Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of a unified Germany, was an active participant in the Anglo-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. Even though Germany had no direct interests there and was never involved on the ground during the two decades of his chancellorship, Bismarck invested considerable resources in working to shape the course of events in that part of the world, stoking the flames of conflict whenever it suited the dictates of Realpolitik. Over a twenty-year period, he actively pursued a consistent strategy that focused on tying down Russian troops in the remote Asian steppes, i.e., as far away from Central Europe as possible. At the same time, he manipulated Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia to achieve various foreign policy goals that would further German interests. This article explores in detail all of these objectives, as well as their interrelationship. In particular, it unravels the perplexing mystery of how Bismarck was able to influence the politics of Central Asia from his distant headquarters in Berlin.

German-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.

For more than eighty years there has been controversy about who set the fire that destroyed the plenary chamber of the Reichstag fire on the evening of February 27, 1933—thereby handing the Nazis a pretext to gut the democratic Weimar constitution through the emergency “Reichstag Fire Decree.” Since the 1960s there has been a consensus among historians that the fire was set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch journeyman stonemason supposedly acting alone—with no Nazi involvement. Few historians, however, have been inclined to investigate the motives behind the development of this single-culprit narrative, or the reasons for its generally positive reception among postwar German historians. With the aid of newly discovered sources, this article examines the legal and political interests that have underpinned this narrative. The single-culprit narrative was developed by ex-Nazis, whereas accounts of the Reichstag fire stressing Nazi complicity came almost invariably from former resistance fighters and victims of Nazism. Postwar historians responded to these accounts in much the same way they have responded to perpetrator and victim accounts of the Holocaust: with a markedly greater preference for those of the perpetrators. This tendency has shaped the debate over the Reichstag fire in the same way it has shaped other areas of research on the Third Reich.

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

In a luncheon address at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in 2013, David Blackbourn delivered an impassioned plaidoyer to “grow” German history, i.e., to rescue it from the temporal “provincialism” that has, he believes, increasingly characterized the study of Germany over the past two decades. Blackbourn was critical of the growing emphasis on the twentieth century and especially the post-1945 period—not because of the quality of the work per se, but rather because of the resultant neglect of earlier periods and the potential loss of valuable historical insights that this development has brought in its wake. There have been other seemingly seismic shifts in the profession as a whole that have not left the history of Germany and German-speaking Central Europe untouched: greater emphasis on discourse analysis and gender, memory and identity, experience and cultural practices (i.e., the “linguistic turn” and the “new” cultural history). Accompanied by a decline in interest about Germany exclusively as a “nation-state,” the last decade in particular has seen a spike in “global” or “transnational” approaches. And, like other fields, the study of Germany has also witnessed greater interest in the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization—what Catherine Epstein referred to as the “imperial turn” in a piece that appeared in the journal Central European History (CEH) in 2013.