While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung, and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was part of a significant, coordinated effort to undermine a small but influential faction of radical social critics. This wave of intellectual persecution radicalized the left, sowing the seeds for Marx's thoroughgoing assault on the foundations of European state and society. Understanding these cases in the context of a broader process of the transformation of censorship practices in modern Germany, however, remains an incomplete project for historians.

In recent years historians have argued that after the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, the concept of race became a taboo topic in postwar Germany but that Germans nonetheless continued to perceive resident foreign populations in racialized terms. Important studies of Jewish displaced persons, the black children of American occupation soldiers and German women, and Turkish guest workers have highlighted continuities and transformations in German racial thought from the Nazi era into the postwar world, particularly in West Germany. In a programmatic essay, Rita Chin and Heide Fehrenbach argue that “the question of race remained at the very center of social policy and collective imagination during the occupation years, as the Western Allies worked to democratize Germany, and during the Bonn Republic,” and they call for a new historiography that is more attentive to the category of race and the process of racialization in Germany and Europe after 1945. While this newfound emphasis on race in Germany's postwar history has been salutary, an approach that puts race and racialization at the center of German interactions with resident foreign populations runs the risk of sidelining the experiences of foreign groups that Germans did not view in primarily racial terms. Indeed, to a certain extent this has already occurred. By the mid-1980s, public and policy discourse on immigrants in West Germany came to focus overwhelmingly on Turks and the problems raised by their “alien” Islamic cultural practices. That West Germany's guest worker program had resulted in the permanent settlement of hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Yugoslavs was largely forgotten. When historians, anthropologists, and scholars in other disciplines began taking more interest in Germany's migration history in recent decades, they too focused overwhelmingly on Turks. Only in recent years has the historiography of Germany's postwar migration history started to reflect the multinational character of Germany's immigrant population.

This essay examines home towns in the “Third Germany,” and suggests that important assumptions about the insularity of the hometown economy might need revision. Ironically, a revised understanding of hometown economies that sees them as active participants in long-distance trade networks can help to confirm Mack Walker's core insights about the resilient strength of German home towns.

“Dear Papa! I have been conscripted into a living grave. . . .” So began a letter in the West Berlin newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat in March 1948. The young man had been sent to work in the Soviet occupation zone's uranium mines, near Aue in the Saxon Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), and had written to his parents in despair. The news article that accompanied the letter explained, “The uranium mines… are not in the Urals, but in the Erzgebirge. But reports from [the Erzgebirge] are as hard to come by as [ones] from the Urals.” Other newspapers in Germany's Western zones of occupation also published reports of “slave conditions,” and “forced labor” in the mines.

In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.

Having described the countries of the “numerous peoples of the Slavs,” the late twelfth-century chronicler Helmold of Bosau added, “If you consider Hungary as a part of Slavania, as some would suggest, because it does not differ by customs or by language, the area of the Slavic language extends so far that a proper estimate is quite lacking.” These few words indicate how clearly local the chronicler's horizon was—the farther away from Wagria, the fuzzier his information. At the same time, though, Helmold made plain that the Slavic language was for him an essential element of what Slavania was. As a parish priest at the forefront of missionary and settlement activities, Helmold wrote a chronicle that is a unique source of information for intercultural interactions between Germans and Slavs during the high medieval colonization period.

During his visit to the Federal Republic of Germany in the summer of 1954, Fritz Stern, a young history professor at Columbia University, witnessed in Berlin the memorial service for the victims of the July 20, 1944, revolt against Hitler. His feelings were stirred at the sight of the sorrowful faces of the widows and children of the conspirators who were executed in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, and by President Theodor Heuss's speech, recalling the anguish and courage of the Germans who made the decision to rebel in an act of atonement. Born in Germany in 1926 to Protestant parents of Jewish ancestry, Stern experienced racist antisemitism in the Third Reich firsthand before his family emigrated in 1938. He returned to Germany with conflicted emotions. During World War II, when the magnitude of the annihilation of European Jewry was uncovered, he felt intense hatred toward National Socialism. The distinction between German and Nazi became blurred. And yet, he could not bring himself to hold the German people collectively guilty for such crimes and to reject his native land. At the ceremony he struggled with his own feelings, saying to himself at first that “their purposes had not been ours.” Then a sense of shame for his indiscriminate hatred overwhelmed him. He left Germany in August “purged of hatred—though not disloyal to the feelings of the past, and full of forebodings about the future.”

On Saturday, September 4, 1610, an urgent message arrived at the criminal court (Zentgericht) of Remlingen from the nearby rural market of Neubrunn: a dangerous criminal by the name of Georg Schmid, alias “Baker Georg,” had been apprehended the previous day, and the officials of the Zentgericht should come and get him. The chief magistrate (Zentgraf) Johann Müller, together with the court clerk and one of the jurors, accordingly rode out to Neubrunn, where the prisoner was handed over, but with the condition, as Müller subsequently reported,

In 1910 Gustav Warneck received nominations and support for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His boosters, mostly from Germany but also from elsewhere in Europe, later speculated that Warneck's failure to secure an award was because his dual nomination prevented enough support for either prize. Instead, they went to the Bureau international permanent de la Paix (Permanent International Peace Bureau) and to German poet and author Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse. The laudatory merits of the Permanent International Peace Bureau and Heyse aside, what had made Warneck worthy in the minds of so many for a Nobel Prize?

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.