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.

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.

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.

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.

Ludwig beck was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1880. He joined No. 15 Prussian Field Artillery Regiment in Strassburg in 1898, attended the War Academy in Berlin from 1908 to 1911, was called into the Great General Staff in 1912, served in general-staff positions through the First World War, and held troop-command and staff positions after the war. From October 1929 to September 1931, as a colonel, he commanded No. 5 Artillery Regiment in Fulda, Ludwigsburg, and Ulm; from October 1932 to September 1933 he commanded the First Cavalry Division in Frankfurt an der Oder.

A few months ago the musical world observed the centennial of the first complete performance of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, which took place in the then barely completed Bayreuth Festspielhaus, August 13–17, 1876. Few works of art have had so long a gestation period; more than a quarter century separates Wagner's original sketches, which date from the fall of 1848, and the realization of the tetrology on the stage. The dramatic structure of the enormous music-drama became definitive by February 1853, when Wagner allowed to be printed privately the texts of the four operas. The music for Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the first two acts of Siegfried was complete by the end of July 1857. There followed, however, an interval of almost twelve years before Wagner again took up work on the Ring in March 1869. He composed the music for the final act of Siegfried and for all of Gütterdämmerung between then and November 1874.

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.

Reporting on the results of the 1935 World Population Conference hosted in the capital of the “new Germany” for members of the nation's medical community, the renowned racial anthropologist and director of the prestigious Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (KWIA), Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), commented on the significance of a new type of physician, one whose duties were intricately linked with the goals of the Nazi state. Just as the house doctor of old was able to prevent and recognize when an individual patient was in imminent medical danger by having carefully watched over his charge—intervening when necessary—so, too, must the Erbarzt (genetic doctor) do the same for the entire Volk by overseeing, and, if need be, managing, the hereditary lineages of all its composite members. This not merely entailed evaluating the trajectory of genetic diseases in different segments of the German population, but it also demanded something equally important. “As getreuer Ekkehardt [loyal Ekkehardt] with his hand on the pulse of the life of his Volk,” Fischer commented, the genetic doctor had to supervise its racial purity. This was to ensure that its racial essence—the presupposition of all cultural and mental attributes of the Volk—was inherited unchanged.

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

In a pioneering work on the regional expansion of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in Schleswig-Holstein before 1933, Rudolf Heberle suggested that “if one wants to understand the reason for its final success, one should study the Nazi movement in its rural strongholds.”1 As early as 1928, the Nazi party could rely on rural strongholds, ranging from Schleswig-Holstein to Baden. The party received particularly firm support from small and medium-sized Protestant farmers. By July 1932 the NSDAP won over fifty percent of the popular vote, not only in the province of Schleswig-Holstein but also in many smaller rural Protestant electoral districts in Germany. Most historians have attributed this rural electoral swing to the NSDAP to a combination of factors which usually include the deterioration of the farmer's economic position, the farmer's alienation from the “Weimar System,” and the Nazi party's antiurban propaganda which appealed to “certain deep-seated resentments and sentiments.”2

Historians of the Second German Kaiserreich have increasingly identified the Catholic milieu as a tightly woven subculture easily as dense and symbolically rich as the social-democratic milieu. But while we have detailed and excellent studies on the alternative culture of the workers, we still know comparatively less about the Catholic milieu: its literature, its patterns of reading and ideological dissemination, its complex world of popular beliefs, attitudes, and symbols.

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

It is common knowledge among historians of Germany that the nationalist right frequently and loudly argued that the Weimar Republic, throughout its fourteen-year existence, was fundamentally “un-German,” foreign in inspiration, and resting on a foundation of internationalist political thought. Indeed, in the opinion of many on the more traditionally minded right, such as the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), monarchy corresponded most closely to Germany's historical development and German national character as a form of state. In large part due to Weimar's ultimate demise at the hands of the conservative and radical right, these sentiments have received the lion's share of scholarly attention. Curiously, however, the republican response to these charges remains less well explored.

Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), the most prominent cultural historian in late-nineteenth-century Germany, has not figured in the annals of art history. Remembered principally as the author of the Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1909) and three-volume Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (1885–86), Lamprecht and his scholarly writings have been studied exclusively by historians. In his own day, however, Lamprecht made considerable forays into art history while constructing the theoretical scaffolding for his cultural historical program. He undertook these art historical studies during the 1880s—remarkably, the very years in which art history was first being shaped as a discipline at German universities. Though Lamprecht scholars have long acknowledged the art historical component in his Kulturgeschichte, they have not considered that Lamprecht's art historical endeavors may have affected the professional development of art history. Art historians, on the other hand, have forgotten Lamprecht's art historical work, associating cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively with the towering figure of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Yet close study of Lamprecht's art historical publications and of related archival materials suggests that Lamprecht's vision, in the 1880s, of an interactive dynamics between art and culture had a formative impact on art history comparable to that of his older contemporary Burckhardt. In certain respects it may have been more directly relevant for art history's later development.

In late nineteenth-century Prussia, as in other industrializing societies, urban policing took on unprecedented significance with uniformed patrolmen becoming, before the century ended, the most visible and ubiquitous representatives of governmental authority. For both the leading officials of the Prussian state and the elites of that state's burgeoning industrial cities, the creation of large urban police forces in the decades between the revolution of 1848 and the First World War raised a number of vital questions. Of particular concern were the problems of defining and legitimizing the role of the new police and of determining the limits of police powers. Related debates centered on the questions of who should control and who should pay for the maintenance of greatly expanded urban police departments.

Among the most haunting features of the culture of murder created by the Nazis are the ruthless efficiency and sheer scale of their success in killing millions of human beings. There are those who link both to the earlier efficiency and scale of death in the titanic and grinding battles of the Great War. And there are others who would associate both with the alternatives of quick or lingering death promised by nuclear war. Efficiency and scale seem common to the mass death produced or proposed in the twentieth century, and many observers view both as attributes of the process of modernity.

The study of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history, was not an invention of the postwar era. But it was in the wake of the Second World War that it carved out a space in the historical professions of the United States, Great Britain and, most pronouncedly, West Germany. In each country, it came with similar definitions: in West Germany as “the era of those living, and its scholarly treatment by academics”; in the United States as “the period of the last generation or two”; and in Britain as “Europe in the twentieth century” or “the histories of yesterday which are being written today.” Such definitions contained a generational component and left contemporary history open to continuous rejuvenation. Yet during the postwar decades, the above definitions steered interest clearly toward the history of National Socialism, the Second World War, and foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s. The horrific cost in human lives of Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies gave an instant relevance to all aspects of Germany's past. The German grip on much of Europe had made National Socialism an integral component in the history of formerly occupied countries, and the Allied struggle to defeat Nazism added yet more countries to the list of those that had seen their histories become entangled with that of Germany. Hence, the academic writing of German contemporary history was never an exclusively German affair. Scholars outside Germany, especially in Great Britain and the United States, were part of the endeavor from the outset. Their involvement was facilitated by the fact that the Western Allies had captured an enormous quantity of German records and archives at the end of the war, part of which would become available to historians over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.