York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, Volume 2: Reverberations, 12, 91, , , ; benefit concert, ; at Castle Garden, , , ; n, , ; English translation, , ; excerpts, 75, , , n, vocal problems, 99, n, Benedict, Julius (), German/ English. IBM and the Holocaust and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. “Black clearly demonstrates that Nazi Germany employed IBM Hollerith punch-card machines to perform critical tasks in carrying out the Holocaust and the German war effort. Black establishes beyond.
Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered around church services and holy days. In Prussia , the peasants drew lots to choose conscription required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions.
The emancipation of the serfs came in , beginning with then Danish Schleswig in Prussia abolished serfdom with the October Edict of , which upgraded the personal legal status of the peasantry and gave them the chance to purchase for cash part of the lands they were working. They could also sell the land they already owned. The edict applied to all peasants whose holdings were above a certain size, and included both Crown lands and noble estates. The peasants were freed from the obligation of personal services to the lord and annual dues. A bank was set up so that landowner could borrow government money to buy land from peasants the peasants were not allowed to use it to borrow money to buy land until The result was that the large landowners obtained larger estates, and many peasant became landless tenants, or moved to the cities or to America.
The other German states imitated Prussia after In sharp contrast to the violence that characterized land reform in the French Revolution , Germany handled it peacefully. In Schleswig the peasants, who had been influenced by the Enlightenment , played an active role; elsewhere they were largely passive.
Indeed, for most peasants, customs and traditions continued largely unchanged, including the old habits of deference to the nobles whose legal authority remained quite strong over the villagers.
Although the peasants were no longer tied to the same land like serfs had been, the old paternalistic relationship in East Prussia lasted into the 20th century. Before Germany lagged behind the leaders in industrial development , Britain, France and Belgium. However, the country had considerable assets: By mid-century, the German states were catching up, and by Germany was a world leader in industrialization , along with Britain and the United States.
In , Germany's social structure was poorly suited to any kind of social or industrial development. Domination by modernizing France during the era of the French Revolution s to produced important institutional reforms, including the abolition of feudal restrictions on the sale of large landed estates, the reduction of the power of the guilds in the cities, and the introduction of a new, more efficient commercial law.
Nevertheless, traditionalism remained strong in most of Germany. Until mid-century, the guilds, the landed aristocracy , the churches, and the government bureaucracies had so many rules and restrictions that entrepreneurship was held in low esteem, and given little opportunity to develop. From the s and s, Prussia , Saxony , and other states reorganized agriculture, introducing sugar beets, turnips, and potatoes, yielding a higher level of food production that enabled a surplus rural population to move to industrial areas.
The beginning of the industrial revolution in Germany came in the textile industry, and was facilitated by eliminating tariff barriers through the Zollverein , starting in The takeoff stage of economic development came with the railroad revolution in the s, which opened up new markets for local products, created a pool of middle managers, increased the demand for engineers, architects and skilled machinists, and stimulated investments in coal and iron. The north German states were for the most part richer in natural resources than the southern states.
They had vast agricultural tracts from Schleswig-Holstein in the west through Prussia in the east. They also had coal and iron in the Ruhr Valley. Through the practice of primogeniture , widely followed in northern Germany, large estates and fortunes grew. So did close relations between the owners and local as well as national governments. The south German states were relatively poor in natural resources and those Germans therefore engaged more often in small economic enterprises.
They also had no primogeniture rule but subdivided the land among several offspring, leading those offspring to remain in their native towns but not fully able to support themselves from their small parcels of land. The south German states, therefore, fostered cottage industries , crafts, and a more independent and self-reliant spirit less closely linked to the government.
The first important mines appeared in the s, in the valleys of the rivers Ruhr, Inde and Wurm where coal seams outcropped and horizontal adit mining was possible. In the Krupp family began operations near Essen. After entrepreneurs in the Ruhr Area , which then became part of Prussia , took advantage of the tariff zone Zollverein to open new mines and associated iron smelters. New railroads were built by British engineers around Numerous small industrial centres sprang up, focused on ironworks , using local coal. The iron and steel works typically bought mines and erected coking ovens to supply their own requirements in coke and gas.
