All nation-states are creations of physical topography, historical circumstance, political claims, and cultural imagination. A country's identity may be the result of its material place, legal self-understanding, and (invented) national traditions, but it is also defined by certain founding myths and historical associations born of dreams and distance. The histories of the United States, Liberia, and Israel are obvious examples, in that their territories have become mythic “landscapes of memory” in their own right for many around the world, even among those who have never been there.

At the end of World War II, vast quantities of German documents had fallen into the hands of the Allies either during hostilities or in the immediately following weeks. Something will be said near the end of this report about the archives captured or seized by the Soviet Union; the emphasis here will be on those that came into the possession of the Western Allies. The United States and Great Britain made agreements for joint control and exploitation, of which the most important was the Bissell-Sinclair agreement named for the intelligence chiefs who signed it. The German naval, foreign office, and chancellery archives were to be physically located in England, while the military, Nazi Party, and related files were to come to the United States. Each of the two countries was to be represented at the site of the other's holdings, have access to the files, and play a role in decisions about their fate. The bulk of those German records that came to the United States were deposited in a section of a World War I torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, which had been made into the temporary holding center for the World War II records of the American army and American theater commands. In accordance with the admonition to turn swords into plowshares, the building is now an artists' boutique.

In 1932, the artist George Grosz offered an optimistic account of his arrival to the United States:

This special edition of Central European History is concerned with how America viewed Germany, and my contribution focuses on how, beginning with Hitler's rise to power, Germany became a point of reference for the emerging American civil-rights movement. By looking at Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, as well as African-American newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Afro-American, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, I will show how the black community discussed developments in Germany, America's struggle against Nazi racism, and the black soldiers' experience in postwar Germany.

In March 1966, the German historian Fritz Fischer wrote to several American colleagues, announcing that he would soon send them a copy of his Assistent Helmut Böhme's dissertation Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht and asking whether they would be willing to review it in one of the leading American journals. Böhme's study on socio-economic aspects of the German unification contained a strong ideological and methodological critique of the extant German historiography on the German Empire, which he—and Fischer—saw as dominated by old-fashioned diplomatic historians who revered the Iron Chancellor. Thus, Fischer apparently anticipated a negative reaction from the West German historical profession and attempted to rally American support.

In the multitudinous accounts of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, one interpretation dominates with regard to the political strategy of his predecessor as Reich chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher. Beginning with the pioneering books of the journalist Konrad Heiden in the 1930s and continuing through countless versions down to the most recent scholarly works, Schleicher has, with rare exceptions, been depicted as having sought to thwart Hitler by bringing behind his own cabinet a political bloc extending from a left wing split away from the Nazi Party to trade union elements of the republican Social Democratic Party. Sometimes described as a Gewerkschaftsachse, this putative goal on the part of Schleicher has now usually come to be referred to as his Querfront strategy. Long regarded by most historians as axiomatic, that version of the chancellor's intentions has seldom been subjected to critical analysis. It is, however, fundamentally erroneous and serves to obscure his actually very different aims.