On March 10, 1972, a little-known Auschwitz trial came to a rather unremarkable conclusion with the release of Fritz Ertl and Walter Dejaco. Both had served as SS architects in the Central Construction Directorate(ZBL)-Auschwitz. Both were part of a team responsible for designing and building the gas chambers of Birkenau. The District Attorneys' Office of Vienna had prepared the case against them with great ambition nearly a decade before. Prosecutors originally had in mind something like the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in the Federal Republic of Germany, which included more than twenty defendants. Such plans were speedily curtailed. The court had only grudgingly agreed to try three defendants and then readily granted a motion to dismiss charges against one (Hermann Töfferl, a construction foreman). That left only two. “The public interest for this monster trial appears to be slight. The benches in the great jury court remain empty,” the Wiener Zeitung reported upon the opening of the trial. Less than two months later, the paper recorded the defendants' release, and no public debate followed.

In September 1929, a group of Russian German farmers who were dissatisfied with conditions under Soviet rule traveled to the suburbs of Moscow and demanded that they be allowed to emigrate. The gathering of ethnic Germans, most of whom were Mennonites, grew rapidly and numbered more than 13,000 people at its height. Their demands were widely reported in the German press and brought the subject of Soviet collectivization into the public eye in Germany. The effect of this event on German-Soviet diplomatic relations, which became increasingly strained as Stalinism took hold, is well known. Although studies of the gathering mention the public outcry in the press, they have generally assumed that the German public's identification with the Russian Germans was self-evident and not in need of explanation. In fact, public interest in and government concern for the Russian Germans was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the post-World War I era, Germans came to understand the Russian Germans as emblematic of Germany's fate—as innocent, hard-working farmers who were loyal to Germanness and who worked tirelessly to expand German culture in the world. The Russian Germans also came to represent the larger crisis of legitimacy that affected the Weimar Republic in which parliamentary government was increasingly perceived as not being able to protect the German people and its interests, whether in Germany or abroad.

In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”

Studies of the East German historical profession and what became of it after 1990—which are now numerous—have primarily dealt with institutes in Berlin affiliated with the Akademie der Wissenschaften or the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). Little attention has been paid to the academic institutions where most of the German Democratic Republic's historians and history teachers received their scholarly and political training, namely the history departments of the country's universities and the teachers' colleges (pädagogische Hochschulen). In this essay, in which I draw in part upon my personal experiences, I will therefore be less concerned with the well-researched “nerve centers” of the East German research establishment than with the long-neglected “academic provinces” and the everyday realities of academic life that, however absurd they might seem in hindsight, shaped the experiences of countless students, instructors, and professors.