In the “Year of Prussia” 2001, celebrated in Germany because of the three-hundredth anniversary of Prussia's becoming a kingdom in 1701, the editor of the culture section of Die Welt, Eckhart Fuhr, remarked in a review of recent publications, “The discourse (on Prussia) has long since lost all of its (former) severity, obstinacy, and passion. The Germans today,” he declared, “are perfectly comfortable with the ambiguity of the Prussian legacy.” His colleague, the historian and Die Zeit journalist Volker Ulrich, agreed. He observed that the discussion about Prussia lacked a critical edge and regretted that no “truly sharp anti-Prussian book” had appeared among the many new publications. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reached the same conclusion in his article, “‘A Mastered Past?’ The West-German Historiography on Prussia after 1945,” published in 2004 in the journal German History. He interpreted as a sign of “normalization” the fact that—unlike thirty years ago—Prussia is no longer the source of sharply formulated historical debates.

Germany's cooperative movement grew and thrived from its inception in the late 1840s to World War I and beyond. Cooperatives were divided along several lines, and perhaps the most serious point of contention concerned the role of the state in the movement. Cooperative leaders in the two decades before World War I especially debated whether they should accept direct grants and subsidized credit from the Reich and the Länder. The several parts of the cooperative movement construed the question differently; much internecine conflict turned on the answers. The cooperative movement's historiography has largely framed the question as did Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and other cooperative leaders opposed to state assistance. To him, the issue was whether cooperatives would be based on “self-help” or “state help.”

The image of the Enlightenment as an era has proved to be remarkably constant, repeatedly resisting protracted and subtle attempts to de-ideologize, pluralize, and reperiodize it. Historians have turned away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations. The concept of a homogeneous, quasi-monolithic Enlightenment has been pluralized and parceled into a large number of geographically and thematically distinct Enlightenments. At the same time, the chronological scope of research interests has been extended and refined. Whereas the decades of the high Enlightenment in Britain and France were the initial focus of interest, the phase of the radical early Enlightenment has since achieved a firm place in a total panorama that also takes account of chronologically different developments in various national contexts. Nonetheless it is true, although necessarily a generalization, to say that the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole concentrates on an “Enlightenment thinking” characterized as rational, critical of dogma, and systematic, and whose main emphases are seen as political ideas, philosophy, criticism of superstition, and the experimental sciences. The intention here is to focus on the aspect of active mass participation in the intellectual project of the Enlightenment and to supplement the image of an intellectual history centered on the triad of ideas, authors, and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective that focuses on learned practice.

The League for the Protection of Motherhood (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, or BfM) was the largest and most active sex-reform organization in Germany before the First World War. The league was at the center of a broad debate about sexuality, gender roles, the family, and population policy, in which representatives not only of the women's movements but also of the Christian churches, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and the sexology, eugenics, and life-reform (particularly nudist) movements participated. Both this broader debate and the BfM itself have been the subject of intensive study over the past fifteen years. One major interpretive focus of the literature to date has been on the issue of the extent to which the biologistic, social Darwinist, and eugenic ideas prominent in the thinking of many of the leading figures in the BfM were or were not evidence of a turning away from liberal, individualist feminism and toward the political and social Right, or of deeper intellectual affinities between National Socialism and sex reform — a point regarding which there is still considerable disagreement.

This article describes how a particular kind of queer figure moved from private photography into the mainstream of East German visual culture. It begins with a set of private photographs from the late 1960s from the collection of Heino Hilger, a regular, with his friends, at the East Berlin bar Burgfrieden. The photographs show how dressing in drag and the act of photography were important ways of constituting a gay male subculture. After the decriminalization of sex between men in 1968, the gay scene became bolder and more political in East Germany. The subversion of gender norms was central to the activism of groups such as the Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB) and Gays in the Church. The visibility of the queer figure culminated in the late 1980s, when parts of the film Coming Out were filmed in Burgfrieden and when the popular monthly Das Magazin published a three-part feature on male homosexuality. What all these cultural artifacts and events had in common was not just a critique of the heterosexual norm, but also a queering of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity.

The central purpose of this essay is to clarify some of the terms in literary criticism that are being employed in current historiographical debates, and to comment on some of their possible implications for German history. As interdisciplinary theoretical debates proliferate beyond their immediate sources, contested positions often come to be built on misleading, heavily derived, or partisan versions of the concepts and practices drawn from the other side. Once battle has beenjoined, the issue of more exacting definitions and distinctions may go by the board. On the other hand, my modest attempt to provide a glossary for others' arguments may mask a more presumptuous claim to both the knowledge and the distance needed to set a tangled record straight. But although I want to suggest which insights might be valuable to historians, and which may be more problematic or unhelpful, I cannot pretend to adjudicate between currently competing theories of knowledge-production. For the German context, that undertaking would require at least some discussion of late nineteenth-century idealist historiography, and of the debate about modernization and modernity that can be traced through Marx, Weber, and Habermas. This will have to await another occasion.

