On January 21, 1727, several communes in the Nordbrookmerland region of East Frisia, a small principality located on the North Sea coast of Germany and hard by the Dutch border, were granted what amounted to immunity from prosecution for acts of rebellion. How and why this happened is a story that has a great deal to tell about the influence ordinary people could exert, through petitioning, on the practice of state power in early modern Europe. In the months and years before 1727, the prince of East Frisia, Georg Albrecht, had become embroiled in an increasingly hostile confrontation with the Estates of his province for control over the administration of taxes in the land. In their efforts to gain the upper hand, both the prince and the Estates had tried to forge alliances among the rural population and mobilized these networks against each other. The Nordbrookmerlanders tended to ally with the prince, but felt increasingly isolated and endangered. Throughout the autumn of 1726, they had been petitioning the chancellor, Enno R. Brenneysen, for protection against attacks perpetrated by the Estates' allies on their “wives and children, houses and farms.” In light of the chancellor's inability to preserve them from further destruction, the village elders asked that they be allowed to obey the Estates' commands until order was restored. Doing this, they pointed out, would force them to commit several “rebellious” acts, such as signing manifestos, supplying recruits for the rebels' militia, and paying an extraordinary war tax that had been levied by the Estates, the so-called Wochengeld.

The commemoration and remembrance of war in modern Germany has played a potent political role in both undermining and legitimizing diverse German states, and war stories have been particularly salient to the formation of German national identity in the century that experienced two world wars and the Cold War. The public commemoration of war and war heroes designed to legitimize a German state, however, dates at least to the nineteenth century, when the Wars of Liberation, fought against Napoleon between 1813 and 1815, provided the new Kaiserreich with opportunities to foster specific visions of the past that highlighted national unity and dynastic loyalty. As recent studies have demonstrated, building national unity in a new state created from former independent polities required a patient process of reconciling the region to the nation. A careful examination of nineteenth-century commemorations illustrates that they actually advanced national allegiance as well as affirmed regional solidarity. Public commemorations of the Wars of Liberation in the former republican north German city-state of Hamburg reveals both growing appeals to national unity and a celebration of traditional civic culture and authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, these public festivities enabled Hamburg's growing population to practice national and local politics simultaneously.

March 18, 1948 dawned cold and rainy in Berlin. Although the city government had proclaimed the hundredth anniversary of the 1848 revolution an official holiday, Berliners awoke to a day that seemed ill-made for personal or political celebrations. One century earlier, some nine hundred persons had died on Berlin's barricades, dramatically challenging the Prussian ancien regime but falling short of their aspirations for a free and unified Germany. After one hundred years that had seen only a brief interlude of tumultuous democracy between the world wars, competing forces in postwar Berlin both claimed the democratic legacy of those barricade battles in a new contest for the city. But that legacy proved difficult to control. For the Soviet-supported Socialist Unity Party (SED), Berlin represented at once the core of the party's expanding power and the greatest threat to its realization. Like the 1848 revolutionaries, the SED leadership in Berlin found the lines between victory and defeat decidedly blurred.

Most historians who address it agree that the street protest by non-Jews for their Jewish family members constitutes the most plausible explanation for the Gestapo's release of intermarried Jews incarcerated at Berlin's Rosenstrasse. Had the women not protested, the Jews (or the overwhelming majority) most likely would have been deported to either death or labor camps. This view holds that regime leaders released the Jews for tactical reasons, not because it was cowed or had moral scruples. Although Wolf Gruner has characterized this long-established interpretation as “legend,’ his evidence on balance supports rather than challenges it.

During the brutal factory raid at the end of February 1943, the Gestapo rounded up thousands of Berlin Jews at their forced labor sites and brought them to various collection points. The Gestapo immediately singled out two thousand Jews in “mixed marriages” and transferred them to a separate building in the Rosenstrasse. The traditional view of the events, which Stoltzfus promotes, is that after a week-long demonstration by their relatives, Goebbels ordered the release of the inmates on March 6, 1943. Based on a variety of hitherto overlooked documents, I provided the reader with a different interpretation in my Central European History article: that special Gestapo orders at this point still exempted the Jews in mixed marriages from deportation. I argue that the real purpose of the arrest was to facilitate the deportation of hundreds of employees of Berlin's Jewish institutions who would be replaced by the Jews in mixed marriages. This interpretation forces us to reconsider key elements of the traditional account.