(Nie)chciane dziedzictwo?

(Un)wanted Heritage? Wrocław as a Palimpsest The process of so called “degermanization” of Wrocław involved, among other things, removing traces of German history from the urban space by displacement of former residents, changing street names, introducing new symbols and erasing German-language signboards. Despite the communist historical policy in Wrocław, many examples of post-German traces in the urban space have survived. The article describes Wrocław as a palimpsest, a city of intertwined German and Polish records, where old layers are not removed, but only given new meanings. It refers to the project “Spod tynku patrzy Breslau” (From under the plaster Breslau gazes), which aims to conduct a social register of Germanlanguage epigrams in the urban space. It describes the changes in attitudes towards post-German heritage over time, especially after 1989.

Transnational Dimensions of a ‘German Case’: The Expatriation of Wolf Biermann and the Politics of Solidarity in the 1970s

In November 1976, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) announced the expatriation of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, preventing his return from a concert tour in West Germany. This step attracted widespread press coverage and sparked a substantial expression of solidarity by East German intellectuals. This article proposes an alternative perspective on this well-known episode in German history by highlighting its transnational dimensions and its international contexts. Biermann’s work interacted with broader cultural currents of the period, while his political engagement with events in Chile and Spain testified to the importance of transnational solidarity for left-wing mobilizations. Moreover, the article points to two important international factors that are crucial for understanding the events of 1976: the role of Eurocommunism within left-wing debate on the one hand, and the resonance of human rights discourse during the 1970s on the other.

The Photographic Metaphor: Heartfield, Brecht, Sebald

From a semiotic point of view, photography is still considered a different kind of sign. Then, how can imagetext works be studied, formed by photography and word? This article argues that fictional texts expose the semiotic nature of photographs, showing that photographs are signs, different from their referents. The fictional, intermedial texts studied here are John Heartfield’s, Bertolt Brecht’s, and W.G. Sebald’s: three authors linked by German history. In the light of Umberto Eco’s semiotics, photographs can also be considered metaphors, enable to provide a new kind of iconicity and to overcome their realistic weight.

Introduction: The Political Ambiguities of Pius XII

This collection of essays evaluates the relations between Eugenio Pacelli and Germany from the beginning of his career as a papal nuncio in Munich in 1917 until his pontificate during the wartime and post-war periods. The contributions to this volume do not provide a complete overview of this topic. Instead, they should be understood as case studies on certain aspects of Vatican-German history. At the core of this work are the complexities and ambiguities of papal politics between four political systems from the Kaiserreich to the West German Federal Republic. Ultimately, this volume thus touches upon very diverse subjects ranging from Pacelli’s ‚concordat diplomacy‘ in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich to his silence during the Holocaust and the German occupation of Italy, the anti-communism of the Cold War, and the Vatican’s path towards reform in the post-war period.

Developing Historical Competency: Teaching German History Through History Films At University Putra Malaysia (BA German Programme)

History films personalize, dramatize and emotionalize historical events and characters. They revive the past by exemplifying it in the present, engage ongoing discourses of history and as a result have proven to be the most influential medium in conveying history to large audiences. History films are regarded as an attractive, motivating and efficient (supplementary) teaching and learning medium in history as well as in foreign language classes. As part of the course “Historical Survey of Germany” (BA German-programme at University Putra Malaysia) history film projects on important periods and events in German history were conducted. The article introduces a film project on World War II and describes the pedagogical approach which aims to develop three core competencies of historical understanding – Content Knowledge, Historical Empathy/Perspective Recognition and Narrative Analysis. It discusses selected general findings provided as qualitative data in group and individual assignments. While the responses to questions related to Content Knowledge and Narrative Analysis show that students achieved higher competency levels, the participants showed shortcomings in the rational examination of historical characters, their perspectives and motivations for their actions. Time, practice and guidance can be identified as key factors in developing historical literacy competencies further.

German Colonial Rule in Present-day Namibia

This article traces discursive shifts in the ways in which imperialism and European colonialism have been dealt with in the classroom in relation to the German history textbook Time for History (Zeit für Geschichte), which was published in 2010. It explores how the textbook’s representation of German colonial rule in present-day Namibia both raises awareness of and reproduces common colonialist-racist images of the “other” by demonstrating how its content is negotiated in year-nine history lessons, as observed over the course of an ethnographic study carried out in a German secondary school. The author assesses the complex interplay between discursive practices of negotiation, everyday educational practices and deeply rooted, colonialist-racist images of the “other” and, on the basis of this interplay, analyses how difficult it is to bring about content-based and discursive shifts in the classroom.

Book Reviews

John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country (London: Atlantic Books, 2020).Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener, eds., Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).Daniel Marwecki, Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2020).Robert Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).Joanne Miyang Cho, ed., Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2018).