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The chapter begins with a brief historical overview of Germany’s transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century from a transit and emigration country to one of immigration. The next part of this chapter looks at the challenges and problems facing German immigration policy within a multi-level federal system. Finally, the chapter gives an analysis of some of the trends in German migration policy since the refugee crisis in 2015, such as changes in the party system and in the concepts underlying migration policies to better manage, control and limit immigration to Germany.
When the "Ostjuden" returned
(2021)
This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term "Ostjuden" to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980's and 2000's, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term "Ostjuden" and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term "Ostjuden" re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term "osteuropaische Juden" (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.
Digital government constitutes the most important trend of post-NPM reforms at the local level. Based on the results of a research project on local one-stop shops, this article analyses the current state of digitalization in German local authorities. The authors explain the hurdles of implementation as well as the impact on staff members and citizens, providing explanations and revealing general interrelations between institutional changes, impacts, and context factors of digital transformation.
Sexual scripts serve as cognitive representations of typical elements of sexual interactions that guide sexual behavior. To the extent that cognitive scripts for consensual sex comprise elements associated with a risk of experiencing nonconsensual sex, they may be indirectly linked to sexual victimization via risky sexual behavior. A longitudinal study with 2,425 college students in Germany (58% female) examined pathways from sexual scripts for consensual sex, sexual behavior, and sexual victimization over three data waves separated by 12-month intervals. Sexual scripts and behavior were defined as risky to the extent that they include known vulnerability factors for sexual victimization (casual sex, alcohol consumption, ambiguous communication of sexual intentions). Path analyses confirmed that more risky sexual scripts prospectively predicted more risky sexual behavior, which predicted higher odds of sexual victimization. The findings held for men and women and participants with exclusively opposite-sex and both same- and opposite-sex contacts. Moreover, reciprocal influences between risky scripts and risky sexual behavior were found over time, confirming the proposed mutual reinforcement of scripts and behavior. The findings have implications for conceptualizing the role of scripts for consensual sex as vulnerability factors for sexual victimization among women and men and may inform intervention efforts.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Cities can be severely affected by climate change. Hence, many of them have started to develop climate adaptation strategies or implement measures to help prepare for the challenges it will present. This study aims to provide an overview of climate adaptation in 104 German cities. While existing studies on adaptation tracking rely heavily on self-reported data or the mere existence of adaptation plans, we applied the broader concept of adaptation readiness, considering five factors and a total of twelve different indicators, when making our assessments. We clustered the cities depending on the contribution of these factors to the overall adaptation readiness index and grouped them according to their total score and cluster affiliations. This resulted in us identifying four groups of cities. First, a pioneering group comprises twelve (mainly big) cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, which showed high scores for all five factors of adaptation readiness. Second, a set of 36 active cities, which follow different strategies on how to deal with climate adaptation. Third, a group of 28 cities showed considerably less activity toward climate adaptation, while a fourth set of 28 mostly small cities (with between 50,000 and 99,999 inhabitants) scored the lowest. We consider this final group to be pursuing a 'wait-and-see' approach. Since the city size correlates with the adaptation readiness index, we recommend policymakers introduce funding schemes that focus on supporting small cities, to help them prepare for the impact of a changing climate.
