In Christoph Wetzel's 1988 painting, An Everyday Story, the divided canvas proudly depicts women's accomplishments in the German Democratic Republic (Figure 1). On one side, a woman operates a large piece of heavy machinery in a rolling mill, cool and competent behind the enormous mass of metal and gears. On the other side, the same woman helps her two children prepare for school in the morning. In the act of combing her daughter's hair, she looks out directly at the viewer, her expression asking: “And what are you surprised at?” This painting, displayed as part of a 1995 exposition on art commissioned by government agencies in the GDR, graphically displays that government's ideological commitment to women's paid labor, especially in jobs that, in capitalist societies, are often thought to be inappropriate for women.

The nature and intentions of Nazi economic policy are once again being hotly contested, although on a new set of terms. No longer is the German bourgeoisie's complicity in the Nazi “seizure of power” or the capitalist underpinnings of Hitler's subsequent aggressions at the center of the discussion. Rather, recent scholarship has chosen to grapple more carefully with the dynamic interplay between economics, race, and social policy in the Third Reich. As David Schoenbaum contended forty years ago, the Third Reich's apotheosization of “national community [Volksgemeinschaft]” led to an array of welfare programs, educational reforms, and “meritocratic” values that may in fact have produced a modern “social revolution.” To be sure, a number of subsequent studies have highlighted longer-term continuities, suggesting that the Nazi Sozialstaat was indebted in some part to the legacy of the Weimar Republic and in other respects presaged the social policies of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Historians likewise continue to debate the relative improvement in living standards experienced by the average German under Hitler. Virtually all scholars agree, however, that, regardless of its efficacy, the underpinnings of Nazi social policy are to be located in the Third Reich's drive to construct a racial utopia at home while securing popular support for wars of conquest abroad.

World War I intensified antisemitism everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe, both at the level of public opinion, among right-leaning political parties and, often, in government circles. The war elevated the significance of the Jewish question in other ways as well, and not only because the Balfour Declaration of 1917 conjured up a Zionist triumph. The prospect of a German victory over Russia promised a reordering under German hegemony of the civil condition and citizenly status of the east European Jews, such as the Central Powers' creation in November 1916 of the Kingdom of Poland in the heartland of Russia's former Polish lands had already begun to bring about. Later, in the shadow of the German defeat, there arose the quite different question of the Jews' integration into the newly founded, nationally legitimized, nationalistically agitated successor states to the now vanished multiethnic monarchies.

According to a joke that made the rounds in the former Soviet Union, women from different countries held on to their husbands in different ways: the German by her skills as a housewife, the Spaniard by her passionate lovemaking, the Frenchwoman by her refined elegance—and the Russian by the party committee. This sexist quip was a not so oblique reference to the ways in which the communist party intervened in the private domestic affairs of its members. But—even leaving aside the obviously offensive—it was not entirely accurate, for the practice was just as common in other communist countries as well. This included the eastern half of postwar Germany, where, as in the Soviet Union, the wives of adulterous members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sometimes appealed to local functionaries for assistance with their straying husbands.

In the history of the Burschenschaft published in 1939, Georg Heer wrote that with the coming of the National Socialists to power “the goals of the German Burschenschaft had been achieved; the National Socialist German Student Union had now taken over its tasks.” Of course Heer was not free to write what he wished about the 1935 dissolution of the Burschenschaft, but his interpretation is consistent with the ideas of many historians about this important organization within the history of German nationalism. Something had gone terribly wrong with this organization, despite its clear liberal and middle-class origins.

Long before Adolf Hitler’s appearance clouded democracy’s prospects in Germany, election battles had provided a means to disadvantage “enemies of the Reich” in the polling booth. Such battles were waged not only during election campaigns but also when new voting laws were legislated and district boundaries were redrawn. Maps produced during the Imperial era informed voters, statesmen, and social scientists how the principle of the fair and equal vote was compromised at the subnational level, and new maps offer historians an opportunity to consider struggles for influence and power in visual terms. This article argues that local, regional, and national suffrages need to be considered together and in terms of their reciprocal effects. On the one hand, focusing on overlaps and spillovers between electoral politics at different tiers of governance can illuminate the perceptions and attitudes that are constitutive of electoral culture. On the other hand, using cartography to supplement statistical analysis can make election battles more accessible to nonspecialist audiences. Combining these approaches allows us to rethink strategies of political exclusion in Imperial Germany’s coexisting suffrage regimes. Focusing on Leipzig and its powerful Social Democratic organization opens a window on larger issues about how Germans conceived questions of political fairness in a democratizing age.

