As a genre, book reviews date back to at least the eighteenth century. Although there were earlier precursors, reviews emerged during the Enlightenment and then flourished with the expansion of print culture in the nineteenth century. They often provided readers who could not aspire to owning or even gaining access to valuable books an introduction to their content. Today, reviews remain a “meta-genre” that reflects the changing place of books not only in specific scholarly fields but also in written culture more generally. As Central European History (CEH) celebrates its fiftieth year of publication, it therefore makes sense to spend some time contemplating CEH’s book reviews—past, present, and future.

To set a single agenda for German history would be a foolhardy task, but let us begin with a major generalization about the long-term development of the field. Two mega-issues have dominated the historiography and debates for a century or more, standing on the path of historical research like some huge boulders that can not be moved or even circumvented. The first concerns how the German communities of Central Europe had constructed a nation-state—Tantae molis erat Germanam condere gentem, to adapt Vergil. There was a Prussian-centered statist answer by scholars including Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Friedrich Meinecke, and continuing through Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom. A more decentered approach has, by contrast, stressed local experiences; liberal and participatory currents of a political or religious (often Roman Catholic in sympathy, e.g., the work of Franz Schnabel) or cultural nature; and, finally, the heritage of a federalist constitutionalism, whether instantiated in the Holy Roman Empire or in the later celebratory afterglow of Heimat. The second mega-issue that dominated the historiography for the first generation—perhaps half-century—after World War II and the collapse of Nazism was one that I was asked about at my undergraduate oral examinations in the spring of 1960: Where did Germany go wrong? The catastrophic career of National Socialist Germany, both internally and for Europe in general, compelled my generation and later ones never to lose sight of that issue. Even those who rejected claims about long-term disabling flaws in the emergence of liberal democracy—the political original sin, so to speak—had to address that fundamental issue.

Central European History has opened its pages again and again to the controversial debate about the so-called German Sonderweg. With that in mind, and on the occasion of this important journal's fiftieth anniversary, the following essay presents some very selective and personal thoughts on this topic. Although discussed and promoted much less frequently now than in previous decades, and although there are understandable reasons why it has left the center stage of scholarly debate, the approach to modern German history signified by this problematic concept has not been disproven or become obsolete. But, confronted by severe criticism, it has been—and can be—rethought and revised.

Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the “middle.” That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the “primacy of foreign policy,” that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: “Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern,” in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: “Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.” But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?

It is obviously difficult to envision the future of Central European studies with any precision. The broader context that surrounds historians, as well as scholars in other disciplines, influences the topics and methodologies they choose. In recent years (i.e., the post-1990, neoliberal era), transnational, global, and imperialism studies have had a significant impact on the historical profession at large. As David Blackbourn observed in a 2013 address to the German Studies Association, ambitious “deep history” projects that cut across multiple cultures and historical periods have recently thrived, prompting him to encourage historians of Germany to push beyond their narrow graduate training and embrace such undertakings. To be sure, historians of Central Europe have adapted to prevailing trends in the discipline (discussed later), but concerns about the chronological, spacial, methodological, and topical limitations of the field have arisen. Even if scholars of Central Europe utilize different methodologies and approaches, they rarely pioneer. Rather, they latch onto the innovations that other fields have spawned instead of breaking new ground.