Dagmar Reese

The Significance of Voluntariness: The Hitler Youth and NSDAP Membership
[Zum Stellenwert der Freiwilligkeit: Hitler-Jugend und NSDAP-Mitgliedschaft]
The following essay begins by discussing the role of »voluntariness« as a key concept in the Nazi youth organization, the Hitler-Jugend. Only by continually referring to »voluntary« membership could Nazi leaders conceal the coercion that remained necessary to achieve the organization’s political goal of ensuring that a new German »state youth« was created. The »voluntary« decision to join was also central to the self-understanding of the Nazi party, the NSDAP. But in fact, the NSDAP not only set quotas for membership—the target was for 10% of German population to belong—but also defined criteria for the party’s social make-up: the composition of the NSDAP was not to be left to chance. As a logical consequence of these policies, the Hitler Youth played an increasingly important role in recruiting new party members during the 1940s. In the course of these developments and as a result of the pressure to meet quotas, the rhetoric of »voluntariness« was finally abandoned, at least for some of the groups in question.

Markus Pöhlmann

Planet Terror: War and Civil War in Zombie Films since 1968
[Planet Terror: Krieg und Bürgerkrieg im Zombiefilm seit 1968]
From the late 1960s onwards, zombie films entered popular culture, and critics have repeatedly stressed the political subtext of this subgenre of the horror film. This article attempts to move the focus away from the atavistic, “gore” dimension of zombie violence to the role of organized, military violence. In doing so, two facts become apparent: firstly, war and the military have always played a crucial role in the genre—zombie films are war films. And, secondly, during the last four decades the plots have shifted from post-apocalyptic confrontations between human survivors and the undead to confrontations between sectarian groups of human survivors, with the undead reduced to mere catalysts of violence or to tactical allies of limited reliability. The zombie film is therefore best understood as a cultural reflection of global social disorder and the changing character of warfare in the early twenty-first century.