Browsing by Author "Timm, Annette F."

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    Commemoration of a Defeated Nation: German Cemeteries and Memorials of the First World War
    (2019-04-29) Gillen, Nicholas Brian; Timm, Annette F.; Spangler, Jewel L.; Marshall, David B.
    The memorialization of the First World War took different forms in each belligerent country. This study focuses on the German case and on memorials and cemeteries. The Volksbund Kriegsgräberfürsorge (The German War Graves Commission) in consultation with the responsible agencies in France, Belgium, Italy and other countries, worked together to build German cemeteries that were and still are a primary site of commemoration, since graveyards act as symbolic representations of the destructive and horrific nature of The Great War. Germany’s First World War memory is not a telling of the past but rather a commemorative act to focus on the men who died. This thesis investigates this memorialization through case studies of memorials dispersed along the Eastern and Western Fronts, as well as in select German cities. These sites provided a place to mourn and remember family members, friends, and loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice for the Fatherland. German municipalities constructed their own monuments dedicated to not only to the young men who died as a result of the war, but also the general population of German citizens whose lives were altered. Through a study of a select number of Germany’s First World War cemeteries and war memorials, I decipher the commemorative approach to German war memory in modern society, and how the war is currently remembered in a society that lost the war.
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    Employing Broad Tactics: Social Change, Women, and Work in Alberta: 1970-1993
    (2020-01) Hrynuik, Erin; Janovicek, Nancy; O'Neill, Brenda; Timm, Annette F.
    This study analyses how working women in Alberta navigated themselves throughout the change in workforce demographic in the province in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I argue that by employing a variety of tactics in advocating for themselves as full participants in the province’s workforce, the groups studied were successful in bringing the voice of women into Alberta’s labour movement. I assessed the activities and initiatives of three feminist labour activist groups in the province and found that each group was unique in how members tried to implement positive change to create a better environment for working women in the province. Through an analysis of each group’s meeting minutes, correspondence, press releases, and media attention, as well as three oral interviews, I argue that each group advocated for the rights of working women in Alberta.
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    OTHERS OF MY KIND: Transatlantic Transgender Histories
    (University of Calgary Press, 2020-10) Bakker, Alex; Herrn, Rainer; Taylor, Michael Thomas; Timm, Annette F.
    An illuminating look at the transatlantic, transgender community that helped to shape the history and study of gender identity. From the turn of the twentieth-century to the 1950s, a group of transgender people on both sides of the Atlantic created communities that profoundly shaped the history and study of gender identity. By exchanging letters and pictures among themselves they established private networks of affirmation and trust, and by submitting their stories and photographs to medical journals and popular magazines they sought to educate both doctors and the public. Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. With more than 180 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.
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    Questioning the Past: The Fragebogen and Everyday Denazification in Occupied Germany
    (2016-02-03) Dack, William Mikkel; Timm, Annette F.; Dolata, Petra; Pendas, Devin; Biess, Frank; Strzelczyk, Florentine
    This dissertation examines the infamous denazification questionnaires – Fragebögen – that were distributed by the four Allied occupying powers in Germany following the Second World War and designed to identify Nazi party members and sympathizers. These self-administered surveys, alongside the Nuremberg Trials, were the public face of denazification, but in reality the Fragebogen process dwarfed all other activities in scale, expense, and impact. The questionnaires determined what employment opportunities were available for German citizens and provided the basic personal information for the Allies’ initiatives to deconstruct the Nazi state, establish democratic government, and rebuild Germany’s economic infrastructure. Upwards of twenty million civilians and returning soldiers completed one of these forms, making it the largest international survey in history. This study explores the origin, development, and implementation of this innovative – and highly criticized – instrument of denazification in the American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones, and evaluates its impact on the lives and livelihood of individual Germans as they recovered from and responded to war and dictatorship. This dissertation ultimately describes how the Fragebogen lay at the heart of the postwar campaign to cleanse the German polity of Nazism. It was a highly experimental solution to the problem of denazification, one that was overseen by the military but written and implemented by civilian specialists and academics. Acting as the fundamental underpinning of each of the Allies’ denazification campaigns, the Fragebogen was never a sufficient instrument for the complex task of screening and judging the German population. But still, the questionnaire had a tremendous impact on the economic security, social standing, and emotional wellbeing of individual Germans. The act of completing the form had a psychological effect, allowing and even encouraging respondents to construct politically and morally acceptable narratives regarding their recent lives under the Third Reich and to establish new identities in order to process wartime experiences of violence and loss and to reconsider notions of guilt and accountability. This study explores the origins of this peculiar instrument of denazification, its influence, consequences, and legacies, and the space that it created for Germans to recreate themselves in the immediate postwar years.
