Paul Betts

Civilizing Europe after World War II

Ruin and Renewal

From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.

A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design

The Authority of Everyday Objects

James Mark

Professor of Modern European History James Mark

Professor of Modern European History Paul Betts

The first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and the decolonising world ranging from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century. At its core is the post-1945 period, when socialism's importance as a globalising force accelerated and drew together what contemporaries called the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds'.

The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation

Socialism Goes Global

Greg Eghigian

The turn of the millennium has stimulated much scholarly reflection on the historical significance of the twentieth century as a whole. Explaining the century’s dual legacy of progress and prosperity on one hand, and of world war, genocide, and mass destruction on the other, has become a key task for academics and policymakers alike. Not surprisingly, Germany holds a prominent position in the discussion. What does it mean for a society to be so closely identified with both inflicting and withstanding enormous suffering, as well as with promoting and enjoying unprecedented affluence? What did Germany’s experiences of misery and abundance, fear and security, destruction and reconstruction, trauma and rehabilitation have to do with one another? How has Germany been imagined and experienced as a country uniquely stamped by pain and prosperity? The contributors to this book engage these questions by reconsidering Germany’s recent past according to the themes of pain and prosperity, focusing on such topics as welfare policy, urban history, childbirth, medicine, racism, political ideology, consumerism, and nostalgia.

Reconsidering Twentieth-century German History

Pain and Prosperity

Christian Wiese

This volume provides an in-depth discussion of Saul Friedlander's landmark two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. It brings together a range of internationally acclaimed historians to address the manifold conceptual and historiographical issues raised in Friedlander's monumental work. It includes a major essay by Friedlander himself on the challenges of producing an integrated history of the Holocaust. The aim of this book is not simply to evaluate Friedlander's work on its own merits, but rather to use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. The central concern is to situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as to explore the ways in which his book opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Shoah in particular and twentieth century genocide in general.

Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies

Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination

Stephen A. Smith

Religion and science were fundamental aspects of Eastern European communist political culture from the very beginning, and remained in uneasy tension across the region over the decades. While both topics have long attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, they almost invariably have been studied discretely as separate stories. Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe is the first scholarly effort to explore the delicate interface of religion, science and communism in Cold War Europe. It brings together an international team of researchers who address this relationship from a number of national viewpoints and thematic perspectives, ranging from mysticism to social science, space exploration to the socialist lifecycle, and architectural heritage to pop culture.

Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe

Alon Confino

Dirk Schumann

Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to its pre-eminent place in 20th-century history, and Germany, predictably, occupies a special place in these inquiries. This collection of essays explores how German mourning changed over the 20th century in different contexts, with a particular view to how death was linked to larger issues of social order and cultural self-understanding. It contributes to a history of death in 20th-century Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich.

The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany

Between Mass Death and Individual Loss

Civilising Europe After the Second World War

Jennifer Evans

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

Photography and Twentieth-Century German History

The Ethics of Seeing

A history of private life in the German Democratic Republic, showing how the private sphere assumed central importance in the GDR from the very outset, and revealing the myriad ways in which privacy was expressed, staged and defended by citizens living in a communist society.

Private Life in the German Democratic Republic

Within Walls

From an award-winning historian, a panoramic account of Europe after the depravity of World War II. In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Some fifty million people were dead, and millions more languished in physical and moral disarray. The devastation of World War II was unprecedented in character as well as in scale. Unlike the First World War, the second blurred the line between soldier and civilian, inflicting untold horrors on people from all walks of life. A continent that had previously considered itself the very measure of civilization for the world had turned into its barbaric opposite. Reconstruction, then, was a matter of turning Europe's "civilizing mission" inward. In this magisterial work, Oxford historian Paul Betts describes how this effort found expression in humanitarian relief work, the prosecution of war crimes against humanity, a resurgent Catholic Church, peace campaigns, expanded welfare policies, renewed global engagement and numerous efforts to salvage damaged cultural traditions. Authoritative and sweeping, Ruin and Renewal is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand how Europe was transformed after the destruction of World War II.

Civilizing Europe After World War II

In 1945, Europe lay in ruins - its cities and towns destroyed by conflict, its economies crippled, its societies ripped apart by war and violence. In the years that followed, Europeans tried to make sense of what had happened - and to forge a new understanding of civilisation that would bring peace and progress to a broken continent. As they wrestled with questions great and small - from the legacy of colonialism to workplace etiquette - institutions and shared ideals emerged which still shape our world today. Drawing on original sources as well as individual stories and voices, this is a gripping and authoritative account of how Europe rebuilt itself - and what we, in the twenty-first century, could lose again.

"Paul Betts first came to my attention through his pioneering article on the post-1945 Bauhaus myth as a joint German-American venture. This book is a landmark study of cultural continuities and ruptures, institutional realignments, and individual careers that introduces a breath of fresh air into a field of research long staled by received ideas. It demonstrates the rewards of approaching the years from 1933 to 1945 as a revealing window onto the subsequent history of West Germany."—Wolfgang Schivelbusch "The Authority of Everyday Objects is a small gem of the new cultural history. This is a work of striking originality and insight that fits the development of industrial design in postwar Germany into the country's broader social, cultural and political history, constructing an analytical narrative that carries from the Third Reich into the Cold War. It illuminates not merely cultural transformation but the wider social history of twentieth-century Germany."—Stanley G. Payne, author of A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 "The Authority of Everyday Objects is a refreshing, innovative, and convincing approach to post-World War II Western consumer society. Design—as a weapon in Cold War competition and as a vehicle for German redemption by revitalizing Bauhaus traditions—is thoroughly researched and wonderfully presented in Paul Betts' book. This well-illustrated work convinces the reader that design was a part of gluecklich Leben ("lucky life") and schoen wohnen ("beautiful living"), and a factor in the politicization of material culture."—Ivan T. Berend, author of Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II and History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century

"This volume explores the tension between mass death and individual loss by linking long-term patterns of mourning, burial, and grief with the short-term cataclysmic violence unleashed by two world wars. How various "cultures of death" shaped the broader historical relationship between the living and the dead in modern Germany is the main concern of this book. It contributes to a history of death in Germany that does not begin and end with the Third Reich."--BOOK JACKET.

Paul Betts

Books

Your next favorite book is out there