In this article, I give an overview on nativist street protests in Germany from the early nineteenth century to the present from an historical perspective. In a preliminary re-mark, I will reflect on some recent developments in Germany, where nativist protest campaigns against immigration took place in the streets when voters were turning towards the populist radical right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In the first section, I will outline an older tradition of anti-immigration protest in nineteenth and early twentieth century Germany, which is closely connected to modern antisemitism. In sections two and three, I will retrace how, from the late 1960s onward, the far right in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) discovered concerns about immigra-tion in the German population, addressed them in protest campaigns and developed narratives to integrate such sentiments into a broader right-wing extremist ideology, itself deeply rooted in antisemitism. Studying nativism and the radical right from an actor-oriented perspective, I will focus on traditionalist movements, including the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and neo-Nazi groups.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Die vorliegende Research Note stellt die erste systematische Dokumentation der Gesetzgebung in den deutschen Landtagen vor. Der Datensatz umfasst insgesamt 16.610 dokumentierte Gesetzgebungsvorgänge zwischen den Jahren 1990 und 2020. Nach einer Beschreibung des Datensatzes werden einige Gesetzgebungsmuster in den deutschen Ländern exemplarisch dargestellt. Die Landesgesetzgebung erweist sich dabei als stark durch den neuen Dualismus zwischen Regierung und Opposition geprägt. Im Initiativverhalten lassen sich zudem die Anreize des thematischen Parteienwettbewerbs ablesen. Wenig Evidenz findet sich für die These, dass innerkoalitionäre Gegensätze die Dauer der Gesetzgebungsverfahren in die Länge ziehen. Der mit dieser Research Note veröffentlichte Datensatz steht der Forschung für die Untersuchung zahlreicher weiterer Fragestellungen zur Verfügung.
Ethnic-racial identity (ERI) is an important aspect of youth development and has been well-studied for the last several decades. One issue less discussed is how the construct of ERI translates across different countries and cultures. The purpose of our paper is to describe the sociohistorical context of Germany and implications for the study of ethnic-racial identity in Europe. We discuss the German adaption of the Identity Project, an 8-week school-based ethnic-racial identity exploration intervention developed in the United States. We use this as a concrete example of how we thought through the focal construct of ERI to figure out how and whether it is a salient social identity category for youth in Germany where, in response to the history of racially motivated genocide, discussions of "race" are taboo. Digging into the ways ERI may not be directly transferable to different contexts can help us understand its nature as a socially constructed identity with real-life implications. Our hope with this paper is to further discussion, question our conceptualizations, and acknowledge how a detailed understanding of sociohistorical contexts is needed for the study of ERI.
Ranking local climate policy
(2021)
Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are crucial tasks for urban areas and can involve synergies as well as trade-offs. However, few studies have examined how mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to each other in a large number of differently sized cities, and therefore we know little about whether forerunners in mitigation are also leading in adaptation or if cities tend to focus on just one policy field. This article develops an internationally applicable approach to rank cities on climate policy that incorporates multiple indicators related to (1) local commitments on mitigation and adaptation, (2) urban mitigation and adaptation plans and (3) climate adaptation and mitigation ambitions. We apply this method to rank 104 differently sized German cities and identify six clusters: climate policy leaders, climate adaptation leaders, climate mitigation leaders, climate policy followers, climate policy latecomers and climate policy laggards. The article seeks explanations for particular cities' positions and shows that coping with climate change in a balanced way on a high level depends on structural factors, in particular city size, the pathways of local climate policies since the 1990s and funding programmes for both climate mitigation and adaptation.
Strategic label
(2020)
The Afropolitan Berlin novel Biskaya by SchwarzRund (2016) is probably the first novel written in German which demonstratively wears this label – on the front cover of the book, the author announces it to be an Afropolitaner Berlin Roman underneath the title. While addressing quite a few particulars of the Berlin-Brandenburg area, the novel writes itself willingly into the globally popular, yet controversial realm of African inflected cosmopolitanism. In this essay, I will argue that the author uses the label strategically to negotiate the global and the local – or worldliness and cultural specificity – with the aim to increase the visibility of queer of Color critique in Germany.
SchwarzRund’s approach may seem contradictory at first: Even though she could have called her novel queer, neuro-diverse, diasporic or Black, she chose Afropolitan. While she wrote an outspokenly political novel, she labeled it with a term often critically denounced as apolitical. Using Afropolitanism, she seems to aim at a rather mainstream audience, but at the same time, she published with a small, activist publishing house. While attempting to tap into the transnational cultural and literary capital of Afropolitanism, the language of the book is German and restricts it to the German-speaking parts of the world.
