Rare is the book that helps to shift the paradigm upon which an entire field rests. Such a book is Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Building on insights and critical approaches that have been emerging and developing for the last twenty to thirty years, Judson offers a fresh framework—a new scaffolding for interpreting the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, especially since the early eighteenth century.

Radical regimes revolutionize their holidays. Like the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, who designed festival cultures intended to create revolutionary subjects, National Socialists manipulated popular celebration to build a “racially pure” fascist society. Christmas, long considered the “most German” of German holidays, was a compelling if challenging vehicle for the constitution of National Socialist identity. The remade “people's Christmas” (Volksweihnachten) celebrated the arrival of a savior, embodied in the twinned forms of the Führer and the Son of God, who promised national resurrection rooted in the primeval Germanic forest and the “blood and soil” of the authentic Volk. Reinvented domestic rituals, brought to life by the “German mother” in the family home, embedded this revamped Christmas myth in intimate moments of domestic celebration. An examination of “people's Christmas” across this spectrum of public and private celebration offers a revealing case study of National Socialist political culture in action. It illuminates the ways Germans became Nazis through participation both in official festivities and the practices of everyday life and underscores the complexity of the relationship between popular celebration, political culture, and identity production in the “Third Reich.”

Within months of its publication in January 1929 Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues) was the world's best-selling book. It provoked a feverish controversy between those who claimed that it was an accurate representation of the war experience of 1914–18, portraying the utter futility of war, and those who denounced it as propaganda and an irreverent commercial exploitation of the Great War. Ironically, despite the intended focus of this heated debate, both the novel and the response which it elicited were more an emotional expression of postwar disillusionment and distress than a contribution to the understanding of the actual war experience.

Recalling the bleak landscape of German higher education in the aftermath of World War I, Peter Gay described the “republican political scientists” of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, a school for political studies established in Berlin in October 1920, as “directly, deliberately—I am tempted to say defiantly—involved in the political life of the Republic…”1 Karl Dietrich Bracher was no less emphatic in pointing to the Hochschule für Politik as the only institution of its day to appreciate the significance of the multi-party system as the driving force in modern political life.2 Led for nearly thirteen years by its founder and only president, the liberal political publicist, Ernst Jäckh, the Hochschule launched innovative programs in civic education and public service training designed to meet the educational needs of an emerging democracy. The Hochschule was radical in its mode of operation, holding evening classes for men and women from all vocations and educational backgrounds, including those lacking the Abitur typically required for admission to graduate and professional schools. Jäckh and his three directors of studies, Theodor Heuss (1920-1925), Hans Simons (1925-1930), and Arnold Wolfers (1930-1933), recruited what Gay described as a “first rate” standing faculty; developed a graduated, state-certified diploma program, and established specialized schools and seminars for economists, social workers, diplomat trainees, trade union officials, journalists, and teachers.3 They also established the Hochschule as a major center for international intellectual exchange, attracting the attention of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which came to view the school as a partner in the Endowment's efforts to promote European rapprochement, and of the Rockefeller Foundation, which recruited Hochschule faculty to contribute dozens of articles to the first (1934) edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and supported the school's research and publication efforts in political science, a field not then recognized as a distinct academic discipline at any German university.4 For Peter Gay, the contribution of the Hochschule to the spirit of Weimar lay primarily in the public engagement of its leadership and faculty. Their determination to “participate in the shaping of policy” “through deliberately cultivated ties to high government officials[,]” set the Hochschule apart from the Institute for Social Research (“a group of powerful intellects,” but perhaps not “a group of powerful intellectuals”).5 Their orientation was decidedly cosmopolitan—committed to the promotion of German recovery through international intellectual cooperation and the development of a scientifically based program of political studies.

Historians who look at the stark contrast between the spectacular successes of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany and their horrific end in the Holocaust only a few decades later continue to argue about the relative success or failure of Jewish integration into German society. Were Germany's 600, 000 Jews — only 1 percent of the population — fully integrated or not? Did they have non-Jewish friends or not? Were they accepted or were they strangers in their own land?

Of all the regions of Central Europe, the Rhineland was the one most affected by the French Revolution. The area on the left bank of the Rhine belonged for almost two full decades to the First French Republic and the Napoleonic Empire; parts of the right bank were, for a shorter period, under the rule of the Napoleonic satellite state, the Grand Duchy of Berg. In studying these unusual circumstances, historians have sometimes focused on short-term political implications, asking how the Rhenish population of the 1790s responded to the Jacobin regime. They have also studied the long-term social and economic effects of the revolutionary legislation and the secularization of church lands.

Although it seems ages ago, it was only in October 1989 that a group of historians, who teach at North American universities, gathered for a conference on postmodern challenges to German History. The symposium was meant to reflect on the changing tempers of the Germans and their (re)appropriations of the German past and on the temperament of those who make German history their living on this side of the Atlantic. What appeared to be a good idea back then, proves to be an even better one after the events of November 1989. German history is being remade and, with it, interpreters as well as their interpretations on both sides of the Atlantic. The call for the conference was a testament to the fact that tremors of this impending earthquake could be felt for some time, although none of the conference participants had any particular foresight into the unfolding events. Already then it seemed that the past had begun to change much faster than historians could remake the written record. History had come unstuck from all sorts of framing devices that historians had devised in order to nail it down.

Since 1945 and the worldwide revelation of the horrible brutalities culminating in mass murder perpetrated against Europe's Jews and other groups in Nazi camps and by the mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Heinrich Himmler's SS, there has been considerable contention regarding the extent to which the German people knew about these crimes while they were being committed. The various responses given to this question, and their implications, have significantly influenced historical interpretations of Nazism and, in turn, popular attitudes among foreigners toward postwar Germans. Although doubtless a definitive answer will never be possible, it is therefore all the more important that the question of general German knowledge and hence at least passive complicity in Hitler's crimes be posed precisely and that all of the surviving documentary evidence bearing upon it be brought to light. A recently uncovered report in the voluminous Records of the Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police offers both an opportunity to redefine the issue and perhaps a partial solution to it.

On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial authority over the young National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP). There were at this point in the party's history some twenty-five local groups of the NSDAP scattered throughout Germany, but the party's base, its nerve center, and its strength lay in the Munich group. This parent cell from which so much was to develop should certainly be of interest to the historian and to the sociologist and political scientist as well. Yet little has been done in the way of a careful analysis of the membership of that group.

On the evening of January 9, 1928, twelve of the most prominent men of German heavy industry, attired in tuxedos, gathered at the Villa Hügel, the Krupp family's grandiose palace outside Essen, for the first meeting of the most mystery-shrouded industrial organization of the Weimar Republic: the Ruhrlade. The man responsible for its formation was Paul Reusch, managing director since 1908 of the coal, steel, and manufacturing combine Gutehoffnungshütte, and a respected figure in German industrial circles. After the First World War and the revolution, Reusch had been instrumental in organizing the Essener Montagsgesellschaft, an informal group of Ruhr industrialists which met in Essen once a month to consider matters of common interest. At the outset, the membership of the Montagsgesellschaft was small, but its admissions policy was liberal, so that within a few years it numbered forty-five. This proved too large a body for the conduct of confidential affairs, and after the group's meetings had been interrupted by the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, Reusch and its other leaders decided not to revive it. Reusch continued, however, to feel a need for an informal, compact organization of the leading men of German heavy industry. In the fall of 1927 he drafted a charter for such a group, using as his model the statute of a small, highly selective prewar organization of Magdeburg industrialists, the Lade, whose name, the German word for chest or similar repository, apparently signified a commitment to secrecy.

Why another article about the “new woman” in Weimar Germany, which for at least twenty-five years has been a favorite topic of historical scholarship in various disciplines? Earlier studies in history, art history, and German and Gender Studies unmasked the “new woman” as a media construction unrelated to the life-world of women after World War I, and newer studies emphasize the liberating tendencies, especially for younger women in Weimar Germany. Broadening these perspectives, I will argue that the concept of the “new woman” and its specific temporal structure can be seen further as a paradigm case for Weimar political and intellectual debates in general. “New women” were conceptualized as anticipations of the future and thus need to be situated and understood in front of the broader horizon of expectation, in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, of Weimar Germany. Because the realm of politics is constituted by expectations of the future, of what will happen and of what may be done, an analysis of the “new woman” and concurring anticipations of the future can, in turn, elucidate the structure and dynamics of political discourse in Weimar Germany.

