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This book explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on the world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, the book describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Chapters cover changes in the Summer and Autumn of 1989, including the stepping back of Americans and rise in East German's confidence; the restoration of the rights of the Four Powers, including the night of November 9 and the Portugalov Push; heroic aspirations in 1990, including the emerging controversy over reparations and NATO; security, political and economic solutions; the securing of building permits, including money and NATO reform; and the legacy of 1989 and 1990. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.

In the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. This book asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time? This book presents seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. It considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the “Final Solution”; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature. Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, the book illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

This book examines the influence of the American political experience on the imagination of Italian political thinkers between the late eighteenth century and the unification of Italy in the 1860s. The book shows how Italian political thought was shaped by debates about the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution, but it focuses on the important distinction that while European interest in developments across the Atlantic was keen, this attention was not blind admiration. Rather, America became a sounding board for the critical assessment of societal changes at home. Many Italians did not think the United States had lessons to teach them and often concluded that life across the Atlantic was not just different but in many respects also objectionable. In America, utopia and dystopia seemed to live side by side, and Italian references to the United States were frequently in support of progressive or reactionary causes. Political thinkers including Cesare Balbo, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Antonio Rosmini Serbati used the United States to shed light on the course of their nation's political resurgence. Concepts from Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Giambattista Vico served to evaluate what Italians discovered about America. Ideas about American “domestic manners” were reflected and conveyed through works of ballet, literature, opera, and satire. Transcending boundaries between intellectual and cultural history, this is the first book-length examination of the influence of America's political formation on modern Italian political thought.

When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first president of Turkey in 1923, he set about transforming his country into a secular republic where nationalism sanctified by science would reign supreme as the new religion. This book provides an in-depth look at the intellectual life of the Turkish Republic's founder. It frames him within the historical context of the turbulent age in which he lived, and explores the uneasy transition from the late Ottoman imperial order to the modern Turkish state through his life and ideas. The book takes readers from Atatürk's youth as a Muslim boy in the volatile ethnic cauldron of Macedonia, to his education in nonreligious and military schools, to his embrace of Turkish nationalism and the modernizing Young Turks movement. Who was this figure who sought glory as an ambitious young officer in World War I, defied the victorious Allies intent on partitioning the Turkish heartland, and defeated the last sultan? This book charts Atatürk's intellectual and ideological development at every stage of his life, demonstrating how he was profoundly influenced by the new ideas that were circulating in the sprawling Ottoman realm. It shows how Atatürk drew on a unique mix of scientism, materialism, social Darwinism, positivism, and other theories to fashion a grand utopian framework on which to build his new nation.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion's origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. This book is a sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas. Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism's emergence in Europe and around the world, the book demonstrates how Mennonites' nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, the book shows how patriotic loyalties rose and fell with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German; under Hitler's Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites committed to collective action in ways that were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.

Demonstrating that similarities between Jewish and Christian art in the Middle Ages were more than coincidental, this book combines a wide range of sources to show how Jews and Christians exchanged artistic and material culture. The book focuses on communities in northern Europe, Iberia, and other Mediterranean societies where Jews and Christians coexisted for centuries, and it synthesizes the most current research to describe the daily encounters that enabled both societies to appreciate common artistic values. Detailing the transmission of cultural sensibilities in the medieval money market and the world of Jewish money lenders, the book examines objects pawned by peasants and humble citizens, sacred relics exchanged by the clergy as security for loans, and aesthetic goods given up by the Christian well-to-do who required financial assistance. The work also explores frescoes and decorations likely painted by non-Jews in medieval and early modern Jewish homes located in Germanic lands, and the ways in which Jews hired Christian artists and craftsmen to decorate Hebrew prayer books and create liturgical objects. Conversely, Christians frequently hired Jewish craftsmen to produce liturgical objects used in Christian churches. With rich archival documentation, the book sheds light on the social and economic history of the creation of Jewish and Christian art, and expands the general understanding of cultural exchange in brand-new ways.

In this book, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment provides a bracing and clarifying new interpretation of this watershed period. Arguing that philosophical and historical interpretations of the era have long been hopelessly confused, the author makes the case that it is only by separating these views and taking an approach grounded in social and cultural history that we can begin to grasp what the Enlightenment was—and why it is still relevant today. The book explains why the Enlightenment was a profound and wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped Western identity, reformed politics through the invention of human rights, and redefined knowledge by creating a critical culture. These new ways of thinking gave birth to new values that spread throughout society and changed how everyday life was lived and understood. Featuring an illuminating afterword describing how the author's argument challenges the work of Anglophone interpreters including Jonathan Israel, the book provides a fascinating reevaluation of the true nature and legacy of one of the most important and contested periods in Western history.

