Joseph Richter, a prolific writer of the Viennese Enlightenment, published a satirical dictionary in 1782 called the ABC Book for Big Children. Here, under the heading “men of letters” (Gelehrte), he wrote, “Emperor Augustus brought them to his table. Among the great nobility of our time, they eat out on the steps.” This criticism of insufficient patronage, marginalization, and loss of status seemed to come at an odd time. By 1781, the current Emperor and Habsburg monarch, Joseph II, freed censorship to the extent that Richter's satire could be published; writers sought to live from their works; and Vienna sustained a vibrant intellectual scene among the booksellers, coffee shops, and Freemason lodges. Yet Richter's lamentation reveals a complex reaction to the transition to a more modern, participatory, and even democratic knowledge culture.

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.

In his memoirs, published in 1919, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the former Secretary of the Navy and architect of the Wilhelmine battle fleet, claimed that it had been his great “fortune” in 1896 to receive a naval command abroad. Deployed to East Asia, he had been able to “take yet another look at the overseas interests of Germandom” right before the “takeover of the Imperial Naval Office and the inception of the naval buildup.” Appointed in late March 1896, Tirpitz commanded the East Asian Cruiser Division until he was summoned back to Berlin twelve months later, on March 31, 1897. He had returned home “with the impression that England sought to block as much as possible our future development,” as he characterized the main lesson he claimed to have learned during the months he spent away from Germany.

The study of German Christian responses to the Nazis is undoubtedly a growing field of historical inquiry. Within this topic much of the focus has been on larger church organizations, such as the Catholic Church or on those who were engaged in the “Church Struggle” (Kirchenkampf)––the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, BK) or the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen, GDC). There are numerous such works that form excellent studies of church organizations, as well as individual theologians.

In October 1936, Herbert Levy, a thirty-year-old German Jew living in Breslau, the capital of Silesia, moved to the eastern stretches of the region in order to become a doctor. Against all odds and repressive trends in Nazi Germany at the time, Levy applied for a spot to study medicine in Hindenburg, a mining town near the Polish-German border. While his application was predictably rejected based on his Jewish identity, Levy's response was less predictable, at least to an outsider. He appealed his case, arguing that he had the law on his side. Levy was right. Although more than three years of Nazi decrees and persecution had driven many Jewish doctors out of the practice and made the study of medicine all but impossible, Levy enjoyed the protections of international law.