The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern of Central European History (CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968, CEH emerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of the Journal of Central European Affairs in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsored CEH, as well as the recently minted Austrian History Yearbook (AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor of AHY, sat on the editorial board of CEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May's The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year, East European Quarterly published its first issue.

In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”

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.”

On November 28, 1904, a new commercial treaty was signed between Germany and Serbia. Though limited in economic impact, the treaty carried political implications which greatly magnify its historical importance. For both signatories this treaty proved consequential to their respective relations with Austria-Hungary. Indeed, for Serbia it became one of the bases from which to carry on the struggle for the fulfillment of her national ambitions. But while its final importance is political, and emphatically so, the treaty can scarcely be understood without an appreciation of the economic motivation behind it. It will not do to dismiss the treaty as merely another manifestation of German expansionism; money, not empire, seems to have lured Germany into this rockiest part of the Balkans. The Serbo-German commercial treaty, therefore, must be studied against the background of two rivalries, separate both in membership and in kind— one the rivalry, mainly political and national, between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and the other the commercial rivalry between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. In the pages that follow an attempt will be made to pursue the second aspect in some detail; the first can here only be summarized.

Spurder Steine (Trail of Stones) is probably the best-known of the approximately two dozen East German films that were banned by state officials. Combining epic proportions with subversive humor, the picture still retains the ability to fascinate and amuse audiences well over three decades after its completion in 1966. In one scene, its most arresting protagonist, the foreman Balla, leads his small band of carpenters across the Iunar landscape of the chemical plant under construction, where the film is set. As martial music blares in the background, the “Ballas,” conspicuously dressed in the black corduroy suits traditionally associated with their trade in Germany, march against a sea of humanity streaming toward a political rally. They rudely shove people out of their way, grope women, and chug beer. Over a loudspeaker, the Communist functionary leading the rally proclaims, “We are already building the road leading into a bright future.” In response, Balla remarks to his cronies, “They comfort you with the future like the priests with the hereafter, but by the time you get there, you're already dead.”

Considering all that is known about the place of anti-Semitism in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are relatively few studies of anti-Semitism within a religious context. This is surprising given that Germany was and is more evenly divided numerically between Catholics and Protestants than almost any other large European nation, (about 60 percent Protestant to 40 percent Catholic). Most studies of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries have focused on various secular motivations. When scholars do choose to investigate religious anti-Semitism, almost all concentrate on Evangelical Lutherans or on Catholics, but not on both. Likewise, many historians consider religious anti-Semitism to be anachronistic. Yet many study the incidence of secular or modern anti-Semitism within a religious context whether institutional or popular, seldom paying equal attention to that context. Additionally, studies of anti-Semitism emphasized Protestantism and the Protestant north of Germany in particular, because, after 1870, that was where anti-Semitic political parties, movements, and groups appeared to thrive.

For Adolf Hitler the problem of constructing a loyal and reliable instrument of force for employment not only against external enemies but also for intra-party discipline was a frequently recurring one. In the summer of 1921 what was to become the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops, “SA”) had its genesis under the camouflage of so-called “gymnastic societies.” The SA, however, soon developed into a mass organization with an internal dynamism of its own which sometimes operated in opposition to Hitler's own aims. Friction between Hitler and Ernst Roehm began, in fact, at least as early as 1925 and precipitated Roehm's temporary self-imposed exile in Bolivia. The problematical loyalty of the SA prompted Hitler during the general party reconstruction of that year to order the organization of a special troop under the command of one of his bodyguards, Julius Schreck. This new body, at first termed Stabswache (Staff Guard), was assigned the tasks of protecting Hitler and other prominent Nazi personages and, somewhat anomalously, of securing new party members and subscriptions to the Völkischer Beobachter. Other similar groups, always small and carefully selected, made their appearance and were accorded the collective designation Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads, “SS”).

This quotation fits the conference only if we agree that “still” connotes sitting, not silence. The “Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique” were voiced with only hints of controversy. All who might have disagreed were outside the room, though not necessarily excluded from the debate. Participants seemed to agree that old “fixities” had to be re-evaluated in the light of postmodern challenges. “Past and future” met in the guise of Young Turks and older veterans. Sessions of redefining and rethinking, as these were, hardly “ascend” to action, but neither were they content with “arrest” or “decline.” Eliot, the modernist, speaks to postmodern issues.

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.

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.

Recent scholarship has cautioned us that censorship does not require a censor, nor can it be described merely as the repression of information by power. Censorship can be discursively productive, and historically it has worn many guises. This article treats a case in which state censorship practices were unstable, their execution uncertain, and their target cunning, if ultimately open to compromise. Sparked by an antiaristocratic short story in Ernst Keil's Gartenlaube (arbor, bower), the most widely read German periodical of the era, the Amazon affair involved not only its namesake ship—the Prussian S.M.S. Amazon (Amazone), a wooden corvette that sank in a storm off the coast of Holland in 1861—but an extraordinary confrontation between the conservative Prussian state and the liberal popular press. From the misstep of a weekly family magazine arose a multiyear press ban and a struggle over liberal-democratic public opinion in Germany. If no clear winner emerged from the Amazon affair, the episode nonetheless speaks to the malleability of German political culture at a moment of profound transition, as well as to the ability of the state to shape it.