This essay will explore the Afropolitanism depicted in Biskaya and elaborate on the strategic choice of label. I will offer one possible interpretation of the characters and settings which illustrate SchwarzRund’s vision and version of Afropolitanism. In my analyses, I am interested in political questions around the characters’ identities and the setting. The Black protagonists of the novel, Tue and Dwayne, live in Berlin, but grew up on the fictional island Biskaya. This island is located somewhere close to the European mainland and part of the continent; it had an entirely Black population until a destructive event forced many to move to the mainland. The protagonists, now living in a mainly white society, are depicted in a state of interrogation of their own sense of self, measuring oppressive societal norms against other possible ways of interaction. The novel shows how people are deemed strange and not fitting into a network of unspoken rules because of racialized bodies, sexual preferences and#shor lifestyle choices. However, SchwarzRund counters those structures of inequality with her characters’ playful ways to deal with queerness, femininity and blackness subverting imposed norms. The novel challenges imperatives of subordination, creates new visions and inscribes Black Germans as political subjects.
Contemporary drought impact assessments have been constrained due to data availability, leading to an incomplete representation of impact trends. To address this, we present a novel method for the comprehensive and near-real-time monitoring of drought socio-economic impacts based on media reports. We tested its application using the case of the exceptional 2018/19 German drought. By employing text mining techniques, 4839 impact statements were identified, relating to livestock, agriculture, forestry, fires, recreation, energy and transport sectors. An accuracy of 95.6% was obtained for their automatic classification. Furthermore, high levels of performance in terms of spatial and temporal precision were found when validating our results against independent data (e.g. soil moisture, average precipitation, population interest in droughts, crop yield and forest fire statistics). The findings highlight the applicability of media data for rapidly and accurately monitoring the propagation of drought consequences over time and space. We anticipate our method to be used as a starting point for an impact-based early warning system.
Der bislang in Deutschland und Frankreich sowie auf EU-Ebene geltende Rechtsrahmen ist grundsätzlich geeignet, um den Besonderheiten der Digitalwirtschaft Rechnung tragen zu können. Legislatives Handeln scheint insbesondere dort sinnvoll, wo es zur Effektivierung der Durchsetzung des bestehenden Rechts beiträgt. Dies betrifft unter anderem die Stärkung einstweiliger Maßnahmen, für deren Anwendung Frankreich als Vorbild dienen kann.
In den untersuchten Rechtsordnungen lässt sich ein inkrementeller Politikansatz beobachten: die Säulen des Wettbewerbsrechts werken sukzessive in den Blick genommen und gesetzgeberische Maßnahmen nur schrittweise vorgenommen.
Die in Deutschland und Frankreich geführten Diskussionen und bereits vorgenommenen gesetzgeberischen Maßnahmen deuten derzeit auf eine zunehmende Divergenz zwischen deutschem und französischem Wettbewerbsrecht bei den Antworten auf die Herausforderungen der Digitalwirtschaft hin. Zum einen, weil die in Deutschland vorgenommenen Änderungen der Zusammenschlusskontrolle in Frankreich nicht übernommen werden. Zum anderen, weil die in Deutschland diskutierten Vorschläge zur Reform der Missbrauchsaufsicht kaum auf das französische Recht übertragbar sind.
Clusterpolitik als Politikfeld an der Schnittstelle von Industrie-, Innovations- (F&E) und Regionalpolitik entwickelte sich Mitte der 1990er Jahre zuerst in einigen EU Mitgliedsstaaten, darunter Deutschland. Mit einem Abstand von rund 10 Jahren begann die Herausbildung als eigenes Politikfeld in Frankreich. Die europäische Ebene begann ebenfalls erst ab Mitte der 2000er Jahre im Zusammenhang mit der Lissabon Strategie sich intensiver mit Clustern und Clusterpolitik zu beschäftigen und entwickelte ab 2008 Jahren einen systematischen Politikansatz.
