Conferences

Conferences 2004

Conference Report

For a complete copy of the brochure for this event, you can download a pdf file.

Conference Report

At the Cutting Edge: Rethinking German and Jewish Cultural and Intellectual History  
Schloss Elmau, Germany, 12-14 July 2004  

A different kind of conference took place between 12 and 14 July at Schloss Elmau, nestled in the Bavarian Alps on the way from Munich to Innsbruck. ‘At the Cutting Edge: Rethinking German and Jewish Cultural and Intellectual History’ was supposed to be a tribute to the field’s late doyen, George Mosse, and in a way it was. But the conference organizers, Anson Rabinbach and Steven Aschheim, opted for an innovative format: most lectures would be given by relative juniors, and the comments by the ‘seniors’. (The seniors averaged about sixty and the juniors were in their thirties and forties.) The conference was conceived not least as a way to explore the relative costs and benefits of the divergent trajectories of social historical and cultural-intellectual approaches, especially as these were elaborated on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the postwar era; one main aim was to investigate what topics and insights may have been ignored, or warded off, in the strict emphasis on social historical method so strongly advanced in the West German context. Extensive debate among the more senior scholars — at times autobiographical, but in interestingly unpredictable ways — centred on the complexity of motives and methods animating earlier research and the difficulty of locating scholars’ individual approaches in a national context, whether that of the US, West Germany, or Israel. And, in any event, the conference also quickly revealed that the more junior scholars were directly opting for a blending of social historical elements into cultural and intellectual history.

 Some highlights: Eva Bremner, in her talk, ‘The Monarchy as ‘‘Family’’: Between the Military and Intimacy in Wilhelminian Germany’, sought to link the image of the monarchy to the relation between family values and military ideals in Wilhelmine Germany, contrasting domesticated and ‘wilder’ emotions. She argued that familial intimacy in a curious manner provided an alibi for aggression. Thus the Hohenzollerns created a whole museum around the image of the perfect Queen, Luise, as a way of legitimating their new national state. Intellectuals wrote essays for the larger public that interpreted the exhibits in the desired way. Stressing the ambivalent quality of the merger between militarism and sentimental domesticity, however, Bremner also suggested that heightened Wilhelmine and Victorian familialism served as a prelude to women’s emancipation because it was already public-oriented and democratic. Dagmar Herzog, speaking on ‘Sex and the Third Reich,’ sought to revise the picture of Nazism as puritanical. She argued that postwar historians had misinterpreted Nazism because of their own desire to link sexual emancipation to Enlightenment values, whereas in fact Nazi biologism suited very well to an ideal of intraracial promiscuity; sexual liberation was in their view an Aryan prerogative. Thus they encouraged infidelity and premarital sex among teenagers. Primarily in competition with the Catholics for the control of sexual morality, the Nazis focused their notions of morality narrowly on sex. Herzog discerned a link between Nazi sexual morality and their genocidal policy, which she characterized as being consistent with each other. In turn, postwar 1950 Germany witnessed a revival of Christian sexual morality, which was understood as being an anti-Nazi position. In general, Herzog argued for the usefulness of the study of sexuality for readingmoral positions. Nicholas Berg implied that postwar German historians inherited much of prewar German history’s defensive attitude towards modernity, while Dan Diner exposed how the Cold War functioned to neutralize ‘hot’ aspects of the memories of Nazism. Other scholars challenged assumptions about the relationships between ethnicity and identificatory processes. Glenn Penny described the German love affair with Amerindians as involving in part an anti-American reaction and in part an identification with the exotic. He analysed the modern quest for an authentic ‘other’ and investigated the dichotomies between a constructed and a natural ‘masculinity’. Adi Gordon talked about the German-Jewish exile publication, the Orient, to show how some German-Jewish exiles evolved in an anti-Zionist direction, heightening their equivocal relation to Central European culture. Daniel Morat returned to the theme of postwar German conservatives with Heidegger and Ju¨nger, analysing the antidemocratic belief in Germany as the metaphysical country between East and West. He especially noted the notion of a ‘secret Germany’ that originated in the circle around Stefan George. Both Berg and Morat refocused assumptions about German shame in the aftermath of 1945. After initial anxiety, German gentile scholars realized they could rescue their own reputations and avoid certain confrontations with the past; e´lite conservatives often felt shame not over Nazi crimes but over not having defended Germany more strongly until the bitter end. 

