Over the last two decades historians of early modern Europe have adopted the paradigm of confessionalization to describe the religious, political, and cultural changes that occurred in the two centuries following the Reformation.1 As an explanatory model confessionalization has often been portrayed as the religious and ecclesiastical parallel to the secular and political process of social discipline, as formulated by Gerhard Oestreich.2 In its simplest form, the process of confessional and social discipline is depicted as hierarchical and unidirectional: the impulse to discipline and control came from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the laity, particularly the peasants at the bottom of the hierarchy, had little possibility of exerting counterpressures on those seeking to shape their beliefs and behavior. The inevitable result of the disciplinary process was the gradual suppression of popular culture and the imposition of new standards of belief and behavior on the subjects of the territorial state.

This article aims to temper the fetishization of the events of 1989–1990. It explores how the historical framing of the Federal Republic transforms when 1989–1990 becomes peripheral, and argues that the force of 1989–1990 as a mythic ending relies on two interpretive paradigms: on a temporal sensibility based on a belief in the progressive development of politics and society, and on a conception of identity and difference understood in terms of a Cold War global order. The article highlights how these twentieth-century paradigms guided the historiography that made 1989–1990 the climax of the history of the Federal Republic. The precondition of any new master narrative for the Federal Republic is the recognition that these paradigms have lost their purchase. Viewed instead through the new temporal sensibility of presentism and the lateral power politics of globalization, 1989–1990 assumes a new position amid longer arcs of historical change that do not hinge on the fate of the Berlin Wall.

Dieser Aufsatz zielt darauf ab die Fetischisierung der Ereignisse von 1989–1990 abzuschwächen. In diesem Sinne wird untersucht, wie sich der historische Rahmen der Bundesrepublik verändert, wenn 1989–1990 an die Peripherie gerückt wird; dabei wird argumentiert, dass die Kraft von 1989–1990 als ein mythisches Ende auf zwei interpretativen Paradigmen beruht, nämlich zum ersten auf einer temporalen Sensibilität, die auf einem Glauben an eine fortschrittliche Entwicklung von Politik und Gesellschaft beruht, und zum zweiten auf einem Konzept von Identität und Unterschiedlichkeit, das auf der globalen Ordnung des Kalten Krieges fußt. Der Aufsatz hebt hervor, wie diese Paradigmen des 20. Jahrhunderts die Historiographie bestimmten, die 1989–1990 zum Höhepunkt der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik gestaltete. Die Vorbedingung eines jeden neuen Masternarrativs für die Bundesrepublik ist somit die Erkenntnis, dass diese Paradigmen ihre Kraft verloren haben. Wenn man 1989–1990 dagegen vom Blickwinkel der neuen temporalen Sensibilität des Presentismus und der lateralen Machtpolitik der Globalisierung betrachtet, nimmt es eine neue Position ein: eine Position inmitten längerer historischer Veränderungsprozessen, die nicht vom Schicksal der Berliner Mauer abhängen.

On May 24, 1704, at about ten in the morning, Agnes Catherina Schickin, a thirty-year-old serving woman from the town of Schorndorf in Württemberg arrived at the village of Krumhard. After asking for and receiving a glass of milk from a local peasant woman, Agnes was on her way out of the village when she saw four, in her words, “beautiful little boys” playing together by the roadside. She approached the children and asked for directions to Schorndorf. When one of the boys, Hans Michael Furch, the seven-year-old son of the local cowherder, said he knew the way, she offered him a gift and asked him to walk with her. The three other boys wanted to come along, too, but she dissuaded them. Agnes and the seven-year-old walked off into the forest alone.

Gustav Stresemann counted on the Locarno accords of October 1925 to pave the way for peaceful revision of the Versailles treaty. Yet just days before these agreements renouncing force as a means of modifying the Rhineland frontier were to come into effect, the German foreign minister spoke of a wake, at which “the hopes which arose in Locarno are laid to rest, under a tombstone bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies the Spirit of Locarno.’” Stresemann's remark to the French chargé d'affaires in Berlin was prompted by France's apparent veto of the restoration of Eupen and Malmédy to the German Reich. As an illustration of the fundamental governmental attitudes of the participating powers, and as a measure of just what each saw in the Locarno treaties, the case of Eupen-Malmédy presents several provocative revelations.

