Monographs and Editions 2019 - 2020

Juliane Brauer, Zeitgefühle - Wie die DDR ihre Zukunft besang. Eine Emotionsgeschichte. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020.
“Today we sing the songs of tomorrow” went the lyrics of a popular 1964 youth song from the GDR. Citizens of East Germany wanted to use music and lyrical forms to propagate hopes, desires, and visions of socialist Germany’s future and to influence the coming generation on an emotional level. Writing of the GDR as a “modern time regime”, Juliane Brauer tells the story of a promised future and the results of its failure to be realized. The certainty and belief in progress that characterized the beginnings were replaced with mistrust and disappointment over shattered dreams. Brauer’s analysis further shows how the desirable emotional dispositions can be categorized in concrete socialist conceptions of past, present, and future. more
Ute Frevert, Mächtige Gefühle. Von A wie Angst bis Z wie Zuneigung – Deutsche Geschichte seit 1900. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2020.
Emotions make history. They steer and shape not only individuals but entire societies. Politicians use them, but can also trip over them. Ute Frevert charts a history of powerful feelings and what they achieved from the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist regime, through East and West Germany to the new Federal Republic. She presents love and hate, shame and pride, outrage and grief in their changing forms and meanings. The book follows on from the exhibition curated by Ute Frevert and her daughter Bettina Frevert, 'The power of emotions: Germany 19/19’, which has been shown at over 2500 locations. more
Ute Frevert, The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Humiliation practices are common, for example, in parenting and education, on the internet, in penal law, and in politics. Thus, after 1944, many French women accused of liaising with Germans were degraded by having their hair shorn in public.
Die Politik der Demütigung investigates humiliation as an instrument of power in public settings over the past 250 years, demonstrating that modernity never relinquished the pillory but simply reinvented it. It is no longer the state that shames and humiliates but society. more
Bettina Hitzer, Krebs Fühlen. Eine Emotionsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2020.
Cancer used to be a death sentence. That is no longer the case today. It took a long time for doctors, nurses, cancer patients and their loved ones to come to terms with the feelings that a diagnosis of cancer brought with it: confidence, fear of death, joy in life, despair, courage, grief, suffering, apathy. Bettina Hitzer describes how this emotional revolution in medicine and society came to be.  more
Bettina Hitzer et al., special issue "Tech Fear", TG Technikgeschichte, 86, 3 (2019).
Fear of technology has a bad reputation. It is often seen as irrational, unfounded and hostile to innovation. However, the relationship between fear and technology is far more complex than this common cliché. To highlight this multidimensional relationship of fear and technology, we created the term “tech-fear”. The aim of this special issue, focusing on the US, Japan, and Germany, is to show to what extent fear has historically influenced the development, design, social acceptance and use of technology. But it also makes clear that the history of fear benefits when it turns to the subject of technology since tech-fear has been an essential factor in the history of fear and has strongly influenced concepts and ways of dealing with fear in a wide variety of contexts. more
Margrit Pernau, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India. From Balance to Fervor. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019.
The book investigates the experiences, interpretations and practices of emotions in India between 1857 and the First World War. It is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many explored for the first time. These sources range from philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality to advice literature, from journals to newspapers, from children’s literature to nostalgic descriptions of the courtly culture, from sermons to psychological essays. Modernity for long has been viewed as a process which went along with a growing control over emotions – whether this control was regarded as linked to capitalism, to the modern bureaucratic state or interpreted as a process through which external control mechanisms moved inside the subject. As the case studies of this book show, this discipline has to be viewed together with the transformation from the ideal of balance and harmony to a desire for strong, visceral and even indomitable passions, showing the youthfulness and vigor of the community. Men (and a little later also women) increasingly strove for an experience of these strong emotions and attempted to inculcate them in others as well, and they devised new languages and practices to bring about these feelings. more
Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen, Margrit Pernau (eds), Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019.
Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization. more
Ute Frevert, Kapitalismus, Märkte und Moral. Wien: Residenzverlag, 2019.
Contemporary calls for a “moral economy” provide the impetus for Ute Frevert’s inquiry into the historical relationship between capitalism and morality. Are struggles over morality intrinsic to capitalism and have they always been? Or has the predicate “moral” been imposed on it from the outside? And if so, with what consequences? The book puts forth the claim that moral interventions have continuously altered capitalism and, importantly, ensured its survival. From Robin Hood to Karl Marx, from Pope Francis to Bernie Sanders, from cooperatives to progressive taxation to the French Yellow Vests Movement - moral feelings like empathy, solidarity, fairness, and justice can animate political forces that have the potential to challenge and transform the capitalist order. more
Ute Frevert (ed.),  Moral Economies. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. (Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Sonderheft No. 26).
Is there a moral economy of capitalism? The term “moral economy” was coined in pre-capitalist times and does not refer to economy as we know it today. It was only in the nineteenth century that economy came to mean the production and circulation of goods and services. At the same time, the term started to be used in an explicitly critical tone: references to moral economy were normally critical of modern forms of economy, which were purportedly lacking in morals. In our times, too, the morality of capitalism is often the topic of debate and controversy. “Moral Economies” engages in these debates. Using historical case studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries the book discusses the degree to which economic actions and decisions were permeated with moral, good-vs-bad classifications. Moreover it shows how strongly antiquity’s concept of “embedded” economy is still powerful in modernity. The model for this was often the private household, in which moral, social, and economic behavior patterns were intertwined. The do-it-yourself movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was still oriented towards this model, thereby criticizing capitalism on moral grounds. more
Hitzer, B. & Geisthövel, A. (eds), Auf der Suche nach einer anderen Medizin - Psychosomatik im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2019.
(Looking for a Different Medicine. Psychosomatic Medicine in the 20th Century)

What makes mind and body strong? Headlines like this are everywhere. Backache, breathlessness, skin rashes – we ascribe many physical complaints to emotional upheaval, too little mindfulness or long-term stress. But where do these concepts of psychosomatic medicine come from? This book provides the first overview of the history of psychosomatic medicine in Germany. Incisive chapters offer a panorama of the varieties of psychosomatics in the 20th century, while also portraying it as a form of medicine which saw itself as the more humane alternative to modern hi-tech, and therefore supposedly soulless, medicine. more
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