Every good humanities journal emerges from and is produced by a specific scientific community that shapes its content and its style. Central European History (CEH) is no exception. For me, i.e., a French historian of Germany teaching at a Swiss university in Geneva, CEH is the journal to read in order to follow the more recent and innovative English-language scholarship on the history of Germany and German-speaking countries. Most of the articles published in the journal are written by historians based in the United States or in the United Kingdom (and its dominions), and most of the books that are reviewed originate from the same community, with the notable exception of ones by German authors.

According to Friedrich Engels, communists would “take an axe to the root of crime.” Criminality was, in this and similar views, “alien” to the very essence of prevailing social conditions in communist societies and ought to have disappeared as a phenomenon as soon as socialism was established. Yet, despite the ruling Socialist Unity Party's (SED) claim to have created “really existing socialism” in East Germany, crime existed and persisted. Official statistics showed that over one hundred thousand incidents of “everyday” criminal offenses, such as theft, were recorded annually. The SED regarded public relations work concerning criminality as essential to its prevention. This article examines the narrative of crime that appeared in the pages of the East German magazine Neue Berliner Illustrierte, which, following SED instructions, attempted to shape public perceptions by informing readers that crime rates were decreasing and that no serious crimes were taking place. Moreover, the articles made it clear that the only way to eliminate the causes of crime were for citizens to live according to the socialist tenets set forth by the party. As this suggests, the regime used the media and its treatment of crime and criminality in an attempt to win greater legitimacy and coopt citizens for the socialist project.

Over the last decade, historians have made steady inroads into the frequently static social sciences as they are trying to understand the changing post-Cold War order and the even more rapidly changing global and domestic political economies. Such softening of disciplinary boundaries is also observable in the other direction. Jonathan Sperber's work on nineteenth-century electoral politics and Kenneth Ledford's study on German lawyers offer two examples among many of historians borrowing concepts and methods from the social sciences. Yet, these encouraging signs of disciplinary trespassing cannot mask the fact that these two disciplines continue only infrequently to publish in each others' journals, intelligently review each others' works, or jointly reflect on the payoffs of interdisciplinary scholarship. Given this limited dialogue, it is a particular pleasure to reply to two such thoughtful and constructive respondents. In subtly tackling the problems inherent in comparing, Kenneth Ledford ventures into the disciplinary borderlands of history and the social sciences while Jonathan Sperber stays more closely in the historical corner and — to use Ledford's apt characterization of his colleagues — “picks cautionary holes in the applicability” of comparisons.

To discuss the connections between place, nature, and identity, and the dilemmas of modern German history that derive from them, James Retallack (University of Toronto) and David Blackbourn (Harvard University) brought together sixteen historians from Canada and the United States for a three-day conference at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto from May 12 to 14, 2005. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD)/University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies Program.

After the Napoleonic Wars, central Europe frequently witnessed important diplomatic discussions, and cities such as Vienna, Aix-la-Chapelle, Carlsbad, Troppau, and Laibach served as the places for rendezvous of European monarchs and diplomats. Austrian Chancellor Clemens Wenzel Lothar Nepomuk Prince von Metternich-Winneburg played a leading role at these meetings between 1814 and 1822, and he particularly wanted them to take place in the territories of the Austrian Empire because he could therefore better control their course and exert influence over the events to an extent undoubtedly exceeding the real power of the state whose interests he advocated. This is exactly what happened after 1814, and the subsequent years were definitely the happiest period in the life of the man known for his extraordinary diplomatic talent as well as his vanity. It was all the more difficult for him to reconcile himself with the loss of the position of the “coachman of Europe” in the 1820s when the alliance formed by the five European powers (Great Britain, France, Prussia, the Austrian Empire, and Russia) failed to solve the Greek war of independence. The July Revolution of 1830 then created a gulf between the liberal and conservative powers, so that neither the willingness of the five powers to cooperate under his leadership nor the necessary conditions for his leadership existed in the 1830s.

In September of 1894, Emperor William stood before his Junkers in Königsberg. He reprimanded them for their outspoken opposition to the policies of his government, particularly to the treaties leading to lower duties on grain. He called it a “thing of nonsense” for Prussian noblemen to oppose their king, though, he said, as a good father he was willing to forget such unruly behavior. The Prussian nobility, he declared, must gather now about the House of Hohenzollern “in the struggle for religion, morality, and order against the parties of revolution.”

Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rittberg is generally recognized as the principal architect of the “Diplomatic Revolution” of 1756 and as one of the greatest statesmen of his day, yet there have been curiously few attempts to describe and analyze the process by which he rose to such eminence. In the available historical literature Kaunitz usually first appears on the scene at the peace congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), although there are occasional references to his earlier diplomatic career. Nineteenth-century historians assumed that Kaunitz's experiences at Aix-la-Chapelle provided the insight which finally led him to propose the reversal of alliances. Adolph Beer, for example, asserted that Kaunitz's enmity towards England was born at Aix-la-Chapelle and that the policy of 1755 first entered his mind in 1748. Though twentieth-century historians have tended to de-emphasize the revolutionary nature of the reversal of alliances and so have been less willing to accept the easy equation that Aix-la-Chapelle produced the diplomatic change of 1756, there has been no systematic examination of the development of the new diplomatic policy in Kaunitz's own mind. While it might be said that the development of that policy represents merely the ordinary maturation of a diplomat, the growth of understanding, the fact is that few of his contemporaries possessed such understanding. It therefore seems of some value to know how this master diplomat matured.

Numerous past review articles by scholars of German history share ideas produced by the religious turn in historiography since the 1970s and 1980s. Although highlighting a still growing groundswell of work focused on the German Catholic minority, these essays typically express discomfort with the relation of their subspecialty to the rest of the discipline. Bemoaning the marginalization of Catholic history and the self-inflicted ghettoization of research narrowly focused on regional traditions, past reviewers have worried about the integration of Catholicism within a larger framework. These past articles summarize phases of research on German Catholicism that produced much scholarship and multiple conceptual frameworks through which to understand the enduring impact of the church. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s pushed against the grain of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Bielefeld School to prove that Catholicism contributed more to the liberal democratic development of Germany than had been previously assumed, and by the 1990s German Catholic research focused primarily on the social history of Catholicism. The field of German Catholic history underwent a period of uncertain change during the early 2000s. Many of the German-language monographs on the topic remained wedded to the milieu model, but some younger scholars responded to critiques of German Catholic history by studying women's history or deploying poststructuralist analysis.

In July 1933, an official at Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry gave an influential speech concerning the “cultural-political tasks of the German press.” The speaker, Wilfrid Bade, was himself an author and journalist who had previously attracted little notice outside Nazi circles. He declared that “a new Germany needs new authors”—an unsurprising sentiment, and one pronounced by the cultural representatives of many new regimes. Bade went on, however, to name a surprising group of candidates for this authorial duty: the storm troopers, members of the Nazi's paramilitary group, the Sturmabteilung (SA), whose violent thuggery had raged through German streets and helped to push the decaying Weimar Republic over the edge.

The relationship between the Roman Catholic church and the state in nineteenth-century German history appears to have been plagued by discord and mistrust. From the secularization of church lands and the dissolution of sovereign ecclesiastical territories at the beginning of the century to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, church and state found themselves repeatedly at loggerheads. One thinks of the negotiations between Prussia and Rome on a concordat after 1815, the Cologne mixed marriage controversy of 1837, the Frankfurt Parliament's debates on Article III of the Reich Constitution in 1848, and the hostility aroused by the Raumer decrees of 1852. In a recent article on the Catholic church in Westphalia during the 1850s and his book on popular Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany, Jonathan Sperber has challenged the validity of this picture of conflict between church and state.

In March 1920 the German Reichstag passed legislation which fundamentally altered the country's tax system. The tax package, known as the Erzberger taxreform after its chief architect, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Center Party, soughtto stabilize the chaotic financial affairs of the young Weimar Republic. Not unexpectedly, the effort provoked intense opposition from many segments of the population. Resistance to the tax plan was particularly strong among the working class, and when it was implemented in July and August, large-scale protests and strikes occurred in various parts of the country. Although an enormous literature exists on labor problems in the Weimar Republic, the tax protests of 1920 have been largely ignored.

Shortly after the turn of the century a Social Democratic newspaper characterized middle-class liberals as forming at best the “tail” (Schwanz) of Social Democracy, at worst the “tail of the Prussian Conservatives.” If the remark reflects the contempt which Marxists as well as radical rightists have manifested toward the middle parties, it also suggests the precariousness, the uncertain orientation of the middle posture. Flanked on one side by the still politically dominant landed aristocracy and the influential industrial magnates, on the other side by an inexorably growing industrial working class was a variety of social and occupational groupings weakly unified by a claim to some degree of status and a consciousness of being bürgerlich. In the imperial period the meaning of bürgerlich was shifting from “nonaristocratic” to “nonlaborer” without having attained the intermediate connotation of “civic.” The bürgerlich social and occupational groupings found their political representation primarily in the liberal and Catholic parties, secondarily in allegedly nonpolitical institutions and an array of regional, peasant, and anti-Semitic parties, increasingly in economic pressure groups.