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It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.
List of contents
Introduction
Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägårdh
Chapter 1. Some Questions Concerning the Conceptual History of "Crisis"
Reinhart Koselleck
Chapter 2. The Institutionalization of Modernity: Shocks and Crises in Germany and Sweden
Erik Ringmar
Chapter 3. Moral Community and the Crisis of the Enlightenment: Sweden and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s
Nina Witoszek
Chapter 4. Crisis and the Politics of National Community: Germany and Sweden, 1933-1994
Lars Trägårdh
Chapter 5. Interpreting the Holocaust: Crisis of Modernity or Crisis of German Ideology?
Benjamin Lapp
Chapter 6. Politics and Catastrophe: Why Is the World So Obsessed with German History?
Manfred Henningsen
Chapter 7. Race, Nation, and Folk: On the Repressed Memory of World War II in Sweden and Its Hidden Categories
Piero Colla
Chapter 8. Crisis: The Road to Happiness?
Yvonne Hirdman
Chapter 9. The Crisis of Consensus in Postwar Sweden
Göran Rosenberg
Chapter 10. Political Modernity's Critical Juncture in the Course of the French Revolution
Robert Wokler
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Lars Trägårdh received his Ph D in history from UC Berkeley and currently co-directs a research project concerning trust and state/civil society relations in Sweden at the Research Institute of Ersta Sköndal University College in Stockholm. His most recent publications include State and Civil Society in Northern Europe (Berghahn Books, 2007), After National Democracy: Rights, Law and Power in America in the New Europe (Hart Publishing, 2004), and with Henrik Berggren Är svensken människa: Oberoende och gemenskap i det moderna Sverige (Norstedts, 2006).
Summary
It is often argued that Germany and Scandinavia stand at two opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to their response to social-economic disruptions and cultural challenges. Though, in many respects, they have a shared cultural inheritance, it is nevertheless the case that they mobilize different mythologies and different modes of coping when faced with breakdown and disorder. The authors argue that it is at these "critical junctures," points of crisis and innovation in the life of communities, that the tradition and identity of national and local communities are formed, polarized, and revalued; it is here that social change takes a particular direction.
Additional text
"... the book deserves credit ... for trying to tackle the tricky issue of crisis as an historical theme, and in doing so offers a novel approach for rethinking the critical 1930s."�����H-German
