Selected Publications
- Verkehrte Welt. Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914-1924, Göttingen: Vandenhoek&Ruprecht 1998.
- Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945, Bd. 6: Die Bundesrepublik 1974 bis 1982: Der Sozialstaat im Zeichen wirtschaftlicher Rezession, Baden-Baden: Nomos 2008. (darin: Kap I: Rahmenbedingungen: Unsicherheit als Normalität, S. 1-107; Kap. II: Sozialpolitische Handlungsfelder: Der Umgang mit Sicherheit und Unsicherheit, S. 110-230; Kapitel IV: Gesamtbetrachtungen: Die Logik sozialpolitischer Reformen, S. 883-913).
- Mit Manfred Berg (Hg.), Two Cultures of Rights: Germany and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002.
- Mit Johannes Paulmann (Hg.), The Mechanics of Internationalism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001.
- War over Words. The Search for a Public Language in West-Germany, in: Willibald Steinmetz (Hg.), Political Languages in the Age of Extremes, Oxford 2011, S. 293-330.
FRIAS Project
Contested Democracy. Financial Scandals and Corruption as Cultural History of the Interwar Period.
The connections of the East European Jewish entrepreneurs and speculators Julius Barmat and Iwan Kutisker to leading representatives of the Weimar Republic became the epicentre of the most vehemently embattled, political, economic, and anti-Semitic scandal, with spin-offs in Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands in the 1930s. I examine these scandals in the context of new sensation-oriented media publics and demonstrate how scandals are ways to contest norm violations, legitimacy and trust. Thus I look broadly at major conflicts over political, economic, and cultural norms involving the political system, financial speculation, the problematic relationship between law and justice, and the role of the Jews in society. The Barmat-Kutisker scandal produced a deluge of images, rivalling political discourses, and radical conspiracy theories in the wake of war and revolution. In documentaries, dramas, films, novels, and contemporary “cultural histories” of democracies, fact and fiction were blurred. Even far beyond Germany’s borders, the “Barmatides” became abstract symbols of the Republic and the contested “democratic age.” I am particularly interested in how fascist movements were active in popularizing the idea of corruption in democracies, and how, in the German case, the radical right developed scenarios which made possible the expropriation and the expulsion of Jews and their supposed supporters.