These integrated coal-iron firms "Huettenzechen" became numerous after ; after they became mixed firms called "Konzern. The output of an average mine in was about 8, short tons; its employment about By , this output had risen to , and employment to about 1, In output was down to 73 million short tons, growing to in Output peaked in at million , declining to 78 million short tons in The miners in the Ruhr region were divided by ethnicity Germans and Poles and religion Protestants and Catholics.
Mobility in and out of the mining camps to nearby industrial areas was high. The miners split into several unions, with an affiliation to a political party. As a result, the socialist union affiliated with the Social Democratic Party competed with Catholic and Communist unions until , when the Nazis took over all of them. After the socialists came to the fore. German banks played central roles in financing German industry. Different banks formed cartels in different industries. Cartel contracts were accepted as legal and binding by German courts although they were held to be illegal in Britain and the United States.
The process of cartelization began slowly, but the cartel movement took hold after in the economic depression that followed the postunification speculative bubble. It began in heavy industry and spread throughout other industries. By there were cartels in operation; by , over By some estimates, different cartel arrangements may have numbered in the thousands at different times, but many German companies stayed outside the cartels because they did not welcome the restrictions that membership imposed. The government played a powerful role in the industrialization of the German Empire founded by Otto von Bismarck in during a period known as the Second Industrial Revolution.
It supported not only heavy industry but also crafts and trades because it wanted to maintain prosperity in all parts of the empire. Even where the national government did not act, the highly autonomous regional and local governments supported their own industries. Each state tried to be as self-sufficient as possible. Despite the several ups and downs of prosperity and depression that marked the first decades of the German Empire, the ultimate wealth of the empire proved immense. German aristocrats, landowners, bankers, and producers created what might be termed the first German economic miracle, the turn-of-the-century surge in German industry and commerce during which bankers, industrialists, mercantilists, the military, and the monarchy joined forces.
Germany's middle class, based in the cities, grew exponentially, but it never gained the political power it had in France, Britain or the United States. The Association of German Women's Organizations BDF was established in to encompass the proliferating women's organizations that had sprung up since the s.
From the beginning the BDF was a bourgeois organization, its members working toward equality with men in such areas as education, financial opportunities, and political life. Working-class women were not welcome; they were organized by the Socialists. Bismarck built on a tradition of welfare programs in Prussia and Saxony that began as early as in the s. In the s he introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance that formed the basis of the modern European welfare state.
His paternalistic programs won the support of German industry because its goals were to win the support of the working classes for the Empire and reduce the outflow of immigrants to America, where wages were higher, but welfare did not exist. Political disunity of three dozen states and a pervasive conservatism made it difficult to build railways in the s.
However, by the s, trunk lines did link the major cities; each German state was responsible for the lines within its own borders. Economist Friedrich List summed up the advantages to be derived from the development of the railway system in Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways. In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by , Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry.
However, German unification in stimulated consolidation, nationalisation into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth. Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialisation, and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts, and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen.
By , Germany had 9, locomotives pulling 43, passengers and 30, tons of freight, and pulled ahead of France. Perkins argues that more important than Bismarck's new tariff on imported grain was the introduction of the sugar beet as a primary crop. Farmers quickly abandoned traditional, inefficient practices for modern new methods, including use of new fertilizers and new tools. The knowledge and tools gained from the intensive farming of sugar and other root crops made Germany the most efficient agricultural producer in Europe by An unintended consequence was the increased dependence on migratory workers, especially from German's Polish districts.
The economy continued to industrialize and urbanize , with heavy industry coal and steel especially becoming important in the Ruhr, and manufacturing growing in the cities, the Ruhr, and Silesia. Big businesses such as BASF and Bayer led the way in their production and distribution of artificial dyes and pharmaceuticals during the Wilhelmine era, leading to the German monopolisation of the global chemicals market at 90 percent of the entire share of international volumes of trade in chemical products by Germany became Europe's leading steel-producing country in the lateth century, thanks in large part to the protection from American and British competition afforded by tariffs and to cartels.