There are over 1,000 McDonald's on French soil. Two Disney theme parks have opened near Paris in the last two decades. And American-inspired vocabulary such as “le weekend” has been absorbed into the French language. But as former French president Jacques Chirac put it: “The U.S. finds France unbearably pretentious. And we find the U.S. unbearably hegemonic.” Are the French fascinated or threatened by America? They Americanize yet are notorious for expressions of anti-Americanism. From McDonald's and Coca-Cola to free markets and foreign policy, this book looks closely at the conflicts and contradictions of France's relationship to American politics and culture. The book shows how the French have used America as both yardstick and foil to measure their own distinct national identity. France has charted its own path: it has welcomed America's products but rejected American policies; assailed Americ's “jungle capitalism” while liberalizing its own economy; attacked “Reaganomics” while defending French social security; and protected French cinema, television, food, and language even while ingesting American pop culture. The book examines France's role as an independent ally of the United States, but he also considers the country's failures in influencing the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Whether investigating France's successful information technology sector or its spurning of American expertise during the AIDS epidemic, the book asks if this insistence on a French way represents a growing distance between Europe and the United States or a reaction to American globalization. Exploring cultural trends, values, public opinion, and political reality, this book delves into the complex relationship between two modern nations.

Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) is perhaps best known today as a novelist, literary critic, and outspoken and independent thinker. Yet she was also a prominent figure in politics during the French Revolution. This book sheds new light on this often overlooked aspect of Staël's life and work, bringing vividly to life her unique experience as a political actor in a world where women had no place. The banker's daughter who became one of Europe's best-connected intellectuals, Staël was an exceptionally talented woman who achieved a degree of public influence to which not even her wealth and privilege would normally have entitled her. During the Revolution, when the lives of so many around her were destroyed, she succeeded in carving out a unique path for herself and making her views heard, first by the powerful men around her, later by the European public at large. The book provides the first in-depth look at her substantial output of writings on the theory and practice of the exercise of power, setting in sharp relief the dimension of Staël's life that she cared most about—politics. She was fascinated by the nature of public opinion, and believed that viable political regimes were founded on public trust and popular consensus. The book shows how Staël's ideas were shaped by the remarkable times in which she lived, and argues that it is only through a consideration of her political insights that we can fully understand Staël's legacy and its enduring relevance for us today.

William Hardy McNeill is known for his ability to portray the grand sweep of history. This book is a classic work for understanding the grand sweep of world history in brief compass. Now with a new foreword, the book brings together two of McNeill's popular short books and an essay. The Human Condition provides a provocative interpretation of history as a competition of parasites, both biological and human. McNeill discusses shifting patterns of microparasitism and macroparasitism and how they affected and continue to affect human history. McNeill uses the term “macroparasites” in a metaphorical sense to refer to the subsets of the human race that included rulers and bureaucrats, and, at times, military men. Macroparasitism can thus be defined as exploitative relations among groups and classes of human beings. The Great Frontier questions the notion of “frontier freedom” through an examination of European expansion. Formulated in the late 1880s, Turner's argument postulated a connection between the wide open spaces of the American frontier and the democratic culture and rugged individualism of American society. The concluding essay speculates on the role of catastrophe in our lives. McNeill discusses catastrophes as a recurrent phenomenon in human history and one that can never be banished from human experience.

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. The book begins with an exploration of the discourse of race—from the nineteenth-century belief that “race is everything” to the more recent argument that there are no races. It focuses on how English observers constructed the “native” and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity—in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. The book pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

This book is the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jewish involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The book shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. The book demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs. Spanning Europe, North America, and the Middle East, the book discusses the myths and realities of Jewish draft dodging, how Jews reacted to facing their coreligionists in battle, the careers of Jewish officers and their reception in the Jewish community, the effects of World War I on Jewish veterans, and Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The book culminates with a study of Israel's War of Independence as a Jewish world war, which drew on the military expertise and financial support of a mobilized, global Jewish community. The book considers how military service was a central issue in debates about Jewish emancipation and a primary indicator of the position of Jews in any given society. Deconstructing old stereotypes, the book radically transforms our understanding of Jews' historic relationship to war and military power.

This book examines the scripting and performance of festivals in Spain between 1327 and 1620, offering an unprecedented look at the different types of festivals that were held in Iberia during this crucial period of European history. Bridging the gap between the medieval and early modern eras, the book focuses on the travels and festivities of Philip II, exploring the complex relationship between power and ceremony, and offering a vibrant portrait of Spain's cultural and political life. The book covers a range of festival categories and probes the ritual meanings of these events, paying special attention to the use of colors and symbols, and to the power relations articulated through these festive displays. It argues that the fluid and at times subversive character of medieval festivals gave way to highly formalized and hierarchical events reflecting a broader shift in how power was articulated in late medieval and early modern Spain. Yet the book contends that these festivals, while they sought to buttress authority and instruct different social orders about hierarchies of power, also served as sites of contestation, dialogue, and resistance. The book sheds new light on Iberian festive traditions and their unique role in the centralizing state in early modern Castile.