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    “Truly Polish in Spirit and Form”: The Communist Poles and their Battle against Nazi Germany, 1941-1945
    (2020-07-06) Hann, Keith; Hill, Alexander; Clark, John Denis Havey; Bercuson, David Jay; Roberts, Geoffrey; Stapleton, Timothy J.; Timm, Annette F.
    The armed resistance of communist Poles and the forces they organized against Nazi Germany during the Second World War—both clandestine and regular—is poorly understood in the West. Rarely examined in any depth in English, the people and events involved are instead typically folded into a historiography focused on other subjects, dominated by Cold War-era prejudices, and defined in large part by a lack of usage of or access to accurate Polish sources. The resulting oversights, simplifications, and inaccuracies have served to mask the significant military contributions of the communist Poles to the armed struggle against Nazi Germany in the period 1941 to 1945, as well as to conceal the ways in which the communists made their armed forces Polish (as opposed to Soviet and/or communist) in appearance and character. In turn, this obscures one of the foundations of communist postwar rule: the communists, who would eventually come to power in Poland and rule that country for over four decades, made a great effort to shore up their legitimacy by constantly referencing and sometimes inflating their role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Whether or not this military contribution was at times inflated, it was a significant one, made by armed forces that were to a meaningful extent “truly Polish”.
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    "Two Souls Dwell in the German Nation": British Historians and the First World War
    (2018-09-14) Wainwright, Samuel George; Ferris, John Robert; Stapleton, Timothy J.; Hiebert, Maureen; Elofson, W. M.; Timm, Annette F.
    Historical scholarship on British-German relations prior to 1914 often emphasizes mutual antagonism. This antagonism, supposedly, reached a nadir during the First World War, with ‘the Hun’ being demonized as the enemy to civilization, but was replaced with a more sympathetic narrative after 1919, rooted in a reaction against the allegedly punitive peace settlement. This conventional view is too simplistic. Pre-war British historians overwhelmingly adopted favourable attitudes towards Germany, and often used their professional writing to encourage congenial relations between the two countries. Conceptually, their arguments centred upon the ‘two Germanies’ thesis, an abstraction which enabled British admiration for German cultural and intellectual achievements to exist in tension with fears concerning Prussia militarism. This literature shaped demi-official British views on Germany before the war, which were anti-Prussian rather than anti-German in orientation. The ‘two Germanies’ thesis continued to influence how historians conceptualized Germany after hostilities erupted in 1914. Following the war, this continuity enabled Germanophile historians to retain an idealistic view of Germany. This conviction led them to embrace and disseminate revisionist interpretations which posited that the European Powers shared responsibility for the conflict. The idea that all the belligerent states were equally responsible for the war encouraged the view that the grievances which a relatively ‘guiltless’ Germany sought to redress were legitimate. Germanophile historians occupied a central role in supplying the vocabulary by which politicians could frame post-war reconciliation. Placed within this context, pro-German historians provided the intellectual and moral justification for sympathetic policies towards Weimar Germany. There can be no doubt that the appeasement policies adopted in the 1930s resulted in part from the conciliatory atmosphere that historians inculcated in the previous decades.