Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Genuss als Politkum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten , Monika Sigmund offers a comparative history of both postwar German states, by examining the ways each country encountered a single consumer item: coffee. Sigmund’s dissertation-turned-book tries to insert the history of both Germanys into a broader global context, identifying the ways in which each country sought to provide a consumer item for which they were each dependant on the world market. Sigmund illustrates both the shared experiences and ‘asymmetries’ that helped shape consumers’ perceptions of self and of the ‘other Germany’. Chapter 1 explores the severe shortage of real bean coffee during the postwar years, which imbued coffee with a luxury status and its association with positive memories of the interwar years offered Germans a sense of a ‘return to normalcy’ (p. 2). Despite the legal risks, Germans continued to seek out coffee on the black market until the end of rationing, because they came to look at smuggling as a right, a ‘socially legitimate’ behaviour under the circumstances (p. 45). Sigmund thus complements Paul Steege’s recent argument (in Black Market Cold War , 2008) that Germans participated in the black market not out of desperation, but out of a sense of desire for goods to which they felt entitled. Access to coffee, meanwhile, continued to define quite different experiences for Germans, contributing to the ‘asymmetries’ in Germans’ perceptions of themselves and one another. For instance, East German hoarding of Western coffee confirmed West Germans’ assumptions about scarcity in the East, while border crossings gave East Germans glimpses of the ‘social realties’ in the West (p. 115). Sigmund’s description of the influence of coffee in establishing ‘asymmetric’ cultural experiences between the two Germanys usefully adds to to Edith Sheffer’s examinations of ‘how East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain’ (Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge , 2010).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".