Population registration has figured only peripherally in histories of state formation in modern Europe. Although the registries never fully shed their original security function, the emergence of the interventionist state transformed the personal data or information collected by the registries into a central element of state administrative power. However, the ways in which this information could be used by both the civilian administration and the police to govern individuals and populations were limited by the use of paper as a means of data storage and transmission and by the information processing technologies available at the time. Rather than viewing the population registries and, later, the National Registry (Volkskartei) primarily as instruments of the Holocaust, this article embeds them in a longer, alternative history, which explores the relationship between population registration, information, information processing, and state formation between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century.

Following the 1918 collapse of the two major empires that ruled central Europe, Austria-Hungary and Germany, successor states inherited billions of increasingly depreciating paper monies. The conversion of imperial currencies posed enormous difficulties for successor states and exposed the limits of an emerging international order that rendered the pan-European predicament of defunct imperial currencies the problem of individual states. This article compares the first, and one of the last, conversions of imperial currencies, taking monetary transitions in Alsace-Lorraine (1918) and Transylvania (1920) as case studies. Although historians usually treat western and east-central European history separately, the conversion of imperial currencies produced similar outcomes in both the former Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania. Differences emerge where one would not expect them: the phasing out of the paper mark was coupled with systematic ethnic discrimination against Germans in Alsace and Lorraine, while in Transylvania, some ethnic minorities even managed to benefit from the process.

This article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.

This article examines the unexpected behind-the-scenes relationship between the conservative Catholic chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Marxist theorist Rudolf Hilferding. This relationship is the starting point to understand both the politics of toleration and the political and cultural ecosystem in which this friendship came about. The German Social Democratic Party's policy of tolerating Brüning's conservative minority cabinet was hotly contested and has been viewed skeptically by political historians ever since. This article analyzes the mechanics of toleration through Brüning and Hilferding's relationship and demonstrates how Hilferding became the indispensable intermediary between the German cabinet and the socialist party. Toleration was a replacement political process in a polarized climate. A behind-the-scenes informal coalition that included the socialists, as well as the conservative cabinet, muddled through governing and policymaking with backroom negotiations instead of parliamentary debate. Although it failed, toleration was a last-ditch political strategy trying to preserve the Weimar Republic.

Historians divide over the question of how far “classic” European colonial experience in overseas empires provided the model for the Nazi empire in eastern Europe. Missing from arguments on either side of the debate have been the colonialists themselves. The Ukraine Project to enlist Dutch plantation companies for occupied Ukraine shows what happened when efforts were made to transfer traditional colonial expertise into the Nazi East. From the perspective of the project's proponents, there was indeed continuity between the two imperialisms. However, the company at the center of the project, the Deli Maatschappij, the ruling and tone-setting firm on Sumatra, saw no connection with its East Indies history and spurned all efforts to take it into Ukraine. Thus the Ukraine Project, despite its short-lived and failed history, complicates arguments from both perspectives and offers a trans-imperial history of a different sort than we are accustomed to encountering.

Thirty years ago, on October 3, 1990, two German states became one. The academy, however, had a long way to go before it could begin to make a similar claim. The relatively swift dismantling of the “Wall on the ground” did not occasion an equally swift dismantling of the so-called “Wall in the head,” especially within the historical field in the new Federal Republic. Young scholars from the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” launched their careers as professional historians in a profoundly different political and social context than the one into which they had been socialized. Few would describe this new academic constellation as “unified.” This forum developed, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1989–1990, as an attempt to understand the ways that having lived through a world-historical transition has impacted the work of historians from the former German Democratic Republic. It explores the ways these scholars’ experiences—lived experiences of a necessarily transnational kind of history—have shaped their appreciation of the project of history: its form, its purpose, its promises, and its limits. It considers the ways the academy in the new Federal Republic did and did not make room for these scholars and their historiographical perspectives. It reflects on the power of culture, politics, and memory on conceptualizations of the past. To engage with these themes, Central European History's editor invited Jennifer Allen (Yale University) to convene a forum. She invited Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (University of California, Berkeley), Christina Morina (Universität Bielefeld), and Patrice Poutrus (Universität Erfurt) to participate.

Does homecoming epitomize Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski's last two films, Ida (2013) and Cold War (Zimna wojna, 2018)? Considering the box office, the awards won, and the film critics’ response, it seems that the transition from documentaries to feature films meant a turn to Polish history and identity for the director. (Pawlikowski was born in Warsaw but has spent most of his life abroad after his parents left Poland in the wake of the anti-Zionist campaign of March 1968, while he was still a teenager.) As Jerry White put it, analyzing Cold War in the light of Pawlikowski's earlier career as a British filmmaker interested in non-Polish themes, his last two films have put “Polish cinema back into global spotlight.” The question arises whether Pawlikowski's recent films gained worldwide success—in fact, they were more successful abroad than in Poland itself—because of the vision of Poland they convey, rather than a “Polish vision” of postwar European history and identity. This article examines several the major themes of Pawlikowski's films and compares them with the work of other acclaimed Polish directors, especially one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's later films, The Double Life of Véronique (La double vie de Véronique, 1991).