The relevant historiography has largely overlooked the role of Karl Haushofer as a cultural-political actor in National Socialist-Fascist relations. From 1924 to 1944, the German geopolitician dealt extensively with Italy, with an eye to both its geopolitical role in Europe and to the political system of Benito Mussolini's regime. On behalf of Rudolf Hess, he began visiting Italy during the 1930s, aiming to overcome ideological and political misunderstandings between Rome and Berlin. He established a network of contacts with Italian scholars and politicians, passed information back to the so-called deputy Führer, and attempted to influence official German policy toward Italy. He eventually promoted the development of an Italian geopolitics, and, in so doing, achieved one of the most significant cultural-political transfers from National Socialist Germany to fascist Italy. This article analyzes the contacts between Haushofer and Italy, both his political activities and his geopolitical theories. It is a case study of a history of contradictions: a man committed to Pan-Germanist culture and to the defense of German minorities abroad, Haushofer also attempted to improve relations between Berlin and Rome. Moreover, he considered the Axis from a geopolitical point of view—as a realization of the European imperial idea—and from a trilateral perspective, i.e., he viewed Japan not only as an ally, but also as a cultural and political model. The reconstruction of Haushofer's relations with Italy is, therefore, an opportunity to rethink the antinomies, as well as the global dimension, of the National Socialist-Fascist alliance.

The years 1906–1910 were a period of crisis and unstable consensus in German colonial history. In contrast to the debates of the previous two decades following Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's 1884 decision to establish overseas protectorates, colonial discourse in Germany after 1905 shifted decisively away from abstract considerations of the desirability of colonies for economic and imperialist expansion to focus on the more practical matters of colonial policy and long-term developmental reform. Indeed, given the fact that by 1905 the German colonial empire covered a sprawling expanse of land six times the size of the German state, including territories in Africa, the South Pacific, and a naval base (Tsingtao) on the coast of China, the enormous challenges of managing its far-flung and costly possessions were becoming increasingly difficult to meet. For better or for worse, the Kaiserreich had become a de facto colonial power, and German society was increasingly and uncomfortably being forced to recognize the hazards and burdens of its fledgling global empire.

It may seem strange today to study aspects of the political sphere—from foreign policy to diplomacy and the military—in the context of sexuality. But the Belle Epoque (1871–1914) was an era of prestige politics, also with respect to the politics of sexuality. This article reveals how the Eulenburg Scandal of 1906 to 1909 used sexual morality as a way to explain and interpret the tensions that pervaded Germany's domestic affairs and international relations. The reliance on sexual mores as an explanation for large-scale political events was the result of an ever-intensifying chain of national and international complications—complications that later undermined Germany's sense of national honor. The Eulenburg Scandal is remembered today mainly as the first major homosexual scandal of the twentieth century, but contemporaries experienced it in a wider sense: it became Germany's counterpart to the Dreyfus Affair in France—two examples of political, social, and cultural conflict that threatened the foundations of their respective countries.

The originally propagated view that the Marshall Plan was an altruistic endeavor through which the U.S. saved Europe from collapse and starvation has long been dismissed and replaced with a more realistic approach to international affairs. Whereas Realpolitik and the perception of the evermore menacing Cold War made it inevitable that Marshall Plan aid and its counterpart funds would become a weapon in the ideological conflict of the two political ideologies, the overwhelming body of literature looks at the Marshall Plan either from a political and diplomatic or from an economic viewpoint. Beyond general statements that the Marshall Plan was used as a weapon in the Cold War, relatively little research has been carried out into how this weapon was wielded. This is even truer for the counterpart funds, which are usually only mentioned in passing in the literature, if at all. This is despite the fact that Marshall Aid in general and the counterpart funds in particular had actually quite a significant impact in Cold-War propaganda and economic matters in Western Europe, which most likely contributed to the declining appeal of communism. This article will look at the specific action of American and, after September 1949, German authorities in the use of counterpart funds to demonstrate their significance.

For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic's chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, with a leadership corps that had been “Bolshevized,” then “Stalinized,” and that took all its orders from Moscow, the KPD by the final years of Weimar was incapable of modifying its policies, even when their disastrous consequences were plain for all to see. As might be expected, East German historians present a very different picture, arguing that the KPD was the sole Weimar party to have defended working-class interests, resisted militarism and imperialism, and fought to prevent the establishment of fascist rule. Since the Weimar Republic, in the Marxist view, was a class state operating to oppress German working people, there was little about it worth fighting for. While conceding that workers suffered even more under the Nazi dictatorship, East German writers deny that the KPD carries any responsibility for Hitler's triumph. On the contrary, they contend, the Communists alone recognized what National Socialism represented and sought to devise the political tactics that would block a Nazi takeover.

In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

Scholars upon occasion have spoken of the “crisis” of the arts in Reformation Germany. It has become increasingly clear, however, that such terminology, when left unqualified, may be excessively ambiguous, and perhaps even misleading. At least one influential historian is arguing today that the true crisis situation is that where a threat is followed by a final regaining of strength, or where there is a “successful resistance or adaptation to a vital challenge.”

