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Vernon Lidtke: A Tribute

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Gary D. Stark  and
Lawrence D. Stokes
Gary D. Stark
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State University
Lawrence D. Stokes
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

On 9 October 2001 Vernon Lidtke delivered his valedictory lecture at The Johns Hopkins University on the topic of “Die Abstrakten,” a left-wing group of artists in Germany during the Weimar Republic. With this address before an appreciative audience comprising students, colleagues, and friends, Vernon concluded almost forty years of a distinguished scholarly career in the field of modern European and German history. In his scholarship Vernon is most widely identified with the study of the German labor movement in general and especially the Social Democratic Party, on which subjects he has thus far published two major books along with numerous journal articles and chapters. His formal retirement from academic life was also marked a few months earlier by a testimonial dinner held in Baltimore and attended by a large proportion of the twenty-five doctoral graduates whose dissertations he had supervised over more than three decades at Johns Hopkins. On both occasions he was fondly remembered as an accomplished historian, an inspiring teacher, and a generous mentor. In this and the four essays that follow, some of his former students wish also to commemorate Vernon's scholarly and teaching career.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 189 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2004

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References

1. A revised version of this lecture is printed in Central European History 37, no. 1, (2004): 41–90.Google Scholar

2. These are listed below.

3. German Social Democracy 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955).Google Scholar

4. For his own historiographical assessment of these issues see his “The Socialist Labor Movement” (1996).Google Scholar

5. “German Social Democracy and German State Socialism, 1876–1884” (1964) and The Outlawed Party, chap. 6.Google Scholar

6. “Engels über Proletariat und Kultur” (1971)Google Scholar and “Recent Literature on Workers' Culture in Germany and England” (1986).Google Scholar

7. “Die kulturelle Bedeutung der Arbeitervereine” (1973).Google Scholar

8. “Naturalism and Socialism in Germany” (1974).Google Scholar

9. The Alternative Culture, 9.Google Scholar

10. “Burghers, Workers, and Problems of Class Relationships 1870 to 1914: Germany in Comparative Perspective” (1986)Google Scholar; see also his review essay “The Formation of the Working Class in Germany” (1980).Google Scholar

11. “Songs and Nazis: Political Music and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Germany” (1982).Google Scholar

12. “Twentieth-Century Germany: The Cultural, Social, and Political Context of the Work of Oscar Schlemmer” (1986).Google Scholar

13. Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Profession 38, no. 3 (2000): 31.Google Scholar

14. See Pedlow, Gregory W., The Survival of the Prussian Nobility 1770–1870 (Princeton, 1988)Google Scholar; Neufeld, Michael J., The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg: Craft and Class in the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989)Google Scholar; Wilson, John R., Seedbed of Protest: Social Structure and Radical Politics in Ettlingen, Grand Duchy of Baden, 1815–1850 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Kühl, Stefan, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Bowman, William, Priest and Parish in Vienna, 1780 to 1880 (Boston, 1999)Google Scholar; Spector, Scott, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka's Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, 2000)Google Scholar; and Baumhoff, Anja, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic's Premier Art Institute (Frankfurt, 2001)Google Scholar; also Stokes, Lawrence D., “The German People and the Destruction of the European Jews,” Central European History 6 (1973): 167–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bönker, Dirk, “Maritime Aufrüstung zwischen Partei- und Weltpolitik: Schlachtflottenbau in Deutschland und den USA urn die Jahrhundertwende,” in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutschamerikanischen Beziehungen vor und im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Heideking, Jürgen and Fiebig-von Hase, Ragnhild (Trier, 1998), 231–59Google Scholar; Liang, Oliver, “The Biology of Morality: Criminal Biology in Bavaria 1924–1933,” in Criminals and their Scientists, ed. Wetzell, Richard (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; and Stitziel, Judd, “Konsurnpolitik zwischen ‘Sortimentslücken’ und ‘Überplanbeständen’ in der DDR der 1950er Jahre,” in Vor dem Mauerbau: Politik und Gesellschaft in der DDR der frünfziger Jahre, ed. Hoffmann, Dierk, Schwartz, Michael, and Wentker, Hermann (Munich, forthcoming).Google Scholar

15. We appreciate the memories provided by Kathleen Canning, William Rice, William Bowman, Judd Stitziel, and Cameron Munter.

16. See its web page http://www.gettysburg.edu/library/donors/lidtke/