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 This article, based on unpublished and published documents from central and local Nazi and state institutions, asks how the Nazis choreographed these celebrations at home and abroad and how they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.

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.

Hitler's takeover of power in January 1933 created a new and dangerous situation for German Jewry. Nazi policy developed gradually, but before the spring of 1933 was well advanced there could be little doubt that serious injury was intended toward the Jewish community. The “wildcat” anti-Semitic actions of undisciplined SA men were followed by the national boycott of Jewish businesses conducted on April 1. Legislative and administrative measures, preceded and accompanied by “unofficial” and “illegal” actions tending in the same direction, began the process that drove Jews from public employment, from medicine, law, and teaching, from cultural, political, and journalistic pursuits, and that severely hampered their economic activity in any form. Long before any sane observer could have glimpsed the outlines of the “final solution,” the leaders of the German Jewish community were faced with a situation demanding the utmost of their political and organizational talents. As a leading Jewish participant put it, the situation provided a classic case of Toynbee's “challenge” and “response.” To one German Jewish leader, Georg Kareski, it was a great and positive political opportunity.

On February 10, 1831, word reached Vienna that revolution had broken out in central Italy, first in the Duchies of Modena and Parma, then in the Legations, the northern provinces of the Papal State. The news was shortly followed by appeals from the threatened Italian princes for Austrian military intervention, and for Metternich, there could be no doubt as to the proper reply: these revolts were not merely another blow at the tottering conservative order, already hard hit by the July Revolution and its aftermath, but a “question of life and death” for the Habsburg Empire itself. At the Congress of Vienna, Metternich had established Austrian predominance in Italy as a fundamental component of her international position, vital for her status as a great power. Revolution in central Italy, if allowed to go unchecked, would end that predominance, for it would surely spread throughout the peninsula, to create in the end a united and independent Italian state.

In 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing:

It is now generally accepted that prior to the outbreak of the First World War German Social Democracy did not, as a rule, count foreign policy among its more central concerns. It is often further assumed that the right wing of the prewar German labor movement was still less interested in foreign policy problems than were left-wing or centrist party spokesmen. This assumption requires qualification, for the work of East German historians and others has shown that social imperialist thought had made heavy inroads into the revisionist wing of prewar Social Democracy. In fact, revisionists and reformists from Vollmar onwards frequently manifested a deep and enduring concern with the problems of Germany's position in the world. Yet there remains in the person of Eduard Bernstein—in many ways the father of revisionism and certainly its intellectual leader and chief publicist—one prominent revisionist whose pre-1914 foreign policy position continues to defy satisfactory categorization and generalization.

The 1970s were an interesting and significant decade for the historiography of contemporary Austria. Among Austrian scholars, the tradition of Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung, a reflection of the political and bureaucratic system of Proporz which reigned in the 1950s and 1960s, began to break down. With the triumph of Social Democracy under Bruno Kreisky, fewer historians—especially those of the “left”—were willing to continue sharing in the orderly division of responsibility for the recent past. Moreover, some of the controversy aroused in Germany by Fritz Fischer's work began to invigorate Austrian historical studies. Both in Austria and abroad, historians became less inclined to treat Austria as a unique case, and increasingly interested in the Alpine state as a study in the general development of contemporary central Europe. The publication of Norbert Schausberger's Der Griff nach Österreich in early 1978—the fortieth anniversary of the Anschluss—marked in some respects a milestone in this direction; it provides the opportunity to review a sampling of the more interesting recent literature, and to reflect, as well, on some general problems of conceptualizing contemporary Austrian history.

At the end of World War II, vast quantities of German documents had fallen into the hands of the Allies either during hostilities or in the immediately following weeks. Something will be said near the end of this report about the archives captured or seized by the Soviet Union; the emphasis here will be on those that came into the possession of the Western Allies. The United States and Great Britain made agreements for joint control and exploitation, of which the most important was the Bissell-Sinclair agreement named for the intelligence chiefs who signed it. The German naval, foreign office, and chancellery archives were to be physically located in England, while the military, Nazi Party, and related files were to come to the United States. Each of the two countries was to be represented at the site of the other's holdings, have access to the files, and play a role in decisions about their fate. The bulk of those German records that came to the United States were deposited in a section of a World War I torpedo factory in Alexandria, Virginia, which had been made into the temporary holding center for the World War II records of the American army and American theater commands. In accordance with the admonition to turn swords into plowshares, the building is now an artists' boutique.

