For more than eighty-five years, Sudeten German communities have gathered together to commemorate the so-called “March Fourth Massacre.” On this date in 1919, Czechoslovak troops opened fire on crowds of Germans who were demonstrating for national self-determination in thirty-five towns across Czechoslovakia's western frontier. By day's end, the violence in seven towns across the border region had claimed a total of fifty-four lives and had left hundreds wounded. The bloodiest altercation took place in the northwestern Bohemian town of Kadaň (Kaaden), which left twenty-two dead and ninety wounded. On that fateful day in Kadaň, this violence was precipitated by an altercation between unruly German students and anxious Czechoslovak guardsmen, who were stationed in front of the town hall. This altercation triggered two minutes of sustained and indiscriminate gunfire upon the crowd of nearly 10,000, who found themselves trapped by Czechoslovak machine gun nests at opposing ends of the market square.

Historians in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), unlike their western counterparts, could never allow themselves the luxury of studying the past for its own sake because, in this Marxist-Leninist state, history and politics were always inextricably linked. The GDR's leaders were committed communists who had long recognized history's apparent political power. They were convinced that, for the new “Workers' and Peasants' State” to acquire legitimacy among its own people, a German historical narrative, based on the ascertainable “scientific” laws of Marxism, was an essential requirement. East German citizens had endured twelve years of anti-communist Nazi rule and, consequently, the task of integrating them into a republic, where an entirely different set of political values predominated, was a fairly daunting undertaking.

The dollars—and pounds, and francs—came pouring in. Speculators and small savers across Western Europe raced to exchange their currencies for the Deutsche Mark. “Hot money” flowed into Germany at astounding rates. The reserves of West Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, shot up by DM 9.4 billion ($2.15 billion) in the first three weeks of November 1968—with DM 7.3 billion arriving in just three days of trading. Airports in Germany barred exchanges of more than one hundred francs at a time; train stations in Zurich stopped accepting French notes altogether.

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems.

Measured against its subject, German history from the ancient forests to the “Berlin Republic,” A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment is a very short book. Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) required some 6,000 pages in twelve volumes to cover the subject, and he had no twentieth century to master. Ozment's book is readable. It moves along in the athletic style and at the brisk pace we expect from him and is largely free of the sarcasms that pepper some of his earlier (though not the earliest) writings. The most surprising thing about A Mighty Fortress is that it was written at all. Why no German historian would tackle the subject today needs no explanation, but it is truly curious that a foreigner would essay the task. Yet Ozment has done just that. The product is a book easy and fun to read, in many respects better entertainment than history. A Mighty Fortress' point of view is so obstinately personal, its attitude toward established scholarship so brusque, and its narrative so broken and at times opaque, that only generous quotations can supply a fair impression of the book.

To discuss the connections between place, nature, and identity, and the dilemmas of modern German history that derive from them, James Retallack (University of Toronto) and David Blackbourn (Harvard University) brought together sixteen historians from Canada and the United States for a three-day conference at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto from May 12 to 14, 2005. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD)/University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies Program.

Studies of national identity and nationalism have experienced a high conjuncture during the last decade, and recently Switzerland (after a typical delay) is taking its place among them. In this rich but somewhat sprawling study, Oliver Zimmer traces the shifting contours of national sentiment in Switzerland—a project that always gave historical arguments a central place in the origins of Swissness—and seeks to show how a national identity could be constrained by embedded traditions and take shape out of the very debates over meaning of “the nation.”

In his small essay collection with the programmatic title German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati/Bloomington, 1985), the late George L. Mosse stressed the cultural dimension of Jewish emancipation in the German context. Jews became Germans by replacing traditional Judaism with the universal and inclusive Enlightenment ideal of Bildung, which developed almost into a new “religion” for bourgeois German Jews. When all German Jews were finally emancipated in 1871, the large majority belonged to the Bürgertum, which can be loosely translated as bourgeoisie. The German term Bürgertum, however, refers not simply to the socioeconomic position but also to a very specific set of values and forms of behavior, underpinned by constant education and achievement—to Bildung. The very broad Verbürgerlichung (embourgeoisement), in two to three generations, of a hitherto marginalized and destitute group is indeed remarkable in the larger European context. “The Pity of it All,” to borrow from the title of Amos Elon's remarkable synthesis of the “German-Jewish Epoch” (New York, 2002), was that in 1933 many of the truest German Bürger still loyal to the universal Bildungsideal were German Jews. They, Mosse emphasized, “more than any other single group, preserved Germany's better self across dictatorship, war, holocaust, and defeat.”

This second volume of John C. G. Röhl's definitive biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II is a hybrid between narrative history and a documentary collection. The narration is buttressed by and interspersed with lengthy quotations from documents, especially unpublished ones from the Royal Archives in Windsor and General Count Alfred von Waldersee's diaries, hitherto available in print only in the falsified edition by Heinrich O. Meisner. This richly detailed account rarely alludes to secondary sources; the reader without previous knowledge of German domestic and foreign policy might well be overwhelmed by the level of detail; however, Röhl's argument is clear. He aims to restore Wilhelm in historiography as “the powerful and pernicious ruler that he actually was, a kind of missing link … between Bismarck and Hitler” (p. xiii). This volume succeeds in showing how Wilhelm built up and used his immense power from his accession in 1888 to the high point of personal regime from 1896 to 1900.

This is a fascinating book, partly because of the excellent contributions, and partly because of the ways in which the editors have chosen to engage the topic and organize their volume. Marchand and Lindenfeld open the collection with a loaded question: Was there a German fin de siècle? Did Germans, in other words, share the kinds of reactions to modernity that have so fascinated historians of Austria and France? Their answer is yes and no. Many German intellectuals embraced the modernist currents Carl Schorske identified more than forty years ago in his work on fin de siècle Vienna, reacting to the depressing problems of modernization in ways similar to their Austrian counterparts. And yet much of the German population was largely unbowed by their putatively perplexing condition. As the editors argue, despite the worries of many an intellectual, “the later Wilhelmine world was characterized by enormous ambition and optimism, booming industries and bustling new urban spaces, cultural and political activism on a new scale, and the promise, if not the immediate realization, of a ‘place in the sun’ on the world stage” (p. 1). That optimism is the perplexing bit, because many of us, schooled in the dark side of Weimar culture and its intellectual antecedents, have learned to imagine Germans at the end of the nineteenth century (or at least our favorite representatives) as people caught up in a pessimistic, existential, Nietzschean funk. Indeed, the editors themselves have not avoided that position entirely.

In the 1970s and'80s, scholars of religion in Central Europe would habitually claim that this topic was overlooked in histories of the modern era. On the one hand, prevailing paradigms of secularization and modernization seemed to squeeze out religion as a serious topic for analysis. On the other, old-fashioned institutional church histories, often apologetic in character, did not make religion seem like a very promising or exciting area for social and cultural historians. How things have changed. Now, confessional identity and religious culture are at the very heart of our understanding of modern Germany (and Austria). The work of Thomas Nipperdey, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, David Blackbourn, Helmut Walser Smith, Wolfgang Altgeld, and Jonathan Sperber, among many others, has revolutionized scholarship on Germany in particular and Central Europe in general. At present, it is hard to imagine serious discussions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without some treatment of confessional issues. Many scholars would go much further and place religion and religious issues at the heart of political and intellectual developments in the modern era. Róisín Healy clearly falls into this latter camp. Her recent study, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, builds upon some of the perspectives and conclusions offered by recent scholarship and mines new ground in its portrayal of “Anti-Jesuitism” as a political and intellectual movement in Imperial Germany.

“Darwinism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause for Nazi ideology.” This is the thesis of Richart Weikart's important, scholarly, controversial, but narrowly conceived book. Put more strongly, but within the parameters of Weikert's argument: No Darwin, no Hitler.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholarly interest in the inter-war Russian emigration has increased significantly, and numerous works on émigré life, culture, and politics have been published. Given the limited influence that émigrés had on the world around them, much of this work has inevitably been rather introspective, of little interest to scholars outside this narrow field. Michael Kellogg's new book, The Russian Roots of Nazism, is rather different. He argues that one group of White Russian exiles had a decisive influence on the development of the Nazi Party and its leader Adolf Hitler in the early 1920s. His account makes an important contribution not only to the history of the Russian emigration, but also to that of German politics.

