The Empress Theophanu, wife of Otto II and regent for her son Otto III, was by all accounts a woman skilled at maneuvering through the complicated world of Ottonian politics. When she died in 991 CE, around the age of thirty, she had accomplished much: after arriving in Italy from Constantinople in 972 at around the age of twelve, she became Otto II's queen and was crowned empress of the Western Empire. During her lifetime, she was among the wealthiest women in Europe and one of the continent's most powerful people. After her husband's death, she secured the succession of her son, Otto III, and actively ruled as regent, successfully navigating the dangerous political world of the Western Roman Empire. Her activities included building churches, placing her daughters in positions of power in key nunneries, issuing acts as imperator and imperatrix, receiving ambassadors, waging war and negotiating peace—essentially doing everything expected of a male emperor with the exception of personally engaging in battle. Thietmar of Merseburg, writing around 1013, praises her rule as regent, stating that she held the kingdom for her son “in a manly fashion,” clearly intending this as a compliment. And yet, after her death and the premature death of her son a few years later, Theophanu seems to disappear from the historical record. Despite the great number of contemporary sources in which she figured during her lifetime and immediately after her death, including charters and donations, letters, chronicles, and annals, we know almost nothing about her. The few sources that do mention her in the period following her death have little good to say about her. Why did this woman fall into disfavor?

It may seem strange today to study aspects of the political sphere—from foreign policy to diplomacy and the military—in the context of sexuality. But the Belle Epoque (1871–1914) was an era of prestige politics, also with respect to the politics of sexuality. This article reveals how the Eulenburg Scandal of 1906 to 1909 used sexual morality as a way to explain and interpret the tensions that pervaded Germany's domestic affairs and international relations. The reliance on sexual mores as an explanation for large-scale political events was the result of an ever-intensifying chain of national and international complications—complications that later undermined Germany's sense of national honor. The Eulenburg Scandal is remembered today mainly as the first major homosexual scandal of the twentieth century, but contemporaries experienced it in a wider sense: it became Germany's counterpart to the Dreyfus Affair in France—two examples of political, social, and cultural conflict that threatened the foundations of their respective countries.

A trend in studies about National Socialism and religion in recent years argues for a deliberate distinction between the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and the antisemitic völkisch movement of nineteenth-century Germany. This article challenges that contention. Several researchers have published comprehensive studies on the heterogeneous nature of Christian responses to the Nazis, but a comparable approach looking at how the Nazis viewed religion has not yet been undertaken. A study of the latter type is certainly necessary, given that one of the consistent features of the völkisch movement was its diversity. As Roger Griffin has argued, a “striking feature of the sub-culture . . . was just how prolific and variegated it was . . . [T]he only denominator common to all was the myth of national rebirth.” In short, the völkisch movement contained a colorful, varied, and often bewildering range of religious beliefs.

“Dear Papa! I have been conscripted into a living grave. . . .” So began a letter in the West Berlin newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat in March 1948. The young man had been sent to work in the Soviet occupation zone's uranium mines, near Aue in the Saxon Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), and had written to his parents in despair. The news article that accompanied the letter explained, “The uranium mines… are not in the Urals, but in the Erzgebirge. But reports from [the Erzgebirge] are as hard to come by as [ones] from the Urals.” Other newspapers in Germany's Western zones of occupation also published reports of “slave conditions,” and “forced labor” in the mines.

In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.