German Pacifism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The article discusses recent work on German pacifist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While many books and articles offer a biographical perspective on key pacifists, other studies are interested in the contributions of functionally differentiated fields of society such as education or the legal system to the advancement of non-violent policies and practices. A focus of much recent work are the West German protest movements against the Dual Track Solution in the early 1980s. These protests sought to reconceptualise the space of the political and to promote a ‘politics of scales’ that translated the potentially global scope of nuclear destruction into the immediate context of a town, village or neighbourhood.