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"Punishment Germany History.."
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The Happy Burden of History
Germans are often accused of failing to take responsibility for Nazi crimes, but what precisely should ordinary people do differently? Indeed, scholars have yet to outline viable alternatives for how any of us should respond to terror and genocide. And because of the way they compartmentalize everyday life, our discipline-bound analyses often disguise more than they illuminate. Written by a historian, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, The Happy Burden of History takes an integrative approach to the problem of responsible selfhood. Exploring the lives and letters of ordinary and intellectual Germans who faced the ethical challenges of the Third Reich, it focuses on five typical tools for cultivating the modern self: myths, lies, non-conformity, irony, and modeling. The authors carefully dissect the ways in which ordinary and intellectual Germans excused their violent claims to mastery with a sense of 'sovereign impunity.' They then recuperate the same strategies of selfhood for our contemporary world, but in ways that are self-critical and humble. The book shows how viewing this problem from within everyday life can empower and encourage us to bear the burden of historical responsibility ? and be happy doing so.
eBook
On the history of abortion from antiquity to the present day, with a focus on Central Europe and Germany
The question of how to deal with a pregnancy, whether desired or unwanted, is a complex biological, ethical, social, and medical issue going back for millennia. Every form of regulatory approach to this issue is culturally and temporally specific and is therefore subject to continuous change. Our look at its history and the medical, legal, and religious background begins in ancient times, progresses through history, and ends with a focus on the second half of the nineteenth century and especially the twentieth century in Germany. These ethical, moral, and medical questions are likely to have been discussed in a similar way in other parts of the Western world.
Journal Article
How Authoritarian Governments Decide Who Emigrates: Evidence from East Germany
Most autocracies restrict emigration yet still allow some citizens to exit. How do these regimes decide who can leave? We argue that many autocracies strategically target anti-regime actors for emigration, thereby crafting a more loyal population without the drawbacks of persistent co-optation or repression. However, this generates problematic incentives for citizens to join opposition activity to secure exit. In response, autocracies simultaneously punish dissidents for attempting to emigrate, screening out all but the most determined opponents. To test our theory, we examine an original data set coded from over 20,000 pages of declassified emigration applications from East Germany's state archives. In the first individual-level test of an autocracy's emigration decisions, we find that active opposition promoted emigration approval but also punishment for applying. Pensioners were also more likely to secure exit, and professionals were less likely. Our results shed light on global migration's political sources and an overlooked strategy of autocratic resilience.
Journal Article
Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany
This book examines the role of banishment, a prevalent form of punishment largely neglected by scholars, in sixteenth-century Ulm, using the town's experience to uncover how early modern magistrates used expulsion to regulate and reorder society.
eBook
Visual aggression : images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany
Why does a society seek out images of violence? What can the consumption of violent imagery teach us about the history of violence and the ways in which it has been represented and understood? Assaf Pinkus considers these questions within the context of what he calls galleries of violence, the torment imagery that flourished in German-speaking regions during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Exploring these images and the visceral bodily responses that they produced in their viewers, Pinkus argues that the new visual discourse on violence was a watershed in premodern conceptualizations of selfhood.
Images of martyrdom in late medieval Germany reveal a strikingly brutal parade of passion: severed heads, split skulls, mutilated organs, extracted fingernails and teeth, and myriad other torments. Stripped from their devotional context and presented simply as brutal acts, these portrayals assailed viewers' bodies and minds so violently that they amounted to what Pinkus describes as \"visual aggressions.\" Addressing contemporary discourses on violence and cruelty, the aesthetics of violence, and the eroticism of the tortured body, Pinkus ties these galleries of violence to larger cultural concerns about the ethics of violence and bodily integrity in the conceptualization of early modern personhood.
Innovative and convincing, this study heralds a fundamental shift in the scholarly conversation about premodern violence, moving from a focus on the imitatio Christi and the liturgy of punishment to the notion of violence as a moral problem in an ethical system. Scholars of medieval and early modern art, history, and literature will welcome and engage with Pinkus's research for years to come.
eBook
HITLER'S JUDGES: IDEOLOGICAL COMMITMENT AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN NAZI GERMANY
We examine the role of judicial policy preferences in influencing whether judges in Nazi Germany sentenced defendants charged with serious political offences to death. We find that judicial policy preferences, measured by the depth of the ideological commitment of the judge to the Nazi Party worldview, were an important determinant of whether judges imposed the death sentence. Judges more committed to the Nazi Party were more likely to impose the death sentence on defendants belonging to organised political opposition groups, those accused of violent resistance and those with characteristics to which Nazism was intolerant.
Journal Article
Study of Deaths by Suicide in the Soviet Special Camp Number 7 (Sachsenhausen), 1945–1950
After World War II, Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp (Oranienburg) was administered until the spring of 1950 by Soviet occupation forces (Special Camp Number 7) and used mainly for political prisoners. Our study analyzes suicides in this camp during the Soviet period. Data was collected from the archives of Sachsenhausen Memorial, Special Camp Collection. Original documents containing certificates or autopsy reports of prisoners who committing suicide were reviewed. In this period, authorities registered 17 suicides. The age of suicides was between 19 and 64 years. The most frequent cause of imprisonment was
Blockleiter
(Kapo in Nazi period, n = 4),
Mitarbeiter Gestapo
(member of the Gestapo, n = 3) and
Wehrmacht
(military, n = 3). Hanging was the most frequent method of suicide. The average time spent in the camp until suicide was 715 days. The number of recorded suicides under Soviet control is considerably lower (calculated rate 2.8/10,000 per year) than under Nazi control (calculated rate 11/10,000 per year). This could be due to comparably more favorable conditions for prisoners and the abolishment of the death penalty during this period. Possible motives for suicides include feelings of guilt for crimes committed, fear of punishment and a misguided understanding of honor on the eve of criminal trials.
Journal Article
Western Prisoners of War Tried by Court Martial for Insults to the Führer and Criticism of Nazi Germany
The fact that the Geneva Convention of 1929 placed prisoners of war (POWs) under the laws in effect in the army of the detaining state meant that western POWs in Nazi Germany were exposed to the extremely repressive Nazi wartime legislation. Hundreds of western POWs had to appear in front of German court martials as a result of a joke on Hitler, a critical comment on the conditions of captivity or the behavior of German soldiers. They were judged under the Nazi anti-subversion laws, which led to thousands of death sentences for civilians and German soldiers (although none for a western POW). Even private remarks in a letter to family could lead to several years in military prison. German judicial practice against POWs became more repressive as cases multiplied and as the judges and civilian witnesses became more nervous toward the end of the war, leading to rapid and harsh judgments based on dubious evidence and frivolous denunciations. The court martials sometimes reflected the attitudes and subversive thoughts of German witnesses. The fact that the sentences were legal according to the Geneva Convention of 1929 prompted the drafters of the 1949 Geneva Convention to revise the provisions for trials of POWs.
Journal Article
