dissolution, would not stop haunting nationalist Germans until the Third Reich collapsed; many Germans took the legend of the stab in the back as a matter of fact, according to which a Jewish-communist conspiracy had betrayed the national cause and sold out the otherwise victorious army. This article further traces the Holocaus…
The Three Horseman of the Holocaust
This article traces the three main issues which dominated Hitler's regime in Germany during the Holocaust. Two interpretive traditions have, since Hitler's day, commanded scholarly efforts to understand the Holocaust. One emphasizes ideas, recounting the intellectual history of anti-Semitism and the aims and political actions of those gripped by its poisoned talons. Paired with this approach is the conviction that history is made by human beings'…
The Place of German Modernism
This article focuses on German modernism. It traces the growth of German nationalism within the larger context of European nationalism. The question pulls in two directions. First, it points toward the problem of how German modernism ought to be situated in literary and art history. No doubt the simplest, most efficient answer is that German modernism finds its place within the larger setting of European modernism. The larger European context can…
Generations
This article traces the revolutions that raged Germany during the 1960s. This later part of the decade saw involvement of all and sundry in revolutions. The ‘Sixties’ — as a set of associations included greater autonomy of youth, anti-imperialist and anti-war activism, leftist aspirations to political revolt, sexual revolution, and women's emancipation. ‘1968’, in particular, functions as a myth, fostered by the participants in rebellion, their d…
Political science (32 obras) · Law (27 obras) · History (24 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · European history and politics (19 obras) · German (19 obras) · Archaeology (13 obras) · European Political History Analysis (12 obras)