German History HI136Week 5

Culture/Ethnic Minorities

Cultural Change • Heinrich Mann (1871-1950),

Professor Unrat (1905), Der Untertan (1918).

• Freie Volksbühne (free people’s theatre) – established 1889 and staged plays with a social message such as Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Weber.

• Scientific Discoveries• X-rays (1895)• Radioactivity (1896)• The electron (1897)• Quantum theory (1900)• Special theory of relativity (1905)

• Munich Secession (1892).• Berlin Secession (1898).• Die Brücke (1905)• Der Blaue Reiter (1911-14)August Macke,

Woman in Front of a Hat Shop (c. 1914)

Käthe Kollwitz, The Downtrodden (1900)

National Museum of Women in the Arts

James Simon sr. The bust of Nefertiti

German excavations in Egypt (1911-14)

The sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)

The Kaiser’s favourite: Prince Phillip zu Eulenburg (1847-

1921)

Sexuality

Front covers of Pan, Jugend and Simplicissimus

Mass Culture/Entertainment

Lebensreform

Reformed clothing

Alfred Messel’s departmental store Wertheim

Treatment of ethnic minorities

• Poles (Westprussia and Posen, Western Germany: Ruhr). At first assimilation, resentmens from the local population, national turn after the Germanizing laws; Poles Catholic

• Expropriation law 1908; new law defining citizenship as ethnically German (1913)

• Danes: smaller numbers, deportations of those deemed “anti-German” to Denmark after 1900

• Alsace-Lorraine: “milder” praxeological approach, special territory in the German Empire, escalation after Zabern

• Jews• School laws and Germanization• Mentality defining ethnic minorities as “enemies of the Empire”

(Reichsfeinde)

Jews in Imperial Germany

• Complicated and ambivalent story• Over 500,000, increasingly urban group, but their percentage in

population decreasing• Middle class, socially mobile, successful group envy of others• Antisemitism: for the poor: symptom of fear of modernity; nobility:

continuity and one of codes of belonging• New, racial antisemitism (Marr, Treitschke)• Reformed Judaism, assimilation, low conversions, rising intermarriage• Jews the keenest Germans? (soldiers, colonizers, voters)• Anti-Jewish violence and accusations of ritual murder at Xanten (1891-2)

and Konitz (1900-01)• Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (1893)

Berlin furrier Philipp Manes reminiscences in Theresienstadt about his youth (1888)

As If It Were Life, ed. Klaus Leist and Ben Barkow (2010)