This article has a twofold aim. First, it intends to present a portrait of the National Socialist physician and functionary Dr. Leonardo Conti, in the context of German health administration during the Third Reich. Second, it proposes to cast more light on the workings of the National Socialist bureaucracy by examining Conti's place in the hierarchical chain of command and by concentrating on his peculiar relationship with the supreme leader.

The study of German Christian responses to the Nazis is undoubtedly a growing field of historical inquiry. Within this topic much of the focus has been on larger church organizations, such as the Catholic Church or on those who were engaged in the “Church Struggle” (Kirchenkampf)––the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, BK) or the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen, GDC). There are numerous such works that form excellent studies of church organizations, as well as individual theologians.

The totalitarian pretensions of the Nazi party's leadership are nowhere better illustrated than in the belief that the entire German people could be “educated” to a sense of service to the Volk, that mythical national community whose sum was allegedly infinitely greater than its parts. Excluded from real power in the state— whatever was claimed about “the unity of party and state”—the party in the Third Reich assumed the role of “spiritual leader” of the community, with the task of reorienting the aspirations of men, women, and children away from the satisfaction of personal desires and ambitions and toward service. Germans were not merely to accept passively the wisdom of the regime's policies, but were positively to channel their concern and their energy into supporting them. In this way, ran the message, they would find deeper satisfaction than in the pursuit of selfish pleasure.

The days are gone when conferences on GDR studies were limited to a small community of cognoscenti gathered far from the bright lights of public scrutiny. The fall of the Berlin Wall changed this situation drastically. After a brief moment of panic in which the entire field threatened to disappear along with its object of study, the now historical GDR has become an attractive area of research and, with the expansion of scholarly interest, one so broad as to make recently undertaken by the University of Mannheim's program in GDR histry lists no fewer than 759 projects in progress. Although it was never completely apolitical, the field is more contested than ever nowadays. The media have been only too happy to use research results as ammunition in daily political battles. Scholars themselves are still hotly debating who should be authorized to reappraise the history of the GDR, and how they should be doing it. This conflict has long since moved beyond scholarly circles and is being carried out aggressively on the culture pages of the tone of this debate appears no less peculiar than the particular fronts and alliances that have developed around it. In the following essay I shall try to shed some light on the background of this new outbreak of scholarly politics, which is in many ways reminiscent of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, and then go on to introduce some of the newly founded institutions for the study of GDR history, all of them located in and around Berlin-Brandenburg.

Long before Melanchthon and Erasmus drew their parallels, paternal and political authority had enjoyed a long and successful association in Greco-Roman thought. The apparent resurgence of this patriarchal metaphor in sixteenth-century European literature and polemic, however, has led some historians to suggest a more socially significant transformation in the actual legal or moral authority of one or both of these father figures. Beginning with the pioneering work of Phillippe Ariès many historians of the family, particularly Lawrence Stone, have identified the sixteenth century as a time of greater paternal authority within the household and the beginning of the modern nuclear family throughout most of Europe. Others, expanding on references by Aries and Stone to a new state paternalism, have focused on the political half of the patriarchal analogy, especially the almost ubiquitous association among sixteenth-century German authors of the Hausvater (head of the household) with the Landesvater (political ruler). For most of these scholars, paternalistic language was a natural and even necessary component of the ambitious absolutist state-building of early modern Europe.

The German industrial revolution that transformed the unified Reich into the leading European economic power by the eve of the First World War was accompanied by an equally notable demographic revolution. In 1871 less than a third of the country's population lived in urban areas (population over two thousand); by 1910 more than 60 percent of Germans were city dwellers. That urban growth was brought about by a great internal migration. Among the millions who forsook the countryside for the expanding industrial centers were large numbers of Poles, Reich subjects native to the eastern provinces of Prussia. Thousands of them—perhaps as many as half a million—attracted by jobs in foundries and mines and courted by labor recruiters, migrated to the prototypical German industrial complex, the Ruhr (Ruhrgebiet). There the Poles not only experienced the universal problems of adjustment from rural to urban and preindustrial to industrial patterns, but were also threatened with the loss of ethnic identity.

Before the commercialization of colonialism, Germans primarily engaged with the possibility of a German colonial empire through German explorers of Africa. This article examines the discourse about such men with an eye to the ways in which Germans formulated identities around them as celebrities in the early Kaiserreich. A shift in the discourse is observable around the time of the beginning of formal German colonialism in the mid-1880s. To that point, observers had placed German explorers within an international scientific community defined by its cosmopolitanism. From the mid-1880s, explorers more often appeared as embodiments of a chauvinistic national identity that defined German colonialism as superior to other variants. This discursive shift was indicative, on the one hand, of the erosion of the Bildungsbürgertum's control of the meaning of German colonialism and, on the other, of the emergence of alternative colonialist identities through public engagement with the exploration of Africa.