In this essay we are presenting results from the research project, “Literacy, School Visitation, and Written Culture in Northwest Germany from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” The essay begins with a discussion of research problems and methodological procedures and then moves on to discuss the results of our inquiries by region. The conclusion is in the form of a comparative synthesis which also indicates the future direction of our research.

Albert Ballin was one of Imperial Germany's most successful business leaders. He early recognized the impact and possibilities of the expansion and integration of global markets. Within little more than a decade after he had joined the management of the Hamburg-Amerikanische-Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) in 1886, he turned an already significant enterprise into the world's largest steamship line. As a leading manager and later as HAPAG director general, Ballin was a major force behind Hamburg's rise to Imperial Germany's second largest city. Due in no small part to HAPAG's spectacular growth, Hamburg emerged as a key global port for passengers and freight by the turn of the century. But Ballin was not just a gifted business leader in a highly innovative economic sector; he also had access to some of the highest figures in Berlin. Ballin repeatedly met with the Kaiser and government members, and he used his long-standing contacts in England on several diplomatic missions to ease rising tensions between the two powers, albeit without lasting success.

EIKE von Repgow commented around 1225 in the Sachsenspiegel: “Now do not be amazed that this book says so little about the law of the ministerials. It is in fact so diverse that no one can fully comprehend it. Under every bishop, every abbot, and every abbess the ministerials have a distinct law; therefore, I cannot describe it.” Eike identified here a fundamental problem in studying German social history: how does one generalize about diverse social institutions that were both a cause and a consequence of Germany's political fragmentation? How different things could be is illustrated by the structure of the estates in the eastern Alpine principalities. In the duchies of Austria and Styria the nobility was divided into two estates, the lords and the knights; but while there were about seventy or eighty families of lordly rank in Austria in 1280, there were so few lineages of lords in Styria—about twenty-five in 1300, of whom only ten survived by 1400—that they could not meet by themselves.

For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only was German Home Towns original and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.

One of the oldest commonplaces about the German Revolution of 1918 is that the leadership of the revolutionary left was ineffectual—that the revolution never found its Lenin. Yet anyone who seeks insight into particular leaders of this revolution will find little to go on. Apart from the peripheral but ever-popular Spartacist leaders and Kurt Eisner, only a handful of leading radicals and revolutionaries have been studied in any depth. Others, however important they were then, are shadowy figures to history. Among these is Ernst Däumig, intellectual leader of the Berlin Executive Council, foremost spokesman of the German workers' council movement, and sometime chairman of two important political parties during the revolutionary years: the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the United Communist Party (VKPD).

This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill their Rechtsstaat ideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.

In early December 1945, the Communist Party functionary Karl Lewke sent an alarming report to the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD). It was entitled “One million anti-Bolshevists are approaching. The democratic reconstruction of Germany is threatened by greatest dangers!” The report referred to the thousands of returning German POWs from the Soviet Union who daily entered the Soviet zone of occupation through Frankfurt an der Oder. Lewke's description of the mentality and the attitudes of these returning POWs was not very comforting for his party superiors in Berlin.

Since so much of what distinguishes Germany's social-economic development from that of other advanced capitalist societies derives from the prominence of the handicrafts (Handwerk) and their institutional legacy, it is regrettable that artisan sightings have become so rare in recent central European scholarship.1 It is especially so because disparaging postwar historiographic portrayals of “backward” late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans leave us without a way to understand the emergence of a prosperous Mittelstand of small and medium-sized craft producers in the postwar years. Moreover, inasmuch as the existence of a vibrant, legally distinct class of handicraft firms constitutes one of the most striking features of the modern German political economy, we need an account of how it evolved and why.2 Furthermore, without this, we have no way to explain several other distinctive “peculiarities” of German institutional arrangements: an educational system that directs a majority of young Germans to practically oriented, work-based apprenticeships supplemented by part-time schooling instead of academically oriented, full-time secondary schools; a labor market that effectively professionalized all occupations and limited the creation of mere “jobs”; and a training system that, as it diffused from the craft to the industrial and service sectors, reinforced Germany's historic manufacturing preference for producing diversified, high-quality goods and services.3 In short, no history of modern German economic, social, or political development can afford to dispense with artisans or their institutions.

