In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderweg thesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

Historians have conventionally depicted the Habsburg Monarchy as the largest modern European imperial polity to disappear from the map because of its inability to accommodate the national aspirations of its peoples. It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynastic empire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identity and loyalty to the state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. For later historians as well as many contemporary observers of the frequent internal crises after the 1890s, this was already a failed state even before World War I brought on the tragic denouement. In this perspective the monarchy's participation in the war was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to the polity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that the monarchy's entry into the war came largely because of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power, defend its position in the Balkans, and counter the challenges of its own nationalist political movements, some of them allied with political forces beyond the borders. Older western European and North American histories also tended to view nationalist politics in Habsburg central Europe, in contrast to western European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic force that helped doom hopes for parliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post-1918 successor states.

The rise of large-scale laboratory research in nineteenth-century Germany has often been portrayed as a continuous success story. Taken as indicative are the two sciences on the leading edge of the trend, chemistry and physiology; developments in biology, physics, and the technical fields are then depicted either as imitations of or as the results of knowledge or personnel transfer from the leading disciplines. At first glance, the founding in 1879 of the world's first continuously operating psychological laboratory in Leipzig by Wilhelm Wundt, a physiologist turned philosopher, seems to fit this model very well. In one study, Joseph Ben-David and Randall Collins assert that this instance of “role hybridization,” as they call it, marked experimental psychology's “take-off into sustained growth” as a scientific discipline.

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Beginning in January of 1946, trains filled with Sudeten Germans—forty wagons, thirty passengers per wagon—left Czechoslovakia daily for the American Zone of occupied Germany. By the end of 1946, the Czechoslovak government completed the “organized transfer” of almost 2 million Germans, and it did so in a manner that in many respects fulfilled the mandate of the Potsdam agreement that the resettlement be “orderly and humane.” But a focus on these regularized trainloads of human cargo obscures the extent of the humanitarian disaster facing Germans during the summer months of 1945, immediately after the Nazi capitulation. By the end of 1945, Czech soldiers, security forces, and local militias had already expelled over 700,000 Sudeten Germans to occupied Germany and Austria. As many as 30,000 Germans died on forced marches, in disease-filled concentration camps, in summary executions, and massacres.

The notion of “crisis” plays an important role in both the history of the Weimar Republic and the historiography on this period of German history. Modifying Max Horkheimer's famous dictum on the intrinsic connection between capitalism and fascism, one might even say that anyone who does not want to talk about “crisis” should remain silent about Weimar Germany. In the brief period between 1918 and 1933 Germany not only had to cope with the consequences of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, but also it was struck by two severe economic crises. Moreover, strong political forces relentlessly tried to overcome the unpopular democratic political system. After the National Socialists finally succeeded in overthrowing the republic, Weimar came to be conceptualized as the ill-born precursor of National Socialism, as the critical stage of German history before the establishment of a rule of terror that intentionally led into the most devastating war in human history. This perspective on the failure of Germany's first democracy stems largely from the dominance of National Socialism as a negative point of reference in historical as well as public debates in the Federal Republic.

This article explores the significance of photography and photo-album making as practices that many Germans used to record their lives during the Third Reich. Millions of photos not only offer insights into everyday life under National Socialism: mass photography itself had a transformative effect, turning seemingly mundane actions into performances for the camera and into conscious acts of self-representation. The article also considers the relationship between amateur snapshots, on the one hand, and propagandistic and commercial photographs, on the other. Identifying connections between the genres, it argues that these are best understood as two-way processes of borrowing and (re-)appropriation, in which private subjectivity and public ideology constantly commingled. Particularly important in linking the two were photos of emotional or affective states, such as relaxation, exploration, introspection, and even melancholy, which were often defined or underscored by the ways in which both civilians and soldiers positioned themselves in relation to particular landscapes. The photographic archival record is highly varied, but such variation notwithstanding, photos helped cement immersive “experience” as the basis for individual and collective identity; this was central to the ideology of the National Socialist regime, even if it never wholly controlled its meanings.

The process of European integration is posing a challenge to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to rethink their frames of analysis. The once dominant nation-state has lost relevance while transnational processes and exchanges are receiving greater attention. This is not only true for the social sciences and economics, but also for history. The closer the European states are integrated, the more questions about Europe's past are asked. But what is European history, and upon which methods and units of analysis can it be built? Is it the sum of national histories, just as the EU is a union of nation-states, or is it something more? Since no one subject of European history can possibly encompass all countries on the continent, it is clear that independent of the general topic there needs to be a certain selection of studies about more than one local or national case. If those studies, no matter whether they cover political, social, or cultural history, are to be synthesized on a European level, comparisons need to be made at a certain stage of any given work. The same holds true for the history of Central Europe, an area with a particularly high degree of internal differentiation.

Up to the end of the nineteenth century Germany was a country of emigrants. Until recently the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transatlantic migration of more than five million Germans, mostly to North America, has been largely forgotten in contemporary Germany, except by a few historians. That is all the more true for the mass movement of foreign migrant workers into the German labor market in the decades preceding World War I. Of immediate interest in West Germany today is the so-called “guest-worker question” (Gastarbeiterfrage) which is now becoming an immigration issue in contrast to the earlier “foreign-worker question” in pre-World War I Germany. In recent years West Germany witnessed the transition from a country hiring “guest workers” to one possessing a genuine immigrant minority. This ongoing experience has contributed to a new interest in the historical development of transnational migration in both of its manifestations, as emigration and as immigration. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Germany experienced alternating waves of the two forms of transnational mass migration, both of which were dwarfed by the internal migration streams.