Until very recently, almost no serious research into the history of feminism and female emancipation in modern Germany has been published. This neglect is indeed far deeper than that from which women's history in Britain, France, or the United States has suffered. In some measure, it is connected with the reasons for the general neglect of social history in modern Germany—the concern of German historians with questions of political power, foreign policy, and intellectual development, the perversion of historical studies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the dominance in West German historiography of a close professional elite whose intellectual roots went back to the period before 1933. This situation is now changing, and there is growing interest in both West and East Germany in women's role in the German past. Yet, so far at any rate, this interest has not inspired in Germany any major work of research or synthesis. Even more surprising is the fact that the numerous recent American discussions of women and modernization in Europe almost entirely fail to discuss Germany, confining themselves instead to taking examples from Britain and France. In view of the centrality of the German model to more general discussions such as that in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, it seems astonishing that so little has been done to investigate the German dimension of women's history.

This article discusses the problem of why there was a constant demand for ennoblement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe, even though those who aspired to it had little or no prospect of integration into the established feudal nobility. Nobility was first and foremost an ideological concept closely connected to power and rule. The Holy Roman emperors ennobled persons who exercised power precisely because, in the premodern social order, the exercise of power was a prerogative of the nobility. However, the newly ennobled had only their title in common with the old aristocratic families and rarely attained the other privileges enjoyed by these families. For this reason, the emperors’ practice of ennoblement gradually reshaped the nobility as a whole and simultaneously the ideological notion of nobility. Certainly, ennoblement still served a strategic purpose in the context of social advancement. Particularly for civil servants and military officers, it was the most effective means of preserving their newly acquired status for their descendants and possibly establishing their families in a new bureaucratic and military hereditary elite, which in some places coexisted with the old aristocracy. The central element of the new ideological concept was the notion of the nobility as a hereditary ruling class, both qualified for and entitled to the exercise of power on account of inherited superiority.

Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of a unified Germany, was an active participant in the Anglo-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. Even though Germany had no direct interests there and was never involved on the ground during the two decades of his chancellorship, Bismarck invested considerable resources in working to shape the course of events in that part of the world, stoking the flames of conflict whenever it suited the dictates of Realpolitik. Over a twenty-year period, he actively pursued a consistent strategy that focused on tying down Russian troops in the remote Asian steppes, i.e., as far away from Central Europe as possible. At the same time, he manipulated Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia to achieve various foreign policy goals that would further German interests. This article explores in detail all of these objectives, as well as their interrelationship. In particular, it unravels the perplexing mystery of how Bismarck was able to influence the politics of Central Asia from his distant headquarters in Berlin.

On January 21, 1727, several communes in the Nordbrookmerland region of East Frisia, a small principality located on the North Sea coast of Germany and hard by the Dutch border, were granted what amounted to immunity from prosecution for acts of rebellion. How and why this happened is a story that has a great deal to tell about the influence ordinary people could exert, through petitioning, on the practice of state power in early modern Europe. In the months and years before 1727, the prince of East Frisia, Georg Albrecht, had become embroiled in an increasingly hostile confrontation with the Estates of his province for control over the administration of taxes in the land. In their efforts to gain the upper hand, both the prince and the Estates had tried to forge alliances among the rural population and mobilized these networks against each other. The Nordbrookmerlanders tended to ally with the prince, but felt increasingly isolated and endangered. Throughout the autumn of 1726, they had been petitioning the chancellor, Enno R. Brenneysen, for protection against attacks perpetrated by the Estates' allies on their “wives and children, houses and farms.” In light of the chancellor's inability to preserve them from further destruction, the village elders asked that they be allowed to obey the Estates' commands until order was restored. Doing this, they pointed out, would force them to commit several “rebellious” acts, such as signing manifestos, supplying recruits for the rebels' militia, and paying an extraordinary war tax that had been levied by the Estates, the so-called Wochengeld.