Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Major social policy reforms shape the extent to which social protection institutions are selective and status stratifying or universally accessible to all citizens and broadly redistributive. When making such reform decisions, policy-makers address substantive policy challenges, and they respond to the demands of important people in society. Yet, the reform options they come up with are not merely technical solutions to rationally defined policy problems, nor are they in-formed by broad and long-term stable class preferences for particular kinds of social protection institutions. Instead, the political dynamic shaping social policy choices is “local”: it is defined on specific reform measures with concrete tangible effects on the lives of clearly defined groups of people, usually smaller than the electoral bases of the political parties, and this dynamic varies not only between welfare regimes, or countries, or eras, but very importantly also between the situations of particular legislative initiatives.
Situation-specific factors and the substantive contents of reform policies define the dy-namic of social policy decision-making in each legislative initiative. Political competition between the political parties renders certain types of social policy reform politically feasible and not others. That dynamic, it turns out, does not primarily translate the preferences of the majority or of the dominant socio-economic group into policies and laws, it often renders crucial minori-ties, over whose allegiance several of the major organizational players in legislative choices compete, disproportionately influential. The interests of these constituencies in the center of po-litical competition then become the highly politicized centerpieces of reform, whereas the de-mands of other people in society are ignored.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The end of World War II is one of the great historical breaking points in European history and gives rise to the expectation that the destruction and dislocations of war and occupation would induce far-reaching changes in the social structures and the institutions of the newly emerging political system. However, in West Germany core institutions of the political system were essentially restored. This was pronouncedly the case in the country?s welfare system. Between 1945 and 1957 the institutional core of that welfare state, the social insurance system lived through tremendous challenges surprisingly unchanged in its core organizational forms.
My paper argues that this resilience of institutional form is only half of the process that needs to be explained about the system?s evolution in during the twelve years after the war. The other half is that the social insurance system was transformed in the principles on which it grants benefits as well as in the overall generosity of its benefits. Explanations of this transformation do not get far when they concentrate on ?constant causes?, such as the functions that the system would fulfill once installed, or the interests of particular actors in the decision system. What is needed, instead, is a genetic explanation that pays attention to the dynamics of the development.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Newspapers were to WW I what radio was to WW II, what TV was to Vietnam and Internet video- digital photographs are to the Iraqi War. In WW II, fascist agitators mixed Freud's work on the
unconscious with radio propaganda, which was analyzed by Adorno, Ernst Kris, Hans Speier, and Ernst Simmel for military intelligence ( O.S.S./O.W.I. ) Some WW II radio heckler techniques have been recycled into US neo-con talk radio/TV shows since 9-11. Today, shaky cam Internet beheadings, & terrorist VCR battle americasarmy.com (video war games) for the hearts and minds
of Internet-video addicted young males.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: During my research on the international career of Katherine Dunham, especially her performances in Germany (“ 'Jungle in the Spotlight'?: Primitivism and Esteem: Katherine Dunham’s 1954 German Tour,” in Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed. Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York: Routledge, 2004: 53–71), I stumbled upon the extensive newsreel holdings of the "Deutsche Wochenschau" film archives in Hamburg. Here the newsreels that were broadcast weekly in German movie theaters reveal the extent of African American influence as “cultural ambassadors” sent by the U.S. government to post-WWII Germany. By the early 1950s, there were signs of what was to later become the German "Wirtschaftswunder" (“economic miracle”). Young people, in particular, were attracted to U.S. culture and way of life; they wanted to have fun and enjoyed, for example, dancing the jitter bug, rock n’ roll, and listening to jazz. America, and often particularly African America, became a desirable expression of the new optimism and cultural innovation people desired after the bleak war and immediate post-war years.

The overall contextualization and presentation of African American stars in this film footage is particularly interesting. For example, Louis Armstrong is shown leaving a plane and clowning with a small German boy who seems to play a better trumpet than Armstrong does; Marian Anderson sings Schubert "Lieder" in a girl’s secondary school; Ella Fitzgerald is filmed during a jazz concert accompanied by Oscar Peterson and Gene Krupa; and Katherine Dunham is shown performing Caribbean dance with the Dunham dancers in Paris.

How are these performers positioned within the newsreel format, i.e. within the content of the whole week’s news? What are the performers shown doing and how are they doing it? What is shown immediately before and after each clip? How are they shown interacting with Germans? How are they presented in relation to European and African performers? I would like to explore the tension between the intentionality of the sequences and what people “really” saw within the context of the genre in an attempt to assess the impact these African American performers had on German audiences.

This project illustrates the potential and necessity of transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary research implicit in American Studies in general, but specifically American Studies conducted outside the United States by scholars who are “at home,” so to speak, in cultures both within and outside the U.S.A. It intends to explore the dynamics of relation between (African) America and Germany in the circulation of culture and performers in the Atlantic space.