German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany - Rilegato

Biess, Frank

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0198714181 ISBN 13: 9780198714187

Casa editrice: OUP Oxford, 2020

Riassunto

German Angst analyses the relationship between fear and democracy in postwar West Germany. While fear and anxiety have historically been associated with authoritarian regimes, Frank Biess demonstrates the ambivalent role of these emotions in a democratizing society: in West Germany, fear and anxiety both undermined democracy and stabilized it. By taking seriously postwar Germans' uncertainties about the future, this study challenges dominant linear and teleological narratives of postwar West German 'success', highlighting the prospective function of memories of war, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. Postwar Germans projected fears and anxieties that they derived from memories of a catastrophic past into the future.

Based on case studies from the 1940s to the present, German Angst provides a new interpretive synthesis of the Federal Republic. It tells the history of the Federal Republic as a series of cyclical crises in which specific fears and anxieties emerged, served a variety of political functions, and then again abated. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary insights generated by the field of emotion studies, Biess's study transcends the dichotomy of 'reason' and 'emotion'. Fear and anxiety were not exclusively irrational and dysfunctional, but served important roles in postwar democracy. These emotions sensitized postwar Germans to the dangers of an authoritarian transformation, and they also served as emotional engines of new social movements, including the environmental and peace movements. German Angst also provides an original analysis of the emotional basis of right-wing populism in Germany today, and it explores the possibilities of a democratic politics of emotion.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Frank Biess is Professor of History at the University of California-San Diego. He started his academic career at the Universities of Marburg and Tübingen in Germany. He earned two M.A. degrees at Washington University in St. Louis, and he received his PhD from Brown University in 2000. He has published extensively on the history of 20th-century Germany, with a focus on the post-1945 period. He is currently working on a set of projects relating to the global history of the interwar Weimar Republic.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: OUP Oxford
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0198714181
• ISBN 13: 9780198714187
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 428
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile