Finis Germania is a collection of writings about German political culture by the German historian Rolf Peter Sieferle that was published posthumously in 2017. The book was, according to the American writer Christopher Caldwell, by the "German literary establishment unanimously denounced" as "an extremist tract", but it became a bestseller. [1]
Sieferle argues that Germans seem to want their nation to disappear. He asserts that the post-World War II Allied occupation by the Western Allies (Britain, France and the United States) saddled Germany with a false image of Germany as a pre-modern culture fundamentally different from the West. He denies this, writing that although this image may fit Russia, and although other Western nations may find it difficult to face the truth, which is that “If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,” he writes, “then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human ‘progress’ of modernity can go into reverse.” [1] He argues that Germans are saddled with the conviction that German sins are unique and absolute, beyond comparison and beyond redemption, and that this conviction has become a hereditary burden, a self-demonisation that meant Germany felt obliged to accept an unsustainable number of migrants in 2015. [1]
Christopher Caldwell remarks that the wild popularity of Finis Germania is "odd," considering that the book consists of "little more than a collection of notes on various subjects" made in the 1990s, most of which were previously published in a more finished form. [1] Caldwell notes that "Finis Germaniae" is a widely used phrase in German history, that captures a fear or paranoia about national decline. [1]
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Cultural imperialism comprises the cultural dimensions of imperialism. The word "imperialism" describes practices in which a country engages culture to create and maintain unequal social and economic relationships among social groups. Cultural imperialism often uses wealth, media power and violence to implement the system of cultural hegemony that legitimizes imperialism.
Franz Uri Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German polymath, whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work, The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan.
Germania, also called Magna Germania, Germania Libera, or Germanic Barbaricum to distinguish it from the Roman province of the same name, was a historical region in north-central Europe during the Roman era, which was associated by Roman authors with the Germanic peoples. The region stretched roughly from the Middle and Lower Rhine in the west to the Vistula in the east. It also extended as far south as the Upper and Middle Danube and Pannonia, and to the known parts of Scandinavia in the north. Archaeologically, these peoples correspond roughly to the Roman Iron Age of those regions. While apparently dominated by Germanic peoples, Magna Germania was also inhabited by other Indo-European peoples.
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who claimed that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people. He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation was popularized.
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The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture is a 1946 study of Japan by American anthropologist Ruth Benedict compiled from her analyses of Japanese culture during World War II for the U.S. Office of War Information. Her analyses were requested in order to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese during the war by reference to a series of contradictions in traditional culture. The book was influential in shaping American ideas about Japanese culture during the occupation of Japan, and popularized the distinction between guilt cultures and shame cultures.
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Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
Christopher Caldwell is an American journalist, and a former senior editor at neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, as well as a regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate. He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, conservative think tank, and contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books. His writing also frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Press and the assistant managing editor of The American Spectator.
Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, art history examines broader aspects of visual culture, including the various visual and conceptual outcomes related to an ever-evolving definition of art. Art history encompasses the study of objects created by different cultures around the world and throughout history that convey meaning, importance or serve usefulness primarily through visual representations.
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Cambodian genocide denial is the belief expressed by some Western academics that early claims of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge government (1975–1979) in Cambodia were much exaggerated. Many scholars of Cambodia and intellectuals opposed to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War denied or minimized reports of human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge, characterizing contrary reports as "tales told by refugees" and U.S. propaganda. They viewed the assumption of power by the Communist Party of Kampuchea as a positive development for the people of Cambodia who had been severely impacted by the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. On the other side of the argument, anti-communists in the United States and elsewhere saw in the rule of the Khmer Rouge vindication of their belief that the victory of Communist governments in Southeast Asia would lead to a "bloodbath."
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