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century associates with the time of expansion in demand , the growth of the production capacity and the rise of exports to Germany. This in its turn stimulated the foreign direct investments FDI into the economics. Ten countries were considered the major investors , namely: Their aim was to get via FDI the access to raw material , and to get involved into the production and sales. The preferred methods of investments were via equity stakes , mergers and Greenfield investments.
In order to implement the destination analysis of the FDI during this time frame mostly knowledge-capital model is used due to the predominant role of horizontal investments or market-driven FDI. Moreover, there were found some evidence of the vertical investment structure known as cost-driven FDI. To be more precise, when there were the wage differences between countries the FDI flows were higher to the low-wage ones. Major factors that influenced FDI were market environment e.
Interestingly, cultural differences or distance between countries did not have major influence on FDI [36]. Steel corporation in the U. The goal was to move beyond the limitations of the old cartel system by incorporating advances simultaneously inside a single corporation. The new company emphasized rationalization of management structures and modernization of the technology; it employed a multi-divisional structure and used return on investment as its measure of success. By American and German exports dominated the world steel market, as Britain slipped to third place.
In machinery, iron and steel and other industries, German firms avoided cut-throat competition and instead relied on trade associations. Germany was a world leader because of its prevailing "corporatist mentality", its strong bureaucratic tradition, and the encouragement of the government. These associations regulated competition and allowed small firms to function in the shadow of much larger companies.
Unexpectedly Germany plunged into World War I — It rapidly mobilized its civilian economy for the war effort. The economy suffered under the British blockade, which cut off supplies. British economist John Maynard Keynes denounced the Treaty of Versailles as ruinous to German and global prosperity. In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes argued the sums being asked of Germany in reparations were many times more than it was possible for Germany to pay, and that these would produce drastic instability. More recently economists have argued that the restriction of Germany to a small army in the s saved it so much money it could afford the reparations payments.
In reality, the total German Reparation payments actually made were far smaller than anyone expected. German reparations payments ended in The war and the treaty were followed by the Hyper-inflation of the early s that wreaked havoc on Germany's social structure and political stability. During that inflation, the value of the nation's currency, the Papiermark , collapsed from 8. Prosperity reigned —29, supported by large bank loans from New York. The Great Depression struck Germany hard, starting in late Unemployment soared, especially in larger cities, fueling extremism and violence on the far right and far left, as the centre of the political spectrum weakened.
Germany had paid about one-eighth of its war reparations when they were suspended in by the Lausanne Conference of The failure of major banks in Germany and Austria in worsened the worldwide banking crisis. So, as known, Germany was among the countries most severely affected by the great depression because its recovery and rationalization of major industries was financed by unsustainable foreign lending.
And as mentioned, war reparation obligations reduced investment propensity and, perhaps most importantly, the government implemented a rigid austerity policy that resulted in deflation. As unemployment reached very high levels, the national socialists accumulated government power and began to pursue their inhuman policies against the Jewish minority, political leftists and many other groups. After being elected, the national socialists undertook a series of rapid steps to abolish democracy. Their trade policy in Germany consisted of an autarkic policy regime that aimed to cancel all imports, such as foodstuffs, that could be replaced with domestic substitutes or raw materials for the consumer-oriented industries.
Only imports of iron ore and similar items were considered necessary because a main aim of the government was to strengthen the production capacity of military products. Both the persecuted and non-persecuted German groups suffered from these autarkic and trade-restraining policies. During the Hitler era —45 , the economy developed a hothouse prosperity, supported with high government subsidies to those sectors that tended to give Germany military power and economic autarky , that is, economic independence from the global economy.
Physical capital in the occupied territories was destroyed by the war, insufficient reinvestment and maintenance, whereas the industrial capacity of Germany increased substantially until the end of the war despite heavy bombing. However, much of this capacity was useless after the war because it specialized in armament production. With the loss of the war, the country entered into the period known as Stunde Null "Zero Hour" , when Germany lay in ruins and the society had to be rebuilt from scratch. Seven million forced laborers left for their own land, but about 14 million Germans came in from the East, living for years in dismal camps.
