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.

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.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50.

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.

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.

Historians have generally interpreted the early years of the Weimar Republic as an important stage in the development of the German welfare state. For the first time in the history of Germany, the state established in the constitution not only its own wideranging responsibilities and opportunities for intervention, but also the political and social rights of its citizens. Apart from “fundamentally” equal citizenship rights for womenand men (Art. 108) these also included entitlement to state support for the family and maternity as well as special state protection for marriage which, the constitution proclaimed, was to rest on an “equality of the two sexes” (Art. 119).

In August 1914 Kurt Riezler accompanied Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the Supreme Headquarters in Koblenz and Luxembourg. His duties were not clearly defined and included a variety of things: He worked on war aims, parliamentary speeches, revolutionary movements, and domestic political questions. He helped interpret the chancellor's policies to the press, establish guidelines for censorship, and write anonymous articles supporting Bethmann Hollweg's policies. He could be called Bethmann Hollweg's assistant for political warfare.

Unlike most Germans Riezler sensed from the beginning that a German victory was not assured. On August 14, 1914, in his first diary entry after the outbreak of war, he noted that although “everybody was apparently happy to be able for once to dedicate himself unreservedly to a great cause, … no one doubts or appears to consider even for an instant what a gamble war is, especially this war.” Riezler also realized that the “ideas of 1914” would not retain their strength forever. “Just as the storm frightens the vermin out of the air—when it becomes quieter again, everything crawls out of its refuge—and emerges again in the state as well as in individual human beings.” This realization protected Riezler from the naive belief that Germany could bear a long war without an obvious effort to achieve a negotiated peace, without a new European order which at most allowed Germany indirect control, and without domestic political concessions to the German masses.

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.

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.

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 Empress Theophanu, wife of Otto II and regent for her son Otto III, was by all accounts a woman skilled at maneuvering through the complicated world of Ottonian politics. When she died in 991 CE, around the age of thirty, she had accomplished much: after arriving in Italy from Constantinople in 972 at around the age of twelve, she became Otto II's queen and was crowned empress of the Western Empire. During her lifetime, she was among the wealthiest women in Europe and one of the continent's most powerful people. After her husband's death, she secured the succession of her son, Otto III, and actively ruled as regent, successfully navigating the dangerous political world of the Western Roman Empire. Her activities included building churches, placing her daughters in positions of power in key nunneries, issuing acts as imperator and imperatrix, receiving ambassadors, waging war and negotiating peace—essentially doing everything expected of a male emperor with the exception of personally engaging in battle. Thietmar of Merseburg, writing around 1013, praises her rule as regent, stating that she held the kingdom for her son “in a manly fashion,” clearly intending this as a compliment. And yet, after her death and the premature death of her son a few years later, Theophanu seems to disappear from the historical record. Despite the great number of contemporary sources in which she figured during her lifetime and immediately after her death, including charters and donations, letters, chronicles, and annals, we know almost nothing about her. The few sources that do mention her in the period following her death have little good to say about her. Why did this woman fall into disfavor?

The introduction of blindness into the Sterilization Law passed by the Nazis in July 1933, was exceptional, even by the standards of the time. Prior sterilization bills had focused on mental and nervous disorders, and they almost always excluded blindness as a category. The wish to sterilize the blind cannot be explained solely as stemming from the eugenic or economic threat that they allegedly posed to German society; such threats were acknowledged to be marginal, and they paled in comparison to the perceived menace attributed to the so-called feeble-minded and mentally ill. What made blindness of special significance for Nazi lawmakers was its disciplinary status among geneticists as an indisputable demonstration of the validity of the laws of heredity to human maladies. Together with two additional disease categories—deafness and Huntington's chorea—blindness provided Nazi legislators with scientific legitimization that helped pave the way for the sterilization of the mentally ill. For the blind, it was therefore not the fanaticism of the Nazis but rather their aspiration to ground their policy in biological teaching that ultimately proved fateful.

“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.

Germany's interwar Social Democratic movement was anything but the monolithic structure often presented in the literature. Indeed, the standard teleology—which portrays the movement as conservative and petit bourgeois, doing its best to fend off Nazism, but ultimately not up to the task—obscures more than it illuminates. It imposes a top-down frame on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that characterizes it and its affiliates as an undifferentiated mass, making a nuanced analysis difficult. As is true of most political movements, interwar German Social Democracy presented multiple faces to the world. While its core was a political party that worked to win elections, the SPD also formed the heart of an alternative culture, one that allowed its largely working-class membership to take part in cultural and social functions, as well as in political meetings to express class solidarity.

In 1780 Christian Dohm, a ranking Prussian civil servant, collaborated with the Berlin Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on a memorandum submitted on behalf of the Jews of Alsace to the French Council of State. A year later Dohm issued his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, a treatise on the civil improvement of the Jews, which contained a comprehensive program for increasing the general utility of the Jewish population. By that time, the European debate over the Jews was already long in progress. The seventeenth century had dealt with the question of readmission and the first half of the eighteenth century less successfully with naturalization. Both debates had centered in England, although the issues involved were pertinent to Holland, France, and to some extent Italy as well. Both debates had also produced a considerable number of polemics. Most recently, a 1753 bill sponsored by the Pelham government sought to facilitate the process of naturalization for Jewish immigrants. The so-called Jew Bill precipitated a wide-ranging public debate on the status of the Jews in England.

When in July 1944 the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, one of the leaders of conservative resistance against Hitler, visited Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's former country-seat in the Sachsenwald, no one with open eyes could doubt that Bismarck's Germany lay in its death-throes. Hassell wrote—and his words are worth quoting in full, since shock at the imminent collapse of Prussia-Germany as a Great Power also signalled the turning point in the national-conservative interpretation of Bismarck

Intellectual history has always been a bit embattled in the English-speaking world, especially the sort of intellectual history that deals with cosmic moods and ideas. There always been those who have tried to place the practitioners of this kind of intellectual history on the defensive. However, the great masters of this discipline— a Dilthey or a Burckhardt or a Lovejoy—continue to cast their spell over many of us. Even in this most utilitarian and political of decades, their achievement remains breathtaking. But it is no use pretending that the approach to history that focuses on “Geistesgeschichte” has no “blind spots.” As with any human enterprise, it has its strengths and weaknessess, its keen insights, its narrowness of vision. This paper is an attempt to point to some of the sources of both the abiding greatness and the blind spots of this approach to history, and to explain why this sort of intellectual history still speaks to many of us.

Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the “middle.” That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the “primacy of foreign policy,” that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: “Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern,” in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: “Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.” But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?