Today genealogy enjoys a wide range of enthusiastic practitioners, and almost every extended family has a self-appointed family historian. Along with professional historians, genealogists are ubiquitous at archives both in Germany and the United States. Of course this was not always so; until about one hundred years ago genealogy was the almost exclusive purview of nobles and aristocrats who had rather immediate concerns driving their inquiries into their families' pasts. That changed around 1900 in Germany, when in the words of a “how-to” guide for amateur researchers written in 1920, genealogy underwent a transformation from a “nobleman's sport” to a bourgeois “science.” This meant that, “today the middle class constitutes four fifths, nay nine tenths, of the biggest genealogical societies.” According to the growing corpus of genealogical literature, the middle class had marked family research with superior values and a greater dedication to truth and knowledge. Beyond the rhetoric, the bourgeois acceptance of genealogy altered the ways that middle-class families saw and remembered the past.

Diaries justly rank among the most valuable sources for historians. Committed to paper soon after the events and thoughts they record, diaries are free of the knowledge about what occurs afterward or only later takes on significance that adulterate memoirs and render them far more problematic for historians. It is therefore worthy of a cautionary note when historians confuse examples of the two genres. That has frequently occurred in the case of Bella Fromm's Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary. Published nearly sixty years ago in the form of a diary; it has been used as such in numerous historical studies of the Third Reich. A more recent book that poses problems similar to Fromm's and that has also been used by historians as a source for the Nazi period, is The Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945, attributed posthumously to Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov.

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.

To discuss the connections between place, nature, and identity, and the dilemmas of modern German history that derive from them, James Retallack (University of Toronto) and David Blackbourn (Harvard University) brought together sixteen historians from Canada and the United States for a three-day conference at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto from May 12 to 14, 2005. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD)/University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies Program.

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.

The February 2006 issue of the European edition of Time magazine contained a DVD dedicated to the subject of the genocide of the Armenian people. The text introducing the documentary, produced by the French-German TV network arte, said, “‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler posed this rhetorical question on August 22, 1939, before embarking upon his campaign to exterminate six million European Jews and other groups.” The introductory paragraph concluded, “His assumption that no one remembered the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey must have emboldened the Führer to perpetrate the Jewish Holocaust.”

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 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.

When Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg converted to Calvinism in 1613 he became the second major German prince, with the elector of the Palatinate, to renounce Lutheranism in favor of Calvinism. Unlike Frederick of the Palatinate and the dozen or so other minor German princes in the empire who had opted for Calvinism, the Hohenzollern decided not to impose his new faith on his subjects, who had been Lutheran since the days of Joachim II in the early sixteenth century. John Sigismund decreed instead that the two Protestant churches were to exist together in peace and harmony in his domains.

If in the 1890s any one aspect of economic development under capitalism confounded the prognostications of German Marxists it was the agricultural. The peasants had not obliged the pundits of German Social Democracy by permitting themselves to be ruined and liquidated as a class. The realization, based on a plethora of statistical evidence, that the peasant would be for years to come a hardy perennial disposed many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) to coquette with reformist approaches to the agrarian problem. This provoked the great debate of 1893–95 in the course of which traditional lines between orthodoxy and reformism became blurred. Some of the party's best men were compromised, and the “whole conception of the movement as that of a class which harbors goals of the broadest revolutionary compass” was put into question. The erosion of principle was such that not only men of the standing of Georg von Vollmar and Bruno Schoenlank in South Germany but also August Bebel, who was the generalissimo of the SPD, Ignaz Auer, and Wolfgang Heine in North Germany were to be labelled by Otto Wels, the later Social Democratic Reichstag leader, shining examples of opportunism. The problem of the small farmer was to be a major factor in the subsequent rise of revisionism, for Eduard Bernstein, that brilliant wandering star in many constellations, was to stress the indispensable auxiliary role of the peasantry in engineering the gradualist transformation of society along Social Democratic lines.

One consequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-century Bürgertum, the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of the Bürgertum has flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures.1 Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-century Bürgertum shared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a mélange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of the Mittelstand and claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement.2

Because German historiography long derided 1848 as “das tolle Jahr,” studies of the impact of this crucial period on Prussia's eastern provinces have been relatively scanty. Professional historians, as well as the amateurs and antiquarians who wrote local history, preferred to treat revered and glamorous epochs like the Reformation, the deeds of the most famous Hohenzollern kings, the Wars of Liberation, or the like rather than events which in retrospect were deplored as one of the more shameful episodes of national history. This neglect, to be sure, has been rectified somewhat since the Second World War after the democratization of West Germany and the socialization of the East lent new interest and respectability to the Revolution of 1848. Then too, the loss of much of the old Prussian heartland to Poland has resulted in a number of often valuable studies of this region by Polish scholars who, however, have for understandable reasons tended to focus rather heavily on nationality problems.

When in 1919 Friedrich Meinecke gave the highest priority to a “union with our Austrian brothers,” he was not alone in the historical profession. Implicit in this demand was a new political role for the Austrians that had been scarcely thought possible before 1918. This political conception quite naturally influenced historical writing. “The Anschluss,” wrote Hans Herzfeld, “was one of the strongest forces in Weimar historical thought.” This was true although the acceptance of Anschluss seemed to violate the heretofore preponderant kleindeutsch tradition in German historiography. This paper traces the attempt of these new forces to undermine the old kleindeutsch history.

This article explores the development of modern refugee camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War by looking at the organization and implementation of child assistance in the camps. The article argues that a state-driven mobilization of relief and rehabilitation was organized to alleviate the plight of refugee children. It points particularly to children's health care and the organization of education as instances that marked a shift in the scope of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary. At first, camps represented a temporary measure to immobilize and control displaced populations. As the war progressed, they became a permanent feature of refugee policy and a microcosm of agendas of state consolidation. Ultimately, the case of child assistance shows that the organization of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary was a fluid and gradual process that meshed technologies of population containment with humanitarian and welfare practices.

More than any other man of his generation Max Weber remains today influential as well as controversial. Neither intellectually nor politically are scholars done with the man and his work. However, his impact has not been steady over the five decades since his death. At various times Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Sigmund Freud have attarcted more attention and approbation. Among these members of the “generation of 1890”—as H. S. Hughes has called them—Durkheim emerges, in the long run, as Weber's closest rival in sociology. In one respect his reception has outstripped Weber's: he was incorporated with less strain into stuctural functionalism, the only contemporary “school” in American sociology that may deserve the lable. It is indicative of this difference that the Parsonian or Durkheimian approach is often contrasted with the Weberian, usually as a juxtaposition of an integration versus a conflict model of society. However, the Weberian approach has not given rise to a comparable school, perhaps because its practitioners are concerned less than functionalists with a general systems theory.

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 essay seeks to defend the contention that in the years between 1749 and 1754 Austria actively and successfully sought to retain its ties of friendship with Great Britain. The operative words in the preceding sentence are “actively” and “successfully.” They are used to emphasize certain positive aspects of Vienna's policy in these years and to dispel the notion that the Anglo-Austrian entente persisted after 1748 merely because a nascent diplomatic revolution had not yet matured. It is well known that Britain sought Austria's friendship at this time; it is likewise well known that in Vienna Count Kaunitz urged an Austrian rapprochement with France. But it is less widely realized that Austria acted with some skill and considerable patience, uncomplainingly enduring a variety of apparent insults, to maintain and then fortify its traditional bonds of cooperation with the island kingdom. What Max Braubach has demonstrated for the Franco-Prussian alliance in 1753 may also be said of the Anglo-Austrian entente in 1754: at no time since the conclusion of the peace had the two powers acted so closely and unitedly.