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SoSe 20: Nazi Germany and the Second World War in Transimperial Perspective

Daniel Hedinger

Hinweise für Studierende

The class will consist of a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning. Prerequisite for an “active and regular participation” will be 1. The reading of the texts provided on blackboard; 2. response papers and forum contributions from your side; 3. working in a reading group which will be organized online. All these contributions can be made in an asynchronous way online, so you can provide them flexible regardless of stable internet connections or time zones. The synchronous part of the seminar will take place via video conference (probable zoom), but will mainly be voluntary. The time slots reserved for such online meetings are the seminar hours (Friday, 12-14). However, we will definitely not hold a 90-minutes online session every week. I would like to clarify details regarding the format and procedure with you in a video conversation during the first seminar session. You will receive an invitation in advance. All of you, who are, for whatever reason, not able to attend, please contact me in advance. Schließen

Kommentar

As the centenary of the First World War approached, the imperial and global contexts of that conflict were stressed in historiography. However, this has never happened in regards to the Second World War: historians have long preferred to write the history of this war as a conflict between nation-states. The price for this has been that imperial, colonial, and non-European dimensions of this war have been overlooked far too often. In contrast to this, one could argue that the Second World War was foremost a struggle fought between empires, fought for the expansion and the survival of empires, and ultimately fought to determine which kind of empire would dominate the world. However, this again opens up some overarching questions when it comes to Nazi Germany that is in the center of this seminar: Was National Socialism an imperial as well as a völkisch movement? Should the expansionist ambitions of the Reich be labeled imperialistic? Did the Nazis, as Hannah Arendt and later Mark Mazower claimed, bring “home the realities of colonialism” to Europe? Finally: How can we place Nazi Germany in a new global history of the Second World War? In this course, we discuss these questions by applying a transimperial perspective to the history of Nazi Germany. Such a perspective stresses the imperial competition, cooperation, and connectivity of the interwar years and the Second World War. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire. Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London 2009. Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire. German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, Cambridge 2011.