Instead, it's based on logic, rigor, and tenacity, qualities that make negotiations challenging but potentially rewarding encounters. "Negotiations with Germans can be difficult," notes Smyser, "but careful preparation and informed understanding can produce good results, especially if one knows the kinds of mistakes to avoid."".

With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.

By looking at state-sponsored memory projects, such as memorials, commemorations, and historical museums, this book reveals that the East German communist regime obsessively monitored and attempted to control public representations of the past to legitimize its rule. It demonstrates that the regime’s approach to memory politics was not stagnant, but rather evolved over time to meet different demands and potential threats to its legitimacy. Ultimately the party found it increasingly difficult to control the public portrayal of the past, and some dissidents were able to turn the party’s memory politics against the state to challenge its claims of moral authority.

"Combining medical, religious, economic, municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of understanding to a fascinating but complex subject."--BOOK JACKET.

'No other book that I am aware of places the German industrial relations system in the broader industrial and political context in an effort to understand the role of the industrial relations system in contributing to a nation's economic success and how that role is being affected by economic and political change.'—James P. Begin, Rutgers University The reunification of Germany in 1990 juxtaposed two very different models of industrial relations. This volume assesses the results. By the late 1980s, West Germany had developed and refined a largely collaborative relationship between business and labor, codified in law, that governed industrial relations effectively. How would East German workers, operating within a completely different system for forty years, respond to West Germany's institutional social partnership? Would western-style social partnership spread to all of the New Germany, or find itself seriously destabilized? The internationally recognized scholars who contribute to this volume are unanimous in their admiration of key elements in the German model. They diverge, however, on their assessments of the resilience of that model in the face of dramatic new challenges in the 1990s.

Immigration is even more hotly debated in Europe than in the United States. In this pivotal work of action and discourse analysis, Riva Kastoryano draws on extensive fieldwork--including interviews with politicians, immigrant leaders, and militants--to analyze interactions between states and immigrants in France and Germany. Making frequent comparisons to the United States, she delineates the role of states in constructing group identities and measures the impact of immigrant organization and mobilization on national identity. Kastoryano argues that states contribute directly and indirectly to the elaboration of immigrants' identity, in part by articulating the grounds on which their groups are granted legitimacy. Conversely, immigrant organizations demanding recognition often redefine national identity by reinforcing or modifying traditional sentiments. They use culture--national references in Germany and religion in France--to negotiate new political identities in ways that alter state composition and lead the state to negotiate its identity as well. Despite their different histories, Kastoryano finds that Germany, France, and the United States are converging in their policies toward immigration control and integration. All three have adopted similar tactics and made similar institutional adjustments in their efforts to reconcile differences while tending national integrity. The author builds her observations into a model of ''negotiations of identities'' useful to a broad cross-section of social scientists and policy specialists. She extends her analysis to consider how the European Union and transnational networks affect identities still negotiated at the national level. The result is a forward-thinking book that illuminates immigration from a new angle.