I recall a remarkable statement made by Hitler to some visitors, of whom I was one, at Obersalzburg in 1932. The death sentence had just been pronounced on the murderers at Potempa, and the unforgotten declaration of solidarity with the murderers made by the leader of the Party had just become publicly known. A nation—so ran the declaration—may overlook and forget anything in so disturbed a time as the present, if it happens in an open conflict between holders of opposed views. If the Storm Troopers were given a free hand, if it came to street fighting and twenty to thirty thousand Germans lost their lives, the nation would be able to recover from that. The wound would heal. It would be like fighting in the field. But a miscarriage of justice, a death sentence pronounced after cool deliberation, and pronounced and carried out against the people's unerring sense of justice, an execution of men who had acted in national passion, like those who had been sentenced at Potempa as common murderers —that would never be forgotten. —Hermann Rauschning

From my point of view it is certain that the whole affair [Potempa] must be regarded less as a political but much more as a criminal one, even taking as a basis the yardstick that any fighter for the movement takes in view of the events of that time. —The Kreisleiter of the NSDAP in Rosenberg, Upper Silesia

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century many of the territories and cities in Central Europe were the scene of witchcraft trials. As recent research shows, it was especially in the years around 1590, 1610, and 1630, and again in the 1650s, that many parts of Germany were overwhelmed by what might be called a tidal wave of witch-hunting, with thousands upon thousands of victims: women mostly, yet also men and children. So far, despite a large number of detailed studies, there is no convincing explanation of why witch-hunting should have played such a prominent role in Germany from the 1590s to the 1650s.

Arising from the French revolutionary upheaval and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, nineteenth-century Baden, as a political and administrative structure joined to a social body, had few continuities with an earlier past. Though a Napoleonic progeny, its successful transition to modern statehood started as an act of dynastic and bureaucratic will, imposed upon a recalcitrant or disinterested population. Remarkably, the new creation struck roots within its inhabitants which are still evident today. Beyond doubt the Zähringen monarch and the grand duchy's officialdom were estranged from large segments of the population at midcentury, as the revolutionary events of 1848–49 show. Nonetheless, a sense of Badenese citizenship and patriotism had become widely institutionalized by 1848.

When World War II finally came to an end, the Allied forces were primed to face a world of hunger. Since the earliest days of the conflict, experts throughout Europe and Asia had been predicting that the unfathomable scale of the war would result in a massive and permanent restructuring of the global food economy. Military victory itself was cast as inextricably intertwined with control over foodstuffs. In 1940, the British nutritionist and future Director-General of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd-Orr, had warned that “we are only at the beginning of what looks like a long grim struggle, in which food may be, as it was in the last war, the decisive factor for victory.” Even more ominously, such experts foresaw the end of the war as ushering in a world defined less by peace and more by hunger. Australian economist and humanitarian Frank Lidgett McDougall axiomatically declared that “the exigencies of war and of the relief period will in the next few years render almost all men everywhere in the world highly food-conscious.” The recognition of the global ramifications of hunger meant that, as Nick Cullather put it in his recent article on the history of the calorie, “the construction of a postwar international order began with food.”

I am grateful to Volker Berghahn for the chance to clarify our differences as well as for the characteristic civility of his critique. In what follows, I will 1) take issue with his view of German historiography; 2) rebut his charge that the recent scholarship has left us with a “fragmented,” ultimately undecipherable picture of the Kaiserreich; and 3) explain why I think my own argument in Practicing Democracy, which he agrees takes seriously the oppressive features of German society, is more persuasive than his picture of “deterioration to the point of impasse and ungovernability.”

In “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” in the issue of December 1969, Sally Marks argued that the reparation issue was misunderstood and deserved new thought. I agree, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Miss Marks believes that the German hardship was exaggerated. I suggest that the destrucive effect of reparations has never been appreciated. Not even the Germans, however much they complained, realized just how bad reparations were.

The returns of a tax called the common penny (gemeiner Pfennig) survive in considerable number, and when they are fully exploited they will help to make pre-Reformation Germany much more intimately known than ever before. Registers of this levy are likely to turn up in archives where they might not be expected. It is important, as a result, to know how to recognize and use these materials, most of which still remain to be identified. I will briefly review the common penny and its collection, and then I will demonstrate its potential as a resource for the study of social and demographic history.