Moritz Follmer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1101561 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moritz Follmer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moritz |
| FAMILY NAME | Follmer |
| SIGNATURE | FOLLMER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-8515-7931 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Ungovernable Amsterdam? Redefining Municipal Government from the Late 1970s to the Late 1980s
This article discusses the challenges that Amsterdam’s municipal government encountered and how it responded to them from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. The presence of heroin addicts and radical squatters alongside the effects of suburbanization and deindustrialization raised the specter of an ungovernable city. Mayors and heads of department were also confronted with conflicting expectations from the public and problems of internal coordinat…
The Quest for Individual Freedom
What does it mean to see oneself as free? And how can this freedom be attained in times of conflict and social upheaval? In this ambitious study, Moritz Föllmer explores what twentieth-century Europeans understood by individual freedom and how they endeavoured to achieve it. Combining cultural, social, and political history, this book highlights the tension between ordinary people's efforts to secure personal independence and the ambitious attemp…
Quest for Individual Freedom
Living the German Revolution 1918–19
The Betrayal of the Humanities
Robert Gellately. Hitler’s True Believers
Journal Article Robert Gellately. Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. Get access Robert Gellately. Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 443. Cloth $34.95. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 1…
The sociology of individuality and the history of urban society
This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern …
The Unscripted Revolution
This article aims to shed new light on the German Revolution of 1918/19 by focusing on male subjectivities on both a micro-level and in political discourse. The first section analyses how after the sudden end of the war and the demise of the Empire, workers and peasants asserted their freedom and dignity as civilian men. They celebrated, pursued their self-interest, confronted representatives of the old order or appealed to the provisional instit…
Founding Weimar
In recent years, the German Revolution of 1918/19 has once again attracted interest. Politically charged controversies regarding the council movement’s objectives or the Majority Social Democrats’ attempt to contain radicalism have lost much of their scholarly importance, although they are still present in the Geschichtskultur of the German left. Recent volumes (co-)edited, respectively, by Alexander Gallus and Klaus Weinhauer et al. have widened…
Malte Zierenberg. Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950
Malte Zierenberg’s Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950, the original German edition of which was published in 2008, is an important addition to the literature on Berlin and Germany in the Second World War and its aftermath. It also contributes to European urban history in the 1940s as well as to the history of economic practices and attitudes. Especially for these latter reasons, its translation into English is highly welcome. The significance of th…
Als Berlin leuchtete
The culture of Weimar Berlin continues to fascinate scholarly and lay audiences alike. This fascination has led to films such as Cabaret or Comedian Harmonists and continues to inspire retrospectives and revivals far beyond the German metropolis. It also underpins a myriad of specialized studies as well as more broadly conceived books such as Richard Bodek’s exploration of Agitprop theatre and other communist innovations or Peter Jelavich’s analy…
Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’
Urban Societies in Europe since 1945
How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geograp…
Cities of Choice
This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing one's surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, …
Individuality and Modernity in Berlin
Individuality and Modernity in Berlin
Moritz Föllmer traces the history of individuality in Berlin from the late 1920s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The demand to be recognised as an individual was central to metropolitan society, as were the spectres of risk, isolation and loss of agency. This was true under all five regimes of the period, through economic depression, war, occupation and reconstruction. The quest for individuality could put democracy under p…
Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel
Journal Article Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel Get access Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 20…
Rudiger Bergien. Die bellizistische Republik
This extensively researched, conceptually ambitious, and powerfully argued book revisits a classic theme in the history of Weimar Germany: namely, the relationship between the armed forces and the Weimar Republic. According to the standard account, moderate social democratic politicians such as Friedrich Ebert or Gustav Noske brought in the remains of the wartime army in early 1919 and again in 1920 to crush socialist uprisings in major cities an…
The Subjective Dimension of Nazism
The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstanc…
The culture of 'crisis' in the Weimar Republic
Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of 'crisis' tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept's constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently tod…
The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
Journal Article The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s Get access The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. By Richard Wolin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. xiv + 391 pp. $ 35.00 ISBN: 978 0 691 12998 3. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google S…
The Heroic City
Journal Article The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958. Get access The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958. By Rosemary Wakeman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. xiii + 401 pp. $ 35.00 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 226 87023 6. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 24, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 605–606, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crq061 Publishe…
Short Oxford History of Germany
Despite, or perhaps because of, the wealth of historiography on Nazi Germany, it is surprisingly difficult to recommend a brief state-of-the-art book to students and non-specialists, or to refer to such a volume oneself whenever at risk of drowning in new monographs and articles. The prominent and contrasting surveys by Michael Burleigh and Richard J. Evans are too epic to serve such a purpose. The important readers edited by David Crew and by Th…
Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930-1945
Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin
The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City , suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the…
Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin
The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City , suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the…
The Subjective Dimension of Nazism
The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstanc…
The Problem of National Solidarity in Interwar Germany
The Unscripted Revolution
This article aims to shed new light on the German Revolution of 1918/19 by focusing on male subjectivities on both a micro-level and in political discourse. The first section analyses how after the sudden end of the war and the demise of the Empire, workers and peasants asserted their freedom and dignity as civilian men. They celebrated, pursued their self-interest, confronted representatives of the old order or appealed to the provisional instit…
Cities of Choice
This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing one's surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, …
The culture of 'crisis' in the Weimar Republic
Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of 'crisis' tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept's constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently tod…