It took nearly a decade for all the German POWs to return. In the West, farm production fell, food supplies were cut off from eastern Germany controlled by the Soviets and food shipments extorted from conquered lands ended. The standard of living fell to levels not seen in a century, and food was always in short supply. In the East, the Soviets crushed dissent and imposed another police state, often employing ex-Nazis in the dreaded Stasi.
The man who took full advantage of Germany's postwar opportunity was Ludwig Erhard , who was determined to shape a new and different kind of German economy. He was given his chance by United States officials, who found him working in Nuremberg and who saw that many of his ideas coincided with their own.
Although he only visited America once towards the end of his life, May provided Germany with a series of frontier novels, which provided Germans with an imaginary view of America. At first, the production of dyes was critical. Mobility in and out of the mining camps to nearby industrial areas was high. The s were a period of extreme political reaction. Germany reached out to Mexico with the Zimmermann Telegram , offering a military alliance against the United States, hoping the United States would diverge most of its attention to attacking Mexico. From the early medieval period and continuing through to the 18th century, Germanic law assigned women to a subordinate and dependent position relative to men.
Erhard abolished the Reichsmark and then created a new currency, the Deutsche Mark , on 21 June , with the concurrence of the Western Allies but also taking advantage of the opportunity to abolish most Nazi and occupation rules and regulations. It established the foundations of the West German economy and of the West German state. After , Germany overtook Britain in comparative productivity levels for the whole economy, primarily as a result of trends in services rather than trends in industry.
The Marshall Plan was eagerly adopted in west Germany as a way to modernize business procedures and utilize the best practices, while these changes were resisted in Britain. On the other hand, the low productivity in Germany was caused by the underdevelopment of services generally, especially in rural areas that comprised a much larger sector. As German farm employment declined sharply after thanks to mechanization, catching-up occurred in services.
This process was aided by a sharp increase in human and physical capital accumulation, a pro-growth government policy, and the effective utilization of the education sector to create a more productive work force. The Germans proudly label their economy a "soziale Marktwirtschaft," or " social market economy ," to show that the system as it has developed after World War II has both a material and a social—or human—dimension.
They stress the importance of the term "market" because after the Nazi experience they wanted an economy free of state intervention and domination. Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy strongly favored Britain and France over Germany in — In contrast to this, President Roosevelt was, as early as mid-March , [48] quite acutely aware of Hitler's views about the United States , with Roosevelt needing to balance the dueling issues of preparing the United States for likely involvement in a global conflict, and the still-strong desire by many Americans to avoid war at all costs; until the consequences of the attack on Pearl Harbor settled the issue.
In the aforementioned poster, which is shown in this article , the United States of America is depicted as a monstrous, vicious war machine seeking to destroy European culture. The poster alludes to many negative aspects of American history, including the Ku Klux Klan , the oppression of Native Americans , and lynching of blacks. The poster condemns American capitalism , America's perceived dominance by Judaism and shows American bombs destroying a helpless European village.
However, America launched several propaganda campaigns in return towards Nazi Germany often portraying Nazi Germany as a warmongering country with inferior morale, and brainwashing schemes. Following the defeat of the Third Reich , American forces were one of the occupation powers in postwar Germany. In parallel to denazification and "industrial disarmament" American citizens fraternized with Germans.
The Berlin Airlift from — and the Marshall Plan — further improved the Germans' perception of Americans. The American presence may have helped smooth over possibly awkward postwar relationships, had they not come under the aegis of the biggest intact army and economy. This lessened the lag before the formation of the precursors to today's EU, and may be seen as a silent benefit of Pax Americana.
Germany and the U. However, German-American cooperation wasn't always free of tensions between differing approaches on both sides of the Atlantic. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany marked a new era in German-American relations.