Since the end of the 1990s, the study of masculinity within German scholarship has made considerable progress, especially in moving beyond the close association made between German manhood and militarism.1 While the figure of the soldier remains crucial for an understanding of masculinity in Germany (as well as the rest of the Western world) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars have increasingly recognized that any culture includes multiple definitions and representations of manhood—even one so thoroughly saturated by the figure of the soldier as Germany was during the Nazi era.2 Increasingly, the goal of research has been to uncover how masculinity is not only represented in official discourse, but also constructed through social interaction and “performed,” to use Judith Butler's term, in the context of everyday life. Moreover, this research has increasingly taken into account “the relations between the different kinds of masculinity,” in the words of the sociologist Robert Connell—especially the relationships of power.3 In short, recent work has increasingly recognized that the meanings of manhood are constructed within a complicated socio-cultural matrix of gender whose points of reference include not only women and cultural definitions of femininity, but also various versions of masculinity that themselves very often reflect class distinctions and other kinds of social fissures.

For over a century now, scholars have viewed the divergent paths of agrarian development east and west of the Elbe river as a watershed in German history. In the west, according to this view, peasants from the late Middle Ages on enjoyed increasing freedom from direct seigniorial interference in their social, economic, and judicial affairs. Seigniorial obligations (often commuted to cash rents) remained, as did a degree of seigniorial control over peasant lands in many regions, but peasants west of the Elbe increasingly shed the more onerous seigniorial obligations, and could generally move without the lord's permission.

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.

On September 14, 1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party led by Adolf Hitler scored its first national triumph by polling over six million votes and winning more than a hundred seats in the German Reichstag. Its gains came mainly at the expense of the established bourgeois parties. The success of the National Socialists stemmed primarily from the ability of Hitler and his colleagues to articulate the anxieties and frustrated ambitions of the German middle class. These anxieties grew out of a multitude of factors, of which the world economic crisis was the most spectacular. But the dramatic character of the world economic crisis has generally obscured the extent to which these anxieties were the product of certain long-range factors present in the structure of German society ever since the end of the previous century. In the period before World War I the German economy underwent a series of changes which resulted in a partial rationalization of its productive and distributive processes. This process was accelerated during the course of World War I and reached a climax in the middle of the 1920's before the world economic crisis deprived German management of the capital it needed for the purposes of rationalization.

In chapter eleven of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, having constructed aneal type “culture-bearing” Aryan race,1 came to elucidate his views on the history of Jews within Germany. Until the time of Frederick the Great, he argued, “it still entered no one's head to regard the Jews as anything else but a ‘foreign’ people.”2 Thereafter, he asserted, came a period of transition wherein Jews had “the effrontery to turn Germanic.”3 The rest of the chapter, for Hitler, was an attempt to reverse this putative historical mistake, and presents the reader with a vitriolic casting out of Jews, described as “parasites” and a “noxious bacillus,” from the German body politic.4 The aim of this textual expulsion, Hitler explained, was to ensure that the Germans would not be destroyed from within, as had “all great cultures of the past.”5 To Hitler, Jews were what Julia Kristeva has called “the abject”6—that which is simultaneously part of the self but radically rejected by the self. In seeking to expel the “Germanic Jews” from the Volkskörper, Hitler sought to expel that part of the German self that, in his view, was a source of weakness and taint.7

Eager to move on after the divisive Sonderweg debates of the 1980s, historians of modern Germany have been busily elaborating a new central narrative around the notion of biopolitics. Aimed at producing a more powerful and productive society by regulating, optimizing, and even exterminating specific human populations, biopolitics has encompassed everything from housing reform, anti-smoking campaigns, and child vaccination programs to pro- and anti-natalist tax policies, national census taking, and the science of industrial hygiene. Identified by Michel Foucault and others as a general feature of all Western modernities, biopolitics has been a particularly fruitful concept for German historians, who have used it to trace the evolution of racial hygiene—the Nazi variant of eugenics and Germany's most infamous application of biopolitical principles—from a politically diverse group of Wilhelmine and Weimar social reformers. The very normality of these reformers, given the international context, has in turn allowed scholars to avoid labeling German modernity as deviant while at the same time framing the murderous dynamic of the Nazi years as a potential latent in modernity more generally. As Edward Ross Dickinson put it in an excellent review article recently, Germany has emerged from this reevaluation “not as a nation having trouble modernizing, but as a nation of troubling modernity.”

