Until only recently, German history has concentrated on the view from the top. As officials and as individuals, prominent Germans have been especially diligent about maintaining their records, and great numbers of previously secret holdings were made public after the Allied victory in 1945. Add all this to the wealth of memoirs and monographs already available, and there is clearly much to engage the interested historian or scholar. In particular, our understanding of the imperial era has benefited from the infusion of these rich resources. However, the vast majority of this material centers on the state and national leadership, with the result that German history is most frequently viewed from their perspectives: the historiography of the German people has been virtually overlooked. Recently, statistical and behavioral-science techniques have increasingly been incorporated into historical methodology in an effort to achieve a greater understanding of the public at large. Quantitative history and group biography are only two manifestations of this trend, and they have made significant contributions to our understanding of imperial Germany. I would like to suggest that careful examination of the German press can also add valuable new dimensions to the study of the imperial era, and to offer some simple techniques to help make this possible.

In 1965, Ralf Dahrendorf published his compelling work Society and Democracy in Germany. In this fruitful union of sociology and history, he argued convincingly that an overwhelming penchant for concord and synthesis has been the bane of the German mind for the past century and a half; not only in political thought but in traditional institutions such as the legal and educational systems, and ironically even in the supposedly radical Social Demorcatic Party. Everywhere in German life Dahrendorf preceived a quest for certainty—an obsessive need for some objective authority to deliver unimpeachable judgments that would find universal acceptance. More than settling disputes, such authorities were expected to obviate the need for disagreement altogether. The converse of this desire for harmony was an inability to accept conflict as normal; wherever conflict reared its ugly head, Germans sought to banish this unnatural phenomenon by appeal to a higher power. In this curious refusal to recognize ambiguity in life and society, Dahrendorf found the key to the German problem: what roadblocks the German ideology has placed in the way of development toward liberal parliamentary government.

Not far from the Brandenburger Tor on Unter den Linden, visitors to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (MfDG) entered Berlin's most beautiful Baroque building. Built by Europe's finest architects under the auspices of Prussia's Kings, the Zeughaus once held a collection of the nation's weapons and Prussia's trophies of war. But since its restoration in the 1950s, this eighteenth-century edifice's long sculptured hallways and high-ceilinged rooms housed the Marxist story of the German people's struggle; images of Prussian peasants, Silesian weavers, and hardened revolutionaries were arranged in glass cases, displayed upon walls and surrounded by Socialist banners, Communist papers, and early Protestant texts. Resurrected from the annals of Germany's past, these images were brought together to fashion a German history, to create the foundation for an East German national identity, and to provide legitimization for the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED).

When Thomas Nipperdey died on June 14, 1992, Gerald Feldman wrote the obituary that appeared in Central European History. This document was a fitting symbol of the condition of our journal—both its strengths and weaknesses—as Ken Barkin became its editor. One distinguished historian's eulogy to another found an appropriate place here, for the journal was widely recognized as a leading forum of international exchange, a link between scholarly communities in Germany and North America. The obituary appeared, however, in volume twenty-four of Central European History, which bore the date December 1991. It thus left the impression that Feldman was a man of extraordinary foresight.

The issues raised in Professor Becker's paper bear directly on the claims that the Franco-Prussian War can make for its place as the most critical war of the mid-nineteenth century. These points must be debated, if not resolved, if this subject is to continue to exercise its hold on international historians—as well as, one may add, on non-historians, interested in the past, concerned to know whether the past can help the present, and bewildered by disputes among the experts. Yet there is only so much an expert—or someone vain enough to fancy himself as such—can do. Simply put, to treat this whole subject in a graceful and coherent form within the limits of a single article in a journal of this nature would surpass the capacity of this writer. He can only attempt, as a starter, to sketch out what he takes to be the main thrust and balance of Franco-Prussian relations in the weeks preceding the outbreak of the war of 1870, and to give at least a partial elucidation of the problem by commenting on several aspects of it, without attempting to bring all of these individual comments into one, comprehensive statement.

In September 1950, Julius Meyer, head of the State Association of Jewish Communities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), sent a letter to the Finance Ministry inquiring about the current state of Jewish communal property. Throughout the immediate postwar years, he and other Jewish leaders had requested, though with little success, the return of Jewish property and assistance to rebuild Jewish sites. With the occupation now over, Meyer hoped that the newly formed East German state might be sympathetic to the needs of the Gemeinde (a religious community of Jews). He noted that the Jewish community had “still not acquired its own property” since most of it remained “under the control of the state” or in the hands of those who had seized it during the Nazi program of “Aryanization.” Meyer also pointed out that the Gemeinde needed money to reconstruct the numerous synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that had been damaged during Kristallnacht and World War II. “We ask,” he explained, “that you take into consideration the fact that the Jewish community, because of the extermination policy of the fascist state, finds itself in a situation like no other religious community.”

