Considered in isolation, the experiences of the ethnic German minority of Slovakia hardly warrant more than a footnote in the history of East-Central Europe during the years of World War II. The wartime experiences of this numerically small German minority, known as the Carpathian Germans, do, however, stand out in vivid contrast to those of the other German minority group of Czechoslovakia, the much-publicized Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia. And it is this glaring contrast that lends significance to a study of the Slovakian German experiences, both with the Third Reich and with the ephemerally independent Slovak state. The juxtaposition of the estimated 130,000 Carpathian Germans of Slovakia and the more than 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans of central and western Czechoslovakia suggests a natural and dramatic comparison, which reveals that no blanket generalization can be offered regarding the wartime experiences of any of the German minorities of Europe.

In April 1809—less than four years after Austerlitz—Austria declared war on France and entered the field as the champion of a vanquished German Empire. In their analyses of the Habsburg bid to restore the old order in the Germanies, historians have stressed certain internal developments within the Austrian Empire that made war possible: a revitalized army, a strong feeling of German nationalism, an embittered émigré lobby, and a powerful war party. This article explores the importance of the factions within the imperial family in relation to these events and points up an irony in the Austrian decision. For while the emperor Francis viewed the war as a final effort to save the dynasty, Count Philipp Stadion, his chief minister and leader of the war party, capitalized on the divergent points of view within the family to attain his own ends. His principal concern was to restore the old political order, to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), and to reconstruct the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. By skillful manipulation of ideology and dynastic ambition, he won most of the imperial princes to his side. They, in turn, persuaded the emperor to commit himself to a foreign policy that jeopardized his monarchy for the sake of a war whose diplomatic goals interested him scarcely at all.

On Easter Monday, 1615—the seventh day of Passover in 5375 by the Jewish calender — the entire Jewish community of the German city of Worms was sent into exile. But the banishment of the Jews, which followed almost two years of anti-Jewish agitation by the citizens of Worms, was far from permanent.Eight months later, by order of commissioners appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Jews of Worms were permitted to return. They remained in the city for another three centuries, until the final eradication of the Jewish community of Worms in 1942.

In the introduction to his 1915 book Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk, Otto Hintze ruefully quoted an Englishman's observation that, “Prussian history is endlessly boring because it speaks so much of war and so little of revolution.” As the “Great War” entered its second year, and with Germany's hopes for a quick and decisive victory fading, Hintze saw history repeating itself. Like Frederick the Great's Prussia, he wrote, “The German Reich, under a Hohenzollern Kaiser, [now] battles for its existence against a world of enemies.” Since the beginning of the war, Entente propaganda had mobilized the home front by depicting the war as an epochal struggle against the enemy of all civilized men: the savage “Hun,” the jack-booted, spike-helmeted despoiler of innocent Belgium. The crudity of this propaganda caricature aside, its power to persuade nevertheless drew on a widespread conviction that the story of war constituted the core of German history and that the disease of “militarism” was a peculiarly German deformation of the national psyche. In response to the censure of their nation's enemies, the German intellectuals rejected that diagnosis while defending the role war had played in their nation's history. Published in the Kölnische Zeitung on October 4, 1914, the hastily drafted manifesto “To the Civilized World!” was endorsed (if not read) by ninety-three of the Second Reich's most prominent scholars, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, including Peter Behrens, Lujo Brentano, Adolph von Harnack, Max Lenz, and Gustav von Schmoller. They vehemently repudiated the distortion of Germany's history: “Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated.” “The word militarism,” the liberal jurist Gerhard Anschütz defiantly declared in 1915, “which is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for us a badge of honor.” As Hintze, Anschütz, and their contemporaries understood the course of German unification (and Germany's rise as a great power under Prussian leadership), the modern German nation-state owed its very existence to what Hintze called “the monarchical-military factor.” If we are to advance our understanding of how a nationalist discourse obsessed with foreign and domestic threats supported a foreign policy that ignited two world wars in the space of twenty-five years, we must be prepared, I believe, to re-think the “Sonderweg thesis,” not in its relation to the putative immaturity of German liberalism or an atavistic predilection for autocratic rule, but as it was rooted in German military culture. The books under discussion in this essay reframe the militarism/“Sonderweg” debate by examining the unique connection between modern German visions of the nation and the waging of war as revealed in the experience of the First World War. Representing the maturation of the new intellectual and cultural history of war, they pose two fundamental questions: What kind of war did the Second Reich's military, political, and intellectual leadership envision that would “complete” the German nation? And how did they define Germany's enemies?

This article looks at the experiences and perspectives of homosexual men in Nazi Germany—in particular, at homosexual veterans of World War I. How did homosexual men perceive “hegemonic masculinity” and ideals of comradeship during the Third Reich? The central argument is that the Nazi regime's emphasis on heterosexuality as an essential masculine trait was contested by homosexual veterans, who attempted to exert agency by actively defining notions of “masculinity,” the nature of their homosexuality, as well as their status in the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). The ways in which homosexual men perceived homosexuality in relation to hegemonic masculine norms were diverse: whereas some tried to argue for the compatibility of homosexuality and martial masculinity, those who were arrested often distanced themselves from their homosexual identity. The testimonies of veterans, available in Gestapo police interrogation records, suggest how subjective constructions of sexual identity both undermined and reinforced hegemonic masculine ideals.

