In a talk delivered on 20 September 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the president of the League of German Women's Associations (BDF) likened the political status of German women to mothers who were forced to nurse their children with their hands tied behind their backs. They were thoroughly frustrated by the destructiveness of the war and were only able to fulfill their duties toward family and nation because they believed that the experience of the war would make the nation stronger.

That many German intellectuals greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but showed little interest in importing it across the Rhine, is a well-known paradox in German history. For Jacques Droz this paradox resulted from the preoccupation of most German intellectuals with the purely ethical implications of the Revolution—in other words, the Germans dealt with the Revolution in the realm of thought but ignored it in the realm of politics. Behind this argument lay the assumption that because the Germans were for the most part “monarchists” rather than “republicans,” they were apolitical.

In the early 1930s German democracy was dying, mired in political gridlock, burdened by four million unemployed, and under assault by Nazis and Communists alike. In the midst of this crisis the Reich Association of Catholic Workers' Clubs and Working Youth (Reichsverband der katholischen Arbeitervereine und der Werkjugend) published a modest anthology entitled Die Arbeit (Work), “dedicated to the poetic glorification of labor.” Editorially justifying the decision to provide Catholic workers with verses at such a time, Ferdinand Göbel, one of the rising young leaders of the Catholic labor movement, argued that the poems, far from serving as a distraction or a momentary boost to morale, would enable workers to find the only true and lasting solution to their predicament. Poetry would lead to an inner, spiritual renewal, a rediscovery by workers that their labor was “not simply to earn bread, but… joyful participation in the act of creation, sacrificial service to humanity and a means of atonement that makes us strong and free within.” Because of this, said Göbel, The modern worker, this man of iron, has discovered his soul. He believes in loyalty and comradeship, in brotherhood and the courage to sacrifice. He hopes in a new humanity. Yes, out of his heavy everyday existence he hammers bridges to the eternal and the divine. He turns hard slave labor into an act of worship.

In May of 1948 a letter from Major J. C. Thompson, chief of the Religious Affairs Section of the American Military Government in Berlin, arrived at the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists in Washington, D.C. Major Thompson's office was responsible for seeing that all Nazis were removed from leadership positions, and his letter was part of an ongoing correspondence about the denomination's need to come to terms with its Nazi past. The Adventist denomination, he complained, was “one of the very few in Berlin which have not cleaned house politically to date. Most of the denominations finished this task long enough ago to have forgotten about it.” The letter must have been particularly embarrassing to Adventist leaders as it went on to compare Adventists to Catholics, who “actually had little housecleaning to do because of their strong opposition during the reign of Hitler to the entire Nazi regime.”

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

Most historians of modern Germany, in describing the final year of World War I, generally note that a massive strike broke out in Berlin at the end of January 1918, spread to virtually every other major city of the empire, and then quickly collapsed. This said, they then usually move on to consider the events of great portent that followed: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia, the spring offensive in the west, the military defeat of Germany, and the abortive revolution of 1918–19. The weakness of this approach is clear: it pays too little attention to the importance of the January strike.

One of the views most widely encountered in the literature on the Crimean War is that Austrian policy aimed at acquiring the Danubian Principalities in one form or another. Austria's purposes were not merely defensive, but expansionist. She wanted to replace the existing Russian protectorate by an exclusive protectorate of her own, to make herself the heir to the Ottoman Sultan's suzerain rights, and thereby pave the way to ultimate annexation. Or, if this proved impossible, she wanted at least to exercise an exclusive political influence in the Principalities, and to incorporate them permanently into her economic sphere and military system. The evidence for this view seems, on the surface, quite impressive. For Austria did force Russia to evacuate the Principalities by diplomatic ultimatum and military demonstration in the summer of 1854, and immediately moved in to occupy them herself. Her military commanders attempted to exclude the Turks from a share in the occupation, and failing this, tried to limit the Turkish role as much as possible. During the occupation, they interfered in matters of local administration and supported officials friendly to Austria against the wishes of the Turks and the local magnates. Austria also undertook the development of roads and a telegraph system, surveying, and other projects designed to aid her economic penetration of the territory. Her occupation was prolonged until 1857, and ended then only under heavy pressure from the Western Powers.

The three articles of this symposium contribute to a vital debate about the nature of modern German politics. The works by Barbara Anderson, Loyd Lee, and Lawrence Flockerzie discuss the political culture upon which the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Germany rested. This political culture transcended the conventional concepts “liberal” and “conservative.” It was based on bourgeois ideals.

