This article deals with early efforts to facilitate steam navigation between Vienna and Constantinople along the Danube. In addition to analyzing the complex negotiation processes that enabled the first regulation project at the so-called Iron Gates, a narrow gorge situated at the Austrian-Ottoman border, it assesses ways in which the new shipping connection transformed the cultural and spatial perceptions of travelers. The article argues that even though the plan for making the Iron Gates navigable was set out on the drawing boards of engineers and in the cabinets in Pest and Vienna, local circumstances changed its practical implementation in a number of important ways. The success of this major engineering operation relied on close cooperation among hydrological experts, state representatives, and entrepreneurs, all of whom had different stakes in the project but still shared a common interest. Establishing a shipping connection to the Black Sea along the Danube was thus the result of an alignment of interests among Hungarian, Viennese, and local Ottoman authorities; a careful match between theoretical knowledge and practical engineering work; and, last but not least, the surmounting of a mental separation between “Orient” and “Occident.”

In 1926, the Women's League of the German Colonial Society opened the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women to train young women to go abroad to the former German colonies. This school joined the Witzenhausen Colonial School (for men), founded in 1899, as institutions of colonial education in a Germany now without an overseas empire. After 1933, the schools entered a new phase of their histories. This article examines the Rendsburg and Witzenhausen Colonial Schools in tandem in order to explore the place of colonial education in the Third Reich. Through their curricula, the schools sought to negotiate the value of this education to the ideological and territorial goals of the Third Reich, a negotiation that was not always smooth, as demonstrated by debates about the political and pedagogical suitability of the directors of the schools. World War II heightened the gendered differences between the schools and led to different wartime experiences, in particular the Rendsburg school's participation in Germanization projects in eastern Europe. The trajectory of both schools in the Third Reich demonstrates that the cultural/national/racial importance of colonial work retained relevance and indeed obtained increased value in a Germany without overseas colonies.

This article analyzes the interplay between Nazi cultural politics and regional identity in the Palatinate region of Germany through the lens of the Ludwig Siebert program. Created by Bavarian Minister-President Ludwig Siebert in the early 1930s to stimulate the regional construction industry, this program involved the conservation of medieval castles and ruins in Bavaria and the Palatinate. The renovation of these monuments, which had been central to the cultural memory and identity of Pfälzers since at least the nineteenth century, proved to be effective in mobilizing the local populace for Siebert's aims and, consequently, for the goals of the Nazi regime. Because its melding of cultural politics and regional identity helped to stabilize the regime in the Palatinate during its early years, the Siebert program provides a particularly illustrative microhistorical case study of the Nazi regime's mechanisms for creating the Volksgemeinschaft in the provinces. By focusing on the Palatinate town of Annweiler, which sits at the foot of the storied Trifels castle, a favored renovation project of Siebert's, this article offers a closely observed demonstration of these mechanisms at work.

This article traces the biography of an Afro-German woman born during the 1920s Rhineland occupation to examine the peculiarities of the black German diaspora, as well as potential connections between these peculiarities and larger trends in the history of German colonialism and racism. “Erika Diekmann” was born in Worms in 1920. Her mother was a German citizen, her father a Senegalese French soldier. Separated from her birth mother at a young age, Erika spent her youth and early adulthood in a school for Christian Arab girls in Jerusalem run by the Protestant order of the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses (KaiserswertherDiakonissen). After World War II, Erika returned to West Germany, but in 1957, she emigrated to the United States, along with her (white) German husband and four children. Erika's story offers unique opportunities for studying Afro-German women's active strategies of making Germany their “home.” It underlines the complicated role of conventional female gender prescriptions in processes of interracial family-building. The centrality of religion to Erika's social relationships significantly enhances our understanding of the complexity of German attitudes toward national belonging and race during the first half of the twentieth century.

In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, “the world would be Mohammedan today.” That was the case, he continued, because “theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have become heirs to that religion. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” Yet, because of what Hitler called Arabs' “racial inferiority” and inability to handle the harsher climate, “they could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.” Hitler concluded, “It's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”