Relations between the United States and East Germany remained hostile. United States followed the Adenauer's Hallstein Doctrine of , which declared that recognition by any country of East Germany would be treated as an unfriendly act by West Germany. To ward off the risk of internal liberalization on his regime, Honecker enlarged the Stasi from 43, to 60, agents. The East German regime imposed an official ideology that was reflected in all its media and all the schools. The official line stated that the United States had caused the breakup of the coalition against Adolf Hitler and had become the bulwark of reaction worldwide, with a heavy reliance on warmongering for the benefit of the "terrorist international of murderers on Wall Street.
However few Germans believed it. They had seen enough of the Russians since —a half-million Soviets were still stationed in East Germany as late as Furthermore, they were exposed to information from relatives in the West, as well as the American Radio Free Europe broadcasts, and West German media. The official Communist media ridiculed the modernism and cosmopolitanism of American culture, and denigrated the features of the American way of life, especially jazz music and rock 'n roll. The East German regime relied heavily on its tight control of youth organizations to rally them, with scant success, against American popular culture.
The older generations were more concerned with the poor quality of food, housing, and clothing, which stood in dramatic contrast to the prosperity of West Germany. Professionals in East Germany were watched for any sign of deviation from the party line; their privileges were at risk.
The solution was to either comply or flee to West Germany, which was relatively easy before the crackdown and the Berlin wall of During the early s, the reunified Germany was called a "partnership in leadership" as the U.
Germany's effort to incorporate any major military actions into the slowly progressing European Security and Defence Policy did not meet the expectations of the U. After the September 11 attacks , German-American political relations were strengthened in an effort to combat terrorism , and Germany sent troops to Afghanistan as part of the NATO force. In response to the mass surveillance disclosures , Germany cancelled the intelligence sharing agreement with the US and UK. In July , two Bundesnachrichtendienst officials were arrested by federal prosecutors for allegedly spying on the German government for the C.
Embassy to leave his diplomatic post. In the cold war it may have been the case that there was mutual mistrust. Today we live in the 21st century. She reiterated the U. In May , Angela Merkel met with U. Trump's statements that the U. Without mentioning Trump specifically, Merkel said after a NATO summit "The times when we could completely rely on others are, to an extent, over," [61] This came after Trump had said "The Germans are bad, very bad" and "See the millions of cars they are selling to the U.
We will stop this. The exploits of gunslingers on the American frontier played a major role in American folklore, fiction and film. The same stories became immensely popular in Germany, which produced its own novels and films about the American frontier. Karl May — was a German writer best known for his adventure novels set in the American Old West.
His main protagonists are Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Typically the writings focus on "Indianness" and authenticity. Germany and the United States are civil societies. Germany's philosophical heritage and American spirit for "freedom" interlock to a central aspect of Western culture and Western civilization. Even though developed under different geographical settings, the Age of Enlightenment is fundamental to the self-esteem and understanding of both nations. The American-led invasion of Iraq changed the perception of the U. A survey conducted on behalf of the German embassy in showed that Americans continued to regard Germany's failure to support the war in Iraq as the main irritant in relations between the two nations.
The issue was of declining importance, however, and Americans still considered Germany to be their fourth most important international partner behind the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan. Americans considered economic cooperation to be the most positive aspect of U. Among the nations of Western Europe, German public perception of the U. During the Cold War , anti-Americanism was the official government policy in East Germany , and dissenters were punished.
In West Germany , anti-Americanism was the common position on the left, but the majority praised the United States as a protector against Communism and a critical ally in rebuilding the nation. Today, it warns that America is plotting to spoil Germany's friendly relationship with Russia. Germany's refusal to support the American-led invasion of Iraq in was often seen as a manifestation of anti-Americanism. Annoyance or distrust of the Americans was heightened in by revelations of American spying on top German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
German-American military relations began in the Revolution when German troops fought on both sides. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben , a former Captain in the Prussian Army, was appointed Inspector General of the Continental Army and played the major role in training American soldiers to the best European standards.
