Professor%20Paul%20Betts: List of publications

This article centres on the cultural politics behind the feverish construction of new houses of worship in West Germany, as well as the restoration of damaged cathedrals and churches, in the first two decades after 1945. At issue is how and why ecclesiastical architecture took on heightened cultural significance at the time, attracting a star-studded group of international architects. After the war, church-building resumed its leading historical role from before the Industrial Revolution as the avant-garde of innovative international architecture, although its comeback has been largely overlooked by architectural and cultural historians alike. While these changes reflected broader international trends, the German situation took on special significance in light of the Nazi legacy of defeat, destruction and dislocation, as well as the pressing need to fabricate new churches for survivors and the millions of expellees arriving in western Germany. Discussions of ecclesiastical architecture therefore touched on broader issues of German history, identity and Christian renewal, and the very form of these houses of worship reflected a unique blend of avant-garde architecture and Christian theology in the aftermath of war.

These days 1989 isn't what it used to be. Not so long ago the wildfire revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe during that momentous year were routinely celebrated as the grand victory of liberal democracy over Soviet-style communism. However, recent developments in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere on the continent which in various ways all invoked 1989, either as inspiration or negative foil, behove us to reconsider the effects of that fateful year in Central Europe from a different perspective. The rise of xenophobia, resurgent populist politics on both the Radical Right and the Left, as well as the spread of ‘illiberal democracy’ across Europe, the US and elsewhere have predictably generated great alarm. Plenty of commentary on the comeback of authoritarian anti-liberalism in Central Europe has claimed that we are witnessing a kind of ‘return of the repressed,’ a dangerous repudiation of the golden principles of 1989 three decades after the uprisings. But construing recent developments in Central Europe as simply an anti-1989 backlash does not get us very far, not least because the unrest of 1989 carried within it the seeds of illiberalism as well. With distance, the inheritance of the ‘revolutionary autumn’ appears more mixed and precarious, and much harder to classify than it once was. Like all revolutions, 1989 brought in its train a mixed bag of dreams and disappointments, stark ruptures and stubborn continuities, and this article revisits some of the grey and even darker tones of the inheritance.

The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history.

Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe is the first scholarly effort to explore the delicate interface of religion, science and communism in Cold War Europe.

Draws on documentation released since the fall of the Soviet Union to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century.

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A history of private life in the German Democratic Republic, showing how the private sphere assumed central importance in the GDR from the very outset, and revealing the myriad ways in which privacy was expressed, staged and defended by ...

From a range of methodological historical perspectives-military, cultural, and social, to film and gender and sexuality studies-this volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts.

Wolfgang Templin Das Helsinki-Abkommen Spätestens ab Mitte der siebziger Jahre waren in der DDR die verschiedenen ... Dies galt jedoch für die unterschiedlichen Milieus der DDR- Gesellschaft in geradezu gegensätzlicher Weise.

The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over.

Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s Richard Bessel, Dirk Schumann... experience of violence and death during the 1940s were profound and colored all aspects of life during the postwar... the connections were between the violence of the 1940s and the normality of the 1950s, remains extremely speculative. ... the late 1940s and 1950s was concentrated on the reconstruction of political and economic structures, especially in Germany.

The contributors to this book engage these questions by reconsidering Germany’s recent past according to the themes of pain and prosperity, focusing on such topics as welfare policy, urban history, childbirth, medicine, racism, political ...