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.

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.

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.

Inspired in part by a recent exchange in Central European History in which Volker Berghahn and Margaret Lavinia Anderson debated trends in the historiography of the Wilhelmian era of the Kaiserreich, Marcus Kreuzer offers to historians the perspective of a political scientist on what he calls the neglected issue of the “parliamentarization” of the imperial regime over its last two decades. From the starting point of an interpretive dispute about German exceptionalism among historians, a dispute that to him seems easily solvable, Kreuzer compares the various arguments that historians have made about whether by 1914 the Imperial Reichstag was already, or was developing toward becoming, a truly parliamentary regime; he next categorizes historians into schools of interpretation; and he finally resolves the issue for historians by comparing the imperial Reichstag with an array of other parliaments, showing that, based upon evidence contained in the cumulative scholarship produced by historians, it in most cases ranks toward the more powerful end of the spectrum. In the end, he remains puzzled as to why this easily available method has remained too difficult for historians to grasp, concluding that it has been rather easy to drive a stake through the heart of the German Sonderweg, as it is with any exceptionalism.

In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty of additional commotion ensued on East German territory: border soldiers combed the terrain behind the border; officers drove around directing the proceedings; helicopters buzzed overhead. Based on their observation of similar past incidents, West German authorities quickly deduced what had probably taken place: an attempted escape across the heavily fortified German-German border. The main variables not known at the time were whether the attempt had been successful and whether anyone had been hurt.

After 1945 both German states overturned longstanding laws and policies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that designated women as second-class citizens in spousal rights, parental authority and marital property. From the early postwar years, female politicians and activists in the women's movement pursued in both Germanys reforms of the obsolete marriage and family law. The article compares how these women and mainly male legislators in both states envisioned the role of women in the family and in gender relations. It shows that these debates in the FRG and the GDR were influenced on the one hand by earlier, pre-1933 ideas, and on the other hand reacted to Nazi-era politics. Yet, because of their different political, economic and social conditions, discourses and policies developed in the context of the Cold War in both states in different directions, though they continued to be related to each other.

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of violence and atrocity by the men of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the police. Scholars have extensively documented its use and abuse on the part of the perpetrators. For the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that not only bound the perpetrators together, but also became a facilitator of acts of “performative masculinity”—a type of masculinity expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. In many respects, the relationship among alcohol, masculinity, sex, and violence permeated all aspects of the Nazi killing process in the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, such practices were increasingly radicalized, with drinking and celebratory rituals becoming key elements for these closed male communities of perpetrators, who used them to prepare for acts of mass killing and, ultimately, genocide.

In 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing:

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.

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 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.

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.

“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.

The study of history in Germany differs from its counterparts in other lands in that from the very beginning it possessed a unique theoretical and methodological conception, called “historicism,” to which German historians held with great tenacity until the 1960s. This point, which is hardly controversial, has recently been reinforced by Georg G. Iggers.

No question today … either among learned men is more discussed or among the highest princes of the Christian world is more controversial than that of monarchy.…” Few persons in early seventeenth-century Europe could have spoken with greater authority on the matter of emperor and empire than that archival miner and assembler of political texts, Melchior Goldast. In his dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Bremen the political publicist proceeded to accuse the Papacy, more wolf than pastor, of having intruded upon both church and secular authority, arrogating to its own monarchy the supreme Sacerdotium and the supreme Imperium. The disturbed publicist concluded his account of papal usurpation and artifice: “If there were no Roman emperors, there would be no Roman pope: if there were no Roman pope, Roman emperors would still flourish.

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)