The sociology of individuality and the history of urban society
This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern …
Urban Societies in Europe since 1945
How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geograp…
Hingeschaut und weggesehen. Hitler und sein Volk
The Problem of National Solidarity in Interwar Germany
Burgertum nach 1945
Reading the recent products of German Zeitgeschichte, one is struck by the degree to which they are based on modernization theory: Ulrich Herbert in particular argues that by the late 1950s, Germans had finally shaken off the remnants of tradition, accepted the world of industry and mass consumption, and thus made their country safe for democracy. A number of empirical studies merely illustrate this broad interpretation at the risk of becoming ra…
Los von Berlin!' Die Rheinstaatsbestrebungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg
Separatists in the Rhineland after the First World War have not attracted much historiographical attention, apart from the controversial question as to whether the then mayor of Cologne and future West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was one of them. Standard accounts of Weimar Germany only treat separatism as a project of ‘insignificant minorities’ (Hans Mommsen), or see them as outright ‘subversive’ (Klaus Hildebrand). Regional studies that…
Suicide and Crisis in Weimar Berlin
The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City , suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the…
The Heroic City
Journal Article The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958. Get access The Heroic City: Paris 1945-1958. By Rosemary Wakeman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. xiii + 401 pp. $ 35.00 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 226 87023 6. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 24, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 605–606, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crq061 Publishe…
Short Oxford History of Germany
Despite, or perhaps because of, the wealth of historiography on Nazi Germany, it is surprisingly difficult to recommend a brief state-of-the-art book to students and non-specialists, or to refer to such a volume oneself whenever at risk of drowning in new monographs and articles. The prominent and contrasting surveys by Michael Burleigh and Richard J. Evans are too epic to serve such a purpose. The important readers edited by David Crew and by Th…
Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930-1945
The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s
Journal Article The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s Get access The Wind from the East French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. By Richard Wolin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. xiv + 391 pp. $ 35.00 ISBN: 978 0 691 12998 3. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Leeds Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google S…
The culture of 'crisis' in the Weimar Republic
Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of 'crisis' tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept's constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently tod…
Individuality and Modernity in Berlin
Moritz Föllmer traces the history of individuality in Berlin from the late 1920s to the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The demand to be recognised as an individual was central to metropolitan society, as were the spectres of risk, isolation and loss of agency. This was true under all five regimes of the period, through economic depression, war, occupation and reconstruction. The quest for individuality could put democracy under p…
Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel
Journal Article Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel Get access Der US-Film in der Weimarer Republik—ein Medium der ‘Amerikanisierung’? Deutsche Filmwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und mediale Globalisierung im Fokus transatlantischer Interessen, by Ursula Saekel (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 20…
Rudiger Bergien. Die bellizistische Republik
This extensively researched, conceptually ambitious, and powerfully argued book revisits a classic theme in the history of Weimar Germany: namely, the relationship between the armed forces and the Weimar Republic. According to the standard account, moderate social democratic politicians such as Friedrich Ebert or Gustav Noske brought in the remains of the wartime army in early 1919 and again in 1920 to crush socialist uprisings in major cities an…
The Subjective Dimension of Nazism
The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstanc…
Individuality and Modernity in Berlin
Urban Societies in Europe since 1945
How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geograp…
Cities of Choice
This article discusses the meanings and effects of personal choice and elective affinities in Western European cities from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. The first section shows how the notion of choosing one's surroundings and relations underpinned the development of ‘modern’ apartment buildings, suburban homes and road networks but also attracted significant criticism. The second section argues that this notion soon was not only criticised, …
Als Berlin leuchtete
The culture of Weimar Berlin continues to fascinate scholarly and lay audiences alike. This fascination has led to films such as Cabaret or Comedian Harmonists and continues to inspire retrospectives and revivals far beyond the German metropolis. It also underpins a myriad of specialized studies as well as more broadly conceived books such as Richard Bodek’s exploration of Agitprop theatre and other communist innovations or Peter Jelavich’s analy…
Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’
Founding Weimar
In recent years, the German Revolution of 1918/19 has once again attracted interest. Politically charged controversies regarding the council movement’s objectives or the Majority Social Democrats’ attempt to contain radicalism have lost much of their scholarly importance, although they are still present in the Geschichtskultur of the German left. Recent volumes (co-)edited, respectively, by Alexander Gallus and Klaus Weinhauer et al. have widened…
Malte Zierenberg. Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950
Malte Zierenberg’s Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950, the original German edition of which was published in 2008, is an important addition to the literature on Berlin and Germany in the Second World War and its aftermath. It also contributes to European urban history in the 1940s as well as to the history of economic practices and attitudes. Especially for these latter reasons, its translation into English is highly welcome. The significance of th…
The Unscripted Revolution
This article aims to shed new light on the German Revolution of 1918/19 by focusing on male subjectivities on both a micro-level and in political discourse. The first section analyses how after the sudden end of the war and the demise of the Empire, workers and peasants asserted their freedom and dignity as civilian men. They celebrated, pursued their self-interest, confronted representatives of the old order or appealed to the provisional instit…
The sociology of individuality and the history of urban society
This article explores the role of individuality in Europe's urban past. In so doing, it builds on Georg Simmel's famous article ‘The metropolis and mental life’ as well as recent work especially by Bernard Lahire, Niklas Luhmann and Uwe Schimank. The article brings out key sociological insights and links them to a range of studies by urban historians, which are thus revisited from a fresh angle. The focus is on three key dimensions of the modern …
The Betrayal of the Humanities
Robert Gellately. Hitler’s True Believers
Journal Article Robert Gellately. Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. Get access Robert Gellately. Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 443. Cloth $34.95. Moritz Föllmer Moritz Föllmer University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 1…
Political science (22 works) · European history and politics (20 works) · Law (19 works) · History (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (13 works) · Art (11 works) · German (11 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Art history (8 works)