From the Spanish Inquisition to Nazi Germany to the United States today, ordinary people have often chosen to turn in their neighbors to the authorities. What motivates citizens to inform on the people next door? In Judge Thy Neighbor, Patrick Bergemann provides a theoretical framework for understanding the motives for denunciations in terms of institutional structures and incentives. In case studies of societies in which denunciations were widespread, Bergemann merges historical and quantitative analysis to explore individual reasons for participation. He sheds light on Jewish converts’ shifting motives during the Spanish Inquisition; when and why seventeenth-century Romanov subjects fulfilled their obligation to report insults to the tsar’s honor; and the widespread petty and false complaints filed by German citizens under the Third Reich, as well as present-day plea bargains, whistleblowing, and crime reporting. Bergemann finds that when authorities use coercion or positive incentives to elicit information, individuals denounce out of self-preservation or to gain rewards. However, in the absence of these incentives, denunciations are often motivated by personal resentments and grudges. In both cases, denunciations facilitate social control not because of citizen loyalty or moral outrage but through the local interests of ordinary participants. Offering an empirically and theoretically rich account of the dynamics of denunciation as well as vivid descriptions of the denounced, Judge Thy Neighbor is a timely and compelling analysis of the reasons people turn in their acquaintances, with relevance beyond conventionally repressive regimes.

This book offers original, expert analyses of Germany's relations with several European neighbors as well as with the United States and explores the essential concerns these nations have faced in their bilateral relations with Germany--past, present, and future.

Table of contents

For Germany's neighbors, perhaps more acutely than for observers elsewhere, the 1990 reunification of divided Germany has raised old memories and new concerns in public and scholarly discourse. The shape and influence of these issues are the subject of this unique, ambitious book. Organized into country-specific chapters, the book offers original, expert analyses of Germany's relations with seventeen European neighbors as well as with the United States. The contributors explore the essential concerns these nations have faced in their bilateral relations with Germany—past, present, and future. In their introduction, the editors trace both commonality and diversity in various national conceptions of the "German Question" and the ways in which these perceptions in turn generate shared as well as divergent national policy agendas vis-a-vis united Germany.

National Book Award Finalist: Never before has the mentality of the average German under the Nazi regime been made as intelligible to the outsider.” —The New York TImes They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Milton Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” These ten men were not men of distinction, according to Mayer, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune. A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.

The editors present a collection of 23 historical papers exploring relationships between "the Germans" (necessarily adopting different senses of the term for different periods or different topics) and their immediate neighbors to the East. The eras discussed range from the Middle Ages to European integration. Examples of specific topics addressed include the Teutonic order in the development of the political culture of Northeastern Europe during the Middle ages, Teutonic-Balt relations in the chronicles of the Baltic Crusades, the emergence of Polenliteratur in 18th century Germany, German colonization in the Banat and Transylvania in the 18th century, changing meanings of "German" in Habsburg Central Europe, German military occupation and culture on the Eastern Front in Word War I, interwar Poland and the problem of Polish-speaking Germans, the implementation of Nazi racial policy in occupied Poland, Austro-Czechoslovak relations and the post-war expulsion of the Germans, and narratives of the lost German East in Cold War West Germany.

A landmark book that changed the story of Poland’s role in the Holocaust On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children—all but seven of the town’s Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan Gross reveals how Jedwabne’s Jews were murdered not by faceless Nazis but by people who knew them well—their non-Jewish Polish neighbors. A previously untold story of the complicity of non-Germans in the extermination of the Jews, Neighbors shows how people victimized by the Nazis could at the same time victimize their Jewish fellow citizens. In a new preface, Gross reflects on the book’s explosive international impact and the backlash it continues to provoke from right-wing Polish nationalists who still deny their ancestors’ role in the destruction of the Jews.