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 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.

“Dear Papa! I have been conscripted into a living grave. . . .” So began a letter in the West Berlin newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat in March 1948. The young man had been sent to work in the Soviet occupation zone's uranium mines, near Aue in the Saxon Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), and had written to his parents in despair. The news article that accompanied the letter explained, “The uranium mines… are not in the Urals, but in the Erzgebirge. But reports from [the Erzgebirge] are as hard to come by as [ones] from the Urals.” Other newspapers in Germany's Western zones of occupation also published reports of “slave conditions,” and “forced labor” in the mines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ignominious and total collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989/90 revealed all too clearly the disastrous state of the country's economy, especially in comparison to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This fact must not, however, be seen in isolation from another, apparently contradictory one: From the beginning to the end of its existence, the GDR was the shining economic and technological star in the communist firmament in Eastern Europe. GDR electronics and optics were crucial to the Soviet space program and to East-bloc military production, which counted among communism's few technological successes. Its chemical and automobile industries were also well regarded in the Eastern bloc and in many developing countries. The GDR's technological prowess—especially when combined with its favored and very lucrative relationship with the FRG—made for a reasonably high standard of living, not just in relation to other countries in the Soviet bloc, but in relation to other industrialized countries as well.

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.

The church to which this paper is devoted was the Unity of Czech Brethren, Unitas Fratrum; the state in which it was founded, in 1457, and existed for some hundred and seventy years, was the kingdom of Bohemia.

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.

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.

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.