In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.

Located on the Alpine frontier between Bavaria and Austria, Reichenhall was once a secluded town, historically defined by its salt industry. Its reputation began to change in the mid-nineteenth century, after a number of enterprising locals opened “cure facilities,” thereby establishing the foundations of a modern health resort. By the end of the century, the spa town drew over 10,000 guests per season. The local community accommodated these visitors with an expanding hospitality industry and a growing number of pleasurable activities. By 1900, the recently renamed Bad Reichenhall had become more than a spa: it was a multifaceted and modern tourist destination, offering progressive medical treatment and cosmopolitan entertainment, along with easy access to the Alpine environment. The following article argues that the marketing of these diverse attractions provides insight into how German society thought about modernity at the turn of the century.

In 1903, Elisabeth von Oertzen, a widely read author and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Children from Mistreatment and Exploitation, exhorted her fellow protectionists in the pages of her organization's newsletter to push for greater legal protections for children from abusive adults. The occasion for her admonition was the infamous Bavarian child abuse case in which a young male tutor, Andreas Dippold, had beaten his young charges so badly that one had succumbed to his mistreatment. The case demonstrated, von Oertzen wrote, that while torture had been abolished for adults, it was still widely practiced on children. One of the chief causes of child abuse, according to von Oertzen, was the claim to the so-called Züchtigungsrecht, the right to use corporal punishment. “Because of [the] defenselessness of children it has become customary to exercise on them the right to use corporal punishment, even where it does not exist,” she wrote. A host of people, including tutors, governesses, and babysitters claim the right, but “how far the right to corporal punishment is transferrable is entirely an open question!” Curiously, von Oertzen asserted both that there was an objectively existing “right” to use corporal punishment and that there was no consensus on where that right lay.

Even as recently as 2011, in the wake of Otto Habsburg's death, Austrians have contested the place of the monarchy in Austrian identity. For many, the Habsburg monarchy represents a defining feature of Austria's past glory. Dating from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the earliest examples of an “Austrian myth” stressed the unifying function of the Habsburgs in Mitteleuropa and the importance of German and Catholic traditions for the advancement of European culture. This nostalgic view tended to overlook the myriad problems of the late imperial period—ethnonationalist tensions, declining imperial might, undemocratic government, social unrest. Not surprisingly, many of the earliest proponents of a distinct, pro-Habsburg and non-German Austrian identity—which emerged after the Great War—were Catholic conservatives who wished to create an animating myth for Austrian Germans that would distinguish them from Prussians. This became increasingly important after the establishment of the Austrian Republic, when many of these individuals pressed for a restoration of the Habsburg Kaiser and a return to the prewar status quo.

With the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, National Socialist Germany aimed to destroy the Polish nation and Polish national consciousness. The Nazi regime attempted to accomplish this in a variety of ways, including the destruction of Polish cultural institutions, forced resettlement, forced labor, incarceration in prisons and camps, random and systematic roundups of prisoners, and mass murder. To the German authorities in occupied Poland and to many Poles, it was obvious that the occupation would target the Polish Catholic Church with vigor and brutality. Catholicism was the religion of approximately 65 percent of interwar Poland's population: it dominated religious life, held tremendous wealth and political power, and its clergy were widely respected as members of the intelligentsia. More importantly for the Germans, the Catholic Church was a locus and symbol of Polish national identity.

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.