This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

This article considers the political theory and political theology of Arnold Ruge during the years he edited the Hallische and Deutsche Jahrbücher, paying special attention to his relationship with a variety of “liberalisms” circulating at the time. It argues that Ruge's central and consistent commitment was to the “absolute state,” which he described as “an end in itself.” Such a state, Ruge believed, would constitute a space in which citizens could realize their public freedom. I show how Ruge constructed this approach through critical engagements with three forms of liberalism: the Romantic nationalist liberalism of Ernst Moritz Arndt; the ethical pluralist liberalism of Franz von Flourencourt; and the pragmatic economic liberalism of Karl Biedermann. I conclude with reflections on Ruge's 1843 “Eine Selbstkritik des Liberalismus.”

This article offers a much-needed reconsideration of the Hitler Youth law's purpose and impact. It contends that Hitler's cabinet adopted the 1936 law for two reasons: first, to pressure boys and girls to join the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, and second, to compel municipalities to finance the construction of thousands of new Hitler Youth Heime (homes). The first part of the article focuses on the drafting of the Hitler Youth law and locates the origins of the Hitler Youth's Heimbeschaffung (home procurement) campaign. It argues that Nazi leaders deliberately inserted language into Article 2 of the final law that would pressure municipal and district authorities to fund the construction of new homes in their communities. The second part of the article documents Nazi leaders’ repeated efforts to persuade and compel municipalities to finance new construction, assume the costs of ongoing maintenance and, after 1939, pay rental and maintenance costs for temporary accommodations.

By tracing the history of abortion politics in Hungary since World War I, this article covers a century of conflict with particular attention to gynecologists’ self-serving professional jockeying and lobbying under very different political regimes. It suggests that nationalism has been a pivotal element of the abortion debates that both government actors and gynecologists have shaped over the last hundred years and argues that abortion rights were differently recognized in eastern and western Europe during the Cold War because of the legacy of mass wartime rapes committed by the Soviet troops in Hungary, among other countries, which determined those countries’ postwar legislation on abortion and reproductive rights. The article introduces the rarely researched contribution of the gynecologist lobby to the debates by examining how they could represent their own interests independently of political regime. Today, Hungary's illiberal regime questions the legitimacy of abortion by normalizing US fundamentalist-Christian discourse because anti-abortion policy fits into its nation-building course.

This article delves into the transnational aspects of the “Two Cultures” debate initiated by the British chemist and writer C. P. Snow, and explores how Italian and West German intellectuals localized and translated aspects of the debate within their respective political landscapes. Snow described the relationship between science and the humanities, and attributed a unique social responsibility to science. Prominent leftist thinkers, including Gino Martinoli, Adriano Buzzati Traverso, Aldo Visalberghi, Giulio Preti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Karl Steinbuch, Hans Mohr, Hilde Domin, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Jungk, engaged Snow's ideas, each formulating their stance on the role of science. These intellectuals were divided in their response. Some concurred with Snow, viewing scientific advancement as a cornerstone of social progress and considering the scientific ethos as a model for political emulation. Others, however, were critical, questioning the very notions of scientific progress, rationality, and modernization. This intellectual discourse foreshadowed the New Left's critique of scientism in the 1970s, a movement that significantly challenged the longstanding marriage between socialism and science.

This article details the influence of Russian psychologist Sergei Chakhotin on the propaganda of the Iron Front, an antifascist organization that resisted the rise of the Nazis in the dying days of the Weimar Republic. Notably the creator of the Three Arrows symbol, Chakhotin espoused theories and methods that used Ivan Pavlov's notion of the conditioned reflex and Fredrick Taylor's theory of scientific management to transform socialist propaganda to better combat the rise of fascism. By scrutinizing Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) periodicals and Iron Front propaganda, I argue that Chakhotin's ideas played a crucial role in catalyzing changes in the form and content of street campaigning throughout 1932. Chakhotin provided a scientific lens through which his allies in the SPD could view and understand the mass appeal of the Nazis, as well as the necessary changes in party tactics that were required in the age of mass media, popular spectacle, and emotional struggle.

The article analyzes the contemporary material, political, and symbolic construction of Hamburg's free port, zooming in on its festive opening in 1888, when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited to perform this ceremonious act. Asking why the “Speicherstadt” (warehouse city) was right away dubbed a “city” even though this was an exclusively commercial space devoid of inhabitants, the article uses this case study to argue that process concepts like “urbanization” frame our perspectives in ways that eclipse how older ideas about urbanity still defined a late-nineteenth-century political imaginary. The article shows how the opening ceremony, staged as an imperial adventus, alongside the “Speicherstadt's” neo-Gothic red-brick architecture, made recourse to established cultural forms that historians and other commentators often deem premodern. To counteract the prospect that port expansion could turn Hamburg into a working-class city, Hamburg's bourgeois merchant elite tried to construct the free port as a global urban bourgeois space embodying the city's history and its longevity as a space of urban trade privilege. The latter had erstwhile been defined by Hamburg's city walls, which, as the article argues, were symbolically rebuilt in the form of the Speicherstadt. The latter was the “city” into which this modern-day imperial adventus led.

This article uses reconstructions of the 1919 German LGBTQ+ rights film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) to consider the meaning of the Weimar Republic. It surveys Weimar's historiography, memorialization efforts, public commemorations, museums, and film reconstruction, drawing connections between these fields. The film as an incomplete document becomes a metaphor for incomplete histories. As such, it offers suggestions for engaging with fragmentary pasts.