80 Conference Report 
Revisiting the early twentieth century, Leora Batnitzky observed critically that the philosophy of religion was not taken seriously enough in subsequent depictions of German-Jewish scholarship. She pointed out that many of the most significant German-Jewish refugees were influenced by and contributed to the philosophy of religion. She stressed that attending to German-Jewish intellectuals’ theological writings could reveal remarks that were disturbing to post-Holocaust sensibilities, and perhaps this is why they were ignored. At the same time, she also emphasized that, for example, German-Jewish intellectuals’ interest in Islam could be viewed as an implicit criticism of Christianity. Peter Gordon reflected on the differences between discourses in cultural history and in the history of ideas, noting that whatever one thinks about philosophy, it was central in both German and German-Jewish discourses. He described how intellectual history had evolved from what he termed a universalist to a differentialist paradigm, heightening the difference between philosophy and history. Gordon focused on the German-Jewish refugees’ complex relation to the Enlightenment, which some of them viewed as having been betrayed while others noted the totalitarian and antisemitic impulses present in much Enlightenment thought. Gordon also emphasized postwar scholars’ changing analysis of antisemitism, which had once been seen as a refutation of universalism, but now—not least under the influence of postmodernism—is seen as denying difference. Both Gordon and Sam Moyn spent some time considering David Sorkin’s notion of an ‘e´migre´ synthesis’, which was subject to the normal kind of criticism that argues that such a suggestion for a paradigm is simplistic. Thus Michael Steinberg argued that George Mosse could not be helpfully evaluated in terms of such an e´migre´ synthesis. Suzanne Marchand’s analysis of the phenomenon of German Orientalism returned the audience to the nineteenth century and especially to the Protestant roots of German Orientalism. Marchand took issue with Koselleck’s (and Foucault’s) notion of a paradigm change in discourse in the middle to late eighteenth century, and argued for an alternative history of Orientalism that links it to more to the history of religious belief and less to secular Enlightenment. She emphasized the Biblical and Protestant core of German Oriental studies, and suggested understanding the development of German Orientalism as an alternative past to the interest in Greek and Roman antiquity. Marchand argued that theology’s long shadow over Oriental studies was not interrupted by imperialism. Thus she took issue with Edward Said’s notion that Oriental studies issued from Western imperial expansion. Yotam Hotam compared German and Jewish Lebensphilosophie, and showed how the interest in vitalism influenced the rediscovery of Gnosticism. Thus Zionism, in his view, could be reconceived as a conversion to heresy: Gershom Scholem’s concern with the Kabbalah could be viewed in terms of this Gnostic impulse. Yfaat Weiss turned back again to the post-1945 era to examine the issue of German reparations to Jewish refugees and survivors 

Conference Report 81
as an issue where Diasporic and Israeli Jewish identities confronted each other, and where there were severe tensions between formerly German and formerly east European Jews, and between these and formerly north African and Arab Jews. She also emphasized the transgenerational transmission and exacerbation of economic inequality within Israel. Implicitly, she drew the analogy between Jewish and Palestinian refugees: the question of reparations is not only a question of acknowledging responsibility, but also an issue for the victims’ identity. There were two constantly recurring subthemes: the presence of prewar attitudes in post-Second World War Germany and the probing examination of the question of whether German emigre´s and refugees from Hitler’s Germany could be said to have possessed a common culture or a common agenda. The consensus appeared to be that postwar Germany could not be understood without studying the sometimes silent presence of prewar and pre-Nazi attitudes in both postwar German republics. In contrast, the idea of an e´migre´ synthesis met with a great deal of scepticism. It also seemed as if much of the work done by younger scholars is affected by a kind of aesthetics of reception: most talks addressed how agents received impulses from their contexts more than how they affected historical developments. Most talks were marked by a level of sophistication and precise scholarship that displayed how the younger generation of scholars has been able to refine and challenge received generalizations. Thus the field of cultural history is alive and well, but it is no longer an e´migre´ affair.  Hebrew University of Jerusalem GABRIEL MOTZKIN 

