Popular Marian devotion played a vital role in the Catholic Church of Germany during the early modern period, especially during the “golden age of religious revival” experienced by post-Tridentine, baroque popular Catholicism. For example, at least ninety-seven local Marian shrines scattered throughout the diocese of Augsburg attracted pilgrims in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most famous was certainly Andechs, which drew half a million visitors each year in the seventeenth century from all over the Holy Roman Empire. In turn, Catholics from the diocese of Augsburg traveled beyond the bishopric's borders to major and minor shrines near and far, such as Altötting in Bavaria. Yet while major sites dedicated to the Virgin Mary such as Andechs and Altötting reflected the intensity of ongoing popular Marian devotions, the breadth of the Virgin Mary's cultural significance is signaled by the large number of Marian shrines within the diocese itself, such as Kobel or Violau, which were mostly small, local affairs that attracted primarily nearby populations as pilgrims and supplicants.

Does air have value? In the first volume of Capital, Marx suggested it did not: “A thing can be a use-value, without having value,” he explained. “This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c.” Because it has no value, understood by Marx in this context to mean labor value, air cannot be a commodity: “Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two fold, both object of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value.” Marx's materialist focus on human labor and industrial production made it hard for him to imagine air as a commodity—at least when he published the first volume of Capital in 1867.

In the opening passage of his memoirs, Gustav Freytag (1816–95) mused that the secret of his literary success came down to the fact that his life “on the whole, resembles the life experience (Bildungsgang) of thousands of my contemporaries.” A century of scholarship on the Kaiserreich has validated Freytag's claim to serve as crown witness for the mentalité of his generation.

The February 2006 issue of the European edition of Time magazine contained a DVD dedicated to the subject of the genocide of the Armenian people. The text introducing the documentary, produced by the French-German TV network arte, said, “‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler posed this rhetorical question on August 22, 1939, before embarking upon his campaign to exterminate six million European Jews and other groups.” The introductory paragraph concluded, “His assumption that no one remembered the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey must have emboldened the Führer to perpetrate the Jewish Holocaust.”

Germany's cooperative movement grew and thrived from its inception in the late 1840s to World War I and beyond. Cooperatives were divided along several lines, and perhaps the most serious point of contention concerned the role of the state in the movement. Cooperative leaders in the two decades before World War I especially debated whether they should accept direct grants and subsidized credit from the Reich and the Länder. The several parts of the cooperative movement construed the question differently; much internecine conflict turned on the answers. The cooperative movement's historiography has largely framed the question as did Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch and other cooperative leaders opposed to state assistance. To him, the issue was whether cooperatives would be based on “self-help” or “state help.”

In 1900, the Encyclopedia Britannica requested an original, previously unpublished portrait from Kaiser Wilhelm II for its forthcoming edition. The German emperor denied the request, instead advising the British publishers to find an existing photograph on the open market. A few years later, when a Berlin-based association for hunting dogs needed a cover shot for its journal, the Kaiser gladly sat for the picture. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Wilhelm's choice seems a bizarre case of misplaced priorities: the Kaiser took care to position himself among the hounds, but left his encyclopedia image in the hands of foreign publishers. Was this gaffe an example of what Wilhelm II's grandson, Louis Ferdinand, later criticized as the Kaiser's “deficient” sense of public relations, his feeling that “the imperial family stands high above the need to worry about publicity”? In England, mused the royal heir, “publicity is taken much more seriously”—after all, as early as the 1860s, Queen Victoria had courted public support by publishing her family portraits and private diaries.

Reporting on the results of the 1935 World Population Conference hosted in the capital of the “new Germany” for members of the nation's medical community, the renowned racial anthropologist and director of the prestigious Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (KWIA), Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), commented on the significance of a new type of physician, one whose duties were intricately linked with the goals of the Nazi state. Just as the house doctor of old was able to prevent and recognize when an individual patient was in imminent medical danger by having carefully watched over his charge—intervening when necessary—so, too, must the Erbarzt (genetic doctor) do the same for the entire Volk by overseeing, and, if need be, managing, the hereditary lineages of all its composite members. This not merely entailed evaluating the trajectory of genetic diseases in different segments of the German population, but it also demanded something equally important. “As getreuer Ekkehardt [loyal Ekkehardt] with his hand on the pulse of the life of his Volk,” Fischer commented, the genetic doctor had to supervise its racial purity. This was to ensure that its racial essence—the presupposition of all cultural and mental attributes of the Volk—was inherited unchanged.

On the morning of October 25, 1944, eleven foreign workers were transported from their overcrowded cells in the infamous Brauweiler prison to the Cologne neighborhood of Ehrenfeld. Upon arrival the prisoners were forced to mount a gallows constructed in an abandoned concrete lot next to an elevated train line. In front of a large crowd of assembled onlookers and police, the accused were executed for crimes ranging from petty theft to armed resistance. Their executioners cataloged their handiwork from start to finish in a detailed series of photographs that revealed that for one unfortunate, the gallows proved too short, forcing the victim to be “assisted” by a plainclothes Gestapo officer who held his legs until he expired.

In his seminal The German Empire, published in German in 1973, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler posited that in respect to the German Empire's colonial policies only the SPD, unlike all other political parties, “retained its capacity to take a critical view on matters of principle.” Moreover, in Wehler's view, the SPD's critical stance on this and many other political questions along with the party's massive electoral gains in the 1912 parliamentary elections precipitated a situation in the years immediately preceding the Great War that prompted the German Empire's “old elites” to bet increasingly on a major military conflict to solve the Empire's internal political tensions (“leap into darkness”). Thus in Wehler's view the Social Democrats contributed in no small part to Imperial Germany's perceived domestic crisis, which prompted the infamous “old elites” to choose war over domestic reform in 1914.

A man
Who sets a house ablaze is an
Arsonist who is prosecuted and punished
Under the law.
A man
Who turns entire cities to
Debris and ash is a
Conqueror
Who is hailed as a hero.

The Great War is not a historical episode that easily lends itself to studying the subtleties of religious belief systems. Believers on opposite sides claimed that they were engaged in a just war of defense against aggression. They argued that God was on their side, and they prayed for victory of their nation—even if that meant the destruction of their fellow believers who were now considered the enemy. Despite Catholic claims to internationalism and universalism, the overwhelming majority of Catholic bishops and prominent clerics in the public sphere devoted themselves to national causes. Clerical nationalism seemed to overwhelm Christian fellowship, and the clerical nationalist paradigm often served as scholarly shorthand for the experience of religion during the war, especially for long-term studies of Christianity and war. The implacable hostility between French and German Catholic bishops became a convenient symbol of European national enmity in an age of total war.

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.”

The originally propagated view that the Marshall Plan was an altruistic endeavor through which the U.S. saved Europe from collapse and starvation has long been dismissed and replaced with a more realistic approach to international affairs. Whereas Realpolitik and the perception of the evermore menacing Cold War made it inevitable that Marshall Plan aid and its counterpart funds would become a weapon in the ideological conflict of the two political ideologies, the overwhelming body of literature looks at the Marshall Plan either from a political and diplomatic or from an economic viewpoint. Beyond general statements that the Marshall Plan was used as a weapon in the Cold War, relatively little research has been carried out into how this weapon was wielded. This is even truer for the counterpart funds, which are usually only mentioned in passing in the literature, if at all. This is despite the fact that Marshall Aid in general and the counterpart funds in particular had actually quite a significant impact in Cold-War propaganda and economic matters in Western Europe, which most likely contributed to the declining appeal of communism. This article will look at the specific action of American and, after September 1949, German authorities in the use of counterpart funds to demonstrate their significance.

The year 1924 marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the Weimar Republic. After months of deep crises in 1923, which included foreign occupation, hyperinflation, and attempted coups d'état by both communists and Nazis, the German economy and polity entered a phase of relative stability, and social peace loomed on the horizon. Recognizing the dramatic shift in the sociopolitical landscape, the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) also underwent a significant transformation. On the political front, the most notable event was the ousting of Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow, under the heavy hand of Moscow, in favor of Ernst Thälmann.

On March 28, 1926, government officials and borderland activists staged a massive rally to protest the border with Poland in Oppeln (Opole), the capital of the German part of the Upper Silesian borderland. The Social Democratic interior minister of the Prussian state, Carl Severing, took the occasion to articulate the terms of a rivalry with the Polish neighboring nation-state to which the disputed drawing of the border here in 1922 had given way. In his speech he noted that he was “not speaking about an arms race” but rather “a struggle” for “Germandom and Kultur” that “should be fought out with the weapons of the spirit”—rather than with actual arms. As part of the struggle, the whole of this border society was to demonstrate that they were “better than the eastern neighbor” in their everyday work. This promotion of good stewardship was meant not only to ensure that Germany would not lose another “single foot-long of soil,” but also foremost “to uphold the faith of the Upper Silesian masses in Polish Silesia's speedy return to Germany.” This last phrase was coined by Aleksander Szczepański, the Polish Consul in Beuthen (Bytom) on the German side of the border. Like other government officials, and also the media, he followed this rally and was startled by how—in his words—“tirelessly” “all of Germany” was calling for the border's revision. In turn, Szczepański warned the Polish government that “it is easy to imagine a sad outcome”—such as the revision of the border in Germany's favor—if Poland did not step up its efforts to counter such propaganda.

In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty of additional commotion ensued on East German territory: border soldiers combed the terrain behind the border; officers drove around directing the proceedings; helicopters buzzed overhead. Based on their observation of similar past incidents, West German authorities quickly deduced what had probably taken place: an attempted escape across the heavily fortified German-German border. The main variables not known at the time were whether the attempt had been successful and whether anyone had been hurt.

Twenty years and a day after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, Hanover county administrator Helmut Janssen declared to an assembly of East Prussian expellee leaders that Germany was still destined to recover all of the territory it had possessed in 1937. One day, he claimed, the roughly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from the lost eastern territories and eastern Europe in the wake of the war would return home. Although by 1965 this political goal seemed “further away than ever before,” he repeated an expellee declaration of March 1960, which pledged that all expellees “still want to return to the Heimat [homeland]—now, in the future, and forever.”

Recent scholarship concerning the Wehrmacht leadership in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (1941–1945) has provided a much more nuanced picture of the motivation and responsibility of the uppermost strata of general for the brutalization of the conflict. The generals just outside this inner military circle, however, continue to be largely ignored. Questions on the mentality of lower-ranking, frontline commanders toward the war of annihilation and what latitude they reserved for themselves in carrying out orders remain, like the war on the front itself, one of the least researched topics of World War II.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50.

In the numerous analyses of the economic failings of the German Democratic Republic, considerable attention and blame have attached to the extensive social policy program of Erich Honecker, leader of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) after 1971. The “unity of economic and social policy” encompassed the GDR's entire political economy under Honecker. It was an attempt—a last-ditch attempt, as it transpired—to incentivize higher production, but also to fulfill the party's promise of higher living standards. In sum, the intention was to secure both the GDR's long-term economic viability and popular support via (modest) consumerism and an extensive program of social welfare measures. In so doing, the SED would prove the economic, social, and political theories that underpinned the whole ideology of “real existing socialism.”