Von Steuben is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the United States Army. Another German that served during the American Revolution was Major General Johann de Kalb , who served under Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden and died as a result of several wounds he sustained during the fighting. About 30, German mercenaries fought for the British , with 17, hired from Hesse , amounting to about one in four of the adult male population of the principality.
These Hessians fought under their own officers under British command. German Americans have been very influential in the American military. Pershing , General of the Army Dwight D. During the Cold War the number of U. Both nations have cooperated closely in the War on Terror , with Germany providing more troops than any other nation. The two nations; however, have opposing public policy positions in the War in Iraq. While Germany may have blocked U. German soldiers operated military biological and chemical cleanup equipment at Camp Doha in Kuwait; German Navy ships secured sea lanes to deter attacks by Al Qaeda on U.
Forces and equipment in the Persian Gulf; and soldiers from Germany's Bundeswehr deployed all across southern Germany to U. Soldiers who were deployed to the Iraq War. The latter mission lasted from until As of nearly all these Bundeswehr have been demobilized. The United States established a permanent military presence in Germany during the Second World War that continued throughout the Cold War and then was drawn down in the early 21st Century, with the last American tanks withdrawn from Germany in Economic relations between Germany and the United States are largely untroubled.
The Transatlantic Economic Partnership between the U. In terms of the total volume of U. At the end of , U. During the same period, German direct investment in the U. Germany is the eighth largest foreign investor in the U. Karl May was a prolific German writer who specialized in writing Westerns. Although he only visited America once towards the end of his life, May provided Germany with a series of frontier novels, which provided Germans with an imaginary view of America.
German takes third place after Spanish and French among the foreign languages taught at American secondary schools, colleges and universities. Conversely, nearly half of the German population can speak English well. It is situated on the historic axis between the White House and the Washington Monument on the National Mall , the garden borders Constitution Avenue between 15th and 17th Streets, where an estimated seven million visitors pass each year. The garden features plants native to both Germany and the United States and provides seating and cooling fountains.
The contributions of German and American scientists to various fields of science are numerous. The cooperation between academics from both countries is extensive.
Since the middle of the 20th century, German scientists have provided invaluable contributions to American technological advancement. For example, Wernher von Braun , who built the German V-2 rockets, and his team of scientists came to the United States and were central in building the American space exploration program.
Researchers at German and American universities run various exchange programs and projects, and focus on space exploration , the International Space Station , environmental technology , and medical science. Import cooperations are also in the fields of biochemistry , engineering , information and communication technologies and life sciences networks through: In the post-war era, a number of institutions, devoted to highlighting American culture and society in Germany, were established and are in existence today, especially in the south of Germany, the area of the former U.
Today, they offer English courses as well as cultural programs. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. German interest in the Caribbean. Anti-American sentiment in Germany. List of German aerospace engineers in the United States. Germany portal United States portal International relations portal. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: Herwig, Politics of frustration: Archived from the original on Retrieved 31 January Evangelical Church of Germany. Retrieved 14 June Retrieved September 4, Census Brief" PDF. Archived from the original PDF on Mustafa, Merchants and Migrations: German Naval Strategy, — Militarism in a Global Age: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, — Europe, the United States and the Mexican Revolution , pp.
Bradford Robinson, Jazz reception in Weimar Germany: Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression Roosevelt, American public opinion, and the war against Nazi Germany Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, — Europe and America, — Notre Dame and The Review of Politics. Involvement in the War in Europe" speech Washington, D. Encyclopedia of the Cold War.
Translated by Josh Ward. Retrieved 23 October Retrieved 2 April Crowley 11 July US-German relations have 'Groundhog Day ' ". Retrieved 11 July Retrieved 12 July Retrieved 18 July Germany Ratchets Up Counterintelligence Measures". Retrieved 23 July Retrieved 29 May Retrieved 9 December Karl May and the German Western of the s. Glenn Penny, "Elusive authenticity: The quest for the authentic Indian in German public culture.
Retrieved 3 February Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. Random House Digital, Inc. Little, Brown and Company. National Archives and Records Administration.