Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.

Communist countries are notably history-minded. Since they see mankind as advancing toward socialism and communism as part of a law-determined historical process, they base their legitimacy in large part on historical antecedents. East Germany, being faced with the opposing claims of West Germany, has been particularly concerned with establishing its historical legitimacy. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) traces its roots back into a distant past, along a road on which medieval peasant risings, socioreligious upheavals, Reformation and Peasants' War, the War of Liberation against Napoleon I, and the revolutions of 1848 and 1918 stand as significant milestones. Perhaps no Communist leadership ever did its homework in history more thoroughly prior to its assumption of power than did the East German leaders. From the mid-1930s on, in their Moscow exile, they devoted considerable attention to the exploration of historical questions from the Marxist perspective; later, Marxist historians and Communist party officials began drawing up plans for historical study programs, textbooks, and monographs in preparation for the day when they would be able to take over power in Germany. They knew it would be important to prepare the way “historically,” too, for the transformation of Germany from a capitalist into a socialist society.

In January 1919, the Bürgertum of the Bavarian town of Hof voted overwhelmingly for the left-liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP). But the following summer, in the Reichstag elections of June 1920, the Democrats sustained significant losses against the right-wing nationalist Bavarian Middle Party (Bayerische Mittelpartei, BMP). This article explores the rise and fall of the DDP in Hof by showing that a pro-republican politics initially proved popular among the local Bürgertum, until its credibility was undermined and ultimately destroyed by a series of devastating crises: the Bavarian Räterepublik of April 1919, the publication of the Versailles Treaty a month later, and the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary convulsions triggered by the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. This article concludes that political violence and a burgeoning confrontation between bürgerliche and socialist milieus were the key factors in explaining the eclipse of left-liberalism in Hof during the first years of the Weimar Republic.

The Councils of many Imperial Free Cities struggled throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to establish their position as “Obrigkeit,” enjoying the same kind of recognized authority as that exercised by the other petty political rulers within the Empire. The struggle resulted in increasingly authoritarian trends in city government, as some Councils sought to extend their control over more and more aspects of citizens' lives in an effort to win the respect of other ruling groups. Although sporadic violence marked the growing polarization between governed and governing which developed from such efforts, city Councils still justified their actions on the basis of benefit to the community—a community which included both Council and citizenry. This unitary concept of the urban community was subjected to further severe strains by the introduction of the ideas of Luther and Zwingli into the cities.

Disabled veterans were certainly in a rotten mood following World War I, and not without reason. A lost war, unrest at home, and physical pain were not things to celebrate. Most aggravating of all, however, were the problems associated with obtaining an adequate pension: for years after the end of the war the pension system caused bitterness among people who felt wronged by the very government that was supposed to take care of them.

In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.

Recent scholarship concerning the Wehrmacht leadership in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (1941–1945) has provided a much more nuanced picture of the motivation and responsibility of the uppermost strata of general for the brutalization of the conflict. The generals just outside this inner military circle, however, continue to be largely ignored. Questions on the mentality of lower-ranking, frontline commanders toward the war of annihilation and what latitude they reserved for themselves in carrying out orders remain, like the war on the front itself, one of the least researched topics of World War II.

When I assumed the editorship of CEH in 1991 the discipline of history was changing rapidly. Political, diplomatic, and economic history seemed to be fading after a long run, and even the nation state was being challenged as a central focus of research. Given the increasing interest in gender, race, post-colonialism, and memory, I had to consider “whither goeth” CEH. In part that decision is made for the editor by the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. My own belief is that excellent history can be written based on a variety of theories, and with the employment of a diverse number of methodologies. I also concluded that weak and unconvincing history could equally be based on very different foundations as well.

The morning of May 23, 1912, witnessed the christening of a new German icon. For many Germans, it was a wonder of the modern age, a powerful symbol of the nation's achievements in industry, engineering, and technology. For others, it was the embodiment of all the evils wrought by political, social, and cultural transformation. Some said it expressed the character of the German people, in a manner similar to Cologne Cathedral and Sanssouci, the palace of Frederick the Great. But there were those who thought it “appeared as a typical manifestation of the new Germany, with its huckstering and obtrusive manners, more a snobbism than a symbol of German competence.” The Kaiser was fascinated by this expression of the ambition, ingenuity, and might of an Empire in which he believed power rested with himself, the Prussian nobility, and a powerful military complex. And yet Hamburg's mayor, Johann Heinrich Burchard, echoed the feelings of many when he described this new wonder as “above all … the product of a flourishing, self-conscious German middle class.” Although extolled as a symbol of German unity, Social Democrats denounced the modern leviathan as an expression of class inequality and lamented that ten men were killed and one hundred injured while constructing it. With this in mind, how could Germany be proud of what it had achieved?

Over the years, scholars have identified the Weimar period as among the most pivotal in the development of the German social state (Sozialstaat). Noting what appears to have been an almost unbroken pattern of expansion in the compass of social work since the late nineteenth century, social scientists and historians have recognized the 1920s as a time of especially acute growth in public assistance. Government expenditures from the First World War onward show a particularly marked increase in three areas: public housing, public health, and social insurance. Together, these three spheres constituted the primary sites of Weimar social interventionism. Analysts have found it more difficult, however, to agree on the historical significance of these interventions, with discussion largely centered on the question of whether, and to what extent, the social programs of the Reich and municipalities overburdened the social state and thus contributed to the demise of the Weimar political order.

The archetype of the modern student movement is the German Burschenschaft of the Restoration era. Some events in the history of the Burschenschaft are well known: the Wartburgfest of 1817; the national federation of Burschenschaften in 1818; the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand; and the resultant Karlsbad Decrees of 1819. Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the post-Karlsbad history of the Burschenschaft, which is the concern of this article. Emphasis will be given to the role which a network of secret, inner circles played in both the survival of the Burschenschaft and its continued involvement in revolutionary conspiracy. These inner circles contained not merely representatives of the normal four-year student classes, but also permanently radicalized Burschenschafter. In some cases such “old boys” did not participate directly but maintained informal ties with key members of the inner circles. Since many of the radical alumni became secondary school teachers, they became the source of a continuous supply of indoctrinated recruits. The Burschenschaft of the Restoration era owed both its survival and the continuity of its traditions to an exclusive, self-perpetuating group of radicals dominated by veteran revolutionaries.

Our Topic is a complex one and therefore necessarily subject to certain limitations. They recommend themselves not only for practical reasons, namely the brief time at our disposal, but, more important, for logical ones as well. In the first place we want to discuss the issue precisely as stated, the problem of change in the balance of power, without injecting into it any value questions of whether such changes are to be welcomed or not from different ideological viewpoints.

Recent German scholarship on the old Reich underscores the strength of the corporate loyalties at work within the ranks of the imperial knights. The carefully drawn analyses of Gerhard Pfeiffer and Dieter Hellstern, to name but two examples, point up the success which attended these sovereign aristocratic families as they worked aggressively through a well-organized system of circles (Kreise) to combat the persistent threat of encroachment by their more powerful neighbors. This emphasis on the success of the knights is squarely on target. The imperial barons do survive, their rights more or less intact, right down to the dissolution of the empire. This essay seeks to draw attention to yet another dimension of this success, to document some of the tensions arising within the corps of knights and to demonstrate the knights' determination to contain these pressures and to prevent them from shattering their corporate unity. In the case of the Reichsritterschaft, not only did corporatism provide the occasion for rivalry among various groups within the corps. It also defined the outer limits to which internal rivalries could safely be pursued.