Abstracts

David Jünger, Historical Experience and Political Action. Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Lessons Drawn from National Socialism and Support for the African American Civil Rights Movement

 

In his article, David Jünger investigates the intellectual and political engagement of German-American rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902-1988) with the African American Civil Rights Movement and American racism during the first two post-war decades. His thesis is that these interactions can only be understood against the background of his personal experience of National Socialism and antisemitic ostracism. In the early 1930s Prinz discussed motives of ghettoization, isolation and exclusion. These became the yardstick of his later intellectual thinking and political actions regarding both racist segregation in America as well as the constitution of global Jewry after the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel.

 

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Manuel Mork, Workers’ Resistance, Fascist Repression and International Solidarity. An Italian Provincial Town in the European Spotlight, 1922 to 1927

 

The Italian town of Molinella was repeatedly in the European and international spotlight after Mussolini’s coming into power in October 1922, as the local farm workers defied the pressure of the Fascist regime to conform to an exceptional degree. In this manner Molinella acquired a symbolic character for both sides: for the regime, it was a red stain, while from the Socialist perspective, it was a ray of hope. This high degree of attention would ultimately lead to the ruin of these working-class families, since the Fascists ultimately deported the remaining Socialists in late 1926. The Labour and Socialist International tried to publicise these repressive measures, which, as Manuel Mork sets out, provide insight into the nature of Italian Fascism.

 

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Ansbert Baumann, More Integration? Football and Migrant Workers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1955 to 1973

 

In contrast to the narrative that sport, and especially football, has an integrating effect, the first generation of “guest workers” in the Federal Republic of Germany initially experienced a separating effect through football: the migrants founded their own clubs, some of which even competed against each other in independent “foreigner leagues” and thus remained in their familiar socio-cultural milieu. Various integration efforts by the German Football Association failed, not least because of the involvement of the sending states, who wanted to strengthen the migrant workers’ ties to their homeland through football. In the long term, however, as Ansbert Baumann’s article shows, the football activities of the “guest workers” made an important, albeit mostly indirect contribution to the migrants’ sense of belonging to the host society.

 

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Alina Marktanner, New Sources for Consulting Studies: Marvin Bower’s Perspective on McKinsey

 

Rather than the founder of McKinsey & Company, the eponymous James O. McKinsey, it was his successor Marvin Bower, who by working mostly in the background until the last decades of the 20^th century proved formative for the development of the business and turned the company into the consulting firm with the highest turnover worldwide. Alina Marktanner has analysed a rare document written by Bower and shows that the closely guarded “company bible” of 1979 is to be read as an intervention at a time when the whole US consulting industry was experiencing temporary weakness. It was not only potential clients who had to be convinced of company consulting as a service, but McKinsey & Company also had to bind its own consultants to the business.

 

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Thomas Schlemmer, Inside Views of a “State Party”. The CSU Between Crisis and Reorganisation – Reports on the State of the Party in the Bavarian Countryside Before the Federal Election of 1953

 

Even though the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) has caught the interest of historical and sociological research since the 1970s, there is a remarkable lacuna in the history of the party, for which absolute majorities seemed a given for many years: After a promising start in 1945/46, the CSU entered a deep crisis in the first half of the 1950s, a period about which comparatively little is known and from which it only started to recover since 1955. Thomas Schlemmer’s documentation aims at helping to close this gap. The sources he presents show a self-proclaimed “state party” emaciated and plagued by the shadows of the past just before the second federal election of 1953. The travel reports of CSU State Manager Alois Engelhard provide a portrait of the Bavarian countryside at a moment, when the crisis-ridden beginnings of the Federal Republic were still much more shaped by the aftereffects of the Second World War rather than people feeling much of the early blessings of the so-called economic miracle.

 

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Martina Steber, “A very English superstar”. John Rutter, Popular Classical Music and Transnational Conservatism Since the 1970s

 

Since the 1980s, it has been largely unnoticed how the British composer, conductor and music entrepreneur John Rutter has become a leading figure in popular music – successful on the global music market, popular in the English-speaking world and regularly at the top of the classical music charts with his Christmas song compositions. Rutter embodies precisely the opposite of commercial pop culture: He is the antitype of a pop star, he succeeds with sacred music, he addresses the middle class and the Bourgeoisie and he personifies family values, community spirit and the preservation of tradition. Using the example of Rutter, the author demonstrates the high importance of conservative pop cultures for the emergence and development of a transnational conservatism in Europe and North America since the 1970s. The article reveals the interplay between nationalisation and transnationalisation in conservatism and points out the variety of forms and contexts, in which conservative dispositions can manifest in popular musical cultures. They offered opportunities for politicisation, but could also remain effective purely in the cultural sphere. Rutter’s sound worlds clearly transcend English cathedrals and college chapels.

 

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Frank Bajohr/Rachel O’Sullivan, Holocaust, Colonialism and Nazi Imperialism. Research in the Shadow of a Polemic Debate

 

Since 2020, there has been an increasingly heated debate in the Federal Republic concerning German remembrance culture: Is it too one-sided and catechistically focused on the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, thus persistently ignoring a broader context of colonialism, imperialism and racism? This article attempts to show that the dichotomies and polemics of this debate almost obscure the scholarly research that has been striving to adequately contextualize Nazi crimes for decades. The majority of research on the topic has rejected simple constructions of continuity between colonialism and the Holocaust. However, Nazi mass violence beyond the Holocaust, as well as Nazi occupation policies in Eastern Europe, are worth analyzing more closely under colonial premises.