1. German History HI136 Week 5 Culture/Ethnic Minorities

2. Woman in Front of a Hat Shop (c. 1914)
Cultural Change
Heinrich Mann ( ), Professor Unrat (1905), Der Untertan (1918).
Freie Volksbühne (free people’s theatre) – established 1889 and staged plays with a social message such as Gerhard Hauptmann’s Die Weber.
Scientific Discoveries
X-rays (1895)
Radioactivity (1896)
The electron (1897)
Quantum theory (1900)
Special theory of relativity (1905)
Munich Secession (1892).
Berlin Secession (1898).
Die Brücke (1905)
Der Blaue Reiter ( )
August Macke,
Woman in Front of a Hat Shop (c. 1914)

3. Käthe Kollwitz, The Downtrodden (1900)
National Museum of Women in the Arts

4. German excavations in Egypt (1911-14)
The bust of Nefertiti
James Simon sr.

5. Sexuality
The Kaiser’s favourite: Prince Phillip zu Eulenburg ( )
The sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld ( )

6. Mass Culture/Entertainment
Front covers of Pan, Jugend and Simplicissimus

8. Lebensreform

9. Reformed clothing

10. Alfred Messel’s departmental store Wertheim

11. Treatment of ethnic minorities
Poles (Westprussia and Posen, Western Germany: Ruhr). At first assimilation, resentmens from the local population, national turn after the Germanizing laws; Poles Catholic
Expropriation law 1908; new law defining citizenship as ethnically German (1913)
Danes: smaller numbers, deportations of those deemed “anti-German” to Denmark after 1900
Alsace-Lorraine: “milder” praxeological approach, special territory in the German Empire, escalation after Zabern
Jews
School laws and Germanization
Mentality defining ethnic minorities as “enemies of the Empire” (Reichsfeinde)

12. Jews in Imperial Germany
Complicated and ambivalent story
Over 500,000, increasingly urban group, but their percentage in population decreasing
Middle class, socially mobile, successful group  envy of others
Antisemitism: for the poor: symptom of fear of modernity; nobility: continuity and one of codes of belonging
New, racial antisemitism (Marr, Treitschke)
Reformed Judaism, assimilation, low conversions, rising intermarriage
Jews the keenest Germans? (soldiers, colonizers, voters)
Anti-Jewish violence and accusations of ritual murder at Xanten (1891-2) and Konitz ( )
Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (1893)

13. Berlin furrier Philipp Manes reminiscences in Theresienstadt about his youth (1888)
As If It Were Life, ed. Klaus Leist and Ben Barkow (2010)