Master of Arts, Miami University, 2018, History

This thesis considers the origins of the embourgeoisement of the mid-nineteenth-century German aristocracy through the lens of the summer 1855 travel diary of twenty-year-old Landedelfraulein (country noble maiden) Marie von Bonin, the oldest daughter of Maria Keller and landowner and politician Gustav von Bonin. Scholars of German history have often contended that the influence of middle-class values on German nobles originated with print culture and socio-political movements. While this thesis neither contradicts, nor focuses on these claims, it examines the ways that the lived experiences of everyday people also gave birth to middle-class values. Focusing on the themes of Heimat (home), travel and education, and romantic courtship, this thesis concludes that Marie's bourgeois views were not revolutionary; rather, they exemplified the influence of middle-class values on the mid-nineteenth century German aristocracy.

Committee: Erik Jensen PhD (Advisor); Steven Conn PhD (Committee Member); Nicole Thesz PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education History; European History; Families and Family Life; Foreign Language; Gender; Gender Studies; Germanic Literature; History; Language; Literature; Modern History; Modern Language; Modern Literature; Pedagogy

BA, Oberlin College, 2016, History

In 1960, during a resurgence of anti-Semitism, the Munich government initiated a program to invite Jewish former residents of Munich (who left during the 1930s and early 1940s due to the Nazis) back to their hometown for two-week visits. This program offered the participants a chance to reminisce about their childhoods, reconnect with their heritage, and visit their former communities. For the government, this program provided a crucial connection between the old prewar Munich and the new Munich of the 1960s, between Munich as the birthplace of National Socialism and Munich as a newly rebuilt city, ready to move forward from the Holocaust. This thesis relies primarily on correspondence between program participants and the Munich government from the Munich City Archive, oral interviews with individuals involved with the program, and secondary sources about postwar Munich and historical memory.

Committee: Annemarie Sammartino (Advisor) Subjects: European History; European Studies; Foreign Language; Germanic Literature; History; Holocaust Studies; Judaic Studies; Language; Modern History; Modern Language; Religion; Religious History

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

While the Afro-/Black German population in the Federal Republic of Germany continues to seek national recognition, the volume and diversity of their cultural output has begun to receive its own international attention. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study that assesses the multiplicity of the discursive constructions and performances of the imagined, yet real concept of Heimat in Black German cultural productions. These productions introduce a decolonization of the culturally and politically laden, as well as hegemonically and heteronormatively conceived, exclusionary space of (German) Heimat. In studying these re-imaginings and reconfigurations and the performative acts that constitute them in select Black German political and aesthetic works, I contend that Heimat is not only performed in resistance to a singularly imagined German origin and space of whiteness, but is also revealed to be a more vital construct than other forms of imagined communities. Black Germans, while rooted by their German cultural inheritance, simultaneously traverse the borders of the bounded German nation and interact on a global scale in the realm/s of the transnational Black diaspora. Heimat encompasses elements of both of these imagined communities; yet, it still can be distinguished from them. Persisting through contradictions, the plural Heimat/en of Black Germans become geographically situated, but also internalized (non-)spaces/places that are simultaneously individual and collective (corporeal in both senses of the `body'), voluntary and involuntary, inclusive and exclusive, local, national, and transnational, and dangerous and safe.

Committee: Tanja Nusser Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Tina Marie Campt Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jana Braziel Ph.D. (Committee Member); Katharina Gerstenberger Ph.D. (Committee Member); Harold Herzog Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

This thesis analyzes the use of film in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as extensions of propaganda and sociopolitical indoctrination within both regimes. Moreover, this thesis analyzes the ways in which each respective nation's concept of homeland ('Heimat' in German, 'Rodina' in Russian) coincided with political thought. Through this, both regimes utilized cinema as a platform for propagating ideas of homeland via the portrayal of the perfect citizen of their regime. This study demonstrates this through the analysis of Nazi German and Soviet Russian films of similar content, themes, and production dates. This study thus argues that a homeland, as demonstrated through select films produced by each regime between the years of 1933-1945, is comprised of its people, whom each State attempted to mold into perfect citizens. Although ideas of what defined the perfect citizen varied between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, many similarities between them are to be drawn. Dissecting these similarities allows for greater academic understanding of the atrocities and events that occurred throughout the twentieth century in the name of both schools of thought.