Norman LaPorte's The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 contributes new and important material to the major debates on the history of German Communism during the Weimar Republic. Laporte distinguishes between an older historiography, which focused on the top-down imposition of a Stalinist model, with a post-1960s revisionist “history from below.” The revisionist historians explained Communist behavior “as a response to a range of social and economic conditions that influenced the mentality of party members and the choices of the party leadership” (p. 22). LaPorte sees his own work as a step beyond both schools. Following Weber, he argues that policy was indeed formulated from above, and he suggests that the revisionists have downplayed the significance of the “top-down system of control” in the KPD. At the same time, the party leaderships' directives were interpreted and responded to in specific political contexts. The rank-and-file could not be easily forced to carry out policies that “failed to account for the realities of their own specific political environment,” and the attempt of the party leadership to impose ideological uniformity, Laporte argues, “destabilized” the relationship between the party and its membership. Hence, he views his work as an attempt to fuse history “from above and below” (p. 31).

In 1997, Peter Hayes was approached by the German chemical firm Degussa to research and write a detailed report about its activities in Nazi Germany. As the author of a well-received volume on the history of IG Farben in the Third Reich and a respected professor of German history and Holocaust studies at Northwestern University, Hayes was a logical and solid choice to undertake such a task. The judicious and careful volume under review is the final product of his effort.

At first glance, Andrew Bergerson's Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times appears to be another local study about the rise and legitimation of Nazism, one more addition to an already impressive list of similar undertakings. What distinguishes this work is the author's effort, through ethnography and oral history, to link the everyday neighborly practices of ordinary Germans in the Hannoverian town of Hildesheim to Nazi criminality. The result is an insightful and often provocative analysis of informal and unexceptional social behavior that paradoxically masked the more formal commitments of class, religion, and ideology in the name of civility, while simultaneously deepening those very same divisions.

Clemens August Graf von Galen (1878-1946) is popularly known as the “Lion of Münster” for his resolute opposition to Nazism, notably to Hitler's policy of euthanasia that was to cleanse Germany of the mentally retarded. Von Galen was the Bishop of Münster in Westphalia until he became a cardinal in 1946, shortly before his death. In the summer of 1941, he delivered three powerful sermons against euthanasia and the closing of monasteries. The sermons were secretly copied and distributed and also, much to the embarrassment of the Nazi regime, dropped as leaflets by the Royal Air Force over Germany. It is thanks to these sermons that Bishop von Galen has been widely recognized and indeed celebrated as a resister against National Socialism.

This absorbing and well-researched book presents the story of Berlin's Catholic Church during the Nazi era from the perspective of a deeply committed believer. Professor Kevin Spicer is also Father Kevin Spicer. As such, it offers critics a chance to test their arguments against a serious voice from within the Church. But it also affords more neutral observers a chance to ponder the assumptions behind debates on the churches in the Third Reich, in particular, what acts can be considered oppositional and what drove certain religious believers into resistance.

Andrej Angrick's definitive work on Einsatzgruppe D is more than a history of the mobile killing unit, for the latter did not operate in a vacuum, but cooperated with the German military authorities to realize Nazi occupation policy in the south Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Angrick's words, Einsatzgruppe D was the “first and most radical instrument for the formation of the to-be-conquered Lebensraum” (p. 732). German determination to recast the ethnic composition of the U.S.S.R. was no “desk fantasy,” as reflected in the priority placed on settlement planning, which required the disappearance of Soviet Jews. Unlike Jewish communities in the western U.S.S.R., where survival of some was guaranteed by the need for labor, survivors in areas “worked” by Einsatzgruppe D were “minutely few”(p. 733). Angrick notes that his work is “perpetrator history”: his perpetrators permitted few victims to survive; and those who did were primarily peasants and Red Army soldiers whose stories were not told after the war. Nevertheless, postwar statements of the perpetrators assist the historian to “reconstruct … the internal history of the unit, down to the individual,” although cautions about judicial and historical “truth” should be well taken.

Reading Karel C. Berkhoff's Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule reaps reward but also some disappointment. For the general public unfamiliar with the historical issues and intricacies of the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union, this book contains far more reward as a montage of vivid depictions of everyday life under German domination in the occupied East. But conversely, for those with a more advanced, research-level familiarity with the subject, the results are reversed.