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Decentering Modern German History à l'américaine: A Look at the French Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2018

Sandrine Kott*
Affiliation:
University of Geneva

Extract

Every good humanities journal emerges from and is produced by a specific scientific community that shapes its content and its style. Central European History (CEH) is no exception. For me, i.e., a French historian of Germany teaching at a Swiss university in Geneva, CEH is the journal to read in order to follow the more recent and innovative English-language scholarship on the history of Germany and German-speaking countries. Most of the articles published in the journal are written by historians based in the United States or in the United Kingdom (and its dominions), and most of the books that are reviewed originate from the same community, with the notable exception of ones by German authors.

Type
Part II: Reflections, Reckonings, Revelations
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2018 

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References

1 See, e.g., Defrance, Corine and Pfeil, Ulrich, eds., Le traité de l’Élysée et les relations franco-allemandes, 1945-1963-2003 (Paris: CNRS éd, 2005)Google Scholar; Berger, Françoise, La France, l'Allemagne et l'acier (1932–1952): de la stratégie des cartels à l'élaboration de la CECA (Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 2001)Google Scholar; Schirmann, Sylvain and Poidevin, Raymond, Les relations économiques et financières franco-allemandes, 1932–1939 (Vincennes: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, 2013)Google Scholar ; Defrance, Corine, L’ influence française sur la rive gauche du Rhin: fondements politiques de l'action culturelle de la France en Allemagne, 1945–1955 (Atelier national de reproduction des thèses, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 Thomas, Albert, Le Syndicalisme allemand, résumé historique (1848–1903) (Paris: G. Bellais, 1903)Google Scholar.

3 Droz, Jacques, Le Libéralisme rhénan 1815–1848, contribution à l'histoire du libéralisme allemand, ed. de Paris, Université (Paris: F. Sorlot, 1940)Google Scholar.

4 Rovan, Joseph, France-Allemagne: deux nations, un avenir (Paris: Julliard, 1988)Google Scholar.

5 This includes Etienne François at the Free University in Berlin, Thomas Serrier at the Viadrina University in Frankfurt/Oder, and Bénédicte Savoy at the Technical University in Berlin.

6 Étienne, François, “Le manuel franco-allemand d'histoire. Une entreprise inédite,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 2, no. 94 (2007) : 7386Google Scholar. For the “Deutsch-französiche Geschichte,” see https://www.dhi-paris.fr/fr/publications/deutsch-franzoesische-geschichte.html.

7 See Krapoth, Stephanie, France—Allemagne: représentations réciproques (1918–1965). Manuels scolaires et journaux satiriques (Saarbrücken: Editions universitaires européennes, 2010)Google Scholar ; Julien, Élise, Paris, Berlin: la mémoire de la guerre, 1914–1933 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009)Google Scholar ; Espagne, Michel, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999)Google Scholar.

8 Savoy, Bénédicte, Patrimoine annexé: les biens culturels saisis par la France en Allemagne autour de 1800 (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Arnaud, Patrice, Les STO: histoire des Français requis en Allemagne nazie, 1942–1945 (Paris: CNRS éd, 2014)Google Scholar. As Andrew Port noted in his “Letter from the Editor,” the only recent French-language book reviewed in CEH was Imlay Talbot's review in CEH 50, no. 2 (2017) of Théofilakis, Fabien, Les prisonniers de guerre allemands: France, 1944–1949 (Paris : Fayard, 2014)Google Scholar.

10 Kott, Sandrine and Nadau, Thierry, “Pour une pratique de l'histoire sociale comparative. La France et l'Allemagne contemporaines,” Genèses, sciences sociales et histoire 17 (1994): 103–11Google Scholar.

11 Noiriel, Gérard and Espagne, Michel, “Transferts culturels: l'exemple franco-allemand. Entretien avec Michel Espagne,” Genèses. Sciences sociales et histoire 8 (1992): 146–54Google Scholar.

12 Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice, Les avant-gardes artistiques: 1918–1945. Une histoire transnationale (Paris: Gallimard, 2017)Google Scholar.

13 My own PhD thesis on Alsace has further inspired my work on the German social state; also see the recents contributions of Catherine Maurer, including La ville charitable: les oeuvres sociales catholiques en France et en Allemagne au XIXe siècle (Paris: les Éd. du Cerf, 2012)Google Scholar; Ayçoberry, Pierre, Cologne entre Napoléon et Bismarck, la croissance d'une ville rhénane (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1981)Google Scholar. Also see the ongoing project Saar-Lorr-Lux at http://www.memotransfront.uni-saarland.de/.

14 This is supported by grants from the French Agence nationale de la recherche and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which has led to publications such as Charle, Christophe, Schriewer, Jürgen, and Wagner, Peter, eds., Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2004)Google Scholar.

15 See Port, Andrew I., “Central European History since 1989: Historiographical Trends and Post-Wende ‘Turns,’Central European History 48, no. 2 (2015): 238–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 For the French historiography on the Federal Republic, see, e.g., Delacroix, Hélène Miard, Willy Brandt (Paris: Fayard, 2013)Google Scholar; Solchany, Jean, Wilhelm Röpke, l'autre Hayek: aux origines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015)Google Scholar.

17 See, e.g., Chapoutot, Johann, La révolution culturelle nazie (Paris: Gallimard, 2016)Google Scholar; Fabreguet, Michel, Mauthausen: camp de concentration national-socialiste en Autriche rattachée, 1938–1945 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999)Google Scholar; Ingrao, Christian, La promesse de l'Est: espérance nazie et génocide, 1939–1943 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2016)Google Scholar; Daviet-Vincent, Marie-Bénédicte, Le nazisme: régime criminel (Paris: Perrin, 2015)Google Scholar.

18 François, Étienne and Schulze, Hagen, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005)Google Scholar. A selection has been published in French in Mémoires allemandes, trans. Lortholary, Bernard and Etoré-Lortholary, Jeanne (Paris: Gallimard, 2007)Google Scholar. For the GDR, see Sabrow, Martin, ed., Erinnerungsorte der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009)Google Scholar.

19 In particular, see Mathieu, Jean-Philippe, Mortier, Jean, and Badia, Gilbert, RDA: quelle Allemagne? (Paris : Messidor—Ed. sociales, 1990)Google Scholar; Poumet, Jacques, La Satire en RDA: cabarets et presse satirique (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1990)Google Scholar. For a short survey, see Kott, Sandrine, “Die DDR-Forschung in Frankreich,” Deutschland Archiv 6 (1997): 1029–31Google Scholar.

20 Kott, Sandrine and Droit, Emmanuel, eds., Die ostdeutsche Gesellschaft. Eine transnationale Perspektive (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2006)Google Scholar, with contributions by more than a dozen French-speaking historians, sociologists, political scientists, and ethnographers.