The success of the treaties of Westphalia in preserving the religious peace in the Holy Roman Empire after 1648 has been a popular scholarly theme. Many historians also realize, however, that confessional tensions and confrontations persisted well into the eighteenth century. Exploring an early eighteenth-century German confessional crisis centered in the Palatinate, this article focuses on the degree to which judicial, political, and diplomatic mechanisms successfully regulated and deescalated confessional strife. In short, it looks at the “juridification” of confessional conflict in the Empire. In so doing, it addresses a number of underresearched themes, such as the reactions of the Catholic princes and the Emperor, the internal dynamics within the Corpus Evangelicorum, as well as the international dimension of European great power politics. This not only provides a multiangle analysis of a crisis that saw the emergence of a new regime in the politics of religion, but also offers greater insight into the relationship between the powerful, militarized Protestant territorial-states of northern Germany and the Habsburg emperorship, specifically with regard to the judicial authority of the latter.

In September 1929, a group of Russian German farmers who were dissatisfied with conditions under Soviet rule traveled to the suburbs of Moscow and demanded that they be allowed to emigrate. The gathering of ethnic Germans, most of whom were Mennonites, grew rapidly and numbered more than 13,000 people at its height. Their demands were widely reported in the German press and brought the subject of Soviet collectivization into the public eye in Germany. The effect of this event on German-Soviet diplomatic relations, which became increasingly strained as Stalinism took hold, is well known. Although studies of the gathering mention the public outcry in the press, they have generally assumed that the German public's identification with the Russian Germans was self-evident and not in need of explanation. In fact, public interest in and government concern for the Russian Germans was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the post-World War I era, Germans came to understand the Russian Germans as emblematic of Germany's fate—as innocent, hard-working farmers who were loyal to Germanness and who worked tirelessly to expand German culture in the world. The Russian Germans also came to represent the larger crisis of legitimacy that affected the Weimar Republic in which parliamentary government was increasingly perceived as not being able to protect the German people and its interests, whether in Germany or abroad.

Subsistence and property. ”This paper looks at an enduring subject from a Central European perspective. It is an historiographical variation of an old matter of dispute: to whom do the goods of the world legitimately belong, to those who need them, or to those who possess them legally, but do not need them? In this paper “subsistence” stands for the legitimizing power of the idea of “need,” and “property” for justification through an appeal to freedom. In theory more than two thousand years ago the question was already answered in favor of the primacy of property.

In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

While on vacation in Rome during the fall of 1913, Freud mentioned in a letter that his visit to the eternal city had restored his zest for work and that in addition to several other pieces he had written the preface to his book Totem and Taboo. In this preface he modestly notes that essays “represent a first attempt on my part at applying the point of view and the findings of psycho-analysis to some unsolved problems of social psychology,” but taken as a whole the four essays in fact present as bold and ingenious a theory on the nature and origins of human civilization as that proposed in Rousseau's Second Discourse a century and a half earlier. Rome was, in every sense, an appropriate place to launch such an ambitious undertaking, and as a connoisseur of jokes and irony Freud may well have chosen his vacation residence, the Eden Hotel, at least in part because of its name. However, the picture Freud draws of primitive man's first steps toward the establishment of civilization is far from edenic. Near the end of Totem and Taboo Freud conjures up a description of the primal crime on which human culture rests: “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together; killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.”

Soon after his wife's incarceration in the Eberbach asylum in 1827, Herr S., a rector and soon to become Gymnasium professor in Weilburg, wrote to Philipp H. Lindpaintner, the asylum's director. The letter was about the pressing problem of his wife's illness, but, strangely, Herr S. spent a great deal of time chatting about himself — about his new position as professor; his recent salary raise; his new apartment “near the castle garden, where the Hofmarschal used to live”; his library; his Naturalien-Kabinett (natural history collection), which will be put on display at the Rathaus “for the use of schools and the enjoyment of the friends of nature and art.” Finally, Herr S. turned to the issue at hand: his wife's mental illness.

An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was a relatively simple operation; it took only a few weeks for Prussian armies to rout the French forces. But integrating this prize of war into Imperial Germany proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. It is indeed a rather pathetic spectacle. While some of the highest civilian officials of the territorial administration sought to integrate the Reichsland into the Reich, the highest military officers sought to impose a military dictatorship; and on the sidelines, powerful German textile, tobacco, and iron and steel interests hoped to minimize competion from Alsace-Lorraine by sabotaging all government efforts at conciliation and integration. It is this latter aspect of the problem, what one might term the economic subversion of political integration, which we shall examine here.

When in spring 1914 Otto Hintze was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Science he indicated in his inaugural address that his publications in the field of Prussian history most likely had earned him this honor. He added, however, that the history of Prussia was by no means the exclusive aim of his work as a historian. Alluding to the fact that his professorship at the University of Berlin was a chair for general constitutional, administrative, and economic history as well as for political science (Politik), he continued: “The real goal towards which my scholarly endeavors are directed has always been a universal comparative constitutional and administrative history of the West [der Neueren Staatenwelt—a term which for Hintze, as in Ranke's Epochen der Neueren Geschichte, comprised both medieval and modern Europe], especially of the Romance and Germanic speaking nations. It is in this context that Ranke's lifework could and should be complemented.”