Eager to move on after the divisive Sonderweg debates of the 1980s, historians of modern Germany have been busily elaborating a new central narrative around the notion of biopolitics. Aimed at producing a more powerful and productive society by regulating, optimizing, and even exterminating specific human populations, biopolitics has encompassed everything from housing reform, anti-smoking campaigns, and child vaccination programs to pro- and anti-natalist tax policies, national census taking, and the science of industrial hygiene. Identified by Michel Foucault and others as a general feature of all Western modernities, biopolitics has been a particularly fruitful concept for German historians, who have used it to trace the evolution of racial hygiene—the Nazi variant of eugenics and Germany's most infamous application of biopolitical principles—from a politically diverse group of Wilhelmine and Weimar social reformers. The very normality of these reformers, given the international context, has in turn allowed scholars to avoid labeling German modernity as deviant while at the same time framing the murderous dynamic of the Nazi years as a potential latent in modernity more generally. As Edward Ross Dickinson put it in an excellent review article recently, Germany has emerged from this reevaluation “not as a nation having trouble modernizing, but as a nation of troubling modernity.”

The Tuchel Heath (Tucheler Heide, Bóry Tucholskie) and Kashubia (Kassubei, Kaszuby), the two regions comprising the geographical region known as Pomerelia (roughly the area of the “Polish Corridor”), came into Prussian possession with annexations from Poland in 1772, when Friedrich II seized most of what would become the provinces of Poznania and West Prussia from the ailing Polish Republic. These territories, some liked to imagine, resembled the North American frontier. Friedrich II apparently compared it to Canada and “jokingly named the inhabitants his Iroquois.” Gustav Freytag immortalized Friedrich's arrival on the frontier in his work Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, characterizing the place as “an abandoned land, without law, without authority; it was a wasteland.” Certainly, the harsh climate, the sprawling pine forests and barrens, and the impoverished populace suggested a certain affinity. In one description of the region from 1879, the author depicted the Slavic game poacher “as a red Indian on the warpath.”

Many aspects of the German-American encounter during the Second World War remain deeply engraved in the American mind. One of them is the story of the German “werewolves,” Hitler's last underground fighters, who challenged the occupying armies in the war's closing months. The werewolf threat made a lasting impression on American troops and media at the time, and on American collective memory up to today. This article traces how the Nazi insurgents became part of an older mythical narrative that continues to infuse not only American popular culture, but even contemporary elite and political discourse. One of the more recent examples is Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld's effort to compare the Nazi werewolves with the Iraqi insurgents whose attacks have plagued the occupied country since the American invasion.

In a recent issue of Central European History, David Wetzel published a wide-ranging review of the first two volumes of my documentary edition on the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne, the immediate pre-history of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71. It goes without saying that I read this review by the author of A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War (2001) with particular interest. My first—and lasting—impression is that here was the discussion of a specialist, one that—precisely because of Wetzel's roots in a different historiographical tradition—represents a model of scholarly fairness. In German historiography since the nineteenth century, and primarily for political reasons, comparably fair treatment of works that deal with a central historical figure such as Bismarck has not been the rule. I am no less grateful for the opportunity offered by his critical objections to make some more general and precise points.

The issues raised in Professor Becker's paper bear directly on the claims that the Franco-Prussian War can make for its place as the most critical war of the mid-nineteenth century. These points must be debated, if not resolved, if this subject is to continue to exercise its hold on international historians—as well as, one may add, on non-historians, interested in the past, concerned to know whether the past can help the present, and bewildered by disputes among the experts. Yet there is only so much an expert—or someone vain enough to fancy himself as such—can do. Simply put, to treat this whole subject in a graceful and coherent form within the limits of a single article in a journal of this nature would surpass the capacity of this writer. He can only attempt, as a starter, to sketch out what he takes to be the main thrust and balance of Franco-Prussian relations in the weeks preceding the outbreak of the war of 1870, and to give at least a partial elucidation of the problem by commenting on several aspects of it, without attempting to bring all of these individual comments into one, comprehensive statement.