Although Gilbert Allardyce's recent article in the American Historical Review is useful in reminding us of “What Fascism Is Not,” even he recognizes the Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, as one of the few ideas common to all fascist movements in Europe during the interwar years. The fascists had little difficulty in deciding what they were against: “Marxism,” liberalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, and often, but not always, Judaism. They could also agree that they favored such vague and general ideas as a “‘new world,’ love of power and the dramatic appeal of youth, elite consciousness and mass influence, revolutionary ardor and veneration of tradition.” They were ultranationalistic and hoped to reunite their socially divided people into “people's communities.” In common with many nonfascist regimes they limited civil liberties and tolerated the existence of only one, all-encompassing political party. They stressed emotion and sentiment over reason, action instead of words, violence in place of peace.

This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe.

Theodor Mommsen called him “the most German man.” The Israelit noted that he had never stepped forward as a Jew. Ernest Hamburger writes that he was the only Jewish deputy who omitted the usual declaration about his religious allegiance in the parliamentary manual. “It was without significance for him.” In his will he requested that “no religious ceremony take place since this is absolutely contrary to my conviction.” And even after his death, when his brother Rudolf established a fund of ten thousand marks for the Berlin Jewish community, it was specified that books could be distributed to talented children except those who attended religious schools. Thus we have a picture of Ludwig Bamberger, the most German man or at least a completely emancipated Jew.

In the summer of 1985, I visited a number of German corporate archives in search of reflective writings, diaries, memoirs, private commentaries on economic or political affairs, and the like by important German businessmen of this century. Much of the trip proved disappointing, probably because little of the sort of material I wanted ever came into being, let alone remains to be found. Executives are not given as a rule, regardless of their day or domicile, to ruminative prose. At the Degussa AG in Frankfurt, however, the archivist pointed me toward a discovery: the Biographische Unterlagen of Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Roessler (1870–1937), the son of Degussa's founder, member of its five- to six-man managing group (Direktion) from 1901 to 1924, and chairman of its supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) from the latter date until his death.

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.

In a recent issue of Central European History, David Wetzel published a wide-ranging review of the first two volumes of my documentary edition on the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne, the immediate pre-history of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71. It goes without saying that I read this review by the author of A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War (2001) with particular interest. My first—and lasting—impression is that here was the discussion of a specialist, one that—precisely because of Wetzel's roots in a different historiographical tradition—represents a model of scholarly fairness. In German historiography since the nineteenth century, and primarily for political reasons, comparably fair treatment of works that deal with a central historical figure such as Bismarck has not been the rule. I am no less grateful for the opportunity offered by his critical objections to make some more general and precise points.

With the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, National Socialist Germany aimed to destroy the Polish nation and Polish national consciousness. The Nazi regime attempted to accomplish this in a variety of ways, including the destruction of Polish cultural institutions, forced resettlement, forced labor, incarceration in prisons and camps, random and systematic roundups of prisoners, and mass murder. To the German authorities in occupied Poland and to many Poles, it was obvious that the occupation would target the Polish Catholic Church with vigor and brutality. Catholicism was the religion of approximately 65 percent of interwar Poland's population: it dominated religious life, held tremendous wealth and political power, and its clergy were widely respected as members of the intelligentsia. More importantly for the Germans, the Catholic Church was a locus and symbol of Polish national identity.

In the last decade the field of studies focusing on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist period of German history has been invaded and nearly overrun by an international throng of journalists, essayists, memoirists, apologists, cultists, and hucksters busily engaged in advancing various interpretations, analyses, and portraits of Hitler. Among this group who are not scholars or professional historians, there seems a wide disparity of ability and expertise and an obvious dissimilarity of motives and objectives. It is, therefore, difficult to specify common points of similarity or agreement that might characterize this particular genre of Hitler studies (or enterprises). On one point only do the efforts seem to tally, in the unspoken but apparent agreement on an injunction by now axiomatic: Adolf Hitler sells.

Georg Herwech was preeminently the German political poet of the 1840's. With youthful arrogance and unstable talent he burst onto the literary and political stage in 1841 with the publication of his Gedichte eines Lebendigen. The contagious excitement generated by this work showed that he both touched and epitomized the revolutionary aspirations of Germany's intellectuals. Gottfried Keller described the immediate impact of Herwegh's work on him: “The new tone struck me like a trumpet blast which suddenly arouses a large camp of the people's army.” And his reaction was typical: Herwegh was feted by literary circles and political coteries impatient for the revolution that his poetry impelled. When the revolution did come in 1848, Herwegh led a battalion into battle, only to flee precipitately in defeat. But the poet outlived his reputation. He spent most of the years after 1848 in exile, growing increasingly estranged from Germany, his infrequent later poetry never equalling the vigor of his first verse. He had lived for revolution, and when that revolution failed he passed the rest of his life in futile and impotent grasping for the past or some imagined future. “They were like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died,” wrote Alexander Herzen, describing the empty lives of the exiled revolutionaries of 1848 like Herwegh. “And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death of Louis XVI.”

