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.

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.

In April 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky left Russia for central Europe, in part to celebrate his marriage to Anna Gregorovich Snitkina, the young stenographer who had helped him compose The Gambler the previous fall. While that book freed him from the clutches of the publisher Stellovsky, who had advanced him money in exchange for a lien on his future works, it did not remove the larger financial destitution that threatened the new family, and fear of the debtor's prison clouded Dostoevsky's subsequent four-year sojourn in Europe. Residing first in Berlin and Dresden, he began to entertain thoughts of escaping his financial difficulties through gambling. In May, he traveled briefly to Bad Homburg; later, both he and Anna proceeded to Baden-Baden. Contrary to his hopes, life imitated art, and Dostoevsky was soon as hopelessly beset by the gambling demons as his fictional anti-hero, Alexei, and with as little success. By the end of the summer, he had pawned many of his and Anna's belongings and systematically lost the gifts sent from Russia by friends to bail them out. Finally on August 23, he managed to tear himself away from the tables. Over the next four years, he would gamble sporadically, but never with the same fervor he brought to Baden-Baden that summer. After returning to Russia in 1871, he gave up gambling entirely.

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”).

Historians Max Braubach, Michael Doeberl, Erwin Hölzle, and Franz Schnabel developed in the interwar period a new understanding of the role of the “Third Germany,” in particular the south Germ an states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, in the shaping of the new European order in the beginning of the nineteenth century: they viewed these governments as masters of statecraft and as liberal counterforces to conservative and nationalist Prussia. Recent scholars have continued to focus on the “Third Germany” but in a different vein. Contemporary writers Helmut Berding, Christof Dipper, and Elisabeth Fehrenbach, for example, examined the reforms in Rheinbund-Germany and concluded that everywhere liberal innovations remained stunted and incomplete. Furthermore, they no longer view the “Third Germany” as an antithesis to Prussia but, instead, perceive all of Vormärz-Germany as engulfed by an overly statist and antipluralistic mind-set.

When asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location.” While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation. Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.” Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.

A curious photograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaper Junge Welt (Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.

An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?

As the centennial of the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the German Empire approaches, historians are likely to find renewed interest in the Bismarckian political edifice. It may be hoped that studies which result will examine the Empire from points of view different from those which have dominated most treatments during the last half century. However valuable some of these may have been, they have sought answers to questions other than those which properly should concern the profession in the future. Twentieth-century students of German history have lived and worked under the impact of two catastrophic world wars. They have understandably been mostly interested in exploring those aspects of German history which seemed to offer an explanation for Germany's role in bringing about those catastrophes. In recent years several scholars have begun to investigate the impact on German politics during the Bismarck era of various old and new socio-economic groupings as they responded to the sweeping changes which the nineteenth century brought to the German and the world economic structure. Their work has contributed new and valuable insights as well as opening the way to further research and controversy. What follows is still another effort to cast familiar ingredients into a new mold so that the product will be at once a closer approximation of the reality of the past and more meaningful to scholars of the present.

Constitution-Reading is a stony road to travel.This is doubly true of early nineteenth-century German constitutions. Working in camera, their authors provided little public justification of their efforts, and consequently historians lack even the great recorded debates of a constituent assembly on which to base their interpretations. And because these constitutions were oktroyierte Verfassungen, handed down, as it were, by gracious princes, interpretations of their provisions rest on the observer's views concerning the fortunes of German constitutional development as a whole.

During the Second Empire, tens of thousands of poor people from East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Posen moved to Berlin every year. They came primarily to improve their economic position. A large number of them were transient agricultural laborers who had been accosted by private employment agents in Berlin railway stations. Others were provincial craftsmen in declining trades who sought to start a new life in the city: for example the cigar maker hoping to make enough money to buy a tobacco shop. Coming on the mere chance of a job, such men were likely to end up as anything from a coal carrier or hackdriver to kitchen help in the Charité hospital. Most of them became factory hands. Journeymen on the tramp who arrived on foot from as far as the Bohemian border were better off as far as job opportunities went. They had not as yet burnt their bridges and could still move on with a small travel allowance from their guilds if nothing lucrative turned up in Berlin. But Berlin needed young looksmiths, turners, carpenters, molders, tinsmiths, and harnessmakers. (In 1905,72 per cent of the workers in Ludwig Loewe's machine-tool factory were immigrants from outside Berlin.) There were also those who became Berliners in the course of their military service: after two or three years of garrison duty in or near Berlin, a country boy often had no wish to renounce the “big-city life” and would go to great lengths to find a living there.

Historians, in their somewhat defensive perusal of sociology for sweeping theoretical statements, perhaps underestimate the careful, often narrow, empiricism of much sociological research. Sociologists unearth facts for subsequent historians to work on and sometimes to interpret more broadly. Historical sociologists to the contrary, fact-grubbing services are mutual in the two disciplines. German sociologists were the first to study the social effects of industrialization extensively. By the early twentieth century, when masses of workers were still entering factory industry for the first time, sociologists were ready to investigate the process of adaptation through systematic interviews. British researchers in the same period, besides being dedicated amateurs for the most part, focused on the urban poor and on material conditions too exclusively still. French efforts were even more scattered. Maurice Halbwachs did some valuable studies of consumption patterns, while Le Play and his school contributed rather conservative portraits of individual workers. For purposes of understanding the working class in manufacturing, German sociological research was long unrivaled.

One of the many issues currently under dispute by historians of Wilhelmine Germany is the question of “parliamentarization”: was the German political system, or was it not, evolving into a parliamentary democracy in the years before 1914? The answers to this and related questions have important implications for explaining modern German history.

Rahel Straus, a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe, begins her memoir of childhood in the 1890s with a story of her experience in a Simultanschule for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls. She does not, as one might expect, complain about “Christian” anti-Semitism. Rather, she notes that when conflicts arose, they were typically between Protestants and Catholics.

The recent revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe represent a mixed blessing for the United States and the western alliance as a whole. On the one hand, the West has had good reason to rejoice, witnessing the triumph of democracy and economic liberalism after more than forty years of Cold War tensions. On the other hand, the fall of the Eastern European communist governments in 1989, including that of the German Democratic Republic, once again brought the German question to the forefront. The Bush administration approached the issue of German reunification in a very cautious manner, insisting that a unified Germany guarantee the finality of its eastern borders and remain committed to the West. This caution clearly demonstrated the apprehension on the part of U.S. policy-makers that nationalism and the push for national unity might prove stronger than the German commitment to NATO and the western alliance.

A requisite for determining the nature of a political movement is identifying the segments of society which provide its base of support. In the case of German National Socialism, however, historians and political scientists have often neglected an empirical analysis of the social composition of the party membership, concentrating instead on its “program,” its leadership, and its organization. From these aspects of Nazism, they have deduced that the movement must have had great appeal for certain dissatisfied groups in German society during the interwar period, and that those groups in fact made up the bulk of the party's rank-and-file members.