As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

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.

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.

This article situates the establishment of the Bundeswehr and the implementation of compulsory military service in the 1950s and early 1960s within contemporary efforts to define a “sexual-moral order” for the Federal Republic of Germany. It argues that West Germany's rearmament offered contemporaries an opportunity to stipulate not only acceptable soldierly behavior, but also adequate male behavior in general. In the context of heightened concerns about juvenile delinquents (so-called Halbstarken), female prostitution, homosexuality, and the distribution of pornographic materials, West German citizens became interested in the social and sexual conduct of Bundeswehr soldiers and officers. Whereas some still considered the military to be a “school of the nation” and of proper masculinity, others worried about the armed forces as a possible breeding ground for immorality. Partly sharing these concerns, government representatives, members of the Bundestag, church officials, and military commanders sought to guide soldiers’ behavior, emphasizing the ideal of the “complete” (vollkommene) Christian male-breadwinner family.

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.

Many aspects of the German-American encounter during the Second World War remain deeply engraved in the American mind. One of them is the story of the German “werewolves,” Hitler's last underground fighters, who challenged the occupying armies in the war's closing months. The werewolf threat made a lasting impression on American troops and media at the time, and on American collective memory up to today. This article traces how the Nazi insurgents became part of an older mythical narrative that continues to infuse not only American popular culture, but even contemporary elite and political discourse. One of the more recent examples is Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld's effort to compare the Nazi werewolves with the Iraqi insurgents whose attacks have plagued the occupied country since the American invasion.

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 opening this exchange, Gerald Feldman accused me of “egregious errors,” systematically “tendentious misconstruals,” “outright inventions,” and “fabrications.” In my reply, I made what I believe to have been a good faith effort to address and evaluate these charges. Because an understanding of the arguments in my book was essential to that evaluation, I first restated those arguments, and my overall thesis. In the face of a fantastic portrayal of business-Nazi conspiracy, it was necessary to set the record straight. Making repeated reference to what I actually said in my book, as opposed to what Feldman insinuates that I said, the substance of my reply was this: First, I openly acknowledged my commission of error. I did not trivialize or minimalize my mistakes. I apologized for them, and said they were “inexcusable.” Second, and not inconsistently, I argued that Feldman was nonetheless wrong to claim that the errors undermined the fundamental arguments of my book. Third, I showed that there was no consistent pattern to the errors—the correction of some hurt the argument; the correction of many others strengthened it—and that there was, therefore, no systematic tendentiousness evident in my mistakes. Fourth and finally, I refuted the many charges of mendacity, invention, fabrication, and fraud, and provided a variety of sorts of evidence to show that these charges—surely the most serious that Feldman made—were utterly baseless.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emerged as socialist theoreticians of the first rank at a time when many of their rivals were still engaged in efforts to design visionary ideal societies. Although they did not hesitate to appropriate key concepts from some of the most original of these architects of the future, Marx and Engels were quite rightly convinced that one of their first tasks must be to still the siren song of the so-called utopian socialists if they hoped to build a politically effective movement. They therefore launched a polemic against the “systematic pendantry” and the “fanatical and superstitious belief[s]” of these builders of “castles in the air” which eventually proved so effective that many contemporary as well as later commentators denied, ignored, or at the very least vastly underestimated the significance of the millenarian appeal of Marxism itself.

From the appearance of On War in 1832 until the end of the First World War, Carl von Clausewitz was known chiefly as the most profound, but also the most enigmatic member of a generation of strategists whose common object had been to discover and explain the secrets of Napoleonic warfare. This interpretation, although not entirely wrong, has lately come to seem one-sided, initially as the result of the work of Hans Rothfels in the 1920s, and most decidedly so in light of the more recent, comprehensive analysis of Clausewitz's life and ideas by Peter Paret. Today, most students of the man and his work would agree that the French Revolution itself, and not simply its Napoleonic aftermath, was the decisive influence on the development of Clausewitz's ideas about war.

