The politics of history and memory culture have recently been the topic of increased discussion again—and this discussion has by no means been cool-headed, but hot, with a high potential for conflict. An argument is ongoing in the public sphere over which (hi)stories are present and visible and which are not, who is being recognized and who is not, as well as what is being forgotten, repressed, or tacitly accepted in this context. Corresponding to this general development, a debate is currently ongoing in the German press that has been dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0,” or “the historians’ debate reloaded.” The controversy was initially sparked by a discussion about the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, his position toward the State of Israel, and his involvement with the BDS movement, before continuing on to a discussion about Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory when it was published in a German translation. Finally, the debates deepened with the controversy surrounding Dirk Moses's polemics concerning an ostensible “German catechism” with regard to Holocaust commemoration.

When I first visited Auschwitz, I visited it as an analyst, a cultural anthropologist accompanying a group of mostly Turkish, Turkish-German, Palestinian, and Palestinian-German youth participating in a federally and locally sponsored program meant to teach them about German history and to address their own antisemitism.1 I was there as an observer who could not help but be dislodged from my professional role and deeply moved by flakes of bone on the ground, and sites of intimate, state-sponsored murder: a shooting wall where guards killed at close range; the collection and smell of the human hair of the murdered a wheelbarrow used to carry human ashes produced after the gas chamber in crematoria. I was moved also by the tears and horror of these same youth, also traumatized by the remains of state-sponsored mass murder. Although the program that led them to Auschwitz was meant to teach them democracy, I wondered about the extent to which actually existing democracy, using its tool of democratization, has the adequate means, humility, or desire to transform itself or to start anew from the position of the mass murdered, the slave, or the noncitizen. What unexpected lessons would it then learn?

“What is going on in Germany?” asked Natalie Zemon Davis after Munich suspended the acclaimed play Vögel (Birds) by Wajdi Mouawad in November 2022. Davis, a renowned historian, had been deeply involved in the play's conception and production only to see it pulled for alleged antisemitism and Holocaust relativization.1 This was not an isolated example.2

This article traces the course of the Elbe River from Czechoslovakia through the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal Republic, where it flows into the North Sea. As the GDR's main water artery, the Elbe's border crossings became a site of security concern for the GDR. Traversing the GDR's border with fellow communist state Czechoslovakia as well as its rival West German state, the river linked the GDR to a larger ecological system as well as transnational sociopolitical dynamics. These connections illuminated the GDR's crucial position in central Europe and beyond. Yet the Elbe also presented challenges for the GDR in terms of controlling information, people, and pollution that streamed into—and out of—the country. The river thus was a precious and contested resource that revealed the communist dictatorship's limited ability to control nature, humans, or interactions between the two. Ultimately, the Elbe's border crossings were a site of transnational and global connection that called into question the GDR's domestic legitimacy and international standing.

Although it lacked a significant domestic market for internationally trafficked drugs, East Germany emerged as an important corridor for narcotics smugglers in the 1970s due to its position between supply countries in Asia and consumer countries in the West. The unique geography of West Berlin created a large market of consumers surrounded by East German territory, forcing traffickers to pass through the GDR border. Efforts by officials in both Germanys and the United States to cooperate on the problem of narcotics trafficking revealed conflicts between the geography of the Cold War—where the GDR border was the front line in the ideological conflict between East and West—and the international drug prohibition system, which sought global interstate collaboration in the name of a “universal international society,” against the common threat of crime. As Cold War tensions declined in the 1980s, border enforcement cooperation between East and West became increasingly viable as both sides reoriented toward the view that Europe had to defend itself from the threats posed by mobilities of those in the global south.

No state has ever been as identified with its borders as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The guest editors’ introduction to this special issue analyzes the development of the historiography of the borders of the GDR, showing how new approaches to the country's history have also impacted scholarship on the everyday history of the border. We argue for approaches that understand the border simultaneously as a site of conflict and cooperation and that situate the border not just alongside its geographical neighbors, but within broader flows of natural resources, pollution, narcotics, migration, and disease. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of border studies, we argue that global approaches can help contextualize the exceptional and encourage scholars to ask new questions about which elements of GDR bordering practices were part of the globally emerging normalcy of border regimes, and which were unique to East Germany. In these ways, this special issue seeks to reveal new aspects of East German history and, in turn, make the GDR more legible within border studies.

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.

In the nineteenth century, caryatids saw an unprecedented renaissance in European architecture. This article explores the cultural history of these female column-statues in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. The focus is on central Europe, and three cities—Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Vienna—play a particularly important role in this exploration. Through a reading of historical, visual, and literary sources, the article probes how these statues came to embody, on both a material and a metaphorical level, the social aspirations and societal rifts that marked the bourgeois age. The nexus, real and imagined, between caryatids and Jews is particularly illustrative here. In tracing antagonistic and largely forgotten discourses, the article seeks to shed light on a larger subject that is still underexplored: the complex entanglement of architecture, religion, and race in the long nineteenth century.

During the early-Cold-War controversy over West German rearmament, the Protestant Church emerged as a center of activism for the right of conscientious objection to military service, departing from decades of precedent. This article uses the dramatic about-face of the Protestant Church to throw new light on how West Germans reimagined democratic politics after Nazism. Building on recent challenges to paradigms of postwar liberalization, it argues that illusory narratives of the Nazi past played a key role in West Germany's transition to democracy. Protestant activists for the right of conscientious objection drew on an imagined legacy of anti-Nazi resistance to reframe the idea of “conscience,” long associated with patriotic loyalties, as a uniquely Protestant contribution to democratic culture. In doing so, they came to identify their church as a pillar of West German democracy, even as they ensconced tendentious accounts of the Nazi past in postwar law and politics.

The private eye Bernie Günther investigates the gruesome deaths of a prominent Berlin businessman's daughter and son-in-law in a house fire. The backdrop is Nazi Germany in the run up to the Berlin Olympics that took place between August 1 and 16, 1936 and that Hitler actively manipulated to present a somewhat whitewashed image of Nazi Germany to the world.

It does not require great powers of observation to note the pervasiveness of Nazi Germany in contemporary U.S. cultural and political discourse. For better or worse, the discursive landscape is saturated with depictions of and references to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Gestapo—an obsession visible everywhere, from the progressive left to the far right, from TV shows to Twitter feeds to video games. The allure of using the Third Reich as a rhetorical weapon may seem obvious enough in a hyperpartisan political climate, but the resonance of that historical period clearly extends well beyond politics. Indeed, National Socialism now functions as an all-purpose conceptual barometer that can be applied to conversations about all sorts of subjects. Over the past few years, scholars have sought to shape such discussions with an unusually heavy outpouring of projects that explore correlations between Nazi Germany and the United States. What they rarely address, however, is why Americans are so prone to invoking the Third Reich as a framework for thinking about life in their own country to begin with. No less important to consider are the implications of how that trend has taken on such a wide-ranging salience and sense of urgency lately. With these questions in mind, Bradley Nichols (History, University of Missouri) convened an interdisciplinary roundtable, composed not only of historians, but also scholars of U.S. politics and culture. He invited Jens-Uwe Guettel (History, Penn State University), Sabine Hake (Germanic Studies, University of Texas), Emanuela Kucik (English and Africana Studies, Muhlenberg College), Alexandra Minna Stern (English, University of California, Los Angeles), and S. Jonathan Wiesen (History, University of Alabama at Birmingham) to share their insights and reflect on the issues at stake.

In May 1906, the Habsburg protectorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced an unprecedented level of labor unrest. The discussions between civil servants and workers that arose from these events, in particular those that occurred during the strike at the government-owned Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, provide a key point of departure from which to explore the character of Habsburg rule in Bosnia. This article examines how late Habsburg imperial rule functioned in Bosnia by analyzing moments of apparent bureaucratic irregularity in order to suggest a different interpretation of Habsburg administrative practice. It argues that in the case of the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, the relationship between subjects of the Habsburg empire and its administrators was characterized by processes of debate and discussion that were in many ways grounded in concerns about fairness. This observation opens up new questions about the broader relationship between the Austro-Hungarian administration and the people it governed.

This article shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany's most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of religion in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the “pure” council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and Bolshevik party rule.

This article explores the historical background of an issue that is central to present-day constitutional and human-rights discourse: the relationship between human dignity and the fight against poverty. It analyzes the role the idea of human dignity played in the reasoning of nineteenth-century German middle-class authors who were professionally engaged in social-reform debates, with a particular focus on debates about mendicancy. In these debates, notions of dignity were pervasive, and they provoked a troubling question: Is poverty a state of impaired dignity, and if yes, in which direction does causality point? Tracing the shifting perceptions from the enlightened belief in the self-perfectibility of man at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the rise of biomedical theories at its end, the article argues that concerns about human dignity gave the commitment to eradicate destitution an important impetus, yet with side effects that highlight the pitfalls of the dignity concept.

