The chapter examines the relationship between the size and diversity of the expellee population and entrepreneurship and occupational change in West Germany. Using statistical data at the municipal and county levels, it documents a reversal of fortune: although expellee presence presented economic challenges in the immediate postwar period, in the long run, it increased entrepreneurship rates, education, and household incomes. The more regionally diverse the expellee population, the better the long-run economic performance in receiving communities.

This chapter examines the reception of expellees in West Germany. I show that expellees were perceived as foreigners, despite sharing ethnicity and language with the locals. I then document expellees’ exclusion from local voluntary associations and the formation of new associations based on migration status and region of origin. I conclude by analyzing contributions to public goods provision in Bavarian municipalities. I show that the more expellees a given community received, the lower the rates at which it taxed the locals’ property and business.

The chapter considers the musical project Popol Vuh in the context of its special relationship to spirituality. Although referred to as a band, Popol Vuh consisted of pianist/keyboardist Florian Fricke and various co-musicians with whom Fricke attempted to express his spirituality through music. The chapter begins with an overview of Fricke‘s early creative phase, beginning with his first album Affenstunde, which, like the first side of its successor In den Gärten Pharaos, was still dominated by the sound of the Moog. A special focus is placed on the process leading Fricke to turn away from electronic music; opting for a sound as natural as possible, he hoped to find spiritual fulfilment in organic sounds. As the chapter discusses, Fricke‘s spirituality originated in the study of Eastern religious texts, which he combined with his own interpretation of Catholicism, for example on Hosianna Mantra. Finally, the use of Popol Vuh‘s music in the films of German director Werner Herzog is explored to explain how the two artists were able to achieve a unique synergistic effect in these films.

How did Munich and Budapest come to host soviet revolutions in 1919? This chapter presents the rapid growth of the two cities in the nineteenth century and looks at the dynamics of class and ethnic conflicts leading up to World War I. The chapter argues that although the cities were considered “bourgeois” the roots of the revolutionary labor movements and also the racial tensions of antisemitism were present in them both before the war.

This chapter examines how the police and courts became the main audience for competing revolutionary narratives of guilt and victimization. People wanted to punish others and rehabilitate themselves. The courts functioned both as a sounding board for narratives through which one found resonance and affected verdicts and sentencing and also as a transmitter of new narratives to the public, as court verdicts seemed to be the official or “true” story of the revolutions. The transnational comparison of Budapest and Munich shows that the narrative developed in each was quite different and led to differential severity of verdicts and sentencing, with the courts in Hungary being more punitive. This situation in turn further radicalized Hungarians on the Left and the Right in the interwar period, with the “judicial terror” added to the fraught narrative of revolution and counterrevolution. In Bavaria, though memoirs such as Ernst Toller’s sought to rally supporters with examples of legal mistreatment, the revolution did not play as central a role in the symbolic world of Weimar German politics, overshadowed by even limited events such as the January 1919 Spartacus Uprising and the martyrdom during that revolt of the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

This article explores Brecht’s origins and life in Augsburg from the time he was born in 1898 until he left Augsburg for Berlin in 1924. Brecht came from a well-educated and prosperous middle-class family, and he was raised as a Lutheran by his mother, although he soon rejected any form of Christian religious belief. From an early age he demonstrated great promise and ambition as a writer and soaked up influences from all around him, including the fairs that occurred in Augsburg on a regular basis. He read widely and was influenced by what he read. Among his most important influences were Frank Wedekind, Georg Büchner, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.In his adolescence Brecht became the center of a group of friends in Augsburg devoted to literature, music, and a nonconformist approach to life. In Augsburg Brecht experienced the Bavarian Revolution after the end of World War I.Brecht’s first plays Baal and Drums in the Night reflect some of his experiences and thoughts while living in Augsburg, and his revolutionary first book of poetry, Domestic Breviary, also emerged above all out of his life in Augsburg.

This chapter deals with Munich and Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), two central places in the life of Richard Strauss. It focuses not only on the phases during which he lived and worked there, but also the significance of both cities in terms of Strauss today. Munich and Garmisch changed considerably over Strauss's lifetime, which spanned from the reign of Ludwig II and influence of Richard Wagner in Munich to the destruction of World War II and the early post-war period, offers a complex, changeful picture. The chapter focuses on the interpenetration of cultural, social, political, and artistic structures and Strauss's interaction with their representatives. By locating the composer and conductor in different milieus, life and work are to become graspable as part of multi-layered contexts that are characterized by interdependencies as well as tensions and contradictions.

Chapter 6 deals with the crisis year of 1923 and examines the German Right’s response to the hyperinflation of 1922–23, the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, the increasingly palpable fear of Bolshevism, and threat of Bavaria’s secession from the Reich. After a discussion of the DNVP’s relationship to the Cuno government that assumed office in November 1922, the chapter takes a particularly close look at its opposition to the Stresemann cabinet that assumed power at the height of the crisis in August 1923. Following the termination of passive resistance in the Ruhr, many DNVP leaders began to embrace the idea of a “national dictatorship” under the tutelage of the army commander-in-chief Hans von Seeckt as the only way out of the crisis in which Germany found itself. But movement in this direction was cut short not only by Seeckt’s ambivalence but more importantly by Hitler’s abortive “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich. As the Stresemann government moved to consolidate its position in the aftermath of the putsch, any chance of replacing the Weimar Republic with a more authoritarian system of government had vanished.