This insightful book explores the history of German education and its impact on the nation's cultural and political life. With a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of the subject, Kohn offers a nuanced and thought-provoking analysis of one of Europe's most fascinating and complex societies. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.

This book explores the total resistance to Nazism among the Catholic Christian voters of the Zentrum party in the elections in German states in the Interwar period. Kolden explains the unique Catholic resistance by comparing the diverging evolutions of Catholic and Protestant cultures and mentalities since the awakening of German nationalism in the late eighteenth century. During the Empire (1871–1918) both socialists and Catholics were regarded as pariah groups by the dominant non-socialist Protestant majority, and more so after the WWI defeat, when the pariah-parties, together with Protestant liberals, tried to accommodate the new democratic circumstances with their Weimar Constitution. When right-wing radicals, and eventually the Nazis, increased their support—largely on behalf of the rapid shrinking number of liberals—the Catholic church leaders showed a stubborn stance against the rightists, issuing several resolutions of condemnation, whereas no such appeared from their Protestant counterparts. In contrast, many local Protestant clergymen agitated for the Nazi party. The anti-Catholic sentiment, obvious among prominent Nazis, enhanced the antagonism, especially after the publication of Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century in 1930. The basic and profound confessional difference appears in the less Christian-profiled agrarian parties: anti-Semitic and right-wing radical Protestant parties confronted by one left-wing and democratic Catholic party. By 1945 the bulk of the former rightist Protestants sided with the Catholics, who reorganized their party to the non-denominational CDU, which has been the mightiest proponent in Europe of the former party’s ambitions of democracy, stability, anti-racism, human rights and European unity.

This title was first published in 2000. This series brings together significant journal articles appearing in the field of comparative politics over the past 30 years. The aim is to render accessible to teachers, researchers and students, an extensive range of essays to provide a basis for understanding the established terrain and new ground. This volume introduces the undergraduate to a significant body of the periodical literature on the subject of national and international security.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, approximately ninety thousand German Jews fled their homeland and settled in the United States, prior to that nation closing its borders to Jewish refugees. And even though many of them wanted little to do with Germany, the circumstances of the Second World War and the postwar era meant that engagement of some kind was unavoidable—whether direct or indirect, initiated within the community itself or by political actors and the broader German public. This book carefully traces these entangled histories on both sides of the Atlantic, demonstrating the remarkable extent to which German Jews and their former fellow citizens helped to shape developments from the Allied war effort to the course of West German democratization.