Giesela Rühl (Humboldt University of Berlin) explains that during the past two decades, German courts have experienced a dramatic decline in cases. While the causes for the loss remain unclear, it is plausible that German courts are not an attractive means of resolving lower-value claims. Thus, these claims remain unenforced. A number of legal tech companies have entered the German legal services market to mitigate that problem. These companies enforce lower-value claims and are extremely popular with consumers. The legal profession, however, has met all this with skepticism – and at times even with hostility – as some lawyers question whether legal tech companies illegally provide legal services. These discussions have since led to various court cases, as well as the adoption of a new federal law that specifically targets legal tech companies. The chapter critically engages with these developments, outlining the regulatory environment for the provision of legal services in Germany as well as relevant case law and legislation. Overall, the chapter hypothesizes that access to justice in Germany has benefited from legal tech companies but that important problems remain to be addressed.

This chapter assesses the extent to which the emergence of Fridays for Future (FFF) resulted in a politicization of climate change and how this affected climate policy and politics in Germany from 2018 to 2022. We show that the politicization resulted in a situation in which the Merkel government decided to gradually phase out coal-fired power plants as the key climate policy decision of the last few years. While this step was triggered by the EU’s announcement in 2017 that it would adopt stricter emissions standards for large combustion plants burning coal and lignite, FFF increased the pressure on the government to act. The politicization of the issue also resulted in changes to climate politics. The positions of mainstream political parties and their candidates have converged in their positions on climate change and the need for climate action. However, this convergence refers to climate policy in abstract terms and not to the specific policy measures supported by the individual parties. While climate change became depoliticized for a while, geopolitical conflicts are expected to repoliticize it and to have an impact on climate politics and policy.

Research on rap music in Germany has focused on questions of transnationalism, ethnicity and gender. This chapter advances studies of German rap through an analysis of the rap song and music video “Ich bin Schwarz” (I am Black, 2016) by the popular female rap duo SXTN. Drawing on intersectional, feminist, and hip-hop studies scholarship, we conduct a close reading of the visuals, lyrics, and signifying practices that are mediated in the cultural text. We argue that “Ich bin Schwarz” promotes a new version of a self-empowered, humorous, and unapologetic Black female German identity by remixing the popular German music genre Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), subverting racist and sexist imaginations of Afrodiasporic womanhood, and continuing hip-hop’s political legacy against right-wing extremism in Germany. Ultimately, “Ich bin Schwarz” contributes to a growing body of performances in rap music and larger popular culture that destabilise white-dominated notions of German national identity.

This chapter examines the War Department’s role in the formation of US policy toward the European war and the growing crisis in the Pacific between the Fall of France in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbor attacks in December 1941. This chapter argues that the War Department played a pivotal role in shaping American policy and actions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, but in different ways. In the Atlantic, the War Department was a primary impetus within the Roosevelt administration for increasingly interventionist policies. It consistently pushed President Roosevelt to act and influenced the politics of his decision-making at several crucial junctures. The War Department provided the crucial nexus between the executive branch, Congress, and outside pressure groups as the US moved toward war. In the Pacific, the War Department pressed for a firm stand against Japan but helped muddle Far Eastern policy by working to undermine the State Department’s more cautious stance. This bureaucratic warfare made it difficult to foster consensus around US deterrence actions and contributed to worsening relations between Washington and Tokyo, setting the stage for the Pacific War.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

Religious ideas have been largely absent in the literature on the welfare state. Instead, class-interest based, rational efficiency, and institutional explanations have dominated. The absence of religious ideas is not a peculiarity of welfare state research but is paralleled by a treatment of ideas as ephemeral to politics in general. The introductory chapter reviews the literature on ideas and politics and the literature on the influence of ideas on welfare policy in particular. It shows why ideas could not play a role in the welfare state literature till today and proposes a solution: to integrate ideas into the study of welfare state evolution. The chapter creates an analytical framework for the study of evolving religious ideas and their impact on welfare state formation and reform in Italy and Germany. It engages with the weaknesses and strengths of both welfare state theory and the new ideational turn literature and introduces a theory of ideational competition. The chapter concludes with a short descriptive outline of the book and the following chapters.

Here we will see how a virtuous cycle of ideational competition led to the formation of the world’s first welfare state in late nineteenth-century Germany. In the first part, we will follow nation building and industrialization in nineteenth-century Germany. Industrialization and the confessional cleavage produced a specific political constellation in which the growth of a pauperized working class not only led to a political conflict between capital and labor but also reinforced the existing confessional cleavage between Protestants and Catholics. In the second part, we will see how the cleavages led to a specific cycle of ideational competition between the dominant political forces of the German Empire (Catholicism, conservative Protestantism, liberal Protestantism, and socialism). In the second half of the nineteenth century, they all started to develop modern social security ideas. The development of these ideas paved the way to the formation of the world’s first welfare state. This chapter looks closely at the evolution of German Catholic social thinking, developing from antiquated medieval social ideas to one of the most sophisticated Catholic social security ideologies at the end of the century. The third part of the chapter gives an account of the making of Bismarck’s social security legislation in the 1880s.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.