Professor Martina Kessel

This course is available on the MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in History of International Relations, MSc in International Affairs (LSE and Peking University), MSc in International and Asian History, MSc in International and World History (LSE & Columbia) and MSc in Theory and History of International Relations. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Notions of collective identity are deeply intertwined with the phenomenon of how politics are understood and acted out. The class will discuss which notions of Germanness were constructed over the course of the twentieth century. It will ask how they impacted politics and society in key moments of German history, and how they were influenced in turn by political developments. We will pursue two major lines of inquiry. On the one hand, we will analyse how contemporaries framed their imagined identity of ‘being German’ by deciding who might belong or not belong to German society, in political, legal, confessional, or cultural terms. On the other hand, we will trace how such projections were used to justify various forms of exclusion or violence. The course will start by analysing issues of race, class, gender, and confession before the First World War, as important categories of boundary work. The class will then debate how notions of Germanness served to legitimize violence and non-democratic politics during the First World War and the Weimar Republic. The third section will focus on National Socialism, exploring the construction of imagined identities on the one hand through popular culture and various practices of implementing a ‘people’s community’ and on the other hand through warfare and genocide. Finally, we will discuss the competition between the two German states between 1949 and 1990 in terms of politics and collective identity.

110-minute live session. Some weeks may include break-out sessions on Zoom or other forms of individual and/or group work.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of the Michaelmas and the Lent Terms.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

Alon Confino, A World without Jews. The Nazi imagination from persecution to genocide, New Haven, Conn. et al.: Yale University Press, 2014.

Chin, Rita et al. (Hg.), After the Nazi racial state: Difference and democracy in Germany and Europe, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2009, 80-101.

Fulbrook, Mary, German National Identity after the Holocaust, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Fulbrook, Mary / Andrew I. Port (eds.), Becoming East German. Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, New York: Berghahn, 2013. 

Gillerman, Sharon, Germans into Jews: Remaking the Jewish social body in the Weimar Republic, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Grossmann, Atina, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Horne, John, Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914. A History of Denial, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Schulte-Sasse, Linda, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Mazon, Patricia, Reinhild Steingröver (eds.), Not so plain as Black and White: Afro-German culture and history, 1890 – 2000, Rochester, NY: Univ. of Rochester Press, 2005. 

O'Donnell, Krista et al. (eds.), The Heimat abroad: The boundaries of Germanness, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005.

Palmowski, Jan, Inventing a socialist nation: Heimat and the politics of everyday life in the GDR, 1945 – 1990, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009.

Slobodian, Quinn (ed.), Comrades of Color. East Germany in the Cold War World, New York 2015.

Essay (35%, 3500 words) and presentation (15%) in the LT.
Essay (35%, 3500 words) in the ST.
Class participation (15%) in the MT and LT.

3500-word historiographical essay due in Lent Term (35%); 3500-word state-of-the-field essay due in Summer Term (35%).