In interwar Germany, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of an era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Historians’ interest in internationalism has primarily focused on liberal and cooperative actors and on some selected examples demonstrating the dark sides of internationalism. Fewer historians, however, have analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of liberal internationalism and the perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in internationalist discourses. Ernst Jäckh, best known as the founder of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, perhaps best represented this collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. Jäckh's internationalism permeated all his endeavors and served the goal of reintegrating Germany in the international community.

Many historians have taken an interest in the last few months of the Weimar Republic. The relationship between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the General Confederation of Labor (ADGB) has become a subject of particular attention, as scholars sought a way in which working-class organizations might have stopped the Nazi movement before Hitler became chancellor. Some scholars have written about a bitter feud between socialist party and union officials that weakened the left's resistance to Nazism. Others have described in tones of condemnation secret agreements supposedly concluded by union leaders behind the backs of union members, and without the approval of the SPD leaders. However, two articles published recently have undermined the main pieces of evidence for the latter version—protocols of two meetings in the second half of 1932 attended by top union officials and figures in the government. The incriminating documents are shown to have been forged. These two new articles also contain genuine evidence regarding union attitudes and conduct toward General Schleicher. Yet the SPD had its own contacts with the general, a fact that scholars have not emphasized sufficiently.

This article examines writings on the Zigeuner (“Gypsies”) by three prominent Hungarian-German scholars—Johann Schwicker, Anton Herrmann, and Heinrich von Wlislocki—as responses to Magyarization pressures, which divided Hungarian-Germans by threatening the traditional privileges of some while offering others opportunities for social advancement. Hungarian and German elites alike cast Zigeuner as primitive Naturvölker in an effort to legitimize reform efforts. By writing about the Zigeuner, scholars asserted competing Magyar and German models for modernization and reform. Passionate German nationalist Johann Schwicker called for the Zigeuner to assimilate into Hungarian and Romanian culture, arguing that Germanization was beyond their reach, thereby asserting German culture's supposedly superior status as an elite culture. By contrast, Hungarian nationalist Anton Herrmann urged the Magyarization of the Zigeuner to strengthen the Hungarian nation-state, denigrating the role of German and Romanian culture. Finally, Heinrich Wlislocki rejected all nationalist modernizing efforts, presenting the Zigeuner as a romantic symbol of the premodern age. In all three cases, Schwicker's, Herrmann's, and Wlislocki's Zigeuner bore very limited resemblance to Romani lived experience. Collectively, the writings of these three scholars illustrate both the range of Hungarian-German responses to nationalist modernization, as well as the role of national disputes in shaping Zigeunerkunde (“Gypsy Studies”).

National identity is a complex political equation that is nevertheless often represented in a single image. Historically, nation-states have erected monuments to display their power and legitimacy in material form. Yet, despite their apparent physical stability, the meaning of such structures is subject to alteration and reinterpretation. Thus they provide the intriguing possibility of exploring the ambiguities that emerge when a multi-dimensional social phenomenon like the nation is given a unified representation.

In recent years the biographical literature about Adolf Hitler has continued to grow. Publications centering on the Führer of the Nazi party are now so numerous that not long ago, one reputable British historian felt compelled to apologize for introducing yet “another book about Hitler.” But with all this activity, most scholars agree that few if any of the new studies on Hitler have significantly extended our understanding of the German dictator beyond that provided by Lord Alan Bullock's authoritative biography, first published in 1952 and now a classic. Novel and trendy approaches to the subject, such as those of the “psychohistorians,” have not broken new ground. Gerhard L. Weinberg's balanced judgment of Robert G. L. Waite's psychobiography of Hitler is that “the very great strengths of the book are precisely in the more traditional portions, and the weaknesses in the least traditional.” The more current life histories—such as Joachim Fest's, which was clearly designed to supersede Bullock's work as well as to be a huge commercial success—remain of questionable value either because they restrict themselves to known factual information as their basis of documentation or because they lack truly original insights.

On February 10, 1944, a colorful ceremony took place in the great hall of the University of Munich. The occasion was the official inauguration of Reich Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart as President of the German Academy. Under swastika banners lining the front of the auditorium sat the General Secretary of the Academy, Dr. Matthias Schmitz; Vice-President Professor Walther Wüst; Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels; and Dr. Seyss-Inquart himself. The organization which Seyss-Inquart had been chosen to head had in nineteen years achieved a predominant position in teaching the German language to foreigners and in promoting German culture at home and abroad. Its world-wide network of schools was particularly strong in southern and eastern Europe.