How neoliberalism is causing a crisis in Germany Upward social mobility represented a core promise of life under the “old” West German welfare state, in which millions of skilled workers upgraded their Volkswagens to Audis, bought their first homes, and sent their children to university. Not so in today’s Federal Republic, where the gears of the so-called “elevator society” have long since ground to a halt. In the absence of the social mobility of yesterday, widespread social exhaustion and anxiety have emerged across mainstream society. Oliver Nachtwey analyses the reasons for this social rupture in postwar German society and investigates the conflict potential emerging as a result. He concludes that although the country has managed to muddle through thus far, simmering tensions beneath the surface nevertheless threaten to undermine the German system’s stability in the years to come. Recipient of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation 2016 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis for Economic Writing.

The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

"Excellent . . . Mr. Taylor tells the history of the Weimar inflation as the life-and-death struggle of the first German democracy . . . This is a dramatic story, well told." --The Wall Street Journal

One of the German-speaking world's leading young sociologists lays out modern Germany's social and political crisis and its implications for the future of the European hegemon. Upward social mobility represented a core promise of life under the "old" West German welfare state, in which millions of skilled workers upgraded their VWs to Audis, bought their first homes, and sent their children to university. Not so in today's Federal Republic, however, where the gears of the so-called "elevator society" have long since ground to a halt. In the absence of the social mobility of yesterday, widespread social exhaustion and anxiety have emerged across mainstream society. Oliver Nachtwey analyses the reasons for this social rupture in post-war German society and investigates the conflict potential emerging as a result, concluding that although the country has managed to muddle through the Eurocrisis largely unscathed thus far, simmering tensions beneath the surface nevertheless threaten to undermine the German system's stability in the years to come. Nachtwey's book was recipient of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's 2016 Hans-Matthfer-Preis for Economic Writing.

Using Germany as a national case study, this volume examines the historical genesis of precarity, its evolution from 19th-century industrial modernity to the present, and its reflections and reconfigurations in artistic production, in particular with relation to work, gender, and sexuality. “Precarity is everywhere now,” sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared almost thirty years ago. Not only declining middle-class standards of living, but also debt, drug addiction, housing and food insecurity, depression, and “deaths of despair” are now being recognized as symptoms of the downward pull of social precarity. Although these and similar ills have been attributed to neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, and willful neglect of the common good, precarization has accompanied the booms and busts of industrial modernity from its beginnings. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film explores how German and Austrian literature, film, and social history have engaged with social precarity, from the period of Romanticism and early industrialization to the present. The chapters in this volume deal with precarity as both an objective phenomenon reflected in literary and filmic representations and as a subjective phenomenon that gives these representations their particular shape. Representing Social Precarity in German Literature and Film opens new critical perspectives on diverse forms of lived precarity and their creative manifestations by reflecting on the history of capitalist modernity from the vantage points of weakness, vulnerability, marginality, impoverishment, and otherness.

From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.

This book analyzes the European Great Recession of 2008-12, its economic and social causes, its historical roots, and the policies adopted by the European Union to find a way out of it. It contains explicit debates with several economists and analysts on some of the most controversial questions about the causes of the crisis and the policies applied by the European Union. It presents the cases of Iceland, Greece and Ireland, the countries that first declined into crisis in Europe, each of them in a different way. Iceland is a case study for reckless banking practices, Greece of reckless public spending, and Ireland of reckless household indebtedness. At least seven other countries, mostly from the peripheries of Europe, had similarly reckless banking and spending practices. In the center of the book are the economic and social causes of the crisis. Contemporary advanced capitalism became financialized, de-industrialized and globalized and got rid of the "straitjacket" of regulations. Solid banking was replaced by high-risk, "casino-type" activity. The European common currency also had a structural problem — monetary unification without a federal state and fiscal unification. The other side of the same coin is European hyper-consumerism. A new lifestyle emerged during two super-prosperous periods in the 1950s to 1960s, and during the 1990s to 2006. Trying to find an exit policy, the European Union turned to strict austerity measures to curb the budget deficit and indebtedness. This book critically analyzes the debate around austerity policy. The creation of important supra-national institutions, and of a financial supervisory authority and stability mechanisms, strengthens integration. The correction of the euro’s structural mistake by creating a quasi-fiscal unification is even more important. The introduction of mandatory fiscal rules and their supervision promises a long-term solution for a well-functioning common currency. These measures, meanwhile, create a two-tier European Union with a fast-track core. This book suggests that the European Union will emerge stronger from the crisis. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers of economics, history, political science and international finance, but will also prove profitable reading for practitioners and the interested public.

As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.