This article discusses the problem of why there was a constant demand for ennoblement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe, even though those who aspired to it had little or no prospect of integration into the established feudal nobility. Nobility was first and foremost an ideological concept closely connected to power and rule. The Holy Roman emperors ennobled persons who exercised power precisely because, in the premodern social order, the exercise of power was a prerogative of the nobility. However, the newly ennobled had only their title in common with the old aristocratic families and rarely attained the other privileges enjoyed by these families. For this reason, the emperors’ practice of ennoblement gradually reshaped the nobility as a whole and simultaneously the ideological notion of nobility. Certainly, ennoblement still served a strategic purpose in the context of social advancement. Particularly for civil servants and military officers, it was the most effective means of preserving their newly acquired status for their descendants and possibly establishing their families in a new bureaucratic and military hereditary elite, which in some places coexisted with the old aristocracy. The central element of the new ideological concept was the notion of the nobility as a hereditary ruling class, both qualified for and entitled to the exercise of power on account of inherited superiority.

In interwar Germany, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of an era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Historians’ interest in internationalism has primarily focused on liberal and cooperative actors and on some selected examples demonstrating the dark sides of internationalism. Fewer historians, however, have analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of liberal internationalism and the perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in internationalist discourses. Ernst Jäckh, best known as the founder of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, perhaps best represented this collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. Jäckh's internationalism permeated all his endeavors and served the goal of reintegrating Germany in the international community.

The relevant historiography has largely overlooked the role of Karl Haushofer as a cultural-political actor in National Socialist-Fascist relations. From 1924 to 1944, the German geopolitician dealt extensively with Italy, with an eye to both its geopolitical role in Europe and to the political system of Benito Mussolini's regime. On behalf of Rudolf Hess, he began visiting Italy during the 1930s, aiming to overcome ideological and political misunderstandings between Rome and Berlin. He established a network of contacts with Italian scholars and politicians, passed information back to the so-called deputy Führer, and attempted to influence official German policy toward Italy. He eventually promoted the development of an Italian geopolitics, and, in so doing, achieved one of the most significant cultural-political transfers from National Socialist Germany to fascist Italy. This article analyzes the contacts between Haushofer and Italy, both his political activities and his geopolitical theories. It is a case study of a history of contradictions: a man committed to Pan-Germanist culture and to the defense of German minorities abroad, Haushofer also attempted to improve relations between Berlin and Rome. Moreover, he considered the Axis from a geopolitical point of view—as a realization of the European imperial idea—and from a trilateral perspective, i.e., he viewed Japan not only as an ally, but also as a cultural and political model. The reconstruction of Haushofer's relations with Italy is, therefore, an opportunity to rethink the antinomies, as well as the global dimension, of the National Socialist-Fascist alliance.

Power in the workplace is almost always conceptualized in terms of the line-management hierarchy. Managers are said to sit at the “top” of the pyramid, whilst shop-floor workers are located at the “bottom.” The language that we use to describe the social organization of the workplace is saturated with words that assign people to ranks within hierarchies. Scholarly analysis of the sociology of the workplace takes the pyramidality of power as a given. This article, by contrast, argues that it is more useful to see power in the workplace as a dynamic but horizontal matrix within which the distribution of power is continually in flux. If we are to understand the workplace experiences of any specific social group, it is necessary to reconstruct the position of that group relative to the overall system of power relations within the matrix, and not just to individual kinds of power relationship. To demonstrate the point, this article explores the case study of female workers in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Between 1945 and 1948, the experiences of women on the shop floor in East Germany were shaped by wider trends in the distribution of power. These included the transfer of power from German nationals to Soviet occupiers, the devolution of power from the center to the periphery and from the manager's office to workers on the shop floor, and the shift of relative power from wage earners to black marketeers. To make sense of the contradictory experiences of female workers, we must situate them in the context of wider shifts in, and conflicts over, the distribution of power within a matrix.

This article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.

Following the collapse of communism in 1989, the Czechoslovak and German governments entered a new phase of relations marked by reconciliatory goodwill. However, relations rapidly deteriorated in the face of mutual claims for material redress concerning the wartime Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and the expulsion/transfer of the Sudeten German population in the immediate postwar period. The Czechoslovak (later Czech) and German governments disputed the legal status of the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Beneš Decrees of 1945, and their differing interpretations had implications either strengthening or undermining the Sudeten German restitution claim. Comparing argumentative strategies reveals a striking symmetry of hypocrisy. Czech and German representatives selectively employed two opposing theories of legal legitimacy, reflecting the jurisprudential schools of legal positivism and natural law theory, either to defend or repudiate the abovementioned instruments. This article argues that reciprocal inconsistency critically undermined attempts by Czech and German representatives to achieve a legal resolution in the 1990s.