In 1926, the Women's League of the German Colonial Society opened the Rendsburg Colonial School for Women to train young women to go abroad to the former German colonies. This school joined the Witzenhausen Colonial School (for men), founded in 1899, as institutions of colonial education in a Germany now without an overseas empire. After 1933, the schools entered a new phase of their histories. This article examines the Rendsburg and Witzenhausen Colonial Schools in tandem in order to explore the place of colonial education in the Third Reich. Through their curricula, the schools sought to negotiate the value of this education to the ideological and territorial goals of the Third Reich, a negotiation that was not always smooth, as demonstrated by debates about the political and pedagogical suitability of the directors of the schools. World War II heightened the gendered differences between the schools and led to different wartime experiences, in particular the Rendsburg school's participation in Germanization projects in eastern Europe. The trajectory of both schools in the Third Reich demonstrates that the cultural/national/racial importance of colonial work retained relevance and indeed obtained increased value in a Germany without overseas colonies.

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”

This article analyzes the interplay between Nazi cultural politics and regional identity in the Palatinate region of Germany through the lens of the Ludwig Siebert program. Created by Bavarian Minister-President Ludwig Siebert in the early 1930s to stimulate the regional construction industry, this program involved the conservation of medieval castles and ruins in Bavaria and the Palatinate. The renovation of these monuments, which had been central to the cultural memory and identity of Pfälzers since at least the nineteenth century, proved to be effective in mobilizing the local populace for Siebert's aims and, consequently, for the goals of the Nazi regime. Because its melding of cultural politics and regional identity helped to stabilize the regime in the Palatinate during its early years, the Siebert program provides a particularly illustrative microhistorical case study of the Nazi regime's mechanisms for creating the Volksgemeinschaft in the provinces. By focusing on the Palatinate town of Annweiler, which sits at the foot of the storied Trifels castle, a favored renovation project of Siebert's, this article offers a closely observed demonstration of these mechanisms at work.

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.

In his seminal The German Empire, published in German in 1973, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler posited that in respect to the German Empire's colonial policies only the SPD, unlike all other political parties, “retained its capacity to take a critical view on matters of principle.” Moreover, in Wehler's view, the SPD's critical stance on this and many other political questions along with the party's massive electoral gains in the 1912 parliamentary elections precipitated a situation in the years immediately preceding the Great War that prompted the German Empire's “old elites” to bet increasingly on a major military conflict to solve the Empire's internal political tensions (“leap into darkness”). Thus in Wehler's view the Social Democrats contributed in no small part to Imperial Germany's perceived domestic crisis, which prompted the infamous “old elites” to choose war over domestic reform in 1914.

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 the final months of World War II, more than a million German children took to the roads in search of family and home. Although the majority returned home with little institutional support, hundreds of thousands of other German children could not. Some were orphaned; others remained in camps, children's homes, or foster families in areas that no longer belonged to Germany. Most challenging for authorities were those who were alone and too young to know their own names. This article explores the struggle to locate, identify, and provide for missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. It argues that despite a general agreement that children were in peril, Allied denazification policies and the decision by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) not to help “enemy children” compromised care for children. The division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War further handicapped efforts to aid children by preventing the creation of a unified search service. Yet, despite the many postwar impediments, the effort to care for these children was remarkably successful in the end.

On 27 February 1943 in Nazi Germany the Gestapo brutally arrested more than ten thousand Jewish men and women. Martin Riesenburger, later the Chief Rabbi of the German Democratic Republic, recalled that day as “the great inferno.” This large-scale raid marked the beginning of the final phase of the mass deportations, which had been under way since October 1941. Also interned in Berlin were people who, according to NS terminology, lived in so-called mixed marriages. But new documents show that no deportation of this special group was planned by the Gestapo. In the past decade, in both the German as well as the American public, quite a bit of attention has been paid to the fact that non-Jewish relatives publicly demonstrated against the feared deportation of their Jewish partners. The scholarly literature as well has pictured this protest as a unique act of resistance that prevented the deportation of these Jews living in mixed marriages. The fact that during this raid an untold number of Jews, both women and men, fled and went underground has so far been ignored. Since we still know much too little, the following article will discuss all the events of the spring of 1943 and their background.

Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the essay that follows, I do not intend to further document the history of this prejudice in the realm of print culture. Rather, I will explore the way in which its central assumption (namely that Jews and Christians possessed radically different and religiously specific conceptions of work and trade) configured, entered into, and also obfuscated rural relations between Christians and Jews.

Most Germans still know the story. One day in October 1906, the 57-year-old ex-convict Wilhelm Voigt dressed himself in the uniform of a Prussian captain, assembled from several second-hand stores. So equipped, Voigt intercepted two squads of soldiers who were going off duty, and ordered the soldiers to accompany him to the town hall of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick. There, claiming to act on “All-Highest command,” Voigt arrested the mayor and other town officials, and had the town's cash handed over to him in two large sacks. He departed with the money and sent the officials in a car to the police station at Berlin's Neue Wache, guarded by several of the soldiers. Only at the Neue Wache did the officials learn that the “All-Highest” had not in fact ordered their arrest.