At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the traditionally close relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia appeared as cordial as ever. Russia had an alliance with France but, except for its lucrative financial advantages for the Russians, this Dual Alliance remained largely an untested one vis-à-vis Germany. Less than a year after the conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan meaningful friendship between Russia and Germany ceased to exist. Within another year, Russia settled her major Asiatic differences with Great Britain, thus completing the process of isolating Germany diplomatically. The culminating period in this deterioration of Russo-German friendship occurred during the seven-month interval between the end of the Portsmouth Peace Conference in September 1905 and Germany's refusal to participate in the international loan to Russia in April 1906. This paper seeks to examine the causes of Russo-German estrangement within the framework of interrelated and often conflicting considerations of German Weltpolitik, Russian military defeats, the Revolution of 1905, and the international aspects of the Moroccan question.

In the two centuries since its dissolution in 1806, the Holy Roman Empire has usually been viewed as an antiquated relic of the medieval past, a dysfunctional polity that hindered Germany's development into a modern, liberal nation-state. In the wake of its demise, a chorus of famous intellectuals and statesmen—including Voltaire, James Madison, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leopold von Ranke, and Heinrich von Treitschke—derided the Empire as a “monstrosity” hampered by outmoded institutions and backward policies. More recently, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, advocates of the so-called Sonderweg thesis blamed the Empire for Germany's belated unification and for the Germans’ supposedly “authoritarian” bent. In Heart of Europe [the American title of the study—Ed.], a bold and sweeping account of the Holy Roman Empire's thousand-year history, Peter Wilson sets out to supplant these anachronistic interpretations by explaining “what it was, how it worked, why it mattered, and its legacy for today” (5). With this important book, the best single-volume history of the Holy Roman Empire currently available, Wilson succeeds in answering these fundamental questions and provides fascinating insights into European politics from the early Middle Ages to the present. I would like to focus first on what I see as Wilson's most significant contributions to the existing scholarship on the Empire, and then examine how he treats the Protestant Reformation as a case study of the merits (and drawbacks) of his approach.

Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen's Pillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on the Communist Manifesto without indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.

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.

On October 10, 1941, the soldiers of the 3rd Company, 691st Infantry Regiment were uneasy. The task ahead of them was something new. They were to kill the entire Jewish population of Krucha, a town in central Belarus. A few hours later, Private Wilhelm Magel stood with another soldier in front of four Jewish women and an old man with a long, white beard. The company First Sergeant, Emil Zimber, ordered the Jews to turn away from the shooters, but they remained facing the German soldiers. Zimber gave the order to fire but Magel and his colleague, a former divinity student, did not aim at their targets. They requested to be relieved from the execution detail and were assigned to guard the remaining Jews who were waiting in the village square for their turn. This German Army unit without assistance of any other organization murdered a minimum of 150 Jewish men, women, and children in Krucha that day.

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

The decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.

This article reexamines the diplomacy of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, focusing on two landmark achievements in 1970: the Moscow Treaty in August, and the Warsaw Treaty in December. On the basis of declassified US and German documentation, it argues that envoy Egon Bahr’s unconventional approach resulted in a poorly negotiated treaty with the Soviet Union that failed to address vital problems such as the status of Berlin. The outcome deepened political polarization at home and proved disconcerting to many West German allies; it also forced the four World War II victors—Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union—to save Brandt’s Ostpolitik by grinding out an agreement on access to Berlin. By contrast, West German negotiations in Warsaw yielded a treaty more in line with West German expectations, though the results proved sorely disappointing to the Polish leadership. Disagreements over restitution payments (repacked as government credits) and the emigration of ethnic Germans would bedevil German-Polish relations for years to come. Bonn’s Ostpolitik thus had a harder edge than the famous image of Brandt kneeling in Warsaw would suggest.

In the span of ten years, what started as a minor commercial enterprise in a faraway African territory grew into an important extension of the German state. This article reorients our understanding of the relationship between the Kaiserreich and its overseas empire, specifically with a focus on Captain Hendrik Witbooi and on how the Witbooi Namaqua he led influenced the evolution of German imperial rule in Southwest Africa between 1884 and 1894. Witbooi's refusal to accept imperial authority compelled colonial officials to confront their administrative limitations in the colony. When the façade of imperial fantasy gave way to colonial reality, German administrators expanded the size and scope of the imperial government to subdue the Namaqua. The article emphasizes the appointments of Landeshauptmann Curt von François and Governor Theodor Leutwein as critical examples of Witbooi's impact on imperial policy, as well as the colonial administration's embrace of military violence to attain German supremacy in Southwest Africa. An emphasis on the Witbooi Namaqua illustrates the prominent role of Africans in German colonial history and exposes how peoples in distant places like Windhoek and Otjimbingwe manipulated official efforts to control and exploit the colony.

Beginning with Ferdinand I's Polizeyordnung of 1552, the Habsburgs’ state inserted itself into the regulation of welfare for the poor. To manage the homeless, there emerged after the 1720s a state-driven but locally administered system (Schubsystem) of police surveillance to discover, arrest, and physically remove those without a provable birth place (or a ten-year residence in one place) to a to-be-determined Heimat, a “home” community declared responsible for their welfare. In practice, the system's specific self-contradictions and conflicted agendas, its brutalization of those who served it, its several social-relational and language figures that emerged as the actualizations of the state's vision, together placed a significant number of the homeless on forced marches toward indeterminate destinations until they collapsed and could be removed from the road to die “in the straw.” The essay suggests that the interplay between Heimat and Schubsystem serves as a foreshadowing dimension in modern Austro-German history.

In the nineteenth century, caryatids saw an unprecedented renaissance in European architecture. This article explores the cultural history of these female column-statues in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. The focus is on central Europe, and three cities—Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Vienna—play a particularly important role in this exploration. Through a reading of historical, visual, and literary sources, the article probes how these statues came to embody, on both a material and a metaphorical level, the social aspirations and societal rifts that marked the bourgeois age. The nexus, real and imagined, between caryatids and Jews is particularly illustrative here. In tracing antagonistic and largely forgotten discourses, the article seeks to shed light on a larger subject that is still underexplored: the complex entanglement of architecture, religion, and race in the long nineteenth century.

Despite its broad transmission and its influence on vernacular chronicle writing in the German Middle Ages, the Kaiserchronik has not received the attention from historians that it deserves. This article describes some of the ideological, historical, and literary contexts that shaped the original composition of the chronicle in the middle of the twelfth century: Christian salvation history, the revival of interest in the Roman past, the consolidation of a vernacular literature of knowledge, and the emergence of a practice of writing history as “serious entertainment” by authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Godfrey of Viterbo. Placed in these multiple contexts, which have a European as well as a specifically German dimension, the Kaiserchronik emerges as an important document of the uses of the past in fostering a sense of German identity among secular and ecclesiastical elites in the high Middle Ages.

This article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called “Turkish menace.” Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados.

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.

A Literature designed to express discontent with political or social conditions, rally public support, and sometimes threaten revolution has as much of a tradition in Germany as in other countries, and it was not the German authors' fault that their efforts remained on the whole without decisive achievements. Until 1918, this genre of literature had been nearly exclusively the preserve of what may loosely be called the political Left. But with the establishment of the republic the forces of the Right appropriated to themselves this time-honored intellectual weapon in their efforts to destroy the hated "Weimar System." Under these circumstances, no responsible independent left-wing journal could afford to do more than criticize the new German state for its shortcomings, and while in this respect some of them were less restrained than others, all of them wanted to reform and strengthen, not overthrow, the republic.

My first encounter with Hans Rosenberg was in the fall semester of 1952 when I switched from evening classers to day sessions full-time at Brooklyn College. His presence in the classroom was both fascinating and intimidating. He constantly took pains to engage each student in the room, and he still serves me as a model of teaching-effectiveness. Short and slightly pudgy but with ramrod posture, he had an expressive, unusually lively face and a profoundly serious but good-natured demeanor; he spoke with a slight impediment, with the heavy accent of his native Rhineland, and with an English vocabulary that was dazzling in scope. He was the epitome of the learned European professor, respected and esteemed by his colleagues. Some of his reputation as a teacher who demanded much of himself and of his students had preceded my entry into his class, and had conveyed a picture of a man who often literally got drunk on ideas in front of his students.

The Allied defeat of the German Wehrmacht in May 1945 brought the military struggle against fascism in Europe to an end. Yet with the occupation of Germany the struggle against fascism was to continue on other fronts. Germany was to be “demilitarized,” the economy “decartelized,” and the society “denazified. ” Ultimately Germany was to be “democratized.” The newly established media were to play a major role in the transformation of German attitudes, in this attempt to “reeducate” the Germans.