Awards
- Winner of Winner of the Norris & Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.
Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Frank Biess (Professor of History, Professor of History, University of California, San Diego)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.40cm
, Height: 3.10cm
, Length: 24.00cm
Weight: 0.816kg
ISBN: 9780198714187
ISBN 10: 0198714181
Pages: 428
Publication Date: 10 September 2020
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
It is the kind of book with which historians can teach, offering students a bold, new interpretive framework for understanding postwar German history and the potency of political emotions. * Christian Bailey, Journal of Modern History * It is the kind of book with which historians can teach, offering students a bold, new interpretive framework for understanding postwar German history and the potency of political emotions. * Christian Bailey, Journal of Modern History *
It is the kind of book with which historians can teach, offering students a bold, new interpretive framework for understanding postwar German history and the potency of political emotions. * Christian Bailey, Journal of Modern History *
Author Information
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.
