In May 1917 twenty-seven residents of Landau (Württemberg) sent a long petition to the German Reichstag. The group, which included doctors, pastors, teachers, and industrialists, demanded that the state put an end to the “immoral” behavior of women who had romantic relationships with foreign prisoners of war. The petition included more than one hundred examples of such affairs, gleaned from newspapers, court records, and eyewitness accounts. The petitioners lamented the “sinking morality” of the countryside and the damaged reputation of German women. They also had more immediate concerns. These affairs were threatening the happiness of families, “complicating” the feeding of the nation, weakening the strength of the people, and heightening the fear of espionage. The petitioners went on to warn the Reichstag deputies that “good German citizens are full of anger at such events,” and that the common person's “sense of sacrifice” was dwindling now, in the third year of the war.

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 manifestly occasioned fundamental adjustments in European strategic considerations. While few powers had given serious thought to Spain's diplomatic, military, or even geographical importance, the rising produced numerous useful opportunities for Germany. It created a potential friend on France's southern frontier, drew the senior, more aggressive dictator, Benito Mussolini, closer to the more recently arrived Adolf Hitler, threatened Great Britain's control of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and redirected the focus of international diplomacy. In order to obtain a position of greater influence within the unstable vector of forces created by the new situation the two dictators had dispatched socalled volunteer military and air formations in support of the rising. While these troops and their equipment were of fundamental value to the Nationalists, their presence forced the participating military high commands to reevaluate carefully their positions and intentions.

In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”

In 1962, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faced an uncertain future. The governing party within the Federal Republic of Germany since the state's founding in 1949 (along with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, known collectively as the CDU/CSU or Union), the CDU had endured a bruising election campaign through the summer of 1961. The combination of a dynamic young Social Democratic challenger, Willy Brandt, and the building of the Berlin Wall had exposed frustration with the leadership style of octogenarian Chancellor and CDU Chair Konrad Adenauer, and cost the Union its absolute majority in the Bundestag. Electoral disappointment was followed by protracted coalition negotiations with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which nearly doubled its vote totals by promising voters a coalition “with the Union but without Adenauer.” The coalition negotiations dragged on well into late autumn and exposed internal divisions. Adenauer, the only chancellor the Federal Republic had ever known, had been forced to agree to retire before 1965 to allow his successor to prepare for the next campaign.

This article traces the rise of new ideas about energy and growth in West Germany between 1973 and 1986. It shows how new economic expertise emerged in response to the oil shocks, and looks at how West Germany could, paradoxically, sustain growth in a world of seemingly exhausted and insecure energy sources. These experts reconceptualized the economy to imagine a future where “decoupling”—reducing energy consumption while expanding Gross Domestic Production—was possible. They found support in the Social Democratic Party, which, in using their ideas to overcome an internal rift precipitated by the rise of the Green movement in the 1970s, helped make these new ideas mainstream. Investigating this new energy paradigm helps us understand why Germany began to diverge from other large, industrialized states in the 1980s, as it increasingly focused on energy conservation rather than on expanding its energy supply.

By all accounts, the Austrians of the late twentieth century live in a stable Western European country with a secure sense of self. The concept of Austrian nationhood finds solid support in the country's population, which consistently displays stronger signs of national pride than its German neighbors. When the Austrian republic was reestablished from the ruins of the Third Reich in 1945, however, historical tradition did not inherently favor the development of a distinctly Austrian national consciousness. Austrians had commonly placed their Austrian identity into a wider German context, not least of all with regard to historical tradition. Thus, the contribution of historical images to the development of an Austrian national identity in the postwar era raises important questions about the interrelationship of history and society.

Over the past few decades, a flood of historical scholarship has been spawned by the groundbreaking works of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and others who have illustrated how a host of traditions were creations invented in the recent past to inform modern identities. The rituals of the British monarchy, the trappings of Scottish Highland culture, and many other traditions were revealed to have anything but ancient origins. Examination of such inventions, Hobsbawm argued, provided, among other things, a means to observe broader historical shifts. The intention of this article is not to illustrate another example of a tradition invented in the recent past. Rather, it seeks to examine how longer-standing traditions have been subject to related processes of reinvention. Some recent work, even if not written to theorize on reinvention, could be read through such a lens. Work in memory studies, for example, has shown how broad notions of national, regional, or local “tradition” could be reshaped based on how and which historical events were remembered. Works on “sites of memory” have similarly shown how conceptions of traditional objects and places can shift due to the fluctuation of memories attached to them. Beyond memory studies, scholars of theological traditions, often confronted with themes of universal truth and intergenerational change, have also produced works that could be viewed through the prism of reinvention. Kurt Schori demonstrates, for example, how the transmission of theological tradition through the written word could lead to submerged reformulation as different generations constructed linguistic meanings according to temporally specific circumstances. While such work could be read through the lens of reinvention, I would argue that more explicit consideration of the dynamics of reinvention is needed both to expand our knowledge of such processes and to develop theoretical models that characterize its diverse occurrences. I would also suggest, as Hobsbawm does with invented traditions, that examination of reinvention provides a means to lay bare symptoms of broader historical shifts.

“The fate of Europe sits on a razor's edge, if war starts now, it will be dreadfully feared. Neutrality will be impossible,” worried Hamburg enlightened merchant and philanthropist Caspar Voght in April 1803. He added, “Should war come, Bremen and Hamburg will be occupied by the French or the Prussians, and the rivers will be blockaded. God give us peace.” His fateful words preceded the French occupation and annexation of northern Germany and the corresponding imperial Continental System, which shattered the north German coastal economy. When he returned to Hamburg in September 1812, Voght shared his impressions in another letter: In what misgivings, with what spirits did I approach the city from Harburg, the once fortunate shores, the towers of the once so prosperous city! I landed. Everything I saw and heard demonstrated the ruin of earlier prosperity, [the city] stripped of its attributes, cloaked in the fog of a threatening future. How my heart bled … The city empty and desolate, benefactors of the poor impoverished, the poor without help, my life's work destroyed.

Some recent trends in the study of National Socialism tend to downplay the significance of antisemitism*—in particular of Christian antisemitism—in producing the Holocaust. Indeed, it would be inaccurate and misleading to present the Christian legacy of hostility toward Judaism and Jews as a sufficient cause for Nazi genocide. Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file—the people who actively carried out the measures against Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation. In his analysis of pre-Nazi forms of German antisemitism, Donald Niewyk concludes that, “The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the ‘new’ antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans”.

More than thirty years ago, Eberhard Kolb commented that the vast wealth of research on the history of the Weimar Republic made it “difficult even for a specialist to give a full account of the relevant literature.” Since then, the flood of studies on Weimar Germany has not waned, and by now it is hard even to keep track of all the review articles meant to cut a swath through this abundance. Yet the prevailing historical image of the era has remained surprisingly stable: most historians have accepted the master narrative of the Weimar Republic as the sharp juxtaposition of “bad” politics and “good” culture, epitomized in the often-used image of “a dance on the edge of a volcano.” Kolb, for example, described “the sharp contrast between the gloomy political and economic conditions … and the unique wealth of artistic and intellectual achievement” as “typical of the Weimar era.” Detlev Peukert, arguably the most innovative scholar of Weimar history, criticized this historical image but, at the same time, declared this dichotomy “an integral feature of the era.” The latest example can be found in the work of Eric D. Weitz, who summarizes the fate of Weimar Germany as “the striving for something new and wonderful encountering absolute evil,” juxtaposing the “sparkling brilliance” of modernist masters like Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Bruno Taut with “the plain hatred of democracy” of Weimar's right-wing extremists. This contrasting of politics and culture is a narrative device that only makes sense, however, from our contemporary vantage point of Western liberal democracy and from our understanding of progressive art. This retrospective interpretation is not in itself the problem—after all, historians can never really escape their own historical contexts. It becomes problematic, however, when it is treated not as an interpretation but as historical fact. Weimar Germans certainly would not have shared this narrative wholeheartedly: many would not have subscribed to the depiction of their time as a never-ending parade of political breakdowns and economic disasters. Even more would have rejected the view of the Berlin-based avant-garde as a sign of progressive achievement—if they had ever had the chance to see its representative works in the first place. The sharp distinction between “bad” Weimar politics and “good” Weimar culture not only fails to do justice to the way many of these Germans perceived their time but also keeps us from understanding how closely intertwined these two spheres were in the Weimar Republic. Thus, rather than giving an overview of the latest additions to Weimar historiography, this review essay looks at how recent publications have questioned—or conformed to—this dominant narrative.

During the last generation the writing of social history has taken an ironic turn. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, it literally exploded across the scholarly landscape as the most dynamic and innovative form of historiography. Many competing conceptions including the French Annales school, the American quantitative social science history (QUASSH), the British Marxist history of society, and the emerging German Gesellschaftsgeschichte combined to overthrow the Rankean paradigm. These diverse programs, nevertheless, showed broad agreement in exploring the mute masses, expanding the scope of inquiry to new topics such as family and education, seeking a theoretical orientation, experimenting with fresh methods such as quantification or oral history, and supporting some form of progressive politics. This agenda was even reflected in T-shirt slogans such as “history from the bottom up,” showing a fat behind, or “bottoms-up history,” depicting raised beer steins. For many of the participants, there was an exciting sense of fresh departures and of camaraderie in an effort at once intellectually daring and politically committed.