In his The Man Without Qualities the Austrian writer Robert Musil examines the declining state patriotism of the Austro-Germans in 1913–1914. He describes a fictional Patriotic Campaign (Parallelaktion) in a land he calls Kakania because the Habsburg ruler was Kaiser (emperor) in Austria and König (king) in Hungary and the state's joint institutions were labeled “k. u. k.” The organizers of this Campaign hoped ostensibly to discover a Kakanian idea or mission for the upcoming celebration of the ruler's seventy-year reign in 1918, but in fact their real objective was to put a stop to the growing enthusiasm of the Austro-Germans for the German Reich. As the head of the Campaign, His Highness the Imperial Liege-Count Leinsdorf put it, he hoped “to win over precisely that section of Kakanians of German descent who felt less allegiance to their country than to the German nation.” This was no easy task as the Austro-Germans were even less loyal to their government than the other peoples of Austria-Hungary. As a result Leinsdorf planned first to gain the support of the other nationalities, “for only when one had been successful in this would all the German circles see themselves compelled to join in, since, it is, of course, much more difficult to hold aloof from something that everyone else is doing than to refuse to be the first to begin.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) flourished in Catholic Germany, developing a distinctive character there. Nothing lay more at the heart of enlightened interests than the reform of pedagogy, and in particular the education of children in parish schools and catechetical classes. This article focuses on the reform of popular education in the Prince-Bishopric (Hochstift) of Würzburg between 1765 and 1795 both to help in defining the goals and policies of the Catholic Enlightenment and to evaluate the extent of its success.

The role of law in the totalitarian state is problematic. In principle, law and unfettered political authority are antithetical but, in practice, the two have coexisted in uneasy and unequal partnership. As the Third Reich neared its apex in terms of internal and external power, a German expatriate described it as a “dual state” in which law existed side-by-side with the dynamic, ideologically charged will of the Führer. Duality did not imply balance, however, for law survived largely as a discretionary tool of total power. Nevertheless, pretotalitarian legality was never entirely deprived of a residual potency, a fact illustrated by an unlikely agent—SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, judge in the judicial branch of the SS. But the organizational context of Morgen's career is sufficiently unfamiliar as to require elucidation.

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.

The archetype of the modern student movement is the German Burschenschaft of the Restoration era. Some events in the history of the Burschenschaft are well known: the Wartburgfest of 1817; the national federation of Burschenschaften in 1818; the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand; and the resultant Karlsbad Decrees of 1819. Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the post-Karlsbad history of the Burschenschaft, which is the concern of this article. Emphasis will be given to the role which a network of secret, inner circles played in both the survival of the Burschenschaft and its continued involvement in revolutionary conspiracy. These inner circles contained not merely representatives of the normal four-year student classes, but also permanently radicalized Burschenschafter. In some cases such “old boys” did not participate directly but maintained informal ties with key members of the inner circles. Since many of the radical alumni became secondary school teachers, they became the source of a continuous supply of indoctrinated recruits. The Burschenschaft of the Restoration era owed both its survival and the continuity of its traditions to an exclusive, self-perpetuating group of radicals dominated by veteran revolutionaries.

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.

In 1903, Elisabeth von Oertzen, a widely read author and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Children from Mistreatment and Exploitation, exhorted her fellow protectionists in the pages of her organization's newsletter to push for greater legal protections for children from abusive adults. The occasion for her admonition was the infamous Bavarian child abuse case in which a young male tutor, Andreas Dippold, had beaten his young charges so badly that one had succumbed to his mistreatment. The case demonstrated, von Oertzen wrote, that while torture had been abolished for adults, it was still widely practiced on children. One of the chief causes of child abuse, according to von Oertzen, was the claim to the so-called Züchtigungsrecht, the right to use corporal punishment. “Because of [the] defenselessness of children it has become customary to exercise on them the right to use corporal punishment, even where it does not exist,” she wrote. A host of people, including tutors, governesses, and babysitters claim the right, but “how far the right to corporal punishment is transferrable is entirely an open question!” Curiously, von Oertzen asserted both that there was an objectively existing “right” to use corporal punishment and that there was no consensus on where that right lay.