Before the commercialization of colonialism, Germans primarily engaged with the possibility of a German colonial empire through German explorers of Africa. This article examines the discourse about such men with an eye to the ways in which Germans formulated identities around them as celebrities in the early Kaiserreich. A shift in the discourse is observable around the time of the beginning of formal German colonialism in the mid-1880s. To that point, observers had placed German explorers within an international scientific community defined by its cosmopolitanism. From the mid-1880s, explorers more often appeared as embodiments of a chauvinistic national identity that defined German colonialism as superior to other variants. This discursive shift was indicative, on the one hand, of the erosion of the Bildungsbürgertum's control of the meaning of German colonialism and, on the other, of the emergence of alternative colonialist identities through public engagement with the exploration of Africa.

In the early 1920s, the press faced an existential challenge. Publishers proclaimed the death of news, not because nothing was happening, but because there was insufficient paper to print newspapers. While historians of the early modern period have long investigated material constraints on the spread of information, the problem of paper in Weimar Germany shows that the economics and politics of supply chains continued to shape cultural production in the twentieth century as well. Rationing during World War I subsequently became a crisis in the 1920s, when paper shortages, which had started as an issue of prices and supply chains, ballooned into a discussion about the role of the press in political and economic life, about the relationship between the federal states and the central government, and about the responsibility of a democratic government to ensure an independent press. Paper became a litmus test for the relationship between politicians and the press. The failure to resolve the crisis not only undermined the trust of publishers in Weimar institutions, but, this article argues, also enabled greater control by right-wing media empires. The public sphere, it turned out, had a very material basis.

A new feature of World War II was the physical proximity of a growing number of women to death and destruction. Britain and the United States bombed Germany with the hope that the bombs would demoralize the population and thus defeat the Third Reich from within. Yet, even during the heaviest bombings between 1943 and 1945, no widespread organized dissent formed against the Nazi regime. Taking into account affect concepts of morale, this article examines the gendered experience of bombing in Darmstadt, a small town near Frankfurt am Main. It is based on largely unexamined home-front narratives from 1945, namely, transcribed United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) interviews with Germans who had recently lived through a period of intense air warfare. The experience with deadly force, as well as the gendered and generational preparation with which individuals encountered and made sense of it, shaped morale and social reorganization in a hopeless war. The affective dialogue between the personal sphere of survival and the public sphere of warfare revealed increasingly fluid gender roles in a besieged Third Reich. The bombing set the stage for a period of female self-sufficiency from as early as 1942, which means that increasing opportunities for female agency—usually associated with the “hour of the woman” during the final days of the war and the Allied occupation in postwar Germany—had appeared much earlier.

Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel), as well as the twentieth anniversary of the lively debate sparked by the publication in 1996 of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. To mark the occasion, Central European History (CEH) has invited a group of seven specialists from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States to comment on the nature, stakes, and legacies of the two controversies, which attracted a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention at the time. To set the stage, the following introduction provides a brief overview of the two debates, followed by some personal reflections.