Der Anstoß zur Politikfeldentwicklung auf dem Gebiet der Clusterpolitik ging in Europa also gerade nicht von der EU-Ebene aus. Auch wenn das Politikfeld „EU-Clusterpolitik“ einem erheblichen Wandel im Zuge der Europa 2020 Strategie unterlag, findet eine Koordinierung der mitgliedsstaatlichen Politiken durch die EU-Ebene bislang nicht statt und ist – soweit ersichtlich – von Seiten der EU auch nicht angestrebt. Die EU Clusterpolitik ist vielmehr komplementär und unterstützend zu den nationalen Politiken ausgerichtet.
In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird aufgezeigt, dass sich die drei clusterpolitischen Arenen EU, Deutschland, Frankreich weitestgehend unabhängig voneinander entwickelten und jeweils eigenen von unterschiedlichen Institutionen, Kontexten, Traditionen und Pfadabhängigkeiten bestimmten Logiken folgten. Sowohl der vertikale als auch der horizontale Verflechtungsgrad ist gering zwischen EU und Mitgliedsstaaten. Verflechtungsmuster beginnen gerade erst sich auszudifferenzieren. Jedoch sind Policy-Transfer oder sogar Policy-Learning Prozesse zwischen den drei Arenen EU, Deutschland und Frankreich schon in Ansätzen erkennbar.
Es gibt deutliche Unterschiede in den Clusterpolitiken Frankreichs und Deutschlands. Clusterpolitik wird in Deutschland in erster Linie auf Ebene der Länder konzipiert und implementiert, während sie in Frankreich nach wie vor vom Zentralstaat gesteuert wird – wenn auch mit zunehmend konzeptioneller Beteiligung der regionalen Ebene. Die Neuausrichtung der EU Clusterpolitik im Rahmen der Europa 2020 Strategie fand in Frankreich eine deutlich stärkere Resonanz als in Deutschland.
Die Handlungslogik hinter den clusterpolitischen Maßnahmen der EU mit Bezug zur Lissabon-Strategie lag in der Verbesserung der Innovationsfähigkeit – die Handlungslogik der clusterpolitischen Maßnahmen im Rahmen der Europa 2020 Strategie liegt in der Modernisierung der industriellen Basis Europas durch Entwicklung neuer Wertschöpfungsketten. Die EU Clusterpolitik unterlag insofern einem erheblichen Wandel.
Large-scale crop yield failures are increasingly associated with food price spikes and food insecurity and are a large source of income risk for farmers. While the evidence linking extreme weather to yield failures is clear, consensus on the broader set of weather drivers and conditions responsible for recent yield failures is lacking. We investigate this for the case of four major crops in Germany over the past 20 years using a combination of machine learning and process-based modelling. Our results confirm that years associated with widespread yield failures across crops were generally associated with severe drought, such as in 2018 and to a lesser extent 2003. However, for years with more localized yield failures and large differences in spatial patterns of yield failures between crops, no single driver or combination of drivers was identified. Relatively large residuals of unexplained variation likely indicate the importance of non-weather related factors, such as management (pest, weed and nutrient management and possible interactions with weather) explaining yield failures. Models to inform adaptation planning at farm, market or policy levels are here suggested to require consideration of cumulative resource capture and use, as well as effects of extreme events, the latter largely missing in process-based models. However, increasingly novel combinations of weather events under climate change may limit the extent to which data driven methods can replace process-based models in risk assessments.
Depuis les débuts de l’ère spatiale à la seconde moitié du XXème siècle, la France et l’Allemagne ont contribué à l’émergence d’une industrie spatiale européenne dont ils sont les deux principaux acteurs et les principaux partenaires. L’agence spatiale européenne, en s’appuyant sur cette industrie duale, à la fois civile et militaire, a donné une place importante à l’Europe sur la scène mondiale. La création de pôles de compétitivité au tournant du XXIème siècle a contribué à soutenir l’innovation dans un secteur bousculé par l’arrivée de nouveaux acteurs internationaux. Ces pôles se sont imposés dans le paysage économique du secteur en créant des organisations où cohabitent et collaborent des acteurs privés et publics allant de la recherche à la mise en oeuvre des technologies développées. A la multiplicité des politiques de soutien à l’innovation en France et en Allemagne s’ajoutent désormais les objectifs européens définis par la Commission Européenne. Les pôles de compétitivité ne sont pas identifiés comme des instruments privilégiés de la politique spatiale européenne pas plus que dans les projets de coopération franco-allemands des dernières années. La capacité d’action locale de ces organisations n’est pas adaptée aux enjeux économiques à dimension européenne qui prévalent aujourd’hui et ne leur permet pas de s’intégrer efficacement dans l’industrie spatiale moderne.
The involvement of the two German states in Korea during the 1950s in the context of the Cold War
(2020)
This master thesis will analyze the background of the involvement of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Korea during the 1950s in the context of the Cold War. In both Korean states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as well as the Republic of Korea (ROK), the so-called humanitarian aid that was provided to them in the form of medical and economic assistance to help surmount the hardship of the postwar period is remembered with great appreciation to this day. However, critical views on the German engagement in Korea are still relatively hard to find. In this paper, two exemplary cases will be studied: the GDR’s city reconstruction project in the North Korean cities of Hamheung and Heungnam and the FRG’s medical assistance to the ROK by means of the West German Red Cross Hospital in Busan. By looking at primary sources like governmental documents, this thesis will examine the geopolitical conditions and particular national interests that stood behind the German development and humanitarian aid for the Korean states at that time, thus shedding light on the political goals the two German states pursued, and the benefit they expected to derive from their engagement in Korea. Sources consulted include primary archival materials, secondary sources like monographs, journal articles, contemporary newspaper articles, and interviews with contemporary witnesses.
The involvement of the two German states in Korea during the 1950s in the context of the Cold War
(2020)
This master thesis will analyze the background of the involvement of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Korea during the 1950s in the context of the Cold War. In both Korean states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as well as the Republic of Korea (ROK), the so-called humanitarian aid that was provided to them in the form of medical and economic assistance to help surmount the hardship of the postwar period is remembered with great appreciation to this day. However, critical views on the German engagement in Korea are still relatively hard to find. In this paper, two exemplary cases will be studied: the GDR’s city reconstruction project in the North Korean cities of Hamheung and Heungnam and the FRG’s medical assistance to the ROK by means of the West German Red Cross Hospital in Busan. By looking at primary sources like governmental documents, this thesis will examine the geopolitical conditions and particular national interests that stood behind the German development and humanitarian aid for the Korean states at that time, thus shedding light on the political goals the two German states pursued, and the benefit they expected to derive from their engagement in Korea. Sources consulted include primary archival materials, secondary sources like monographs, journal articles, contemporary newspaper articles, and interviews with contemporary witnesses.
An increase in zoonotic infections in humans in recent years has led to a high level of public interest. However, the extent of infestation of free-living small mammals with pathogens and especially parasites is not well understood. This pilot study was carried out within the framework of the "Rodent-borne pathogens" network to identify zoonotic parasites in small mammals in Germany. From 2008 to 2009, 111 small mammals of 8 rodent and 5 insectivore species were collected. Feces and intestine samples from every mammal were examined microscopically for the presence of intestinal parasites by using Telemann concentration for worm eggs, Kinyoun staining for coccidia, and Heidenhain staining for other protozoa. Adult helminths were additionally stained with carmine acid for species determination. Eleven different helminth species, five coccidians, and three other protozoa species were detected. Simultaneous infection of one host by different helminths was common. Hymenolepis spp. (20.7%) were the most common zoonotic helminths in the investigated hosts. Coccidia, including Eimeria spp. (30.6%), Cryptosporidium spp. (17.1%), and Sarcocystis spp. (17.1%), were present in 40.5% of the feces samples of small mammals. Protozoa, such as Giardia spp. and amoebae, were rarely detected, most likely because of the repeated freeze-thawing of the samples during preparation. The zoonotic pathogens detected in this pilot study may be potentially transmitted to humans by drinking water, smear infection, and airborne transmission.