The idea of publicly recognizing an important milestone in the life of Mack Walker's book German Home Towns, which appeared in 1971, goes back to January 2011 when David Luebke and Yair Mintzker put out a call for papers to discuss “German Home Towns—Forty Years Later” at the upcoming meeting of the German Studies Association (GSA) in Louisville, Kentucky. The robust response to their call confirmed the wide-ranging impact of Walker's book and validated their hunch that the fortieth anniversary was the right time for a critical celebration of this influential text.

We have loved this book for more than forty years. Age cannot wither its intellectual charms, nor custom stale its endless teachability, especially in graduate seminars. As in any long relationship, there have been moments of vexation and irritation, but we return to this book over and over to be nourished anew by its originality, its insights, and its capacity not just to evoke a certain kind of German community but also to convince us that the values of such communities shaped much of German history right into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

German Home Towns is a very forward-looking book. I say that not because it proved so influential—although it certainly had a profound impact on my generation of historians. My point is more prosaic, namely that German Home Towns occupies a set point in time and social milieu, the inaugural moment of an attenuated phase of stability for a peculiar type of human community in central Europe. That moment, of course, is 1648; the milieu is that of walled and privileged towns—large and differentiated enough for self-sufficiency in most economic functions, but not so large or so differentiated as to generate the degrees of stratification and anonymity that characterized larger commercial or manufacturing cities. In contrast to metropolitan centers, “home towns” embraced all inhabitants in a web of face-to-face relations, at once integrating, enabling, and controlling all inhabitants through guilds and the political systems built around them. Usually, almost all hometown inhabitants were citizens, too—again in contrast to larger cities, with their substrates of noncitizen residents. From the vantage of 1648, and within the stream of early modern German history, German Home Towns peers into a future of confrontation with “movers and doers”—those vanguards of the “general estate,” as Walker called them, who trampled idiosyncrasy, leveled difference, and, with some help from Napoleon, replaced both local corporatism and the imperial “incubator” with provincial and national systems of general, liberal delegation.

As far as visuality and materiality are concerned, Mack Walker's German Home Towns is a paradoxical work. In more than 400 pages of dense text about society, politics, and law in and around German towns from 1648 to 1871, the author devoted almost no space to the home towns' visual and material aspects. One would look in vain in this book for detailed descriptions of burghers' private and communal buildings; the layout of fortifications, streets, and public spaces; the location of civic and religious institutions; or the outward appearance of the townspeople, their fairs, rituals, and processions. Early in the book, Walker set the tone for his approach by dismissing as intellectually lazy the most common definition for a town in early modern central Europe—a settlement surrounded by physical walls—and in the entire book he included only one image of a German home town (and even that only on page 222).

This essay examines home towns in the “Third Germany,” and suggests that important assumptions about the insularity of the hometown economy might need revision. Ironically, a revised understanding of hometown economies that sees them as active participants in long-distance trade networks can help to confirm Mack Walker's core insights about the resilient strength of German home towns.

Having described the countries of the “numerous peoples of the Slavs,” the late twelfth-century chronicler Helmold of Bosau added, “If you consider Hungary as a part of Slavania, as some would suggest, because it does not differ by customs or by language, the area of the Slavic language extends so far that a proper estimate is quite lacking.” These few words indicate how clearly local the chronicler's horizon was—the farther away from Wagria, the fuzzier his information. At the same time, though, Helmold made plain that the Slavic language was for him an essential element of what Slavania was. As a parish priest at the forefront of missionary and settlement activities, Helmold wrote a chronicle that is a unique source of information for intercultural interactions between Germans and Slavs during the high medieval colonization period.

On Saturday, September 4, 1610, an urgent message arrived at the criminal court (Zentgericht) of Remlingen from the nearby rural market of Neubrunn: a dangerous criminal by the name of Georg Schmid, alias “Baker Georg,” had been apprehended the previous day, and the officials of the Zentgericht should come and get him. The chief magistrate (Zentgraf) Johann Müller, together with the court clerk and one of the jurors, accordingly rode out to Neubrunn, where the prisoner was handed over, but with the condition, as Müller subsequently reported,

In 1910 Gustav Warneck received nominations and support for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His boosters, mostly from Germany but also from elsewhere in Europe, later speculated that Warneck's failure to secure an award was because his dual nomination prevented enough support for either prize. Instead, they went to the Bureau international permanent de la Paix (Permanent International Peace Bureau) and to German poet and author Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse. The laudatory merits of the Permanent International Peace Bureau and Heyse aside, what had made Warneck worthy in the minds of so many for a Nobel Prize?

In 1969, the newly elected coalition government of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) in West Germany announced plans to reform Paragraph 218, the law that regulated women's access to abortion. This announcement prompted a public debate in West Germany on the state's obligation to protect unborn life—a debate that continues today in reunified Germany. Through an analysis of key events in that debate between 1969 and 1989, this article makes a twofold argument. First it argues that despite West Germany's increasingly secular orientation, the Catholic Church exercised significant political influence with respect to abortion policy throughout the history of the Federal Republic. Second, it argues that the West German Church's participation in these debates exposed deep rifts within the Catholic community, which, in turn, contributed to the formation of a smaller, more activist, and conservative Church. This smaller Church has achieved a remarkable degree of political success in reunified Germany by mobilizing its conservative core constituency, embracing new arguments, and pursuing issue-specific alliances.