This article explores the historical background of an issue that is central to present-day constitutional and human-rights discourse: the relationship between human dignity and the fight against poverty. It analyzes the role the idea of human dignity played in the reasoning of nineteenth-century German middle-class authors who were professionally engaged in social-reform debates, with a particular focus on debates about mendicancy. In these debates, notions of dignity were pervasive, and they provoked a troubling question: Is poverty a state of impaired dignity, and if yes, in which direction does causality point? Tracing the shifting perceptions from the enlightened belief in the self-perfectibility of man at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the rise of biomedical theories at its end, the article argues that concerns about human dignity gave the commitment to eradicate destitution an important impetus, yet with side effects that highlight the pitfalls of the dignity concept.

In May 1906, the Habsburg protectorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced an unprecedented level of labor unrest. The discussions between civil servants and workers that arose from these events, in particular those that occurred during the strike at the government-owned Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, provide a key point of departure from which to explore the character of Habsburg rule in Bosnia. This article examines how late Habsburg imperial rule functioned in Bosnia by analyzing moments of apparent bureaucratic irregularity in order to suggest a different interpretation of Habsburg administrative practice. It argues that in the case of the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, the relationship between subjects of the Habsburg empire and its administrators was characterized by processes of debate and discussion that were in many ways grounded in concerns about fairness. This observation opens up new questions about the broader relationship between the Austro-Hungarian administration and the people it governed.

This article explores the development of modern refugee camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War by looking at the organization and implementation of child assistance in the camps. The article argues that a state-driven mobilization of relief and rehabilitation was organized to alleviate the plight of refugee children. It points particularly to children's health care and the organization of education as instances that marked a shift in the scope of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary. At first, camps represented a temporary measure to immobilize and control displaced populations. As the war progressed, they became a permanent feature of refugee policy and a microcosm of agendas of state consolidation. Ultimately, the case of child assistance shows that the organization of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary was a fluid and gradual process that meshed technologies of population containment with humanitarian and welfare practices.

Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.

It does not require great powers of observation to note the pervasiveness of Nazi Germany in contemporary U.S. cultural and political discourse. For better or worse, the discursive landscape is saturated with depictions of and references to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Gestapo—an obsession visible everywhere, from the progressive left to the far right, from TV shows to Twitter feeds to video games. The allure of using the Third Reich as a rhetorical weapon may seem obvious enough in a hyperpartisan political climate, but the resonance of that historical period clearly extends well beyond politics. Indeed, National Socialism now functions as an all-purpose conceptual barometer that can be applied to conversations about all sorts of subjects. Over the past few years, scholars have sought to shape such discussions with an unusually heavy outpouring of projects that explore correlations between Nazi Germany and the United States. What they rarely address, however, is why Americans are so prone to invoking the Third Reich as a framework for thinking about life in their own country to begin with. No less important to consider are the implications of how that trend has taken on such a wide-ranging salience and sense of urgency lately. With these questions in mind, Bradley Nichols (History, University of Missouri) convened an interdisciplinary roundtable, composed not only of historians, but also scholars of U.S. politics and culture. He invited Jens-Uwe Guettel (History, Penn State University), Sabine Hake (Germanic Studies, University of Texas), Emanuela Kucik (English and Africana Studies, Muhlenberg College), Alexandra Minna Stern (English, University of California, Los Angeles), and S. Jonathan Wiesen (History, University of Alabama at Birmingham) to share their insights and reflect on the issues at stake.

On September 25, 2017, Germany awoke to the horrifying reality that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, had romped to third place in the previous day's federal election. With 12.6% of the vote, the party became not only the official face of the opposition to Angela Merkel's not-so-grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but also the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the 1950s. Election watchers soon noticed that the AfD had racked up stunning margins in the states that once made up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coming in first on the second ballot (Zweitstimme) in Saxony and second in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. That the AfD, a racist and xenophobic party that campaigns against European integration and immigration, should do so well in once-socialist states bespoke East Germany's strange resonances in German culture and memory nearly thirty years after its dissolution.

The expulsion of millions of people and the loss of Germany's eastern territories at the end of the Second World War have been a part of ongoing public discussions about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or Germany's “mastering of the past.” These events have deeply shaped personal and family memories in East and West Germany, even if political discourse about them had been marginalized in the German Democratic Republic. In the Federal Republic, the issue of expellees has been especially fraught because it represents the intersection of two discourses of German victimhood: war victims and victims of communism—here specifically the postwar East European governments that organized postwar expropriation and “resettlements.” Memorials range from the eternal flame on Theodor-Heuss-Platz in Berlin to the small plaque affixed to the wall outside of Bayreuth's train station for the almost 40,000 expellees from the Sudeten region who arrived on thirty-three freight trains in 1946. The expulsions have made their way into popular culture as well, as can be seen in the works of artists who had had little or no direct experience in the “German East.” In the 1969 song “Erstes Morgenrot,” for example, Alexandra (born as Doris Treitz in 1942 in today's Lithuania) wistfully looks forward to the dawn that brings greetings from the land where “my cradle once stood.” Heinz Rudolf Kunze, born in 1956, emphasizes his uprootedness and a sense of not belonging in his 1985 song “Vertriebener.”

The private eye Bernie Günther investigates the gruesome deaths of a prominent Berlin businessman's daughter and son-in-law in a house fire. The backdrop is Nazi Germany in the run up to the Berlin Olympics that took place between August 1 and 16, 1936 and that Hitler actively manipulated to present a somewhat whitewashed image of Nazi Germany to the world.