The history of Krupp is the history of modern Germany. No company symbolized the best and worst of that history more than the famous steel and arms maker. This book tells the story of the Krupp family and its industrial empire between the early nineteenth century and the present, and analyzes its transition from a family business to one owned by a nonprofit foundation. Krupp founded a small steel mill in 1811, which established the basis for one of the largest and most important companies in the world by the end of the century. Famously loyal to its highly paid workers, it rejected an exclusive focus on profit, but the company also played a central role in the armament of Nazi Germany and the firm's head was convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg. Yet after the war Krupp managed to rebuild itself and become a symbol of Germany once again—this time open, economically successful, and socially responsible. This book presents a balanced account, showing that the owners felt ambivalent about the company's military connection even while becoming more and more entangled in Germany's aggressive politics during the imperial era and the Third Reich. By placing the story of Krupp and its owners in a wide context, this book also provides new insights into the political, social, and economic history of modern Germany.

Originally published in 1975, this book remains a landmark of historical and political thought. The book looks at the consequences for modern historical and social consciousness arising from the ideal of the classical republic revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. It shows that Machiavelli’s prime emphasis was on the moment in which the republic confronts the problem of its own instability in time, which the book calls the “Machiavellian moment.” After examining this problem in the works of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti, the book turns to the revival of republican ideology in Puritan England and in Revolutionary and Federalist America. It argues that the American Revolution can be considered the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance and it relates the origins of modern historicism to the clash between civic, Christian, and commercial values in eighteenth-century thought.

This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. The book shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization. It examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. The book takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. It reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history—as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens. The book traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim–Jewish polarization.

Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, this book examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence. Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, the author presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. The book compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. The book demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before World War II, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance. Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, the book sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.

In 1949, Romania's fledgling communist regime unleashed a radical and brutal campaign to collectivize agriculture in this largely agrarian country, following the Soviet model. This book provides the first comprehensive look at the far-reaching social engineering process that ensued. The book examines how collectivization assaulted the very foundations of rural life, transforming village communities that were organized around kinship and status hierarchies into segments of large bureaucratic organizations, forged by the language of “class warfare” yet saturated with vindictive personal struggles. Collectivization not only overturned property relations, the book argues, but was crucial in creating the Party-state that emerged, its mechanisms of rule, and the “new persons” that were its subjects. The book explores how ill-prepared cadres, themselves unconvinced of collectivization's promises, implemented technologies and pedagogies imported from the Soviet Union through actions that contributed to the excessive use of force, which Party leaders were often unable to control. In addition, the book shows how local responses to the Party's initiatives compelled the regime to modify its plans and negotiate outcomes. Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic data, the book sheds new light on collectivization in the Soviet era and on the complex tensions underlying and constraining political authority.

This book is a collection of the World War II letters of Dr. Konrad Jarausch, a German high-school teacher of religion and history who served in a reserve battalion of Adolf Hitler's army in Poland and Russia, where he died of typhoid in 1942. He wrote most of these letters to his wife, Elisabeth. His son, the author of this book, brings them together here to tell the gripping story of a patriotic soldier of the Third Reich who, through witnessing its atrocities in the East, began to doubt the war's moral legitimacy. The letters grow increasingly critical, and their vivid descriptions of the mass deaths of Russian prisoners of war are chilling. They reveal the inner conflicts of ordinary Germans who became reluctant accomplices in Hitler's merciless war of annihilation, yet sometimes managed to discover a shared humanity with its suffering victims, a bond that could transcend race, nationalism, and the enmity of war. The book is also the powerful story of the son, who for decades refused to come to grips with these letters because he abhorred his father's nationalist politics. Only now, late in his life, is he able to cope with their contents—and he is by no means alone. The book provides rare insight into the so-called children of the war, an entire generation of postwar Germans who grew up resenting their past, but who today must finally face the painful legacy of their parents' complicity in National Socialism.

With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than 600,000 inhabitants—almost all of them ethnic Germans—were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of pre-war Poland. This book examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of forced migration in twentieth-century Europe through the experiences of Wroclaw's Polish inhabitants. The book tells the story of how the city's new Polish settlers found themselves in a place that was not only unfamiliar to them but outright repellent given Wroclaw's Prussian-German appearance and the enormous scope of wartime destruction. The immediate consequences were an unstable society, an extremely high crime rate, rapid dilapidation of the building stock, and economic stagnation. This changed only after the city's authorities and a new intellectual elite provided Wroclaw with a Polish founding myth and reshaped the city's appearance to fit the postwar legend that it was an age-old Polish city. The book also shows how the end of the Cold War and Poland's democratization triggered a public debate about Wroclaw's “amputated memory.” Rediscovering the German past, Wroclaw's Poles reinvented their city for the second time since World War II. The book traces the complex historical process by which Wroclaw's new inhabitants revitalized their city and made it their own.