Books in the Social History, Popular Culture and Politics in Germany series

Highlights the contradictory and competing impulses that ran through the project to democratize postwar society and casts a critical eye toward the internal biases that shaped the model of Western democracy. In so doing, contributions probe critical questions that we continue to grapple with today.

The common understanding is that honour belongs to a bygone era, whereas civil society belongs to the future and modern society. Heikki Lempa argues that honour was not gone or even in decline between 1700 and 1914, and that civil society was not new but had long roots that stretched into the Middle Ages.

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy.

Reveals the relationship between the rise of political violence in West Germany to the unprecedented growth of consumption

Analysing literary texts and films, White Rebels in Black shows how German authors have since the 1950s appropriated black popular culture, particularly music, to distance themselves from the legacy of Nazi Germany, authoritarianism, and racism, and how such appropriation changes over time.