The David Barclay Book Prize was inaugurated in 2020 to mark the occasion of Dr. David E. Barclay’s retirement from the German Studies Association’s Executive Directorship, a position he held for fifteen years. This annual prize recognizes both Dr. Barclay’s service to the Association and his scholarship as Professor Emeritus of History at Kalamazoo College. The Barclay Book Prize is awarded to the best monograph (in English or German and published in the previous year) on the social, cultural, economic, political, or labor history of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Germany or central Europe.

2024 Recipient of the Barclay Book Prize

Mikkel Dack, Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen and Political Screening (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

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Previous recipients of the Barclay Book Prize

2023

The David Barclay Book prize is awarded to the best monograph on the social, cultural, economic, political, or labor history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany or central Europe. Among many excellent submissions, we find a clear winner, indeed one that crosses these methodological realms with great skill and rich reward. Samuel Clowes Huneke’s States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany is a highly original and important study, at once contributing to the history of both postwar Germanies, of the Cold War, of sexuality, of liberal democracies and dictatorships, of social movements, and of the nature and limits of change. Drawing on archival material that ranges from government reports and legal briefs to magazines and cultural ephemera, as well as oral histories, Huneke offers a volume that is not only both top-down and bottom-up, but also cross-country, and carefully attentive to change over time. This permits him to offer a compelling challenge to Foucauldian arguments for biopolitics and, in turn, to terms like “homophobia.” Taking a queer perspective and identifying evidence of Eigensinn, Huneke provides new insights regarding the nature of states and social movements, and the influenceability of states irrespective of regime type. As such, it resolutely refutes any notion that a more liberal regime would necessarily be more attentive to gay rights—and even to popular political demands generally. In this “conjoined history” [13], Huneke demonstrates clearly through both qualitative and quantitative evidence how activists in both East and West Germany, and the sexual citizenship they embodied, “changed the societies and the governments with which they interacted.” [10]

It might be assumed that the authoritarian East German regime was far more repressive than West Germany concerning the freedoms of gay people. Yet, as in other areas, such as gender equality and access to abortions, the GDR was on the whole more resolute in institutionalizing homosexual rights. This was the case both legally, in terms of the of the early complete repeal of Paragraph 175, and, on the whole, in practice, although, as Huneke deftly demonstrates, this practice varied over time, as it did too in the FRG. Indeed, both regimes were acutely aware of popular perceptions, and, to the degree that the SED did crack down gay groupings and sites of congregation, it was fundamentally an issue of protecting the state’s legitimacy against perceived prejudices within the broader populace. While change over time marked government attitudes in both Germanies, if “adaptability” described practice in the GDR, “tenacious rigidity” better characterized that in the FRG, in which, inter alia, concern for homosexual spies from the East and other “tricks” was a near-constant refrain. Political calculation reigned in both Germanies, but West German authorities adopted a language of “respectability” in the face of this feared “social ill.” [83]

In this study, gay people themselves are not just the objects of concern but also subjects in their own right, demonstrating clear agency in many forms in both Germanies, and likewise shifting through the decades. At the same time, there was no tight relationship between flourishing subcultures and the ability to influence politicians—or the larger population. We come to know gay people as activists, but also as people who lived their everyday lives, and the way the two intimately interacted—and didn’t. Notably gay activists and state officials in each Germany influenced one another and always considered questions of homosexuals and homosexual rights with an eye to the other. Certainly there were activist achievements in both countries; conversely, Huneke shies away from reference to political “failures,” questioning the usefulness of such characterization in understanding activist efforts and their outcome. Yet it doesn’t require such terminology to observe, in the wake of the Wall’s fall, a “broad political consensus in favor of gay and lesbian interests in East Germany […] in a way not yet accepted in West Germany.” [228] In turn, Huneke observes, reunification was not a “happy” moment for gay rights, and, in this arena as others, much was lost as well as gained.

Thus, as much he tells a newly nuanced as well as broad story of gays and gay rights in both postwar Germanies, Samuel Clowes Huneke offers a critical example of, as he puts it so well, “the degree to which social and political changes, especially changes we might call progress, are localized, subjective phenomena that can occur in democracies and dictatorships alike.” He reminds us too in this study, both soberly academic and a call to action, of the very “impermanence of the past”: both the potential limits of any accomplishments and moreover our own ability to transform that past through the future we ourselves write. We are delighted to confer this honor on Samuel Clowes Huneke’s States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany.

2022

Steven Press’ book Blood and Diamonds. Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa tells the important and hitherto neglected story of the colonial German diamond trade from the early 20th century into the post-World War I period. Focusing on diamonds from Southwest Africa, Press adds a crucial economic dimension to our understanding of German colonialism. Trade in diamonds, he argues convincingly, constituted a significant aspect of the German colonial economy and added an economic motivation to the German colonial enterprise. In particular, the author relates German “blood diamonds” to the more well-known history of the German colonial genocide in Southwest Africa. Deftly written and based on multi-archival evidence from several countries, including Namibia and South Africa, the book directs our attention to a central aspect of Germany’s imperial past.

The committee was deeply impressed by the author’s ability to analyze “blood diamonds” from a variety of perspectives, including German domestic politics, international finance, global trade, emerging consumer culture, labor regimes and colonial rivalries. Blood and Diamonds sheds light on the interaction of private economic interests and the imperial German state in exploiting the colony’s mineral riches. The author also presents distressing evidence of the racist and violent exploitation of migrant labor from Ovamboland that stood in the continuity of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama. We also learn of an underworld of diamond smuggling and myriad forms of illicit trade in diamonds. Finally, the book provides vivid portrayals of key individuals, most notably, Bernhard Dernburg, the head of the German colonial office from 1906 to 1910 and main organizer of the German diamond trade.

2021

Impeccably written, Heidi Tworek’s book, News from Germany, describes the many ups, downs, and historical twists shaping one nation’s efforts to engage with other major powers by actively competing to control and shape news gathering, as well as its global dissemination, between 1900 and 1945. Beginning with the rise of Reuters in Britain, the French Havas news agency and, later, the US-based Associated Press, she reveals the profound impact of technological innovation on the power of dominant states not only to control their own images abroad but also to adapt constantly to changing rules of the game, resulting in new forms of “information warfare.”

As a latecomer, Germany is torn between the pulls of private enterprise, ideological competition (e.g., between Bernhard Wolff and Alfred Hugenberg), and the need for massive subsidies, opening the door to state influence. Actors seeking to control Germany’s communication with and about the world range from Kaiser Wilhelm to Telefunken, the Post Office, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Army, and the Navy; its investments in wireless transmission stations literally run from Mexico City and Nauen to Shanghai and Java. Drawing on an extraordinary array of technical, national, and international archival sources, Tworek’s account pulls together media studies, geography, the science of communications, and political history, testifying to the global nature of news production dating back a century. She provides “behind the scenes” accounts, highlighting flashpoints conditioned by World War I, a troubled Weimar Republic, and the descent into dictatorship under propaganda-savvy Nazi officials.

News from Germany is sure to generate further excavations of national and international media landscapes and the serious challenges they pose to contempo- rary democracy. The book holds major implications for scholarship on the digital monopolization of news formation and dissemination by both private and state agents. Historians have long relied on newspapers as core research sources with little thought given to the underlying power of political institutions and profit-seeking networks in generating the information found there. As Tworek eloquently demonstrates, “News was never neutral. And its production never uncontested” (7).

Andrew Demshuk’s work, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany, begins with the author’s chance encounter with “a forlorn neon sign and bowling ball-shaped fountain” (ix) on the outskirts of Leipzig, all that remained of an extraordinary community effort to resuscitate local pride between 1987 and 1989. The story that follows refutes a two-fold stereotype of the GDR as a land in which local SED officials mindlessly complied with orders from party bosses in Berlin while alienated citizens watched passively as their hometowns “became dystopian oceans of decay punctuated by modernist boxes” (3).

This particular case of “urban ingenuity” centers on a two-year effort, grounded in cooperation among party officials desperate to regain citizen affections, a new generation of educated “planning elites” concerned with historical preservation, and local residents willing to provide 40,050 hours of “volunteer labor” to rescue the city they loved. Using Western designs and technologies, materials pilfered from other state construction projects, and funds surreptitiously generated by creative, off-book “city budgeting” measures, the Bowling Palace offered diverse entertainment venues and quality cafes—with friendly waiters!!—rendering it at least indirectly responsible for the spirit of possibility and renewal that drove thousands of Leipzigers onto the streets in late 1989.

Looking beyond Berlin, Demshuk focuses our attention on the profound connection between architectural preservation, local identity, urban planning, and political consciousness, the combined effects of which generated seismic forces for national change and ultimately transformed the world order in 1989. Like so many other East German projects from below, this one fell victim to “the tyranny of capitalist investors” after the fall of the Wall, whose pursuit of self-interested profits led to bankruptcy. The actions of Western “privatizers” eviscerated this monumental urban renewal campaign, turning the Bowling Palace into just another architectural ruin. There are many more local GDR histories of this kind that can and should be told.

Barclay Book Prize: Call for Nominations

2025 Prize Competition Announced

We are pleased to announce the opening of the 2025 application cycle for the David Barclay Book Prize. The David Barclay Book Prize was inaugurated in 2020 to mark the occasion of Dr. David E. Barclay’s retirement from the German Studies Association’s Executive Directorship, a position he held for fifteen years. This annual prize recognizes both Dr. Barclay’s service to the Association and his scholarship as Professor Emeritus of History at Kalamazoo College. The award will be given to the best monograph (published in English or German in 2024*) on the social, cultural, economic, political, or labor history of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Germany or Central Europe. Translations, edited collections, anthologies, memoirs, and books that have been previously published are ineligible for consideration for the Barclay Book Prize. Applicants may be non-US citizens as well as non-US residents. Applicants may apply for both the Barclay Book Prize and another GSA book prize in any given year, although no submission may ultimately receive more than one award.

*2024 must be the year printed on the copyright page; titles published in late 2024 but with a copyright year listed as 2025 are eligible for the 2026 award cycle.

The submission deadline is May 30, 2025. The prize is awarded under German Studies Association rules by a GSA committee, and is presented during the banquet of the GSA Annual Conference, which in 2025 will take place in Arlington, Virginia from Sept. 25 – Sept. 28, 2025.

Please send a copy of the book to be considered to each of the three committee members per the format instructions below before the submission deadline; direct any questions to prizes@thegsa.org.

• Electronic copy and hard copy to:
• Heidi Tworek (Committee Chair)
• The University of British Columbia
• Room 1297, 1873 East Mall
• Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
• Canada
• heidi.tworek@ubc.ca

• Hard copy to:
• Samuel Clowes Huneke
• History and Art History
• George Mason University
• 4400 University Drive, 3G1
• Fairfax, VA 22030

• Electronic copy to:
• Celia Applegate
• Vanderbilt University
• celia.applegate@vanderbilt.edu

The Barclay Book Prize was generously seeded by former GSA presidents and colleagues of David Barclay's. Donate to help us reach our goal of endowing the prize in perpetuity. To make your donation to the Barclay Book Prize, click here and select "Barclay Book Prize".