82 Conference Report  

For a complete copy of the brochure for this event, you can download a pdf file.

Conference 2001

AN HISTORIAN'S LEGACY
George L. Mosse and Recent Research
on Fascism, Society, and Culture
September 7-9, 2001

Downlaod a pdf file of the brochure if you wish.

All sessions will be held in:

The Pyle Center,
702 Langdon Street
The University of Wisconsin-Madison

FRIDAY, September 7, 2001

Alumni Lounge, Pyle Center

4:30 p.m. Welcome
Director, Humanities Research Institute
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Keynote Address

Saul Friedlander, University of California-Los Angeles

"Mosse's Influence on the Historiography of the Holocaust"

OPENING BANQUET

University Club, 803 State Street

6:00 Social Hour
7:00 Dinner

SATURDAY, September 8

9:00 a.m. Session I: Mosse's Early

Scholarship on Early Modern Europe
Chair: Lee Palmer Wandel, University of Wisconsin-Madison

David Sabean, University of California-Los Angeles
"The Holy Pretence: Method and Theme in George Mosse's Early Work"

Johann Sommerville, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"The Modern Contexts of Mosse's Early Modern Historiography"

10:15 Refreshment Break

10:45 Session II: Mosse and Fascism

Chair: Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

Emilio Gentile, University of Rome

"The Development of Mosse's Concept of Fascism"

Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University

"Withstanding the Rush of Time. The Prescience of Mosse's Anthropological Approach to Fascism"

12:00 Lunch

Alumni Lounge, Pyle Center

David James Fisher, UCLA School of Medicine

"Confronting George Mosse: Reflections on His Autobiographical Writings"

1:45 p.m. Session III: Nationalism and Memory

Chair: Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland

Jay Winter, Cambridge University

"War and Remembrance in the 20th Century"

Rudy Koshar, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"National Memory and 'Destination Culture'"

Emmanuel Sivan, Hebrew University

"George Mosse and the Israeli Experience"

3:30 Refreshment Break

3:45 Session IV: War and the Body

Chair: Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh

Sander Gilman, University of Ilinois-Chicago

"Nationalism and Sexuality: What It Means to Have a German and or a Jewish Body"

Joanna Bourke, University of London

"The Corporeal Self in War: Battle Narratives about 'the Body', 1914-1945"

SUNDAY, September 9

9:00 a.m. Refreshments

9:30 Session V: Respectability, the Jews, and the Image of Man

Chair: David Sorkin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Steven Aschheim, Hebrew University

"Doctors, Degeneration, and (Murderous) Respectability"

Shulamit Volkov, Tel Aviv University

"German Jewish History: Back to Bildung and Culture"

Robert Nye, University of Oregon

"Mosse, Masculinity, and the History of Sexuality"

Lodging

Plan to make your reservations early. Hotel space is limited. A block of rooms has been reserved at

The Lowell Center, 610 Langdon Street.
Mention the Mosse Conference when making your reservations.

Reservations:

Phone: 608/256-2621
FAX: 608/262-5445

Additional hotels in campus area:

The University Inn
441 N. Frances Street
Phone: 608/257-4881

Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel
525 West Johnson Street
Phone: 608/251-5511

For more information on this conference please contact:

Loretta Freiling
Institute for Research in the Humanities
1401 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53506-1295
Phone: 608/262-3855
FAX: 608/265-4173
freiling@facstaff.wisc.edu