This article explores the development of modern refugee camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War by looking at the organization and implementation of child assistance in the camps. The article argues that a state-driven mobilization of relief and rehabilitation was organized to alleviate the plight of refugee children. It points particularly to children's health care and the organization of education as instances that marked a shift in the scope of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary. At first, camps represented a temporary measure to immobilize and control displaced populations. As the war progressed, they became a permanent feature of refugee policy and a microcosm of agendas of state consolidation. Ultimately, the case of child assistance shows that the organization of refugee camps in wartime Austria-Hungary was a fluid and gradual process that meshed technologies of population containment with humanitarian and welfare practices.

The aim of this article is to make clear that, although men largely dominated the institutions of the Holy Roman Empire, beyond these constitutional institutions we can find many examples of women's agency. In particular, women of noble and princely families assumed political roles, both in relation to territories and to the empire as a whole. While it would not be correct to reinterpret the Holy Roman Empire as a “realm of ladies,” it seems clear that the empire, as a communicative context and dynastic network, was constituted with the participation of elite women, and that women were important for the ritual perpetuation of the constitution of the empire. In short, it was not only law and the constitution and the actions of men that held the empire together, but also the actions of women, who helped shape networks and politics just as they influenced the transfer of knowledge and culture.

How did early modern sovereigns establish authority over newly acquired territories? This is the question behind this article which examines the beginning of Austrian rule in the Southern Netherlands after the Peace of Utrecht 1713. Transfers of sovereignty like these marked the end of international conflicts and lead to the change or reinforcement of the social and political order within affected territories. Therefore, their analysis offers new insight into early modern state building. To achieve this, the article first offers an overview of the events before and after the transfer of sovereignty. This is followed by a closer look at the vital role of the relationship between the local church and the new ruler. Finally, a spotlight will be cast on a tax called Pain d'Abbaye, which serves as a example for an empowering interaction that helped to create a stable relationship between the new Lord and his new subjects.

The postwar deconcentration of IG Farben AG shows that the Allied military governments and their German counterparts were anything but united on the extent and form of sovereignty the Federal Republic of Germany should receive. The American plan to divide the corporate enterprise into a large number of individual companies aimed to establish a democratic state independent from the influence of domestic business. By contrast, West German government officials and the business community were convinced that the future sovereignty of the Federal Republic depended on the global competitiveness of large industrial conglomerates. To thwart the American deconcentration plans, they traded off one dimension of sovereignty against the other. Leading members of the West German government accepted delegating the negotiations over the future of IG Farben to business representatives, thereby sharing domestic sovereignty because the delegation promised to maintain a powerful German chemical industry that could support the trade balance of the future West German state. This development contributed to the emergence of a Federal Republic characterized by the close involvement of economic actors in political decision-making. It contained important elements of a post-democratic sovereignty, which is commonly used to describe the development of the late twentieth century.

Divided Germany became one of the focal points for international disputes over sovereignty in the late 1960s and early seventies. In a period that is commonly associated with West German Ostpolitik and the diplomatic recognition of German division, the international community disputed how the sovereignty of “divided nations” should be framed under international law. The German-German battle over the terms of détente unfolded within these politics of sovereignty surrounding conflicts over “national divisions” along Cold War front lines as well as the simultaneous confrontations over postcolonial sovereignty. At the United Nations, the issues of German and Chinese division converged at the height of decolonization when East German concepts of sovereignty and self-determination challenged the UN foundational principle of “one nation, one seat” rooted in ethnic nationality. Eventually, the United Nations accepted a German exceptionalism in admitting both German states as members in 1973 based on historical rather than legal explanations for divided German sovereignty, while conflicts around “divided countries” in Asia remained unresolved. In turn, these clashes over international law transformed older German legal traditions of sovereignty and self-determination and opened up Staatsrecht frameworks to legal concepts originating from decolonization.

Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik is widely regarded as a precursor to World War I, as a reckless break from the Bismarckian past, and as a counterproductive form of German deviation from European norms. Yet, when one reexamines certain German overseas expansion schemes between 1897 and the early 1900s, a strong intellectual continuity emerges between the methods of Weltpolitik and wider views about colonial sovereignty. Like Bismarck and other European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, the actors producing Weltpolitik sought to enlist private businessmen in colonial governance, as well as to parcel and transfer sovereignty as a commodity in places like the Caribbean island of St. John. Counterintuitively, this way of treating sovereignty was highly imitative and compliant with norms, both at home and abroad. It also represented an alternative, at least at times, to a more aggressive course in foreign policy.