Most Germans still know the story. One day in October 1906, the 57-year-old ex-convict Wilhelm Voigt dressed himself in the uniform of a Prussian captain, assembled from several second-hand stores. So equipped, Voigt intercepted two squads of soldiers who were going off duty, and ordered the soldiers to accompany him to the town hall of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick. There, claiming to act on “All-Highest command,” Voigt arrested the mayor and other town officials, and had the town's cash handed over to him in two large sacks. He departed with the money and sent the officials in a car to the police station at Berlin's Neue Wache, guarded by several of the soldiers. Only at the Neue Wache did the officials learn that the “All-Highest” had not in fact ordered their arrest.

The process of European integration is posing a challenge to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to rethink their frames of analysis. The once dominant nation-state has lost relevance while transnational processes and exchanges are receiving greater attention. This is not only true for the social sciences and economics, but also for history. The closer the European states are integrated, the more questions about Europe's past are asked. But what is European history, and upon which methods and units of analysis can it be built? Is it the sum of national histories, just as the EU is a union of nation-states, or is it something more? Since no one subject of European history can possibly encompass all countries on the continent, it is clear that independent of the general topic there needs to be a certain selection of studies about more than one local or national case. If those studies, no matter whether they cover political, social, or cultural history, are to be synthesized on a European level, comparisons need to be made at a certain stage of any given work. The same holds true for the history of Central Europe, an area with a particularly high degree of internal differentiation.

In June 1937, a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Fritz Brüggemann wrote Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, asking for some theological advice. Himmler, a leading “neopagan” in the Nazi movement, had formally left the Catholic Church in 1936, but had been lost to Christianity years before. Fritz Brüggemann had also left his church, which meant that he, like Himmler, formally went by the designation gottgläubig (literally “believing in God”). Those designated as “believing in God” did not just avoid church taxes; they were also making a statement about their rejection of Germany's two confessions and their interest in a new völkisch alternative. Still, for this young Hitler Youth squad leader from Schönebeck, a speech on religion delivered to his troop was causing him concern. He was not sure if he had heard correctly, but he thought he understood the speaker to say that Jesus had been a Jew. He wrote to see if the Reichsführer-SS could perhaps enlighten him on this question. He received a reply from Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's personal assistant and a leading figure in his entourage. “The Reichsführer is of the opinion,” wrote Brandt, “that Christ was not a Jew. You must certainly have misunderstood the speaker.”