Committee: Valerie Weinstein Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Sunnie Rucker-Chang Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: European Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Germanic Languages and Literatures

This dissertation explores manifestations of the topos Heimat in East German novels and films of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, it identifies Heimat as a cultural-anthropological concept taking shape as an individual and social human endeavor, and explores the tensions, that arise between this endeavor and a socialist Heimat as defined by the GDR state. I propose that these tensions were never fully resolved, although it was a core ideal of the socialist society to harmonize them. Analyses of novels by Hans Marchwitza, Anna Seghers, Karl Heinz Jakobs, and Werner Braunig, and feature films and documentary films by Kurt Maetzig, Konrad Wolf, and Winfried Junge reveal different approaches to the understanding of Heimat, as well as conceptions of how to resolve the tensions described above. Their conclusions range from equating Heimat with a societal form, to acknowledging and wrestling with an increasing gap between the individual's grasp of Heimat and that of the state, and to mourning this gap. By employing Heimat as a discursive medium, this dissertation adds a new dimension to the ongoing discussion about the development of real socialism and its discontents in the GDR. It ultimately proposes that their reconciliation remained an utopian promise.

Committee: Helen Fehervary (Advisor) Subjects: Germanic Literature; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2010, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

This dissertation explores the religious voices of three German-Jewish women. The trauma of exile caused by the Holocaust for Else Lasker-Schuler and Nelly Sachs, as well as the trauma of migration for Barbara Honigmann during the Cold War, changed their religious voices to become stronger. Their works bear testimony to the struggle of reconciling their assimilated German-Christian and German-Jewish heritages. Each of the authors' works have been researched in regards to their religious voices, however, in spite of many commonalties between the three female exiles, no attempt at contrasting the changes of their religious voices with each other have been made so far. I approached each of my three chapters by first researching the authors' familial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Since this dissertation covers 106 years of German-Jewish publications, there are some main differences in the historical, personal, and professional development of each writer. After having established an understanding of their lives and religious backgrounds, I investigated selected works, starting with the first published work of each author and ending with the last. My research reveals that living in exile changed the religious voices of all three German-Jewish authors. With the losses of their geographical Heimat, the losses of family members and friends, they indeed lost part of their German cultural identities. Nonetheless, the predicament goes deeper. The exiled authors rejected their German identities or they were rejected because of their assimilated German cultural heritage. They were not able to replace this part of their lives, unless they concentrated on their Jewish identities and built their lives around it. All three authors set out on journeys to discover Judaism right before or soon after their moves into exile. This dissertation concludes that Lasker-Schuer's and Nelly Sachs's religious voices became quieter in their last works. Their religious voices changed back (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Harold Herzog PhD (Committee Chair); Richard Schade PhD (Committee Member); Sara Friedrichsmeyer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: German literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2011, History

In the decades around 1900, Wilhelmine Germany embarked on a quest for world power status. This endeavor included the acquisition of overseas colonies and a naval arms race with Great Britain, but it also encompassed a broader effort to achieve global presence and economic might through a rapidly expanding merchant fleet. Accordingly, many Germans began to view the maritime community as an extension of the nation and its empire on and over the seas. This study argues that, between the advent of German expansion in 1884 and the outbreak of world war in 1914, a variety of German groups reconceived merchant mariners as emblems of the nation at home, on the oceans, and overseas. Consequently, state authorities, liberal intellectuals, social reform organizations, Protestants, and nautical professionals deployed middle-class constructions of masculinity in their attempts to reform civilian sailors' portside leisure and shipboard labor for the nation. A broader “crisis of masculinity” around 1900 informed this focus on mariners' bodies, sexualities, comportment, and character. Reform groups portrayed their efforts to mold model seamen as essential to the success of German overseas expansion and Weltpolitik. They created highly-gendered programs designed to channel mariners' transnational mobility into steady flows of national power, capital, and culture around the world. This investigation situates its analysis primary and secondary literature in a transnational framework. It follows merchant mariners on a journey across the Atlantic, where most German shipping was engaged, focusing on the ports of Hamburg, Bremen, New York, and Buenos Aires. This structure allows me to consider the tensions between sailors' urban leisure practices, both at home and overseas, and reformers' attempts to anchor these men in marriage, family, Volk, and Heimat. It also allows me to consider how masculinity and Weltpolitik shaped conflicts between traditional notions of skill, training, and co (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Alan Beyerchen (Committee Co-Chair); Dr. Robin Judd (Committee Co-Chair); Dr. Donna Guy (Committee Member); Dr. Birgitte Soland (Committee Member) Subjects: European History; Gender Studies; Modern History