The discussion of the hand-made and hand-written cookbook of Ruth Bratu, who was evacuated from Prague in a Kindertransport in 1939, leads to a wide-ranging exploration of what we expect and what we can know about the cookbook. It discusses its recipes as well as Ruth Bratu's use of the cookbook's pages for handwritten notes about the 1941/42 political gatherings of exiles of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the Czechoslovak Republic in London. Above all, it is a reflection on Alltagsgeschichte, the use of a single document as a vehicle of historical interpretation, and not least the sensory recognition that this cookbook evoked for the author.

The semi-official Kölnische Zeitung of December 16, 1888, unleashed a violent attack upon Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador to Russia. After alluding to his friendly relations with the recently deceased Emperor Frederick, the article stressed Morier's hostility to Germany. This was substantiated by the charge that, in August 1870, he had sent news of the German crossing of the Moselle to the French commander, Marshal Bazaine.

In descriptions of the political structure of the Weimar Republic, the German Center Party is usually grouped as a party of the “middle,” together with the German Democratic Party and German People's Party, between the left-wing Social Democrats and the right-wing German Nationalists. In the years after 1928, the Center showed an increasing disinclination to work in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and finally, under the leadership of Dr. Ludwig Kaas, the last chairman of the Center Party, broke completely with the Socialists. During the same years Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, made persistent, though futile, attempts to find an acceptable coalition partner for the Center on the Right, hoping, among other possibilities, to encourage a secession movement from the Nationalist Party in 1930. Because of the rapid dwindling of electoral support for the other parties of the middle, very little attention has been paid to the Center's relationship with them. It is the purpose of this article to show that the mutual antipathies between these parties and the Center were as great or greater than its antipathy toward Social Democracy on certain matters which were vital to the Center's existence. By 1928, in fact, coalition with the parties of the middle had become as unsatisfactory to the leaders of the Center as coalition with the party of the Left. The turning-point in this development was the breakup of the Marx-Keudell right-wing cabinet of 1927. The failure of that government to attain the party's goals in the realm of Kulturpolitik, i.e., religion and education, confirmed the Center's disillusionment with the workings of the parliamentary system itself.

In the issue of June 1971, there appeared David Felix's “Reparations Reconsidered with a Vengeance,” which constitutes an assault upon my article, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” in the December 1969 issue. Unfortunately, Mr. Felix has attacked an article which I did not write rather than the one which I did write. My brief ten-page essay addressed itself exclusively to the question of how much Germany was initially asked to pay and consisted of little more than a close textual analysis of the London Schedule of Payments of May 5, 1921. My main point, which Mr. Felix accepts, was that this document established the German reparations debt at a nominal value of 50 billion gold marks, not the figure of 132 billion gold marks widely cited in the general literature concerning the period. Secondly, I pointed out that Germany had offered to pay a considerably larger amount less than two weeks before. Mr. Felix ignores this point while attacking my conclusion based upon it to the effect that the London Schedule constituted a victory for the Germans. Finally, I remarked briefly that, with a high ostensible figure and much lower actual payments, the Germans had an excellent propaganda position and made the most of it, leading the English-speaking world to believe that the reparations burden was both outrageous and unpayable. I concluded that “We shall never know what Germany could have paid, had she seen any reason to do so, but we can easily demonstrate that the settlement was not outrageous, even in German eyes” (p. 365).

When the Red Army moved through Eastern Europe in 1945, it faced the problem of creating what the men in the Kremlin called “friendly” governments. In several countries, Joseph Stalin in short order resolved the dilemma by putting into power Communists who had arrived in the van of his army. In the Western mind, Stalin represented a force inexorably driven by a logic inherent in all totalitarian systems. Stalin became the reincarnation of Hitler, a dictator who sought to impose his system on all territories under his sway—and whose appetite could not be sated. Such a view left little ambiguity in interpreting Stalin's foreign policy. It offered no room for an assessment that Soviet foreign policy was driven by a mix of motives, not only by aggression steeped in Communist ideology, but also by considerations of national security, opportunism, and compromise.

Central European History appears in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe. The need for such a periodical has been especially great since S. Harrison Thomson's Journal of Central European Affairs, which published studies dealing with this along with other areas, ceased publication in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History, after two years of study, voted in December 1966 to sponsor a new journal, Central European History, to meet this need. Together with such periodicals as the Austrian History Yearbook (also published in collaboration with the Conference Group) and the East European Quarterly, which have also been founded in recent years to meet similar needs, Central European History should help fill a serious gap in the ranks of American scholarly periodicals.

In 1932, the artist George Grosz offered an optimistic account of his arrival to the United States:

This article traces changing conceptions of maternalism in the West German New Women's Movement from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. I argue that there were two moments in which the concept of motherhood was heatedly discussed and transformed. First, from the mid-1970s onward and within the broader cultural currents of “New Inwardness” (Neue Innerlichkeit) and “New Sensuality” (Neue Sinnlichkeit)—both of which permeated the New Left—motherhood became sensualized, eroticized, and sexualized. Second, these trends were intensified and at the same time drawn into new directions after the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. For while the focus on female corporeality was consolidated, a growing ecofeminist strand successfully reimagined motherhood as tightly bound to nature and life itself. Serving also as a means to deal with the Nazi past, this late 1980s conception of motherhood was marked by a more pessimistic, even apocalyptic outlook.