Deutsches Geschictes Hausaufgaben

Post date: Jul 30, 2020 7:13:44 PM

Day 1: A fresh year and a new approach to reading

Welcome to Madman as Hero. First some housekeeping:

a. Please bring a working laptop or tablet to class every day. If you don't have one, go to the media center and you can sign one out. b. No, I don't use google classroom. Watch this site and check your er9 email daily for updates on deadlines. I plan to send out weekly announcements on Monday mornings.

We begin working on both skills and content with a short reading.

1. Please create a common space for your work. The pandemic has given me the impetus to fulfill my ambition to move to a paperless classroom, so the doc you're creating is where ALL your assignments and my feedback for this unit will go. Please date and title each assignment at the top and leave the most recent work at the top of the document.


1. Google "google drive." Login using your er9 id and password.

2. Click the blue "new" button and then click "google doc."

3. In the new doc, click "untitled document" in the upper left corner and retitle it using this formula:

M1, Your last name, Madman unit 1

e.g. M1, Lightman, Madman unit 1

4. Click the blue "share" button on the upper right corner and give rsmith@er9.org access and editing privileges.

5. All your notes and work for this unit will go into this new doc that you've created, with the most recent work at the top.

Once your doc is created, named, and shared you can move on to the main academic task for the day:

2. Spend 10m reading the directions and models for a first pass of CSI reading. The doc you create should contain all the work you do in this unit. Put the most recent work at the top.

3. Spend the next ten minutes performing a first pass CSI this short reading. In the end you should have an annotated document and three original sentences containing quotes, one for "C," one for "S," and one for "I."

Day 2: Guided lecture - What is the central question of this course and why does it matter?

By 1945, just about everybody who survived the war wanted to make sure no more world wars or genocides would ever happen again.

In order to achieve this ambitious goal, scholars across a broad range of disciplines sought to create an accurate model that would explain why these events happened. If they had a good model, they could make forecasts and craft policies to help make future tragedies less likely or impossible.

The quest to fulfill the promise of "never again" has lead to two competing models of how it all happened: intentionalism and structuralism. Here's what these models are in a nutshell:

Intentionalism = the "men" made the times

Look for: unique events where the choices of individuals had a decisive impact on outcomes, charismatic leaders taking unprecedented actions motivated by original ideas

Structuralism or functionalism = the times made the "men."

Look for: similarities and symmetry between past events and rise of the Nazis, World War II, and the Holocaust, i.e. "Hitlers before Hitler," and evidence of direct or indirect influence, imitation and appropriation.

Answers matter! Answering this question is not merely an academic parlor game played by academics or by trolls, bots, and saboteurs on internet threads. Our ability to be able to spot and prevent genocides depends upon which model best fits the facts. If you don't have an accurate understanding of the disease, you risk taking the wrong medicine.

This opening unit of study will take you through some highlights of German history to help you decide which team you're on.

Day 3. Nazism in a nutshell

The point of the previous lesson was to underscore the importance of finding an accurate model of how history works. If the intentionalist model is correct, we should expect Hitler and the Nazis to be unique, qualitatively different from the history that preceded it. Conversely, if the structuralist model is to be believed, we would expect that the Third Reich would resemble the past and would actively borrow ideas and strategy from previous regimes.

But before we go comparing the Nazis to the history of ancient, medieval, and early modern Germany, we first need to know what Nazism is. Today's lesson will equip you with the basics you need in order to make these comparisons valid.

We all know that the Nazis favored military solutions to problems and that they hated Jews. But there is considerably more that is less well remembered, especially the reasons why they took these positions along with a host of other ideas.

To understand the essence of Nazism, please perform a CSI first pass reading of these two excerpted primary source documents. They distill the ideology and ambitions of Hitler and his regime down to their core beliefs. What did the Nazis believe, why did they believe it, and what did they hope to achieve through war and the Holocaust?

It is crucial to master it so you can compare it to what we will study going forward. Similarities between Nazi thinking and the German past would support which model? And differences would prove what?

