This article examines the impact of Nazi persecution on the gender identity of German-Jewish veterans of World War I. National Socialism threatened to erase everything these Jewish men had achieved and sacrificed. It sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the Fatherland, as well as the high status they had earned as Frontkämpfer (front-line fighters) in the Great War, upon which their sense of masculinity identity rested. Although diminished and disempowered by Nazi terror, Jewish veterans were able to orient themselves toward hegemonic ideals of martial masculinity, which elevated military values as the highest expression of manhood, giving them a space to assert themselves and defy the Nazi classification Jew. For the Jewish men who fought in World War I, the Nazi years became a battle to reclaim their status and masculine honor. They believed that the manner in which they handled themselves under the Nazis was a reflection of their character: as men who had been tried and tested in the trenches, their responses to persecution communicated their identity as soldiers, as Jews, and as Germans.

We still do not have a satisfactory synthesis of the history of resistance to National Socialism. A new history with different chronology, continuities and perspectives, different geography and range of activity or behavior, is increasingly necessary because of recent scholarship on numerous aspects of the subject. A new history should commence before 1933 as well as extend beyond 1945; give greater emphasis to resistance inside Germany between 1933 and 1938, and also to the efforts of Germans in exile during the entire Nazi period; minimize the role of the churches; provide another view of the conservative political-military resistance from 1938 to 1944; include youths who were active in gangs and individual Germans whose irreverent and nonconformist behavior was correctly viewed by the regime as subversive; examine resistance from July 20, 1944, until the end of the war; survey the contribution to the two postwar Germanies of the surviving internal groups and the returned exiles; sketch the changing treatment of the history of the resistance in public life, the military, journalism, and academic historiography since 1945.

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.

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.

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.

Responding to a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them the Rechtsstaat (variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined the Rechtsstaat to make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.

In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs's children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Blümchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children.

The soul of die Prussian army is in its officers,’ wrote the Prussian general, military theorist, and writer Baron Colmar von der Goltz in his widely read book The Nation in Arms. These officers, he continued, must be recruited from the privileged social classes “who exercise even in ordinary life a natural superiority over the masses.’ Goltz went on to underline the army's concern over restricting its leadership to the better elements of society when he cautioned that the nation's merchants, manufacturers, and private gentlemen were unlikely to provide good long-term officers.

The tribute given to Saul Alinsky on his death in 1972 indicates the attention paid in our age to the problems of community organizing. Most citizen groups formed in response to such threats as urban renewal, danger to the environment, or mandatory busing face problems of factionalism, inefficiency, lack of money, and even conflicting loyalties of their members, unless they have the direction of someone like Alinsky, who earned his reputation as a professional organizer. The alternative is to found a group imbued with an ideology which can be characterized as radical (“as a kind of mental and moral discipline”) and an organization which consequently reflects this discipline. The existence of such political organizations, “specially designated and organized bands of men [who] might play a creative part in the political world,” of individuals motivated to join forces “with any man who might help them without regard to the older bonds of family and neighborhood” have a historical origin: they were the contribution of the religious wars in sixteenth-century Europe. The Calvinists were the ancestors of the Bolsheviks.

One of the ironical facts in the history of the Jews in Germany is that it was not until after Hitler came to power that they united and formed for the first time a central organization to represent their interests in politics. Before 1933 German Jews made several attempts to create a separate political platform or pressure group. The first venture had perhaps the best prospects of success. It started around 1900, a time when the ideological divisions that later polarized the German Jews into liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist camps were not yet strongly felt, and when cooperation between liberal and Zionist leaders was possible. Despite what appeared to be an opportune moment, all efforts came to naught. Historians can argue at length over whether or not German Jews committed a grave error in failing to form an independent political front, and whether or not it was possible in Germany for Jews to follow the example of Russian Jews and form an autonomous party. A more fruitful discussion will begin only when historians consider why Jewish leaders, who had stood within the existing party framework since 1848, decided in the late 1890's to organize independently of the liberals to whom they felt indebted for emancipation, and why they never achieved their goal. This essay attempts to answer these questions and to shed light on the political behavior of Jewish notables in Wilhelmian Germany.

In the wake of Germany's military defeat in 1918, social and economic programs that previously could have been left to academicians or party theoreticians suddenly acquired a new urgency and immediacy. One of the more interesting—and controversial—of these was an ambitious proposal by the engineer Wichard von Moellendorff, who served in 1918 and 1919 as Under State Secretary in the Reich Economics Office (later the Economics Ministry), to redesign the entire edifice of the German economy through the implementation of a system of economic “collectivism” or “planning” (Gemeinwirtschaft or Planwirtschaft). With the assistance of his superiors, the right-wing Social Democrats August Müller and Rudolf Wissell, Moellendorff endeavored to institutionalize his plans in the months after the November Revolution, until a negative cabinet decision in July 1919 precipitated his resignation.

Fully five decades before Olympe de Gouges, Mary Woll–stonecraft, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel spoke out for the equality of men and women, Dorothea Christiane Leporin, Germany's first female medical doctor, challenged the readers of her Thorough Investigation of the Causes which Prevent the Female Sex from Studying to free themselves from the idea that all women are destined to serve husband, house, and children. As she put it: “If one admits that the female sex is capable of learning, then one must also admit that it has received a calling to go with it.” She reached this conclusion by accepting the assumption that men and women are equally suited for intellectual endeavors and then questioning all real and fictitious obstacles that were placed in the way of female study. Like all her known contemporaries, Leporin did not want to press all women into advanced study, which according to her would cause disorder, but she pleaded eloquently for the removal of prejudices and obstacles to talent.

In the East German Marxist-Leninist analysis of German history the role of Prussia, of the Prussian state and the Junkers, of Prussian militarism and agrarianism have received a great deal of attention. Since they are regarded as major causes of the catastrophes that subsequently befell Germany, this concern is of course not surprising. Moreover, class interests, special socio-economic configurations, the transition from feudal conditions to a capitalist-industrial system played so manifest a role in Prussia's rise that Marxist scholars, if only for that reason, were bound to turn to the investigation of these developments.

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.

German commemorative culture is clearly in flux. Over the last year or so, a series of seemingly never-ending controversies have made it abundantly clear that, more than seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust is not only very much present in contemporary Germany but also remains deeply contested. The list of controversies is familiar to everybody who has followed German public debates over the last three years: first the debate over the planned appearance of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe at the 2020 Ruhr-Trienale in the spring of 2020; then the publication of the German translation of Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory in March 2021 and the heated controversy around A. Dirk Moses's “catechism” blog article a few months later; and finally, the recent debate about antisemitism at the documenta art exhibition curated by an Indonesian artist collective.