Established in spring 1928, the Sturmabteilung's (SA's) Sturm 33 was known in the Berlin area for its bloody street fighting. Four years after its founding, the well-known journalist Gabriele Tergit observed in the Weltbühne that “People know it—when Sturm 33 is involved, . . . there is terror. But no newspaper says as much any longer, no police pass it on as news—it is civil war as habit.” The Berlin-Charlottenburg district's SA-Sturm represented the Nazi movement's systematic application of violence in an especially acute manner, as both social experiences and the way of living within the unit were closely tied to violent action. In that respect, I will here argue that in Sturm 33, only an internal sociohistorical dynamic of violently plotting camaraderie made it possible to fulfill Nazism's ideological promise of integration, rendering it plausible within the organizational unit's particular cosmos.

In the aftermath of World War II, Christian leaders in Germany embraced the political ideology of Christian Democracy. Viewing Nazism as a form of materialism and atheism, which they blamed on the ongoing secularization and moral decay of German society, both Protestant and Catholic leaders argued that only the society-wide renewal of Christian faith and Christian values could provide a solid foundation for the future. Enjoying a privileged position in the eyes of the western Allies (particularly the Americans), the churches took on a leading role in the reconstruction of German society. And, working to overcome the postwar disillusionment of many of their members, church leaders urged their followers to take active, personal responsibility for political life in the new German states.

A man
Who sets a house ablaze is an
Arsonist who is prosecuted and punished
Under the law.
A man
Who turns entire cities to
Debris and ash is a
Conqueror
Who is hailed as a hero.

Many elements were woven into this rather sneering assertion by Ferdinand Avenarius, founder and editor of the leading cultural journal of Wilhelmine Germany, Der Kunstwart. Toys, by then thoroughly commercialized consumer goods, had “true value.” By extension, consumer goods could have value. Unfortunately for Avenarius, that value stands in “inverse ratio to its dazzle.” Dazzle did not simply obscure or even eliminate value, but rather maintained a complicated link. “Value” was the mirror image of “dazzle,” varying in equal and opposite proportion. That “inverse ratio” was also connected to the power that dazzle had over “weak minds.” The values and assumptions that informed and united Avenarius' broadside represent the subject of this essay. For Avenarius was not piecing together ideas at random, nor were they applicable to toys alone. Rather, this outburst was but one example of a persistent effort by German cultural elites to assess the problems as well as the possibilities of an increasingly commercial, even consumerist society. In that effort, Avenarius and others would mobilize the Romantic suspicion of vision and reemphasize the central importance of creativity and autonomous self-expression in the construction of genuine subjectivity. In this way, important elements of the Romantic tradition worked to authorize, even promote, certain types of consumer items while stigmatizing others, suggesting a nuanced and historically specific response to the challenges of modern consumerism.

Working—Class women in the Weimar Republic faced a complex and disorienting political situation. The revolutionary government granted women the right to vote in November 1918, but then ousted many women from their wartime jobs with the assistance of the trade unions and factory councils. The growing radicalism of working women during the latter phases of the First World War, marked especially by heavy female participation in the general strike of January 1918 in the munitions industry, was checked by the expulsion of women from exactly those sectors of employment which were most conducive to radicalism, the large plants in the metal industry. In other sectors, however, there was a large expansion of union membership among women during there volutionary period from November 1918 until May 1919, and many women in light industry and rural areas simultaneously joined unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Urban women working in large plants who might have supported the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) or the Communist Party (KPD) were fired to make room for returning war veterans, and this led to an eclipse of female radicalism from 1919 until 1923. The inflation of 1923 again activated many women who were attracted to the Communist Party by its neighborhood price control committees, and women took an active part in pressuring food shops to keep prices down and joined in plundering shops or stealing from the fields of landlords and peasants when hunger left them no alternative. The economic chaos of 1923 pushed even women in light industry to the left, and textile workers in Berlin, Saxony, and Thuringia gave the Communists a majority in union elections.

It is the omnipresent soldiery of Berlin that first catches the American visitors’s attention. The whole city seems to have a half military stride, all Prussia rushes pell-mell to the window to see the ever-passing regiment, and German ideals from king to lover appear at first sight to be clad in spurs and shoulder-strap. The military spirit appears not to be confined to the army, but largely to permeate society. The American sees it in the stiff bow of the students, in the perfect rage for uniforms in all classes, which enables both footman and chancellor to carry their histories on their backs; above all this spirit pervades the political state. The all-pervading government works about and around the new-comer, with a military precision and careful attention to trifles which is calculated to make a Bostonian uncomfortable, and take a New Yorker's breath away.