Since the early 1960s we have witnessed in West German historical writing noteworthy changes in the interpretation of the causes of the First World War and, therefore, of the meaning of that war for Germany. One is particularly struck by the refreshing debate which ensued among German scholars on Germany's war aims specifically and on Imperial Germany's foreign policy prior to the World War in general. The so-called captured German documents of the Foreign Office and other branches of the government were returned to Germany, and a younger generation of historians eagerly examined the newly available material. Remarkable, if at times controversial, studies were the result of the scholarly reexamination of the German imperial era. Yet, in all the commotion and controversy, there was one area of German foreign policy which conspicuously remained ignored or treated with astonishing marginality

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.

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.

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.

During the late nineteenth century, prostitution became the subject of controversy and debate because of an enormous increase in the number of prostitutes who walked the streets of all large European cities, including Hanover. This growth was a byproduct of rapid urbanization and of the frequent economic contractions that characterized urban economies. Young women who were drawn to the cities often found only low-paid or seasonal work. They turned to prostitution when other work was unobtainable, or, occasionally, prostituted themselves in order to supplement low wages or to support themselves when they were between jobs. The creation of a large market in prostitution was noted by many observers, some of whom estimated the population of prostitutes to be in the tens of thousands.

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). His Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigung or VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.

Resistance under conditions of close to total control is fraught with enormous, almost insurmountable, difficulties. And in the Germany of 1933–45 they were compounded by the fact that the “totalitarianism” of the state was effective not merely by virtue of controls it exercised, but also of the consensus it had managed to whip up. But the most agonizing difficulties were of an ethical order: unlike the Resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied countries, the German Resistance was bound to come into conflict with the “national interestü and it thus got involved in the dilemma of risking the charge of treason in order to assert the prerogatives of higher laws, natural or divine. The “foreign policy” of the German Resistance, involving contacts abroad before the war and during the war, takes us to the most exposed aspects of our problem.

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

The question Wer ist schuld am Krieg?, the focus of a propaganda battle already during the Great War, has obsessed German historians unlike any other issue in their recent history. In America the publishing success of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, the acclaim of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, and the continual appearance of paperback introductions testify to an abiding interest in the outbreak of the First World War. But with the exception of the memorable debate between Sindey Fay and Bernadotte Schmidt, there have been no major American contributions because the issue of causes and responsibilities has been seen primarily as an academic problem.

The emergence and general acceptance of polycentrism in the communist world since the late 1950's has brought the difficulty of defining communism in either ideological, organizational, or programmatic terms out into the open. That difficulty had always existed but had been concealed since the early 1920's largely by the impact of the successful Bolshevik Revolution and by the subsequent bolshevization and Soviet domination of most non-Russian communist groups and movements through the Comintern and the Cominform. The Western cold-war theory of the monolithic nature of a Moscow-centered and -controlled expansion of world communism has perpetuated a widespread identification of communism as such with bolshevism.

In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.

Punctually at 4:05 on the morning of March 31, 1938, a new diesel locomotive left the Holzkirchen Bahnhof in Munich, pulling the first traveling “achievement exhibition” (Leistungsshau) of German technology. It had been nineteen days since the Anschluss, and on April 10 all Greater Germany would vote its approval of incorporating Austria into the Reich. Despite their use of terror to influence the Austrian vote and virtual assurance of electoral success, the National Socialists embarked on an extensive propaganda effort in Austria to ensure a wide margin of victory there. Hitler campaigned throughout Austria during the last ten days before the vote, making six major speeches, and other top Nazi officials made electioneering tours. Famous for constructing the Autobahn network, Fritz Todt, Inspector General for German Highways, and the engineers of the NSDAP Central Office for Technology, organized a traveling propaganda exhibit to display German technology under the motto “Austria's chimneys will smoke again.” It was the first of three “Voyages of Technology” undertaken by Todt and his Nazi engineers.