Day 4. Ancient Germany

Now that we have a grasp of the Nazi world view, we can explore the ancient, medieval and early modern history of Germany, looking to see if what we find there supports an intentionalist or structuralist view of World War II and the Holocaust.

If we find that Hitler and the Nazis bear little resemblance to their forebears, the intentionalist model would probably be the winner. On the other hand, if we see a lot of similiarities, it would likely support the latter.

Did the Nazis borrow more of their beliefs and tactics from the ancient Germans or the ancient Romans? Please create at least THREE ARGUMENTS prepared in your notes, ready to defend in class.

You have two main sources to gather information as support:

1. the chapter of Terry Jones' Barbarians entitled "The Germans"

2. Here's part of the film series covering the Germans from which Jones' book was inspired, covering Arminius, Trajan's wars against the Dacians, and Alaric. You can source quotes from this video. I recommend watching the whole thing.

You can also use the abc-clio website to get proof...

User Name: joelbarlow

Password: barlow

Day 6: Pogrom of 1096 or the Slaughter of the Rheinland Jews

The page at right is from a Jewish prayer book from Hamburg, El Malé Rahamim (God of Mercy), a hymn memorializing murdered communities. It is an artifact documenting a complex and disturbing episode from the First Crusade is often cited by structurualists as the Holocaust before the Holocaust, but does a CSI reading of all these primary materials support this conclusion? This time, let's try a CSI first AND a second pass reading, looking deeper than we normally do.

Come to class ready to support your position using the text. (That's code for finding quotes that you can use to support either the intentionalist or structuralist model of the Holocaust).

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1096jews-mainz.asp

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1096jews.asp

A video documenting it.

Day 8: Frederick II of Prussia

Does Frederich the Great deserve his moniker or was he the Hitler before Hitler? Consider three issues in your answer. You can use abc-clio too!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_The_Greathttp://www.iht.com/articles/1991/08/15/grea.phpThis article documents how Frederick's legacy was recontextualized by subsequent leaders and regimes, including Hitler & the Nazis:http://ldfb.tripod.com/fred.htmlHere's Frederick's political book, The Anti-Machiavel is a line-by-line refutaiton of Machiavelli's famous work, The Prince. It is a fantastic primary source that is interesting to compare and contrast with Hitler's 25 Point Nazi Program, Mein Kampf, and Zweites Buch. Was Frederick the Hitler before Hitler?http://www.oocities.org/danielmacryan/antimac.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Machiavel

Maybe play his Symphony #1 in G major the background while you read. He could compose music as well as he planned war:

And here's a fantastic 2010 BBC documentary about him by Cambridge Professor, Christopher Clark. We will watch it in class, pausing to discuss evidence for intentionalism & structuralism, so make sure you catch up on what you miss:

Day 9: Napoleon Bonaparte, part 1 - secondary sources

Every year on Bastille Day, the German philosopher Hegel would drink a toast to Napoleon Bonaparte. What would motivate him or any other German to drink to the health of a minor Corsican noble who conquered Germany? What impact did Napoleon have on the German states? We'll discuss the political, economic & cultural ramifications. Would be fair to think of his career as the 19th century prototype for Hitler and World War 2?Want background, for instance how France puts an Italian on the throne after a revolution designed to create democracy? Context is key, so here's a series of fast and short videos that tell the story of the French Revolution in fifteen minutes. Click here, then here, and then here.

BTW, "Holy Roman Empire" is code for hundreds of independent German-speaking states that would become the modern state of Germany in 1871:

Do a CSI first pass of several passages from least two of the following articles, looking for evidence of whether or not Napoleon was a Hitler before Hitler and whether or not the French Empire he reigned over was equivalent to the Nazi state:

Day 10: Napoleon Bonaparte, part 2 - primary sources

Secondary sources are great, but sometimes looking at primary sources will reveal something important we might have missed in the previous assignment.

Here's a GREAT packet of primary sources. In the pacet, please to a CSI first pass reading of the intro essay from pages 144-49 and at least one document that follows it. Be sure to look for important information that was not part of our previous conversation about Napoleon, that might cause us to reconsider whether or not he was a Hitler Before Hitler, thereby either supporting or contradicting a structuralist model of history.