Hegemonic masculinity in Nazi Germany, as well as in many militarized societies around the globe, meant physical, emotional, and moral “hardness.” The ideal man, embodied by the soldier, was tough and aggressive, in control of his body, mind, and psyche. He did not hesitate to sacrifice life and limb on behalf of the Fatherland, or to subordinate his individuality under the command of a conformist group of comrades. Whereas many scholars have already stressed these features of hegemonic masculinity, this article argues that the act of soldiering provided men with a male identity that was ultimately not defined by the repudiation, but rather integration, of what was (and is) often coded as feminine. In the social practice of male interaction, diversity and flexibility were needed, thus allowing for the display of femininely coded behavior like affection, tenderness, empathy, caring, and tolerance toward emotional breakdowns and moments of weakness in their midst. Thanks to its inclusive nature, such “protean” masculinity enabled different types of soldier-men to establish male identities; it also allowed them to switch among different emotional and moral states without losing their manliness. Yet, this was true only if the predominance of hardness was respected. Eventually, protean masculinity integrated diverse men and diverse emotional and moral conditions into a fighting unit, and, in the case of the Third Reich, into a genocidal society.

The originally propagated view that the Marshall Plan was an altruistic endeavor through which the U.S. saved Europe from collapse and starvation has long been dismissed and replaced with a more realistic approach to international affairs. Whereas Realpolitik and the perception of the evermore menacing Cold War made it inevitable that Marshall Plan aid and its counterpart funds would become a weapon in the ideological conflict of the two political ideologies, the overwhelming body of literature looks at the Marshall Plan either from a political and diplomatic or from an economic viewpoint. Beyond general statements that the Marshall Plan was used as a weapon in the Cold War, relatively little research has been carried out into how this weapon was wielded. This is even truer for the counterpart funds, which are usually only mentioned in passing in the literature, if at all. This is despite the fact that Marshall Aid in general and the counterpart funds in particular had actually quite a significant impact in Cold-War propaganda and economic matters in Western Europe, which most likely contributed to the declining appeal of communism. This article will look at the specific action of American and, after September 1949, German authorities in the use of counterpart funds to demonstrate their significance.

Since the nineteenth century, cleanliness and hygiene have played an integral role in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and notions of self-governance in Europe. Drawing on this reservoir of potential signification, the spread of a mass consumer society in the twentieth century has capitalized on commodified images of health, hygiene, and cleanliness, while the maintenance and representation of clean bodies for modern men and women became virtually inseparable from consumption. The Nazis both accelerated and gave a racial spin to the idea of a clean, healthy body as the symbol of racially superior, socially productive, and sexually virile Aryans. Whether commodified and sexualized under consumerism or channeled into a murderous project under the Nazis, hygienic and healthy bodies became the object of pleasure and a signifier of superior social and racial identity. When these considerations are taken into account, it is important to inquire into the problems faced by the founding fathers of the GDR with regard to questions of health and consumption. The vision of the socialist “New Man” and the ideal of pure and healthy living that were so frequently invoked in the early years of the GDR must be seen as attempts to forge a positive identity for the new socialist state while avoiding the twin ideological dangers posed by the memory of Nazi racial policies and the implicit connections made between health, consumption, and freedom in the pluralistic consumer society to the west.

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.

In the opening passage of his memoirs, Gustav Freytag (1816–95) mused that the secret of his literary success came down to the fact that his life “on the whole, resembles the life experience (Bildungsgang) of thousands of my contemporaries.” A century of scholarship on the Kaiserreich has validated Freytag's claim to serve as crown witness for the mentalité of his generation.

In December 1918, in its first conference since the outbreak of the Great War, the revolutionary syndicalist Free Association of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften — FVdG) noted that it was the only trade union organization in the country that did not have to readjust its program with the return of peace. The syndicalists were alluding to the fact that theirs had been the only German workers' organization to have adopted an internationalist rather than a patriotic response to the war. The FVdG had neither supported the national cause nor endorsed the Burgfrieden, or civil truce, whereby all factional disputes were to be set aside and all sectoral interests subordinated to the higher interests of the imperiled nation. Its opposition to the war, its refusal to cooperate with the state and the employers, moreover, had made the FVdG a beneficiary of the growing radicalization of German workers. In the immediate postwar period it expanded at a rate six times greater than any other labor organization in the country.

