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.

This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines the role of the German language in early Jewish nationalism. It focuses on the publication, reception, and afterlife of the pamphlet Autoemancipation!, published in 1882 by Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish doctor. The first Jewish nationalist pamphlet to be written in German by a Russian Jew, its rhetoric and terminology tapped into various Jewish and European discourses of emancipation. Pinsker not only challenged the legal-political conception of emancipation as it had been commonly used in German-Jewish discourse, but also mobilized its social and revolutionary connotations, which had been associated with radical European political movements since 1848. Moreover, Autoemancipation! marked a shift in Jewish political culture with regard to the potential function of the German language. Since the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, German had a controversial status in Central and Eastern European Jewish societies given its association with Jewish Enlightenment, religious reform, secularization, and assimilation. Pinsker was the first to use German as a transnational language aimed at promoting the Jewish national cause. In this respect, Autoemancipation! set in motion a process whereby German became the chief language of Jewish nationalist activism.

In the 1950s and 1960s, West German citizens found themselves living in a “radioactive age.” The public learned that radiation exposure pervaded postwar society, not only from atomic testing but also from medical treatment, workplace exposures, and radium consumer goods. By 1970, West Germans—ranging from farmers and housewives, to physicians, scientists, and bureaucrats—had recast nuclear radiation from a technological wonder or health aid into a public health hazard. This article illustrates that anxieties about uncontrollable technology, ineffective institutions, disingenuous political leaders, and volatile citizens persisted from the 1950s to the 1970s, coexisting with optimism and progress, without truly subsiding in the 1960s, as historians often suggest. Further, it advocates taking those fears seriously, showing that they played a critical—and lasting—role in shaping public policy and state-society relations in the early Federal Republic.

The East German consumer supply lobby? Admittedly, the very idea strains our credulity. That it has yet to receive its scholarly due is hardly surprising in view of our assumptions about everyday consumer reality in socialist societies: empty shelves, long lines, poor quality merchandise, frustrated customers, surly salespeople, monochromatic drabness. What evidence, if any, is there to suggest the existence of a consumer supply lobby in the German Democratic Republic in the 1950s?

The 1905 Kalender für das Erzgebirge und Vogtland described an apparently spontaneous shift in the relationship between the German state of Saxony's mountainous southern borderlands and its rapidly urbanizing lowlands. Yet from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Kalender, the Erzgebirgsverein that published it, and a host of similar Heimat (homeland) and tourist organizations pushed, prodded, and cajoled lowlanders into visiting the borderlands. In the process, they repeatedly reframed the ways in which they portrayed the landscapes they championed, rethought their reasons for enticing travelers to the southern regions, and redirected their efforts to new audiences. Saxon Heimatler and tourism promoters succeeded in defining southern Saxony's regions, and eventually Saxony as a whole, in terms of three important characteristics: the interplay of nature and industry in their landscapes; the diversity of those landscapes; and proximity to and interactions with Bohemia. So powerful were these themes that they continue to shape ideas about southern Saxony to the present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Holocaust literature is one of the richest devoted to a single event; it is also one of the newest. In the 1950s and '60s one could count on one's fingers the monographs that dealt with the destruction of the Jews. Then came a surge of interest in the 1970s, perhaps due to the arrival on the scene of a European generation innocent of this heinous crime. Since then, the production of books, articles, and films on the subject has continued unabated; in fact, it is growing. Yet the thousands of books and the tens of thousands of articles, many of them not only accurate and scholarly but also beautifully written, have not achieved their purpose. They may have persuaded other scholars but not the public. For when Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust was published, in 1996, with new claims, it was as if the previous literature had never existed.

This article has a twofold aim: first, to explain the concept of confessionalization that has been developed in recent decades in German historiography as an interpretive tool for the period and to review the main lines of its critique, which raise important questions for the discussion of “confessionalization and literature”; and second, to explore the connections between confessionalization and literature as well as the applicability of the concept of confessionalization to the history of literature, a little-understood but increasingly important question for early modern cultural history. The understanding of the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is greatly enhanced by the cooperation between literary scholars and historians. First, the literature of the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation was not yet an autonomous entity in society and therefore requires historical contextualization, particularly with regard to its social origins. Second, Germanists have extended the definition of early modern literature to include all kinds of Gebrauchsliteratur (functional literature), which are often important sources for historians. “Literature” and “confessionalization,” however, are difficult terms representing very complex phenomena. “Literature” is understood here as encompassing all printed works of the period, of which this article can of course only explore a sample; “confessionalization” denotes an interpretive concept, which has been criticized and modified in recent research. Given the exploratory purpose of this discussion, a good many questions will be raised for which we have no clear answers at the present time; we hope above all to further the exchange of ideas between literary scholars and historians working on the confessional age.

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.

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.

In 1926, the President of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise (Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen, or DRAL) Theodor Lewald discussed the significance of sports for the German economy and national health in a presentation to the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Lewald deplored the physical state of the German population as a consequence of the lost war. Two million of the physically and mentally strongest German men had been killed, while millions of German men, women, and children were permanently physically weakened as a result of starvation during the war and the allied hunger blockade after the armistice. To make matters worse, the hygienic benefits of military service that had guaranteed the physical strength and fitness of male youth had been lost. Prior to the war about 500,000 men had served in the German army or navy where they had learned regimens of cleanliness, order, and discipline. According to Lewald, by limiting the size of the German army to 100,000 men, the victorious allies had not only weakened Germany militarily, but they had also tried to paralyze Germany economically by permanently weakening the “strength of the German people” (deutsche Volkskraft).1

Dealing with the Nazi past has become a permanent component (some would say obsession) of contemporary German national identity. Almost every day, the German print and visual media carry stories related to Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Each new major anniversary sets in motion another round of discussion, argument, and controversy. Each new autobiography and each new film on Nazism generates extensive media commentary. Among the most interesting aspects of recent discussions of the Nazi past is the new prominence afforded to depictions of Germans as victims of “Hitler's War.” Nowhere has this predilection for presenting Germans as victims been more apparent and pronounced than in the flood of recent popular books and made-for-TV documentaries about the bombing war.