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.

By 1850, a major shift in how Europeans participated in the Christian religion was well underway. On Sundays, most members of a church's or chapel's congregation were women. Women received communion more assiduously than their male counterparts. Catholic religious congregations for women were founded and joined at rates well above those for men. In Protestant lands, women became deaconesses. From Italy to Scotland, women contributed greatly to churches' social and charitable missions through their active involvement in voluntary associations and parish committees. Moreover, mothers now had the primary obligation to nourish religious sentiments in the home. Even the representation of angels had changed, the powerful, free masculine figure replaced by one who was restrained, domesticated, and feminine.

As the sovereign of a newly fashioned kingdom facing uncertain prospects, King Ludwig I of Bavaria launched a sprawling building program to transform his capital city, Munich. Ludwig believed that the patronage of art and architecture would enhance his political authority and foster a sense of historical legitimacy in his kingdom. He regarded this building program as a way of expressing and impressing on the public his own views of politics, culture, and history, but the associated financial burden became a source of public discontent, a focal point for political opposition, and, ultimately, a factor in Ludwig's later abdication. Public sentiment and scholarly opinion toward Ludwig nevertheless underwent a broad rehabilitation after his reign. Many soon came to view Ludwig's projects as expressions of the monarch's cultural sophistication and generosity, rather than as instruments of political and ideological calculation.

Many Germans defended local time well beyond 1893, when Germany adopted a time standard bearing on the life of the entire nation. Yet the defining feature of Germany's temporal landscape was its multilayered nature, with North and South adopting different temporal regimes and undergoing different experiences. Focusing on the spread of (railway-induced) standard time and the responses it provoked, this article offers an investigation of German time culture in the nineteenth century. Out of curiosity and because their lives depended on it, Germans took an interest in obtaining the right time from the frequently contradictory horological landscapes they inhabited. Yet their shared curiosity did not breed conformity. The inspectors of the station clocks concerned with accuracy and synchronicity; the townsfolk in southern Germany who fast-forwarded their favorite public clock in order to get to the station in time; the Prussian scientists and villagers who opposed railway time becoming public time—they all, in their own way, contributed to putting time back in its place.

Among the international community of scholars, journalists, and laymen who share an interest in the history of Nazi Germany, one of the most frequently discussed and persistently controversial subjects of that era is the Waffen SS. Attempts to define what the Waffen SS was lead invariably to questions about the extent to which the Waffen SS was or was not an integral part of the overall SS organization and the degree to which it was or was not involved in the criminal acts attributed to the Schutzstaffel.

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.

From 1934 until 1945, the Nazi regime celebrated the anniversary of January 30, 1933, the day of Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor. This article, based on unpublished and published documents from central and local Nazi and state institutions, asks how the Nazis choreographed these celebrations at home and abroad and how they fit into broader Nazi conceptualizations of history. Stage-managed celebrations etched January 30 into the historical consciousness of Germans as beginning of the Third Reich and were a crucial step toward the realization of the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), although the Nazi seizure of power was a process and cannot be pinpointed to a single date. Ambivalence characterized the festivities, reflecting the fact that the Nazis saw their coming to power as both revolutionary and restorative of the natural flow of German history. In the Nazi imaginary, this day was a conjuncture in history, separating the Nazi struggle for power from their triumphant mission to “make Germany great again” and create a racial utopia.

Does homecoming epitomize Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski's last two films, Ida (2013) and Cold War (Zimna wojna, 2018)? Considering the box office, the awards won, and the film critics’ response, it seems that the transition from documentaries to feature films meant a turn to Polish history and identity for the director. (Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw but has spent most of his life abroad after his parents left Poland in the wake of the anti-Zionist campaign of March 1968, while he was still a teenager.) As Jerry White put it, analyzing Cold War in the light of Pawlikowski's earlier career as a British filmmaker interested in non-Polish themes, his last two films have put “Polish cinema back into global spotlight.” The question arises whether Pawlikowski's recent films gained worldwide success—in fact, they were more successful abroad than in Poland itself—because of the vision of Poland they convey, rather than a “Polish vision” of postwar European history and identity. This article examines several the major themes of Pawlikowski's films and compares them with the work of other acclaimed Polish directors, especially one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's later films, The Double Life of Véronique (La double vie de Véronique, 1991).

In 1969, the newly elected coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) in West Germany announced plans to reform Paragraph 218, the law that regulated women's access to abortion. This announcement prompted a public debate in West Germany on the state's obligation to protect unborn life—a debate that continues today in reunified Germany. Through an analysis of key events in that debate between 1969 and 1989, this article makes a twofold argument. First it argues that despite West Germany's increasingly secular orientation, the Catholic Church exercised significant political influence with respect to abortion policy throughout the history of the Federal Republic. Second, it argues that the West German Church's participation in these debates exposed deep rifts within the Catholic community, which, in turn, contributed to the formation of a smaller, more activist, and conservative Church. This smaller Church has achieved a remarkable degree of political success in reunified Germany by mobilizing its conservative core constituency, embracing new arguments, and pursuing issue-specific alliances.

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.

In the Third Reich a high percentage of the civil servants in the cadres of functionaries of the National Socialist Party on the local and district levels were teachers. It is thus not surprising that some historians who studied the elementary school teaching profession in the Weimar Republic began their research with assumptions about the “ideological affinities” of teachers to fascism and discussed “the specific predispositions that made it easy for them to identify with National Socialism.” The German Teachers' Association, one scholar wrote, “proved to be more a precursor than an opponent of fascism.” At its national congress in May 1932, another historian related, the representatives of the chapters voted for a policy which, in effect, abandoned the democratic republic and “indirectly helped those political forces that would create a dictatorship in Germany within a year.” In 1932 and 1933, on the other hand, recruiters for the National Socialist Teachers’ League often complained about “hard and difficult soil” and “unpenetrable” regions.

Historians have examined the Herero genocide in German South West Africa extensively. The role of the Prusso-German general staff has received only rudimentary treatment, however. The following study focuses on the actions of this institution and its chief. Evidence indicates that initially and with varying degrees of success the general staff was heavily involved in German military actions. After the Battle of Waterberg, however, the local military commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, fought his own war. Meanwhile, the general staff gravitated toward a different role: shielding Trotha from criticism emanating from German civilian leaders and the public. The impulse to protect sprang not only from a harmony of views about the annihilation of the Herero, but also from an urge to preserve the prestige of the German military after unexpected losses at the hands of “African savages.” In fact, the Prusso-German general staff was complicit in, if not partly responsible for, the conduct of genocidal warfare in GSWA.

Of all the officers in the German High Command (OHL) during the First World War none played a more active political role than Colonel Max Bauer. Colonel Bauer's papers, which are preserved in the federal archives in Koblenz, contain numerous memoranda on a wide range of topics, which make it possible to present a coherent picture of his views. This paper will analyze Bauer's political thinking during the First World War, but it will not deal with the more complex questions of his political role and influence.