The politics of sexuality in modern Germany was complicated, contradictory, and multivalent. Reflecting on how to conceptualize that complexity is worthwhile, for doing so allows us to formulate multiple interpretive perspectives. After briefly sketching two of the most common scholarly interpretations, this article explores the usefulness of a third model, one in which the political dynamic of the broad and complex debate about sexuality is neither univalent (i.e., moving toward greater freedom or greater repression) nor binary (moving toward both), but “trivalent.” This perspective reveals the usefulness of seeing a political dynamic set up by conflicts and contrasts among three loose groupings that stand out among the many voices debating the nature and meaning of sexuality. At the same time, it uncovers and defines the productivity of multiple contradictions and conflicts, as well as the contingent coherences, they generated. Making use of particular readings of Foucauldian theory and the theory of complex systems, the article suggests the value of thinking about the politics of sexuality in terms of processes of change, as well as structures of power.

By the early 1970s, the West German Protestant churches became involved in the increasingly bitter conflict surrounding the production and use of nuclear energy. While the nuclear issue remains as controversial and divisive as ever in Germany today, no historical analysis has yet been offered to explain the reasons that the churches especially in West Germany have become avid participants in this debate for decades.

The essential goal of Hitler's National Socialist ideology and its implementation by Heinrich Himmler's SS was the military conquest of “living space” from the eastern borders of the Reich to the Ural Mountains. Within this newly won territory, peoples perceived to be of “alien” race—and hence a danger to the future German Reich—were to be eliminated entirely or intellectually decapitated through the elimination of their political, cultural, and religious elites, leaving a “residue” to provide manual labor for German settlers. Himmler's appointment as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFDV) on 7 October 1939, in the wake of the successful Blitzkrieg against Poland, established his SS and police as the primary executive apparatus for this project. The elimination of the Jews formed an integral part of this “racial restructuring of Eastern Europe.”

In the early 1990s, reunified Germany faced surging numbers of asylum seekers and a wave of far-right violence against foreigners. In letters that German citizens wrote to President Richard von Weizsäcker, it is clear that some Germans feared that the arrival of large numbers of non-Germans would bring about the collapse of the state or the destruction of the German people. This article engages with the history of fear in postwar Germany by examining Germans’ post-reunification fears of migration and foreigners. I argue, first, that a biological understanding of race was still surprisingly widespread as late as the early 1990s. Second, I call for a substantially more nuanced understanding of German reunification, one that emphasizes uncertainty and the terrifying openness of the future. Finally, I highlight the intersection of race thinking and memory by showing that racial fears were frequently shaped by memories of Germany's dark past.

This article shows how the material culture of nationhood can reveal a different perspective on the problem of nationalism. Using simple time graphs and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the article considers temporal and spatial dimensions of “nation objects” in an effort to understand the allusive phenomenon of banal, everyday national identity. Specifically, it brings together quantitative evidence for the pervasiveness of veterans monuments, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck monuments, as well as monuments to Germany's great intellectuals, and then examines the world of objects, largely kitsch, that these monuments brought forth. The article argues that, especially in small-town Germany, objects signifying the nation point to a national sentiment governed less by the sharp logic of ideology than by the harmonizing tendencies of kitsch.

Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, wie die materielle Kultur der nationalen Einheit eine andere Perspektive auf das Problem des Nationalismus bieten kann. Durch die Verwendung einfacher Zeitgraphiken und Geographic Information Systems (GIS) werden die zeitlichen und räumlichen Dimensionen von “Nationalobjekten” betrachtet, um das anspielungsreiche Phänomen banaler, alltäglicher Nationalidentität zu begreifen. Konkret werden quantitative Nachweise weit verbreiteter Kriegsdenkmäler, Denkmäler für Kaiser Wilhelm I. und Otto von Bismarck sowie Denkmäler für Deutschlands führende Intellektuelle zusammengeführt und im Anschluss daran die Welt der Objekte – größtenteils Kitsch –, die diese Denkmäler hervorgebracht haben, untersucht. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass diese die Nation repräsentierenden Objekte vor allem im kleinstädtischen Deutschland auf ein Nationalgefühl verweisen, das weniger durch klar definierte Ideologie als vielmehr durch die harmonisierenden Tendenzen von Kitsch bestimmt ist.