For a long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.

On New Year's Eve 1890 Hildegard, Baroness von Spitzemberg recorded these reflections in her diary:

The end of 1890: the year in which Bismarck left the global stage, not called by death but dismissed against his will. That in itself would be sufficient to make this year unforgettable; who knows if this experience, this past year will become a milestone in German history.… We confront the last decade of the century under the banner of a new generation which rushes with full sail into the heavy sea of time, its impetuous emperor prematurely in command. Towards what? That we may know all too soon—or better all too late—when the reefs rise threateningly before us and there is no experienced mariner at the helm.

A MOST significant development has been taking place in the field of German history in the last half dozen years or so. Although largely overshadowed, especially in this country, by such emotion-laden issues as the Fritz Fischer debate and the ever popular history of Nazism, it has been quietly changing the terrain of German history and touching the historical consciousness of West Germans in essential ways. It is the maturation of the postwar period from 1945 to 1949 into a significant and sophisticated area of historical inquiry. In a larger West German cultural-political context this has meant the reclaiming of a piece of German history long regarded as lost together with the war and assorted eastern territories.

On March 28, 1926, government officials and borderland activists staged a massive rally to protest the border with Poland in Oppeln (Opole), the capital of the German part of the Upper Silesian borderland. The Social Democratic interior minister of the Prussian state, Carl Severing, took the occasion to articulate the terms of a rivalry with the Polish neighboring nation-state to which the disputed drawing of the border here in 1922 had given way. In his speech he noted that he was “not speaking about an arms race” but rather “a struggle” for “Germandom and Kultur” that “should be fought out with the weapons of the spirit”—rather than with actual arms. As part of the struggle, the whole of this border society was to demonstrate that they were “better than the eastern neighbor” in their everyday work. This promotion of good stewardship was meant not only to ensure that Germany would not lose another “single foot-long of soil,” but also foremost “to uphold the faith of the Upper Silesian masses in Polish Silesia's speedy return to Germany.” This last phrase was coined by Aleksander Szczepański, the Polish Consul in Beuthen (Bytom) on the German side of the border. Like other government officials, and also the media, he followed this rally and was startled by how—in his words—“tirelessly” “all of Germany” was calling for the border's revision. In turn, Szczepański warned the Polish government that “it is easy to imagine a sad outcome”—such as the revision of the border in Germany's favor—if Poland did not step up its efforts to counter such propaganda.

The Tuchel Heath (Tucheler Heide, Bóry Tucholskie) and Kashubia (Kassubei, Kaszuby), the two regions comprising the geographical region known as Pomerelia (roughly the area of the “Polish Corridor”), came into Prussian possession with annexations from Poland in 1772, when Friedrich II seized most of what would become the provinces of Poznania and West Prussia from the ailing Polish Republic. These territories, some liked to imagine, resembled the North American frontier. Friedrich II apparently compared it to Canada and “jokingly named the inhabitants his Iroquois.” Gustav Freytag immortalized Friedrich's arrival on the frontier in his work Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, characterizing the place as “an abandoned land, without law, without authority; it was a wasteland.” Certainly, the harsh climate, the sprawling pine forests and barrens, and the impoverished populace suggested a certain affinity. In one description of the region from 1879, the author depicted the Slavic game poacher “as a red Indian on the warpath.”

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have called into question the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult. This article paints a different picture. First, virtually all Nazi leaders appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and “border-scientific” thinking across the German population and within the Nazi Party itself. Second, although Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and even Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo consistently advocated anti-occult policies or pro-enlightenment campaigns during the first six years of the Third Reich, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. Third, the regime's reticence to eradicate even popular or commercial occultism—indicated by the fact that the environment for professional debunkers became more hostile with the outbreak of World War II––reflected the popularity of supernatural and border-scientific thinking within the German population. Indeed, whereas some Nazis intervened on the side of occultism for reasons of public opinion, many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value.

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.

On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.

The age of high imperialism was also the age of the emergence of mass journalism. This heralded a steady widening of what might be called the “political nation,” that is, those groups who took an active interest in politics in contrast to the mass of the population still largely outside the political arena. Up to the 1890s politics tended to be Honoratiorenpolitik—confined to “notables” or Honoratioren, a term first applied by Max Weber around the turn of the century to describe the elites who had dominated the political power structure up to that time. Gradually “public opinion” ceased to be, in effect, the opinion of the educated classes, that is, the classes dirigeantes. In Wilhelmian Germany the process of democratization had been successfully contained, if seen in terms of the constitutional system; the age of mass politics was still far away.

Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not the strongest) field in modern European history. Whether measured anecdotally by the number of job openings, the number of historians hired, the stream of published books, or the share of German history articles in academic journals, it always seems that German historians and German history are at the forefront. In fact, though, historians of Germany have always made up the smallest cohort of historians of the major European history fields (that also include British, Russian, and French history). According to the latest figures available from the American Historical Association (AHA), in 2010 there were 990 historians of Britain, 668 historians of Russia, 605 historians of France, and 592 historians of Germany in the United States.

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over the longue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

In the midst of the upheaval created by military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and other German monarchies, and the threat of radical social revolution, a movement that had been taking shape for some time became a visible presence in German public life. Intellectuals, writers, visual artists, and numerous others declared that they would no longer remain aloof from the world of politics, social reform, and even revolution. On the contrary, they would seek to merge the arts and politics into a synthesis that would help to mold a new and greatly improved society. They issued manifestos and programs, founded organizations and journals, joined political parties — primarily on the left — and went to the streets, at least to observe if not also to act. The majority of the participants in this movement were, at some point in their careers, part of new artistic trends and, as such, contributors to the formation and advancement of aesthetic modernism in Germany.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

Consideration of political life in modern Germany has often centered on two main issues: classically, the vicissitudes of the national state; more recently, the impact of the creation of an industrial society on existing structures of power and on the position of ruling elites. Without denying the centrality of these questions, an exclusive focus on them can obscure the importance of other factors in German political development, both in their own right, and in the way they mediated the experience of state-building and industrialization to different sections of the population. Two such relevant factors are regionalism and confessional identity.

Iregret that David Abraham's lengthy, bizarre, obfuscating, and often mendacious reply to my charges requires me to impose on the generosity of CEH once again, but readers will understand why I insisted that Abraham not be allowed to have the kind of “last word” granted him in the AHR. In my article, I deliberately refrained from a discussion of the various circular letters sent around by Abraham, myself, and others for the simple reason that most readers would have no direct means of checking the evidence for themselves, that the whole affair had been utterly confusing, and that it was most appropriate in this journal to concentrate on what had appeared in print. This is not a tabloid, but a scholarly journal, and I find the airing of Abraham's personal grievances against me inappropriate in this forum. The way in which I treated Abraham can have no bearing whatever on the reliability of his book or other writings. Although I initially contemplated writing a detailed reply to Abraham's plaints, I have concluded that this would be an abuse of CEH's hospitality. Since this is a historical journal, however, falsifications of the historical record and certain charges should not go totally without comment, and I will now make a number of brief responses to certain of Abraham's charges for that purpose.

To order an untidy past, historians identify and interpret significant pivots in the development of nations. One such pivot in the fractured history of twentieth-century Germany was the period between 1945 and 1949. In these brief postwar years, a remarkable “mutation” of German politics and society began under Allied tutelage. In this interregnum between Hitler and Adenauer, a war-devastated West Germany started on the path “from shadow to substance.” As the Bonn Republic endured, historians started to trace its origins back to certain political and economic structures first erected in the postwar years. Increasingly, they emphasized postwar Weichenstellungen, or turning points, which influenced later events. By the 1980s, this structuralist view strongly suggested that contemporaries of the years 1945–1949 had actually lived through the Vorgeschichte, or prehistory, of the Federal Republic, and of affluence.

Gustav Stresemann counted on the Locarno accords of October 1925 to pave the way for peaceful revision of the Versailles treaty. Yet just days before these agreements renouncing force as a means of modifying the Rhineland frontier were to come into effect, the German foreign minister spoke of a wake, at which “the hopes which arose in Locarno are laid to rest, under a tombstone bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies the Spirit of Locarno.’” Stresemann's remark to the French chargé d'affaires in Berlin was prompted by France's apparent veto of the restoration of Eupen and Malmédy to the German Reich. As an illustration of the fundamental governmental attitudes of the participating powers, and as a measure of just what each saw in the Locarno treaties, the case of Eupen-Malmédy presents several provocative revelations.