The Nuremberg Trial may well be the most famous trial of the twentieth century, which is as it should be. After all, the Nuremberg Trial, while perhaps not as unprecedented as is frequently assumed, did mark a decisive turning point in the history of international law. It marked the first broadly successful attempt to impose the rule of law not just on the conduct of war but also, in a limited way, on domestic atrocities as well. The fame of this single trial has had the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing the literally thousands of other Nazi trials that took place after World War II, however. These additional trials can be divided into three categories: those that took place in the domestic courts of victim nations, those that took place in occupation courts, and, perhaps least well-known, those that took place in German courts.

In the struggle for increased educational and employment opportunities for women that took place in Europe and America during the second half of the nineteenth century, no profession was the subject of more controversy than medicine.1 Although the issues involved in this controversy were similar in most countries, the paths by which women eventually succeeded in entering the medical profession displayed an intriguing variety. In Britain and the United States, resistance from much of the medical establishment forced women to found independent medical schools for the training of female physicians. Women in France and Switzerland, in contrast, gained access to existing medical faculties in the 1860s; yet for many years very few French or Swiss women took advantage of the opportunities available. In both countries, Russian women generally comprised the largest number of female medical students during the period, especially in the years before 1873 and again between 1882 and 1897, when no courses were available to them inside Russia.

Masterplots of national history are now commonly criticized for the univocal and unilinear nature of their narratives.1 Such narratives are increasingly seen as only one, and not necessarily even the most important, approach to understanding the modern European nation state. The study of the internal heterogeneity of nations as expression of a conflicting diversity of subnational identities, the emphasis on the peculiar place of nation-ness in the process of modern societalization (Vergesellschaftung), and the political role of integral nationalism as a contentious strategy of homogenizing difference and inequality—all this has supplanted nation- and state-centered approaches which treated the modern (nation-)state as allegorical subject.

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”

If the French faced the 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic Empire with some trepidation about how to commemorate the infamous Corsican, the British celebrated the Battle of Trafalgar as an enduring national victory. A grand exhibit in the National Maritime Museum in London, “Nelson and Napoleon,” observed this event in 2005. In contemporary Germany, however, the commemoration of 1806 has occurred mainly among small circles of specialists and remained largely absent from popular historical consciousness. In recent times, besides the exhibition on the Holy Roman Empire in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, only small local exhibits and substantial articles in magazines like Die Zeit and Der Spiegel recall 1806. Past momentous occasions such as 1848, 1914–1919, 1933–1945, and 1949 clearly overshadow in contemporary historical memory the tumultuous decades that surrounded the Napoleonic Wars. This tendency to overlook and underestimate the significance of the early nineteenth century also remains evident among scholars who work on later periods of German history. In the shadow of World Wars and the Holocaust, the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1792 and 1815 seems distant to the contemporary audience. But why do historians also tend to disregard the importance of this era of warfare and domestic, social, and economic transformation—a period so rich in complexity—and its enduring consequences for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe?

In a recent article on state-building in the “Third Germany” during the Rheinbund years, Hans Schmitt noted the “degrees of variation” that were to be found in the tempo, structure, and results of government reform programs among the German states. This variety stemmed not only from the uneven penetration of French influence, but also from the different historical conditions and levels of political development pertaining in each state. Schmitt concluded part of his analysis by pointing out that this variety which so characterized state-building between 1806 and 1813 continued after the fall of Napoleon and the unravelling of the Rheinbund. The multiplicity of state-building programs and agendas in Germany during the Restoration era confirms this assertion. For the monarchs of states such as Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Nassau, the end of the French Imperium was an opportunity—under the new auspices of the German Confederation—to continue the integration of new territories and subjects via bureaucratic centralization and experimentation with constitutional models.

Travelers strolling through Stuttgart's Old Town who pause before Württemberg's royal residence can hardly fail to notice the Victory Column. Thirty meters high, it towers over the square and proclaims Crown Prince Wilhelm's victories against the armies of Napoleon in 1814. Erected in 1841, the Victory Column marked the Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm's reign, by that time a much-loved regent. Eight years earlier, at the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, the Bavarian king Ludwig I dedicated a memorial to the dead of the Russian Campaign. Evidently cast from the metal of French cannons, the massive obelisk dominates a crossroads in Munich—roads named after victorious battles fought during the Wars of Liberation. With their military campaigns engraved in stone, the two monarchies, Württemberg and Bavaria, demonstrated their zealous opposition to the French Emperor.

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems.