Since the turn of the millennium, major political figures around the world have been routinely compared to Adolf Hitler. These comparisons have increasingly been investigated by scholars, who have sought to explain their origins and assess their legitimacy. This article sheds light on this ongoing debate by examining an earlier, but strikingly similar, discussion that transpired during the Nazi era itself. Whereas commentators today argue about whether Hitler should be used as a historical analogy, observers in the 1930s and 1940s debated which historical analogies should be used to explain Hitler. During this period, Anglophone and German writers identified a diverse group of historical villains who, they believed, explained the Nazi threat. The figures spanned a wide range of tyrants, revolutionaries, and conquerors. But, by the end of World War II, the revelation of the Nazis' unprecedented crimes exposed these analogies as insufficient and led many commentators to flee from secular history to religious mythology. In the process, they identified Hitler as Western civilization's new archetype of evil and turned him into a hegemonic analogy for the postwar period. By explaining how earlier analogies struggled to make sense of Hitler, we can better understand whether Hitler analogies today are helping or hindering our effort to understand contemporary political challenges.

German-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.

The Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, was occasioned, if not caused, by complex disputes over religion. Fought mainly in Germany, it was a European war, involving powers from Spain to Poland. The three decades of merciless warfare in the heart of Europe undermined the old awareness of a universal Christendom, shattered the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, and contributed to the consolidation of the territorial entity or nation state. The war ended with Germany weakened and divided, and with the once proud Kingdom of Bohemia bereft of its former national and confessionla identity.

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.

Periods of great unrest are often characterized by the spread of wild rumors. In the excitement real dangers are magnified and completely new ones conjured up out of thin air. People, in their unbearable thirst for information, seem willing—or better, compelled—to believe almost anything they hear. Most often these conditions lead to amorphous feelings of dread and unease. But occasionally sensibilities become strained to the breaking point, and apprehension gives way to outright panic. Fear, no longer a disembodied and shapeless cloud, now finds a receptacle. The panic begins with an avalanche of terrible rumors, all testifying to the immediacy of a specific danger. Fear travels in well-defined currents, engulfing whole communities and regions in its path.

Universal suffrage is a commonplace in today's political world. In modern Western states it seems self-explanatory that there should be a general right to vote, or at least the pretense of such a right; and it is rather the exception to universal suffrage that requires explanation—at best as a quaint local peculiarity, at worst as a sign of pigheadedness or paranoia. In our era of bland populism, it is easy to forget the nineteenth century's passion over suffrage matters. But passion there was: from the sanscullottes of the 1790's to the suffragettes of the 1910's, no decade of the nineteenth century, no part of the Atlantic world was entirely free from this all-important question. Indeed suffrage issues erupted regularly whenever and wherever internal political tensions ran highest. Anti-Bourbon agitation in Restoration France, Chartist demands in England, Negro emancipation in the United States, demands for reform of Bismarckian Germany's Prussian heartland—these issues spanned the century, and they all contained at least some taint of the suffrage question. The European revolutions of 1848–49 came roughly at the mid-point of this century-long suffrage debate, and these revolutions too raised in various ways the issue of the right to vote. And one of the most interesting discussions of the franchise question came in February and March of 1849, when Germany's abortive constitutional convention, the Frankfurt National Assembly, turned its attention to an Electoral Law for the lower house of the projected national representative body.

Much has been written about the events of 9 November 1918 at Spa, but little about the aftermath in Holland. Some studies present sketches, often inaccurate, of “the squire of Doorn”; others remark that answers to many questions must await the opening of Dutch archives. Since the Dutch documents have now been published in profusion, answers are for the most part available.

History preserves numerous images of workers' protests. Both contemporaries and later historians, inspired by fear or enthusiasm, have scoured the records of the past for examples of popular rebellion, workplace militancy, or class mobilization. Indeed, a large literature exists that seeks to explain collective behavior by puzzling out the links between class formation and collective protest as well as the relationships between the individual's “objective” class situation and thought and action. But this literature—like the subjects of its inquiry itself—is in transition. It was once assumed that protest had its own iron logic and that “radical” consciousness was the necessary end product of the changing labor process under industrial capitalism; all other behavior was easily dismissed as “false” consciousness.

The Treaty of Belgrade, concluded in 1739, ended over fifty years of Austrian expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. From the siege of Vienna in 1683 to the Peace of Passarowitz in 1718, the Austrians enjoyed almost absolute supremacy on the battlefield and at the peace table, forcing the Turks deep into the Balkan peninsula and adding to the Habsburg possessions such cities as Buda, Pest, Timişoara, Cluj, Debrecen, and finally Belgrade, guardian of the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers and bastion of Austrian might in southeastern Europe. Given these successes and the apparent decline of the Ottoman state, in the 1720's and 1730's Austria appeared capable of establishing its hegemony over most of the remaining Turkish possessions in Europe.

The historiography of the Peasants' War is currently dominated by Peter Blickle's The Revolution of 1525. Blickle builds upon Günther Franz's Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, long the standard history of the Peasants' War. Blickle uses the concept of “the Revolution of the Common Man” to describe the Peasants' War. The common men in both the towns and villages were united in a revolutionary effort to establish the “communal Reformation.” Blickle writes: “Evangelical doctrine gripped urban and rural communities alike, and the lay community claimed the right to decide right doctrine.… Thus, the Reformation's dependence on community erased the barriers between urban and rural communities, between burghers and peasants.”

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.

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.

Ladislas Löb's superb translation of Otto Weininger's highly controversial but enormously influential book is a most welcome contribution to understanding Vienna circa 1900 for readers who, for whatever reason, must approach Weininger via an English edition. It replaces what Wittgenstein termed a “beastly” anonymous translation published by Heinemann in England and G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1906 in the United States; the latter was reissued in 1975 by AMS Press and again as recently as 2003 by Howard Fertig. Approaching Weininger from that translation, one has the sense of being confronted with the work of a madman, who spins thoughts off the top of his head in a way that can only be described as absurd, so absurd that their very implausibility and contrariness have a way of making it into a fascinosum. To be sure, there is enough in Weininger's original to encourage that impression. It also helps to explain his appeal to half-educated fanatics like Dietrich Eckhart. Such a seriously defective edition, expurgated, bereft of one hundred thirty-five pages of notes and references and notoriously inaccurate, made it even more difficult than it otherwise might have been to understand how Weininger attracted the attention of brilliant thinkers and writers like Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and even James Joyce (whose Ulysses, improbable as it seems, is deeply indebted to Weininger). In his Translator's Note, Löb provides numerous examples of absolutely grotesque mistranslations—in one place “es ist klar” is rendered as “it does not follow”—which more than corroborate the judgment Wittgenstein passed on the 1906 English edition. Löb neglects to mention, however, that English prudery seems to have dictated that all explicit references to orgasm be deleted. The expurgated version gives the impression of being a kind of misogynistic, anti-Semitic version of Peter Pan. Only a naïve, sensitive “boy genius” could have written such nonsense. In the end, camps formed on both sides about whether the author was a genius or a madman. Nobody, however, paid much attention to the argument—or the state of the text itself. This state of affairs has persisted until recently. Only in 1982 did it become known that there were two slightly different German editions of the work, and this only became widely known in the mid-1990s thanks to the assiduous research of Waltraud Hirsch (who is currently preparing an electronic critical edition of Weininger's complete works that should finally clear up the matter of the authoritative German text). Little wonder that there has been so much confusion surrounding Weininger.