In a contribution to this journal, Volker Berghahn regretted the fragmentation and lack of focus in the recent research on the German Empire. While he may have overstated his case, his criticism certainly applies to the historiography of Germany's parliamentarization. The dearth of research, especially of recent vintage, has left the debate about the exceptionalism of Germany's governing institutions indeed “fragmented and decentered.” Since Manfred Rauh's two volumes in the 1970s, little has been published. His thesis about Germany's silent parliamentarization has been attacked, it seems, more for the haughtiness of its footnotes than the substance of its argument. As a result, Rauh's provocative interpretation coexists far too quietly with other accounts, and thereby preempts the sort of dialogue and scholarly integration Berghahn so misses. In her response to Berghahn, Margaret Anderson points out that such a dialogue can be found in, without being confined to, the new work of Germany's electoral politics, that looked anew and more skeptically at the exceptional political development of Imperial Germany. Its findings indirectly raise questions about why the development of Germany's governing institutions — the Reichstag, the Bundersat, and the chancellor — continue to be interpreted in much more exceptionalist terms than the evolution of electoral politics.

There has been a good deal of scholarly work on the history of the political economy of the German Empire. This is particularly true for the history of customs and trade policy, which historians identified quite early as a central arena of political conflicts and disputes and to which historians quite often assigned a key role in their competing interpretations of the history of the German Empire.

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”

Hamburg, as any tourist guide will tell you, occupies a unique position within Germany. Now, every city can make this claim, so what constitutes Hamburg's uniqueness? Natives would say it is the harbor (Germany's largest) and the water that flows through the metropolis that claims more bridges than Venice. But ask an outsider, German or not, and he or she will likely say the Reeperbahn, Hamburg's notorious red-light district, known also to music fans as the incubator of The Beatles. Historically speaking, the harbor has been this Hanseatic city's source of trade and prosperity, as well as a major transit point for overseas travelers; the nearby Reeperbahn has long been a magnet for those seeking pleasure and distraction from the cares of life. In the 1950s and 1960s—the years of West Germany's “Economic Miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder)—Hamburg saw greater numbers of visitors than ever before. These guests included Germans from west and east (before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961); international tourists, particularly from neighboring countries; British NATO troops stationed in the northern Federal Republic; and seamen from around the world. Some chose Hamburg specifically as their destination, others passed through on their way to someplace else.

In late July 1914, upon partial mobilization of the Austro-Hungarian army, an urgent appeal to “Austria's women” circulated widely in the Viennese press. It urged women to “perform service in the time of war” and reminded them that in this moment of state peril, women had to suppress their “differences” and display the “strongest solidarity” among themselves. “Women's unity, women's energy, and women's work” would be crucial for the survival of Austria. The notice was published by one of the women's groups in what would become the Frauenhilfsaktion Wien, an umbrella organization founded in early August, comprising the major women's groups in the city. Together with similar subsequent appeals to duty, service, sacrifice, and an inner bond uniting all women, the notice marked the beginning of World War I as a potential turning point in women's relationships with each other and with the state. Across the political spectrum, noble, bourgeois, and working-class women, Christian and Jewish, German-speaking, and others, were asked to put aside their differences and perform war service as “Austria's women.”

Following the GDR's surprising collapse in 1989, historians have produced a range of studies that have added new contours to its state and society and contributed to a much fuller understanding of the reasons for East Germany's implosion. As scholars became more aware of the “limits of dictatorship” in the GDR, however, the longevity of a state that lasted for almost as long as the second German Empire became all the more perplexing. In response to this problem, a number of historians reflected on approaches practiced by historical anthropologists and sociologists, to explore the distinctive nature of GDR life in its everyday manifestations. Inspired by the pioneering work of Alf Lüdtke and Lutz Niethammer, they began to investigate the history of everyday life at the workplace, within and across generational and gender divides, and in areas such as consumption and leisure.

The German Enlightenment has often been described as a philosophical or literary movement. This is certainly true to some extent; however, it is far from being an adequate description. It seems more justified to regard it as a general reform movement, even though many reforms that were suggested were not introduced. In the second half of the eighteenth century, social and economic problems became increasingly important for the enlightened thinker. First the emancipation of the peasants was demanded, then that of the Jews, and towards the end of the century, some even asked for the emancipation of women, to name just a few major groups. The enlightened reformers advocated the abolition of the guilds, the introduction of free trade and agricultural reforms. The old penal law was to be brought up to the standards of the time, and the system of poor relief to be reorganized. Groups that needed special care, like the blind, the deaf, and the insane, now received more attention. For the first time, public health became a matter of general concern. Educational reforms were proposed, not only to improve schooling, but also in order to change society through an educative process.

The despoliation of the Strasbourg Cathedral during the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94 has long been considered a high point of revolutionary iconoclasm, which manifested for some the anti-enlightened nature of the Terror regime and the violence inherent in the French Revolution itself. The hybrid space—linguistic, cultural, and political—in which these vandalizing acts took place, however, brings to the fore the problem of Franco-German cultural transfer and its politics of emotion as a significant, yet previously untapped, interpretative layer. This article explores the emotional vocabularies used by both French and German commentators, which substantiated their divergent stances regarding historical consciousness, aesthetic sensibility, and national identity in the debate on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. It argues that while it contributed to the denouement of intercultural transfer in the German-speaking sphere, the vandalism debate also had long-term consequences for German communal identity formation in a sentimental key.

This study of the economic proposals of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and the German Free Trade Unions (ADGB, Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) during the years 1929–33 is not intended merely to revive a long-forgotten discussion of German economic policy.By exploring the complex interaction during the depression of economic theory, in the form of half-articulated assumptions as well as formal systems, and political ideology and behavior, it attempts to deepen our understanding of the fundamental political conflicts produced by modern economic crises. The Social Democratic Party and the Free Trade Unions had important political roles in the Weimar Republic. Their strong interest after 1929 in reviving the economy and in preventing the rise of a National Socialist regime makes them especially appropriate subjects to explore the relationship between economic theory and politics.

In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those participants was Gustav Hertle, director of the Leipzig Cotton Spinnery, the largest cotton spinner in Germany, who had long expressed interest in colonial cotton production. Following the trip the Leipzig Spinnery went on to acquire land in German East Africa, where it founded one of the biggest cotton plantations in the colony. Other textile industrialists who accompanied Dernburg also established cotton plantations in East Africa.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the most influential Afro-American intellectual of the twentieth century. His accomplishments in journalism and the academic disciplines of history and sociology were pioneering, and have only recently come to be fully appreciated. His more than twenty books and over 1,000 articles should qualify him to be considered one of America’s major scholars, and certainly the leading interpreter of race relations in the U.S., although he was never offered a professorship at a major American university. In the past two decades, Du Bois has experienced a renaissance of interest in his scholarship as well as in his Pan-African politics. Although he wrote three autobiographics in his lifetime and submitted to a 180 page oral history in 1960 at Columbia University, Du Bois’s life and thought have become the subject of innumerable books and articles by historians—a cottage industry in and of itself. Du Bois’s early writings merit the attention of historians and social scientists because of their freshness even after a century and because of his openness to ideas and methods that one would not expect from his later writings.

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany's most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society. With the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent social and political turmoil, the party stood ready to receive, organize, and mobilize Germans from all social strata.

History conjures up an image of the past and transports it into our present. Photographs both facilitate and, at times, markedly determine this historical process, especially for the twentieth century. For better or worse, they have irrevocably shaped the way we imagine the characters and sites of modern history. From infamous dictators to mass political rallies, from radical protests to everyday leisure pursuits: photographs form powerful frames through which we historians represent the past to ourselves and to our audiences.

Recent studies of the history of the National Socialist Party of Germany have produced much illuminating material on the k. party's organizational development and growth during its period of struggle up to the seizure of power. In addition, there are several studies of local or regional scope covering the same period, mostly dealing with areas in northern Germany, which provide a close-up view of the party and its tactics. This investigation will examine the nature of the Nazi voter appeal as it is revealed in the campaign and election to the state legislature (Landtag) in the south German state of Baden in 1929. The circumstance that the election fell in this year permits an examination of the development of the party midway between its failure in the Reichstag election of 1928 and its success in 1930; a close analysis of local statistics will show where the early converts to the National Socialist voting ranks came from, and will suggest some clues to the reasons for Hitler's early successes.

As one of the world's busiest rivers the Rhine carries about 300 million tons of freight annually, upriver and down, between Switzerland and the Dutch ports on the North Sea. Heavy shipping traffic on the Rhine, including ocean vessels reaching Mannheim and barges reaching Basel, has been an integral part of the Rhine valley landscape for the past 150 years. But a bounty of commercial shipping on the Rhine has not always been part of the river's history. Despite the Rhineland's growing population and increasingly productive economy at the end of the early modern period, long-distance shipping activity along the river gradually declined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. River commerce revived and expanded only in the early nineteenth century, stimulated in part by new developments in transportation technology, business organization, industrial development, and an unprecedented civil engineering assault on the river's natural contours. These material components of the nineteenth century transportation revolution as it unfolded along the Rhine are generally well known.

The purpose of these remarks is to contribute to the exposure of the egregious errors, tendentious misconstruals, and outright inventions contained in David Abraham's Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, 1981). Clearly, therefore, this is not a normal book review. I would not consider it appropriate to review this book in any case, since I read two versions of the manuscript for the Princeton University Press in 1979 and recommended its publication. I did so despite severe disagreements with the methodology and the argument. I assumed, however, that the scholarship on which the argument was based was sound and respectable and that the argument of the book would stimulate fruitful discussion. Since publication, the book has been widely reviewed, and while reviewers have divided over the theses of the book, most have praised its scholarship. The notable exception was Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., who must be credited with first drawing attention to the book's deplorable scholarship. Turner, as well as another scholar whose review is soon to appear, Ulrich Nocken, had the advantage of knowing many of the documents with which Abraham “worked,” and thus had reason to be suspicious. Most other reviewers, as was true in my own case, operated under the usual assumptions, namely, that a scholar with a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from a respected institution who was teaching at Princeton University, where high tuitions are paid for instruction by carefully chosen persons of demonstrated competence, would operate in conformity with accepted scholarly standards.

As we enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.

The ascension to power and twelve-year rule of National Socialism has had an enormous and continuing impact on the writing of German history. Since the early fifties, the leitmotiv of scholarship has been the search for the origins of Nazi successes in the peculiarities of Germany's or rather Prussia's history in the nineteenth century. Even with the emergence of social and economic history in the late sixties, the task of unearthing National Socialism's roots remained unchanged, although the tools altered and a more sophisticated strategy was adopted. A pervasive tendency developed to view all contemporary institutions as props of the authoritarian Prussian regime. Whereas pre–World War II scholarship glorified the Prussian past uncritically, the past two decades have witnessed across-the-board condemnation.

In December 1935, Heinrich Himmler established an SS agency designated as Lebensborn, or the “Well of Life” society, ordering it to perform a twofold task: to administer welfare assistance to SS families having a large number of racially valuable children; and to extend maternity and child-care facilities to expectant mothers, whether they were married or not, if they could prove the biological excellence of their expected children. Even with the emphasis placed on racial value as a criterion for Lebensborn involvement, the agency might appear to have been a curious blend of an SS “fringe benefit” combined with a charitable SS gesture toward unwed mothers. In reality, Lebensborn functioned as one unit within a comprehensive eugenics policy begun earlier in 1931 when the Reichsführer issued his famous “marriage decree” to the SS. The contribution which Lebensborn made to this eugenics program is examined below with emphasis placed on the socio-biological motives that prompted the Reichsführer's concern for childbearing and ultimately lay behind the agency's founding.