Rosa Luxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.

In the opening lines of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx writes: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes on order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

Central European History has opened its pages again and again to the controversial debate about the so-called German Sonderweg. With that in mind, and on the occasion of this important journal's fiftieth anniversary, the following essay presents some very selective and personal thoughts on this topic. Although discussed and promoted much less frequently now than in previous decades, and although there are understandable reasons why it has left the center stage of scholarly debate, the approach to modern German history signified by this problematic concept has not been disproven or become obsolete. But, confronted by severe criticism, it has been—and can be—rethought and revised.

Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel), as well as the twentieth anniversary of the lively debate sparked by the publication in 1996 of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. To mark the occasion, Central European History (CEH) has invited a group of seven specialists from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States to comment on the nature, stakes, and legacies of the two controversies, which attracted a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention at the time. To set the stage, the following introduction provides a brief overview of the two debates, followed by some personal reflections.

A Few years ago Ernst Nolte concluded a discussion on the role of big business in German politics with these words: “History in a modern sense begins at the point where passionate thinking is ignited by new realities related to economics.” Nolte meant modern historiography—especially the Marxist variety—when he spoke of “history in a modern sense,” but one may claim validity for an even more literal meaning of his statement. Is it not true that the course of modern history has been shaped significantly by “passionate thinking” applied to economic affairs? And are not good examples of this kind of thinking provided by the political leaders who rose above the era of the worldwide depression of the 1930's to direct its fate—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler? These men, one might argue, saw “economic realities” in new ways and made their insights into economic affairs the core of the national response to the crisis of their day.

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

In acknowledging the congratulations of Lord D'Abernon, British Ambassador to Germany, upon the successful outcome of the Locarno negotiations, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, wrote: “… we have owed much to your action and influence in Berlin—exactly how much I want some day to learn. I have been discreet in asking no questions about the origins of Stresemann's initiative.” Lord D'Abernon has long been recognized as the god-parent of the 1925 reciprocal security pact between Germany, France, and Belgium, guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which appeared to have stabilized the West European status quo. He and Carl von Schubert, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, were in the habit of referring to it in its initial stages as “das Kind,” and the Ambassador watched over its development with tender care. This paper examines D'Abernon's role in the drafting of the proposals which were to lead to the West European security pact.

“At the beginning of this book,” Ernst Kantorowicz wrote in the preface to The King's Two Bodies, “stands a conversation held twelve years ago with my friend Max Radin (then John H. Boalt Professor of Law, at Berkeley) in his tiny office in Boalt Hall, brimful floor to ceiling and door to window of books, papers, folders, notes—and life.”1 The conversation the two men had that day centered on Kantorowicz's amusement at receiving a mailing from The Order of St Benedict, Inc. “To a scholar coming from the European Continent and not trained in the refinements of Anglo-American legal thinking,” Kantorowicz wrote, “nothing could have been more baffling than to find the abbreviation Inc., customary with business and other corporations, attached to the venerable community founded by St. Benedict on the rock of Montecassino in the very year in which Justinian abolished the Platonic academy in Athens.” Kantorowicz thus traced the origins of his magnum opus to an amusing tale about a mailing from an American Benedictine abbey and a stimulating conversation between two scholars on the Berkeley campus. But what Kantorowicz accomplished with this opening—in part by reminding his reader of his European erudition—was to place his study in a realm very different from that occupied by his first immense volume of 1927, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite.

The fixing of the disputed Polish-German border in Upper Silesia by referendum in 1921 has generally stood in a second rank behind other dramatic and difficult episodes of peacemaking and stabilization. Set in calmer times, the phenomenon of 1.2 million voters deciding whether their region would belong to one state or the other might reasonably rate as a remarkable event. Indeed, the German plebiscite victory in the face of an actual majority of “ethnic” Poles, the ensuing paramilitary war (May to July 1921), and the eventual partition of the province provide ample historical drama.

Germany in the fifteenth century was the scene of an extended struggle over the nature and scale of imperial institutions, and much of this conflict boiled down to the question of who was to pay taxes and how much. In the first half of the century, two alternative methods of financing the Reich emerged, and in the years around 1500 only one of these two methods proved to be politically practical. The style of imperial taxation which won out, the Matrikel, has long been studied in detail, and its workings are well known to any student of imperial institutions.1 From the first Matrikel in 1422 until the end of the Old Reich in 1806, negotiated quotas were the basis for payments to the Reich made by each of the three-hundred-odd estates. Paying the listed quota in men or money fell in principle on the government of the individual estate, which had to find its own way of raising the money or of passing the costs on to subjects. This method of raising public revenues was not, however, the only system of taxation which contemporaries thought to be possible or desirable. The Matrikel won out only after princely estates tried and failed to gain the adoption of a monetary tax paid directly by the population in proportion to individual wealth or income. I will first consider the development of imperial direct taxes in the fifteenth century, and then I will show that the defeat of that tax helped to determine the structure and scale of Reich institutions throughout the early modern period.

The Revolution of 1848 is a favorite subject for historians of Germany because, in so many ways, it inaugurated contemporary German history. It is a Significant “watershed” in political, social, and even intellectual history. But our understanding of this great upheaval is nonetheless still vexingly deficient. In particular, the political impact of pre-March social change, though it is the subject of much recent inquiry, is not well understood. German society was so complex, so diverse, and in such a bewildering state of tranistion that general observations are hard to make; what is true in one place is often false in another. So there is no comprehensive study. for example. of the agrarian uprisings of 1848, and opinions differ widely on their scope, intensity, and siginifcance. The role of the working class is also murky and unclear, partly because that class was beginning its long-term transformation from a traditonal guild artisante to a modern factory proletriat, a process which gratly complicates sociological definitions.

Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar European fascism, especially the National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler. By contrast, a second group has rejected this comparison and sought analogies for Trump in other historical figures from European and US history. This article surveys the course, and assesses the results, of the debate from its origins up to the present day. It shows that historians of Germany have played a prominent role in helping to make sense of Trump, but notes that their use of Nazi analogies may be distorting, rather than deepening, our understanding of contemporary political trends. By examining the merits and drawbacks of Nazi analogies in present-day popular discourse, the article recommends that scholars draw on both the German and American historical experience in order to best assess the United States's present political movement.

The year 1924 marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the Weimar Republic. After months of deep crises in 1923, which included foreign occupation, hyperinflation, and attempted coups d'état by both communists and Nazis, the German economy and polity entered a phase of relative stability, and social peace loomed on the horizon. Recognizing the dramatic shift in the sociopolitical landscape, the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) also underwent a significant transformation. On the political front, the most notable event was the ousting of Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow, under the heavy hand of Moscow, in favor of Ernst Thälmann.

On January 15, 1919, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, recently appointed foreign minister of the German Republic, concluded a press conference with the following appeal:

We demand a policy of reconciliation …, a policy which realizes a genuine … League of Nations. But we will be asked whom we are introducing into this League. Then we must be able to say: “We are introducing a united people that wants peace in the world and is willing to enter the lists for every progress of mankind. …”

With these words the German minister gave expression to an ideal that had inspired many left-wing liberals and pacifists in Germany during the war, and that had been taken up by the spokesmen of the newly proclaimed German Republic immediately after the armistice. To them, as well as to Brockdorff, the future League of Nations, in the way it was going to be constituted, was to become the test of the spirit in which the peace would be concluded. The crucial point was whether, and if so on what terms, it would include the new German Republic. If it admitted Germany on equal terms, it would thus demonstrate that it would be a universal organization, open to all democratic nations and in line with the aspirations of the moderate Left of Europe.

The relationships between German intellectuals and politics at the turn of the nineteenth century have been much debated, with the nature of the German liberal tradition at the core of controversy, and with questions about the interconnections between liberalism, nationalism, and neohumanist Bildung circling not far beyond that core. Prominent in such discussions stands the figure of the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt. Best known today variously for his part in overhauling the Prussian educational system during the “reform era” of Chancellors Stein and Hardenberg, or for helping to establish the disciplines of classical philology and comparative linguistics, Humboldt also authored one of the seminal texts in the European liberal tradition and was actively involved in the diplomacy, constitutional planning, and nationalist upheaval surrounding Napoleon's expulsion from Germany and the subsequent construction of the German Confederation.

The function and importance of welfare in the industrial state is usually inversely proportional to the degree of commitment to progressive social reform. The greater the concern of government with solving the problems of economic dislocation and endemic poverty, the less the need for welfare as an economic equalizer. Conversely, an unwillingness to redress the socioeconomic consequences of industrialization—by allocating an increasing share of the national income to social services—forces a heavy dependence on relief and related financial support systems, if only to avoid the political repercussions of poverty. Welfare policies therefore deserve closer attention as useful barometers of national priorities. An analysis of the economic and political implications of Nazi welfare will not shake the consensus that labor was low on the regime's list of priorities, but it will shed light on its handling of the sensitive issue of labor relations within a command economy. For a state attempting to achieve a political basis for an expansionist foreign policy, the implications of welfare posed a particular problem: how to reap the political benefits of progressive social services—which could justify the necessary labor regimentation—without a heavy commitment of public revenues; that is, how to shift the financial burden of an embattled welfare system not easily dismantled during the economic crisis of the thirties.

An important element of urban planning as it has developed in Europe and North America is the provision of housing for classes of people who are poorly served by private housing markets. In the case of Germany one can trace this activity back to the 1920s, during the middle years of the Weimar Republic, when public authorities began to plan and build housing on a large scale. However, one can also see in the activity of German employers, dating back another half century or more, earlier efforts at urban residential planning for people with modest incomes.

During the last ten years historians have begun to reinterpret nearly every aspect of Nazi history. Many of their conclusions are very fruitful indeed. But there has as yet appeared no satisfactory reinterpretation of Nazi ideology. The study of Nazi ideology presents some apparently intractable problems; many scholars believe, moreover, that political thought played a relatively unimportant part in the rise (and fall) of the Third Reich. For these and other reasons, some of the most important source material for the study of Nazi ideology has been almost totally neglected. This is the large quantity of writings and programs published by the various Nazi leaders before 1933.

During the last several decades, the history of the self, its nature, essential shifts, and trajectory have undergone considerable re-examination. The Western Civilization textbook premise that the history of the West and the rise of individualism correlate closely with each other is being critically examined. There are a number of different historical, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses about bodies, memory, conscience, subjectivity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and gender, which have developed separate narratives about the self, frequently (mostly) in isolation from one another. Some recent feminist theory finds the thesis of individualism irrelevant for women and suggests that the self as a continuing story (autobiography) is gendered. Some theorists counter the creative possibilities of forgetting to a self constructed around a memory core. Multiple selves, schizoid selves, and decentered selves challenge older ideas of identity. The dialectic between public and private produces new problems about who “owns” the self, its image, and its location. Bodies, sexualities, and desire turn out to be shaped and disciplined within hidden forms of power. Old ideas about the rise of the individual and new ones about the pathologies of the self make the self and its history a central issue for contemporary debate.