This rather brief essay represents an attempt to raise a problem relating to the direction that much of recent research on Imperial Germany has taken. The deliberations that follow emerge from a renewed and quite extensive reading of the secondary literature on the history of the German Empire that I undertook in connection with my contribution to the 1806–1918 volume of the 10th edition of Gebhardt's Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Although my research interests had moved into other fields of German and European history following my work on the sociopolitical history of the Wilhelmian period, I confess that, like so many fellow historians, I continue to be fascinated by those decades before 1914. So, even if I have not been back to the archives, I have been trying to follow the no doubt rich “post-Bielefeld” output of what are by now at least two consecutive generations of younger scholars in this field.

Hakoah Vienna was the most important Jewish sports organization in interwar Austria. Indeed, Hakoah, which means strength or power in Hebrew, was one of the most significant sports clubs on the continent of Europe during that period. This article examines the early history of Hakoah, its rise to international fame, and its demise in 1938 at the hands of the Nazis and their sympathizers in Austria.

For some time now, maternalism has been recognized as “one of women's chief avenues into the public sphere.” It has dominated the politics of women's movements in different countries, regardless of political persuasion, since at least the 1850s. The term maternalism has been used to describe “ideologies and discourses that exalted women's capacity to mother and applied to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality.”

At no time during the past century has European society been closer to major revolutionary upheaval than at the close of World War I. That in the end the Russian Revolution was contained and “world revolution” averted has been related by historians to any number of factors. Yet one of the most important reasons for the ebbing of the revolutionary tide has generally been overlooked or passed over lightly. This was the failure of the revolutionary movement, except in Russia, to secure really significant support from a particular segment of the working classes, namely women. A more classic case of the historian's tendency to accept sex as a constant, i.e., to operate in general as if only one sex—the male sex—exists, would be difficult to find. In fact an individual's sex can be an important variable in political behavior and like age, occupation, religion, and a variety of other social, economic, and cultural factors, something which needs to be considered much more carefully in order to arrive at a better understanding of the past.

In April 1920 Friedrich Ebert admitted to a Swedish socialist that Social Democracy had failed to create a consolidated democratic republic for Germany. The president of the Weimar Republic noted that the social divisiveness which he and his colleagues had tried to overcome had increased. Though he left it unmentioned, he knew also that socialist democracy which he had outlined as the main goal during the German Revolution of 1918–19 had not been realized. However, in explaining why the army and administration still required reforming, why the universities remained “breeding stations of reaction,” Ebert blamed solely the Treaty of Versailles. He did not acknowledge that he and his party had contributed to the legacies left for the Weimar Republic by the critical period 1917–20.

Between 1890 and 1914 the Center party was, in Friedrich Naumann's words, “the measure of all things” in German politics. Throughout this period it possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and held the balance of power between left and right. Its importance from the standpoint of Bismarck's successors as chancellor stemmed from the electoral and parliamentary decline of the National Liberals and Conservatives, the parties which had formed theKartell through which Bismarck governed the Reichstag. After 1890 these no longer commanded a majority, and other parties had to be won over by the government. With the Social Democrats permanently hostile, this narrowed the government's choice down to the Progressives and Center, either of which would give the Kartell parties a majority, and both of which were to be used to this effect. However, the Progressives were used only sparingly (above all during the Biilow Bloc of 1907–9) because of their increasing shift to the left. The historic reason for this was the party's antimilitarism; and this move to the left was reinforced by fears among Progressive leaders that their supporters might otherwise defect to the Social Democrats. The Center was therefore the only alternative. For most of the Wilhelmine period successive chancellors depended for their parliamentary majorities on the Center, which in turn showed itself willing to become a “party of government.”

The plan of the Deutschtümmler has been shattered…,” Metternich wrote exultantly to a subordinate in Berlin in November of 1831. Despite the advice of his foreign minister, Count Christian von Bernstorff, King Frederick William of Prussia had just agreed that any Prussian-South German military agreement had to be preceded by a preliminary political understanding between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was so relieved by this turn of events because he had been sure that current Prussian-South German military discussions were leading, not to plans for the defense of Germany in the face of the threatening French revolutionary government, but to the reorganization of the German Confederation along constitutional lines—under the aegis of Prussia. From Metternich's perspective such a change of politics and political leadership in Germany would only cause dissension among the German governments and benefit only their common enemy— “the all-devouring revolution.”

