In summer 1546, armed conflict erupted in the Holy Roman Empire. The war pitted the Catholic Emperor Charles V against the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant imperial estates led by Landgrave Philip of Hesse and Prince-Elector John Frederick of Saxony. While the conflict's most famous and final battle took place in Thuringia at Mühlberg, the Schmalkaldic War's first military action occurred in southern Germany in the Danube River basin. This area housed numerous evangelical imperial cities, several of which sat south of the Danube in eastern Swabia. When hostilities began in July 1546, magistrates throughout the region ordered their forces to occupy the local countryside. With their soldiers came the Reformation, as city councils sent preachers to reform the seized parishes. For councilors in Augsburg, Ulm, and elsewhere, evangelization complemented the general war effort, since true believers must “first and foremost consider God's word and honor … and let God's word be preached. … Such a thing should not be delayed until after the war, for if one undertakes the Christian work of improving the corrupted churches of these poor subjects now, God will grant us victory more quickly and allow the newly won Christians to remain with us.” Closely tied to the religious goals of this wartime program of reform, therefore, was the concrete political objective of spreading urban jurisdiction to areas formerly controlled by Catholic lords.

A twenty-first-century visitor must find it difficult to imagine that the Thuringian city of Eisenach, lately known for its shopping, once held a place in the collective memory of Germans. On October 18, 1817, 450 students descended upon Eisenach for the Wartburg Festival, a two-day commemoration of the tricentenary of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. Drawing on the symbolic power of nearby Wartburg Castle, best known as Luther's hideout in 1521, the festival witnessed a number of songs and speeches calling peacefully for the introduction of reforms by German governments. But that was only part of the story. In a sideshow to the official proceedings, a handful of students also claimed to throw “reactionary” literature into a bonfire, thus interesting police across Europe.

Why another article about the “new woman” in Weimar Germany, which for at least twenty-five years has been a favorite topic of historical scholarship in various disciplines? Earlier studies in history, art history, and German and Gender Studies unmasked the “new woman” as a media construction unrelated to the life-world of women after World War I, and newer studies emphasize the liberating tendencies, especially for younger women in Weimar Germany. Broadening these perspectives, I will argue that the concept of the “new woman” and its specific temporal structure can be seen further as a paradigm case for Weimar political and intellectual debates in general. “New women” were conceptualized as anticipations of the future and thus need to be situated and understood in front of the broader horizon of expectation, in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, of Weimar Germany. Because the realm of politics is constituted by expectations of the future, of what will happen and of what may be done, an analysis of the “new woman” and concurring anticipations of the future can, in turn, elucidate the structure and dynamics of political discourse in Weimar Germany.

When we think about the Third Reich, the first images that come to mind are not those associated with buying and selling. Though an increasing number of studies have appeared on consumer habits and policies toward consumers, the literature on the Nazi period has been dominated by a focus on production, specifically war production. For every study of the consumer economy, there have been dozens on the Four-Year Plan, the use of foreign and slave labor, and heavy industry. In recent years a number of historians have begun to question this imbalance. Hartmut Berghoff and Wolfgang Koenig have argued that the regime encouraged “virtual consumption” through images of a future postwar era of peace and prosperity: the people's car, the people's refrigerator, and other products that would be available to all once victory had been achieved. Nancy Reagin and Irene Guenther have provided compelling material on the responses of female consumers to the decreasing availability of many household items, starting with the introduction of the autarkic Four-Year Plan. Nonetheless, this recent wave of interest in issues of consumption has tended to concentrate on the prewar years of the regime; after 1939, most historians merely emphasize the growing shortage of goods as the war dragged on. One exception is Goetz Aly, who has maintained that allegiance to the regime was secured through the dissemination of goods stolen from Jews and the occupied territories. But his arguments have not convinced everyone, and his focus on the distribution of goods merely as a means of generating political support says little about how it fit in with wider patterns of consumer expectations and long-term economic thinking.

During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in an intensive effort to appeal to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. It did so by presenting the Nazi regime as a champion of secular anti-imperialism, especially against Britain, as well as by a selective appropriation and reception of the traditions of Islam in ways that suggested their compatibility with the ideology of National Socialism. This article and the larger project from which it comes draw on recent archival findings that make it possible to expand on the knowledge of Nazi Germany's efforts in this region that has already been presented in a substantial scholarship. This essay pushes the history of Nazism beyond its Eurocentric limits while pointing to the European dimensions of Arabic and Islamic radicalism of the mid-twentieth century. On shortwave radio and in printed items distributed in the millions, Nazi Germany's Arabic language propaganda leapt across the seemingly insurmountable barriers created by its own ideology of Aryan racial superiority. From fall 1939 to March 1945, the Nazi regime broadcast shortwave Arabic programs to the Middle East and North Africa seven days and nights a week. Though the broadcasts were well known at the time, the preponderance of its print and radio propaganda has not previously been documented and examined nor has it entered into the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Nazi regime during World War II and the Holocaust. In light of new archival findings, we are now able to present a full picture of the wartime propaganda barrage in the course of which officials of the Nazi regime worked with pro-Nazi Arab exiles in Berlin to adapt general propaganda themes aimed at its German and European audiences to the religious traditions of Islam and the regional and local political realities of the Middle East and North Africa. This adaptation was the product of a political and ideological collaboration between officials of the Nazi regime, especially in its Foreign Ministry but also of its intelligence services, the Propaganda Ministry, and the SS on the one hand, and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin on the other. It drew on a confluence of perceived shared political interests and ideological passions, as well as on a cultural fusion, borrowing and interacting between Nazi ideology and certain strains of Arab nationalism and Islamic religious traditions. It was an important chapter in the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Nazism during World War II and comprises a chapter in the history of radical Islamist ideology and politics.