German Home Towns is a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely that German Home Towns occupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, “home towns” embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history, German Home Towns peers into a future of confrontation with “movers and doers”—those vanguards of the “general estate,” as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial “incubator” with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation.

This article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.

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.

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

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 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).

Anti-Semitism is the darkest and ugliest side of a modern German history that has had more than its share of dark and ugly sides. There is a strong and intellectually by no means illegitimate temptation to see the entire history of German anti-Semitism as a one-way street leading straight to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Yet such a teleological approach to anti-Semistism does not do justice to the complexity of the past, does not highlight what Karl Schleunes has called “the twisted road to Auschwitz.” The excellent thematic articles in this issue all take up this complexity, their authors demonstrating a subtle and sensitive approach toward understanding anti-Semitic attitudes and behavior. One could go further and say that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, that several themes running through all the individual contributions describe and characterize a one hundred year history of Catholic anti-Semitism in Germany. I have identified four such themes and will discuss their changes and variations, both over time and in the different handling of them by the authors.

This article revisits the interplay between enterprise, technology, science, and the state in the latter stages of Prussia's “early industrialization.” Tracing the footsteps of Werner Siemens as he sought to establish a business in Berlin during the 1840s, it highlights the social networks that enabled individuals and ideas to circulate between the military establishment, administrative departments, scientific circles, and entrepreneurial communities. At heart, these abstract entities constituted dense clusters of individuals who shared strong connections to one another, but whose contacts with other groups also enabled them to mobilize resources. During the 1840s, fostered by the dynamism of Berlin's expansion, social networks stepped into the breach caused by the Reform Era's upheaval of traditional employment structures and the emergence of a market economy. They provided a means of negotiating the uncertain socioeconomic circumstances that characterized Vormärz Prussia.

Recent historical studies on the organizations of German expellees and their influence on West German political culture highlight the insincere attitude and deception by the whole West German political establishment toward the expellee politicians and activists and their cause. One study in this field is Matthias Stickler's important book “Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch,” and a more recent one by Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen?, takes Stickler's thesis even further. It creates the impression that the expellee organizations, highly dependent on the government for financial and political support, had no option in this matter and were even helpless in that they had to accept the noncommittal rhetoric and the West German government's unwillingness to obligate West Germany for their cause. In this article, I probe this portrayal of the expellee politicians and activists as objects rather than subjects of German politics by inquiring into the political and public relations activities of the German Sudeten Council (Sudetendeutscher Rat) in the field of foreign policy during and around the tenure of Hans-Christoph Seebohm as the leader (Sprecher) of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society (Landsmannschaft) (1959–1967). The Sudeten Council is a non-party association; one half of its members are elected by the federal assembly of the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and the other half by the political parties of the Bundestag. As well as being a politician of the expellee organization, Hans-Christoph Seebohm pursued the longest political career in the German federal cabinet—seventeen years. He served as Minister of Transportation and Mail of the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1966 under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. To date, no monographic work has been written about Seebohm.

The murder of the minor reactionary poet and alleged Russian spy August von Kotzebue in March 1819 by the Jena student Karl Ludwig Sand was a clarion calling the forces of conservatism in Germany to unite against dissidents and extremists in the universities and in the student reform movement, the Burschenschaft. Metternich, reacting to what appeared to be a groundswell of opposition, wrote Friedrich von Gentz in June that the political stability of Central Europe would not be threatened by academics and professors; rather, any threat would likely come from the more practical-minded Advocaten, or counselors at law. Mathias Edler von Rath, Austrian member from April 1820 until June 1824 on the Mainz Central Investigating Commission, formed in September 1819 by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt on Main to investigate “revolutionary activities” in Germany since 1810, concluded that there were no more than eight key “facts” that deserved the Commission's attention: six of these had occurred in one specific area of the Southwest—the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Duchy of Nassau.

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between Jewish emancipation and the revival of Catholic neoorthodoxy in the years preceding the revolutions of 1848/49. My focus is on the Grand Duchy of Baden, renowned as the most liberal of all the nineteenth-century German states. The rise of neoorthodoxy in Baden provoked political liberals to rethink the relationship between church and state and, consequently, through a conjunction of circumstance, to make Jewish emancipation a central plank in their political platfrom. The Jewish emancipation implemented by the liberals in the revolutionary years, however, would be heavily burdened from its inception by the manner in which the new Catholic “religious right” deployed anti-Jewish rhetoric in its struggle for religious and political influence.