This observation, registered by Marianne Enigl and Herbert Lackner, points to an incontestable and compelling feature of contemporary Austrian political culture: during the 1980s and 1990s, the first meaningful steps toward an Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung developed out of a discussion of Austrians' military service during the Nazi era and its highly problematic association with wartime atrocities and genocide. Exploration of this important theme had been avoided throughout the period of the Second Republic by a carefully cultivated expression of public memory. The inherent tension between the internationally sanctioned notion of Austrian victimization during the Nazi years and the pride of many Austrian veterans in having performed their soldierly duties (Wehrpflichterfüllung) had been a taboo subject.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, a popular nationalist movement developed in the German states that had gained considerable strength by 1871, the year of unification. The German gymnastics association movement was one of the main forms in which popular nationalism was organized. It was started by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn early in the nineteenth century as a means to train young Germans to fight the French occupation. Gradually, it developed into a movement that sought to unify Germany, a project that was not, at first, supported by the German states. The movement was also guided by liberal and, especially before the revolution of 1848, democratic principles, and in this sense, too, was at odds with the reigning political system in Central Europe.

In 1910 Gustav Warneck received nominations and support for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His boosters, mostly from Germany but also from elsewhere in Europe, later speculated that Warneck's failure to secure an award was because his dual nomination prevented enough support for either prize. Instead, they went to the Bureau international permanent de la Paix (Permanent International Peace Bureau) and to German poet and author Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse. The laudatory merits of the Permanent International Peace Bureau and Heyse aside, what had made Warneck worthy in the minds of so many for a Nobel Prize?

In the conclusion of his 1915 dissertation, the influential German urban planner Martin Wagner argued forcefully for a new approach to the role of green space in city planning. Referring to recent efforts to improve urban hygiene and general cleanliness in major German cities, especially the public bathhouse movement of the late nineteenth century, Wagner claimed that expansion and promotion of accessible green space constituted the next big challenge for those interested in improving urban living:

Recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine has begun to consider the diversity of sites, markets, and audiences for scientific knowledge. This article investigates a single publicly accessible location: Vienna's Prater park. At a time when the Second Vienna Medical School led the world in anatomy and pathology, two case studies demonstrate how knowledge about human anatomy entered the fin-de-siècle Viennese public sphere in a noninstitutional setting. Josef Hyrtl, an anatomist, and Hermann Präuscher, a showman, employed targeted marketing strategies for their anatomical preparations to facilitate the circulation of anatomical knowledge among the socially diverse audiences that congregated on the fairground. Examining how anatomy was visualized and discursively constructed, alongside questions of site, accessibility, and audience response, sheds light on a pivotal historical moment when the meaning of the human body was undergoing significant transformation in Austrian society.

Relying heavily upon Freud's greatest work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Professors Carl Schorske and William McGrath have attempted to increase our understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis. Both authors feel that the key to Freud's discoveries lies in his reaction to the sociopolitical realities of late nineteenth-century Vienna, and while the articles differ somewhat in emphasis their arguments are sufficiently similar so that they can be treated together. To Schorske and McGrath psychoanalysis had its origins in Freud's decision to give up his initial desire to mount a direct political (even revolutionary) attack on the inequities of the existing society for a “counter-political” psychology which enabled him to adjust to the existing political situation and even achieve a measure of scientific success. As a youth Freud had radical political aspirations and was even active in radical political organizations. However, the hopelessness of the liberal position in Vienna and the rise of anti-Semitic popular movements led Freud to believe that direct political action would not be successful. By reducing political conflict to father-son conflict Freud, like other liberals, would ignore the reality of the political and learn to live (albeit imperfectly) in a world which he could not influence. A career in science could bring recognition and at least partial acceptance, and thus a minimum of satisfaction at least.

Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German struggles with memory. In recent years, however, this state of affairs has begun to change. As the epochal events of 1989–90 have forced Germans to confront still another burdensome historical legacy—that of communism—the increasing calls for a “second” Vergangenheitsbewältigung have, for better or worse, broken the monopolistic hold of the Third Reich on the nation's historical consciousness. course of this new Vergangenheitsbewältigung by comparing it to the experience of coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism.