Robert G. Moeller

Robert G. Moeller powerfully conveys the complicated story of how West Germans recast the recent past after the Second World War. He rejects earlier characterizations of a postwar West Germany dominated by attitudes of "forgetting" or silence about the Nazi past. He instead demonstrates the "selective remembering" that took place among West Germans during the postwar years: in particular, they remembered crimes committed against Germans, crimes that—according to some contemporary accounts—were comparable to the crimes of Germans against Jews. Moeller draws on a wide range of U.S. and German government documents, political debates, film archives, letters, oral histories, and newspaper accounts.

The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany

War Stories

Robert Moeller investigates the German peasantry's rejection of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and provides a new interpretation of Catholic peasant conservatism in western Germany. According to Moeller, rural support for conservative political solutions to the troubled Weimar Republic was the result of a series of severe economic jolts that began in 1914 and continued unabated until 1933. During the late nineteenth century, peasant farmers in the Rhineland and Wesphalia adjusted their production to a capitalist market and enjoyed an unprecedented period of prosperity that lasted until the outbreak of World War I. After August 1914 peasant producers confronted state intervention in the agricultural sector, regulation of prices and markets, and the subordination of agrarian interests to the demands of urban consumers. A controlled economy for many agricultural products continued into the postwar period. Focusing on the Catholic peasantry, Moeller shows that peasant rejection of the Weimar Republic was firmly grounded in the immediate circumstances of the war economy and the uneven process of postwar recovery. He challenges the dominant view that rural support for conservative political solutions was primarily the product of the peasantry's hostility toward industrial capitalism and of long-term social and political affinities dating from the nineteenth century. Moeller's findings show that conservative agrarian ideology was carefully formulated in response to the specific peasant grievances that originated in this period of continuing economic and political crisis. Originally published in 1986. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Rhineland and Westphalia

German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914-1924

"Entirely original. . . . All future texts on modern Germany will have to take on board the findings of this major study."--Volker Berghahn, author of Modern Germany

Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany

Protecting Motherhood

"A brilliant analysis of the manner in which postwar Germany forged for itself a new identity on the basis of vivid yet selective memories of the past. Robert Moeller convincingly demonstrates that public preoccupation with the expulsion of Germans from the east and the fate of prisoners of war in the Soviet Union created a sense of German victimhood that facilitated overcoming past crimes by asserting an equivalence of suffering. This is the best analysis by far of the 'negative' elements in the reconstruction of German national identity. The book is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of German politics and culture from the fall of Nazism to the present day."—Omer Bartov, author of Mirrors of Destruction "Required reading for anyone interested in how selective memory shapes national identity, Robert Moeller's War Stories provides a whole new reading of Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past from the fifties through the nineties. . . . This is history as it should be written in the twenty-first century."—Temma Kaplan, author of Taking Back the Streets

Frank Biess

In 1945, Europeans confronted a legacy of mass destruction and death: millions of families had lost their homes and livelihoods; millions of men in uniform had lost their lives; and millions more had been displaced by the war's destruction, and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime. From a range of methodological historical perspectives-military, cultural, and social, to film and gender and sexuality studies-this volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts. With a focus on distinctive national experiences in both Eastern and Western Europe, it illuminates how postwar stabilization coexisted with persistent insecurities, injuries, and trauma.

Robert G. Moeller

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