The experiences and catastrophes of the second World War fundamentally affected European political attitudes. Particularly intensive was the reconsideration of fundamental problems that went on in the non-communist resistance groups in the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe. What were their political plans? Research on the resistance movements is still in its early stages; however, there is already general agreement that the resistance movements did not fight for a return to prewar conditions, but for a new European society. In particular, as several writers have pointed out, the goal of a democratic federation of all European nations appears repeatedly in the newspapers and proclamations of the Resistance. To describe the ideas of the Resistance on European federation requires a thorough study of the documentary material on the various European resistance movements, with particular attention to those texts concerned with the future relationships of the European states; the following pages are a first report of the findings of such a study.

This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.

In the months and years following ratification of the Versailles Treaty, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland became a focal point of German nationalist propaganda. The campaign against the so-called “black shame on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), a racist slogan referring to the stationing of soldiers from northern Africa, Senegal, and Madagascar in the French zone of occupation, was one of the ugliest outgrowths of German opposition to the peace treaty. Support for the movement against France's African troops was disquietingly broad. An interpellation to the Reich government of May 1920 launched by the Majority Social Democrats (SPD) and endorsed by all parties in the national assembly except the Independent Socialists (USPD) is illustrative of the racist fears motivating “black horror” protests: “Even after the armistice, the French and Belgians continue to use colored troops in the occupied territories. … For German women and children, men and boys, these savages pose a horrifying danger. Their honor, health and life, purity and innocence are being destroyed. … This situation is disgraceful, humiliating, and insufferable!”

In 1913 the bourgeois youth movement in Germany fell under the influence of a radical minority who called for complete emancipation from adult control. The two most influential youth movement publications of that year joined the language of countercultural rebellion with unconventional discussions of adolescent sexuality. Hans Blüher's book The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon argued that the adolescent boys and young adult male leaders of Wandervogel groups were bound together by homoerotic attraction and that these male leagues were of great benefit to the German nation. Der Anfang, a monthly journal written by adolescents and university students only tangentially related to the Wandervögel, proclaimed that Germany's young people were perfectly capable of self-education in all matters, including sexuality. The countercultural trend of 1913 culminated in the Hoher Meissner festival in mid-October.

Despite the wealth of published studies on individual German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities of the early modern era, it is remarkable how rare have been the attempts to synthesize the material and reach an overall assessment of the impact of the Thirty Years' War on Central European Jewish life. This gaping lacuna was noted some years ago by S. W. Baron, whose own general discussion of this subject is virtually unique. Immensely erudite, Baron's piece not only reveals the vast scope of the relevant material but tentatively suggests that the great European conflict was a key formative episode in the development of German Jewry, reversing earlier trends and preparing the way for the “Court Jews” of the later seventeenth century. This it undoubtedly was. Even so, Baron's evaluation is open to criticism on several counts. In particular, he fails to bring out, or make clear, just how crucial and how favorable a phase the Thirty Years' War was for the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, while some effort is made in his essay to identify the key shifts of the period, such as an alleged drift of Jews from the countryside to the towns, it is arguable that this is not handled very convincingly or with sufficient precision. In any case, it is evident that a fuller, more systematic explanation is needed if we are to account for the singular fact that during this period of almost unparalleled disruption, turmoil, and suffering Christendom's perennial scapegoat fared considerably better than most of the rest of German society.

Armed with high-powered computers able to shoot out statistical tables faster than speeding bullets, American social scientists have, over the past few decades, carried on a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and perhaps more often than not the American way. Whereas almost no social malady, institution, theory, or type of human behavior has escaped their attack, the statistical warriors have been more successful in shooting holes through traditional arguments and preconceptions, and sometimes through each other, than they have been in erecting defensible new theories which explain the complexities of human behavior. The scholarly war against crime has proved no exception. After countless studies we still do not know very much about what causes crime, and we certainly have done little to help control it. To provide just one supporting example: there were fewer homicides in sum for all the years between 1873 and 1906 in the single city of Berlin than there were in the city of Detroit, Michigan, in the year 1980 alone. This should provide sufficient shock value to demonstrate that the battle for truth and justice will benefit by an understanding of more than just the American way.

Kaspar von Graffenried, the Landvogt or administrator in this polemic from ca. 1617, was a Bernese patrician serving for two years as highest authority in the Swiss subject territory known as the County (Grafschaft) of Baden. He acted as an agent not of the Bernese city-state that had appointed him, but of all eight of the cantons that shared possession of Baden and its surroundings; his tenure fit into a rotation of administrators from the other cantons according to a precisely determined two-year cycle that had been in place since the early fifteenth century. In many respects the Swiss Landvogt of Baden therefore looked far different from the local feudal nobles who had served the Habsburgs as administrators back when William Tell was supposed to have lived—though this evidently contributed nothing to Graffenried's standing with the author of the verses above.