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.

In a luncheon address at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in 2013, David Blackbourn delivered an impassioned plaidoyer to “grow” German history, i.e., to rescue it from the temporal “provincialism” that has, he believes, increasingly characterized the study of Germany over the past two decades. Blackbourn was critical of the growing emphasis on the twentieth century and especially the post-1945 period—not because of the quality of the work per se, but rather because of the resultant neglect of earlier periods and the potential loss of valuable historical insights that this development has brought in its wake. There have been other seemingly seismic shifts in the profession as a whole that have not left the history of Germany and German-speaking Central Europe untouched: greater emphasis on discourse analysis and gender, memory and identity, experience and cultural practices (i.e., the “linguistic turn” and the “new” cultural history). Accompanied by a decline in interest about Germany exclusively as a “nation-state,” the last decade in particular has seen a spike in “global” or “transnational” approaches. And, like other fields, the study of Germany has also witnessed greater interest in the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization—what Catherine Epstein referred to as the “imperial turn” in a piece that appeared in the journal Central European History (CEH) in 2013.

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.

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.

Only a minority of Germans involved in Nazi crimes were prosecuted after the war, and the transnational history of trials is only beginning to be explored. Even less well understood are the ways in which those who were tainted by complicity reframed their personal life stories. Millions had been willing facilitators, witting beneficiaries, or passive (and perhaps unhappily helpless) witnesses of Nazi persecution; many had been actively involved in sustaining Nazi rule; perhaps a quarter of a million had personally killed Jewish civilians, and several million had direct knowledge of genocide. How did these people re-envision their own lives after Nazism? And how did they reinterpret their own former behaviors—their actions and inaction—in light of public confrontations with Nazi crimes and constructions of “perpetrators” in trials? Going beyond well-trodden debates about “overcoming the past,” this paper explores patterns of personal memory among East and West Germans after Nazism.

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.

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.”

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.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic political parties and affiliated organizations were formed in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. These movements, variously referred to as “subcultures,” “ghettos,” the Dutch Catholic “pillar,” and the German “tower,” have only begun to break down and become integrated into national society within the last thirty or forty years. The best known of these parties, the German Center, has been called “a strange product of German history and … of conditions in Europe around 1870,” an ill-assorted alliance of interest groups who, if not actually the “mobilization against the state” of Bismarck's rhetoric, were opposed to the way in which the Bismarckian Reich was created: an alliance which was given an extension of life by Bismarck's decision to wage war against the party and the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf. Several recent interpretations have seen the Center as a byproduct of Germany's transition from a precapitalist agrarian society to a modern capitalistic society, representing those peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and traditional preindustrial bourgeoisie whose interests were being injured by liberal economic and social policies introduced after 1867. According to these interpretations, the party is defined primarily by its anticapitalism and antiliberalism, rather than by ethnic allegiance. Any satisfactory analysis of the Center's place in the German political spectrum, however, must account for the striking parallel provided by the history of similar Catholic parties in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

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.

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.

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.

In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.

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.

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.”

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.