The natives here have great awe and respect for our entire Nordic nation. If this had not been the case, they could have easily become our masters. They regard us as the strongest and heartiest people as well as the best and most fortunate warriors, although together with this fear, they also despise us and hold themselves to be better. The English know very well how to keep their respect, although there is no slavery in their settlements here, while it does exist among the Dutch, the French, and the Portuguese. In the establishments of the English, on the other hand, more money circulates, there is more polity, the troops and servants are much better paid, and in this way the English gain much more respect and sympathy.1

It is obviously difficult to envision the future of Central European studies with any precision. The broader context that surrounds historians, as well as scholars in other disciplines, influences the topics and methodologies they choose. In recent years (i.e., the post-1990, neoliberal era), transnational, global, and imperialism studies have had a significant impact on the historical profession at large. As David Blackbourn observed in a 2013 address to the German Studies Association, ambitious “deep history” projects that cut across multiple cultures and historical periods have recently thrived, prompting him to encourage historians of Germany to push beyond their narrow graduate training and embrace such undertakings. To be sure, historians of Central Europe have adapted to prevailing trends in the discipline (discussed later), but concerns about the chronological, spacial, methodological, and topical limitations of the field have arisen. Even if scholars of Central Europe utilize different methodologies and approaches, they rarely pioneer. Rather, they latch onto the innovations that other fields have spawned instead of breaking new ground.

Working hours were largely unregulated in nineteenth-century Germany, but a powerful alliance emerged in the 1890s between the Christian churches and the socialist labor movement to prohibit most industrial labor on Sunday, including most production of steel. In the 1950s steel management persuaded organized labor that it would be advantageous to produce steel continuously throughout the week, the prevalent system in other countries. The Evangelical Church retreated in this debate, but the Catholic Church waged a fierce and partly successful campaign from 1952 to 1961 to defend the old prohibition. Until the 1980s organized labor continued to cooperate with both major churches to keep Sunday industrial labor quite rare. Their influence declined suddenly after national reunification in 1990, however, and many Germans have come to prize individual freedom above the old principle, honored by Christians and the unchurched alike, that most people should have the same day of rest.

During the past two decades, focus on the German-Soviet war has shifted from a nearly exclusive fascination with field marshals and their battles—“chaps and maps”—to one more concerned with the social aspects of the war. Issues of resistance and collaboration, German occupation policies and everyday life under Nazi rule, and the Soviet Union's recovery from the catastrophe of 1941 and its subsequent unprecedented mobilization during the latter stages of the war now constitute the main emphases of research. Many of these new lines of investigation revolve around the implementation and results of the German Vernichtungskrieg, the war of annihilation carried out by the Wehrmacht, SS, and myriad other German agencies against the Soviet state and population. As the army was the largest and most powerful German institution operating in the Soviet Union, it has recently attracted the most attention and generated the most controversy. Historians have reached a rough consensus concerning the German High Command's complicity in implementing the Vernichtungskrieg; here, the set of orders commonly referred to in the literature as the “criminal orders” illustrate the army's means of achieving Hitler's goals. More recently, scholars have begun to investigate the army's responsibility for starving millions of Soviet civilians. While some dissenting voices have been heard, it is clear that the German High Command willingly and even enthusiastically participated in the war of annihilation.

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.

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.

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.

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came as a surprise to most western observers. For historians of modern Europe, its disappearance remains remarkable for at least two reasons. First, East Germany has ceased to exist in an era when new states are constantly being born. Since the French Revolution unleashed the power of national self-determination as an ordering principle more than 200 years ago, new sovereign states have continued to emerge across the globe, whether through the breakup of multiethnic and colonial empires or the dissolution of pan-Slavic states in eastern Europe. Illiberal governments have been swept aside, often with the result that new states have been cast out of imperial entities by the centrifugal force of cultural attachment. In the history of European political sovereignty during the twentieth century, the particular has triumphed over the universal. Except in the case of the GDR. Against the tide of European history, the GDR has gone from sovereign state (East Germany) to regional designation (eastern Germany). In this sense, the story of the GDR's absorption by a larger polity is a tale of modern state-building told in reverse.

The Berlin Republic of the twenty-first century, writes W. R. Smyser, is destined to be unlike all previous German states. A status quo power and a stable democracy, it is neither the battleground of others nor dominant over them, neither reticent like Bonn nor arrogant like the Berlin of the late Hohenzollerns. The Cold War was “the essential incubator” of this “new Germany” (p. 402). It provided Germany with the tools of change—a role through which to overcome its past, and time to overcome old wounds. Aiding the incubation were contradictory Communist policies, astute Western statesmanship, and bravely pursued Eastern popular aspirations. Two Germans and two Americans, Smyser avers, stand at the heart of the eventual Communist defeat: East German leader Walter Ulbricht, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, President Ronald Reagan, and Smyser’s onetime mentor, General Lucius Clay. Mighty assists go to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the inspirational Polish Pope. Further down this idiosyncratic hierarchy stand Chancellors Adenauer and Kohl and U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

This article focuses on compulsory psychiatric admissions in the early German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until 1968 there were no East German laws regulating such hospitalizations, a regulatory vaccuum filled by neither the police nor the judicial system. Instead, families made decisions in conjunction with medical personnel about sometimes unlimited stays in psychiatric institutions and clinics—a practice that calls into question popular scholarly characterizations of the relationship between state and society in the GDR. Previous research has explicitly argued that GDR citizens had agency and acted in a so-called eigensinnige manner in many areas, but has not examined this issue with regard to the sensitive practice of forced psychiatric admissions: where there was no state interest, no Eigensinn vis-à-vis authorities was necessary. This was an especially curious constellation given that psychiatric institutions were run by the East German state and that state interventions in this area had been well established under the Third Reich, as well as in the Soviet Union, which served in many areas as a model for the GDR. One might well have expected that continuing state intervention would have thus been path-dependent. This article suggests resurrecting the term Vergesellschaftung (socialization), only shortly discussed in the 1990s, as a way in which to understand the way in which agency on the part of patient families compensated for the absence of formal state regulations regarding such admissions. The term nicely captures such routine forms of compensation by East German society in areas where the state abdicated its responsibility—as was the case in the early GDR when it came to forced psychiatric hospitalizations.

As the French Revolution lurched toward the Terror in the early 1790s, the reaction of the German educated public shifted from qualified approval to horrified condemnation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few German intellectuals who defied the trend. In the spring of 1793, at age thirty-one, Fichte denounced the governments of Europe for their reliance on secrecy and censorship and appealed for unconditional freedom of public expression. It was a fitting irony that this brief but impassioned Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit had to appear anonymously, with its place of publication given as “Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness.”

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.