Reparations after World War I can be divided into two categories: non-German reparations, which remain largely terra incognita to the historian, and German reparations, an excruciatingly tangled thicket into which only a few intrepid explorers have ventured. Understandably, most students of twentieth-century history have preferred to sidestep the perils of travel on territory of extreme financial complexity and, as a consequence, a number of misconceptions about the history of German reparations remain in circulation. This brief summary is not addressed to those few brave trailblazers, whose work it indeed salutes, but rather to those many who have assiduously avoided the subject and to the myths about reparations which still adorn studies of the Weimar Republic and interwar history.

This article puts forced migration at the center of the Federal Republic's history. Forced migration to Germany has often been understood as an unprecedented crisis, but, far from being an aberration, such migration has been a necessary component of the classic legitimating narratives of the Federal Republic and a crucial support for its postwar “economic miracle.” The official reception of forced migrants has been structured by a categorical distinction between genuine refugees and ersatz “economic refugees.” The former are lauded for their economic contributions to Germany, whereas those alleged to have migrated mainly for economic reasons are condemned as fraudulent opportunists. These categories have been continually transposed onto new groups of forced migrants, whose arrival is invariably grasped as a crisis. The unfolding of refugee “crises” and their resolutions have continually shown the artificiality of the distinction between genuine and economic refugees—while simultaneously redrawing it.

Increasingly, historians have been turning their attention to the effects of Nazi racism. In recent years major studies have appeared on forced sterilization, euthanasia, theft of “racially valuable” children, and “antinatalism,” as well as the destruction of “racially undesirable” groups: the handicapped, certain foreign laborers, and homosexuals.

Soviet socialism shared with its utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the conventional family and its household economy. Marx and Engels asserted that women's emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between the sexes would be “a purely private affair.” Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October 1918. The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexuality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing tensions in the history of socialism.

Demographic research is rapidly rewriting the history of the preindustrial European population. Numerous recent local studies contradict the common stereotype of geographical stability; European communities before 1800 housed highly mobile populations. Much of this new research concerns England and France, but significant migratory movement has also been found in early modern Sweden, Scotland, and Japan. This paper surveys the evidence on mobility in Germany since the later Middle Ages, and places it within a broad socioeconomic context.

In the years leading to the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, popular books and films have sparked lively discussions about the ways Germans use gender and sexuality to interpret the Nazi past. July 2003 saw the re-release of Eine Frau in Berlin, the anonymous diary of a woman who experienced the mass rapes surrounding the Battle for Berlin. In October of that year, the film Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) told a sentimental tale of a late-returning POW's relationship with his son. Coming on the heels of renewed discussions of German suffering, the popular film and best-selling diary formed something of a “his-and-hers” opportunity to revisit debates about guilt and trauma, Nazi-era dominance and postwar degradation, now with gender front and center. If these debates raised concerns that Germans might believe their sufferings have redeemed their guilt, Thor Kunkel's novel Endstufe raised a different specter: a Nazi guilt that is not redeemed, that is paired not with suffering but rather with pleasure. Endstufe, released in March 2004, describes scientists at the SS Hygiene Institute who, in their cocaine-filled leisure hours, produce and enjoy pornographic films.

These words introduced a collection entitled Deutsche Wehrlieder für das Königlich-Preussische Frei-Corps (German Military Songs for the Royal Prussian Volunteer Corps), that appeared in March 1813 immediately after Prussia declared war on France. It was not only in this songbook that the patriotic national mobilization for the struggle against Napoleonic rule was closely linked to the propagation of “valorous manliness” (wehrhafte Mannlichkeit). In the period of the Wars of Liberation between 1813 and 1815, the press and topical literature teemed with similar phrases and cultivated a veritable cult of manliness. A new breed of “patriotically”-minded, “combat-ready” men was needed if, as intended, a “people's army” of conscripts was to fight a successful “national war” against France. This phenomenon has generated scant interest in the extensive historical literature about the time between 1806 and 1815, which is considered as the birth period of the German national movement.

It has long been held that Weimar democracy lacked the symbolic appeal necessary to bind collective sentiment and to win popular support. While recent revisionist histories of Weimar politics and culture take their cue from Peter Fritzsche's argument that “Weimar is less a cumulative failure than a series of bold experiments,” the turn toward new approaches and perspectives is uneven and incomplete even in those studies that avoid conflating the fragility of Weimar democracy with the overall lack or absence of democratic identifications. Detlev Peukert, while admonishing his readers not to minimize the Weimar experiment in democracy, also argues that the first German republic had no founding ritual, and that this absence in national history attests to a general lack of legitimacy. Eric Weitz, in his eloquent survey of the republic's promises and tragedy, has little to say about the proponents and forms of Weimar democratic culture. Thomas Mergel, who shows that the Weimar parliament was marked by a cooperative atmosphere of pragmatic republicanism, attributes to the republican Left a certain tendency “toward a rationalistic understanding of politics, toward the underestimation of the emotional attachment to a flag.” This assessment is entirely in line with the earlier claim that the rationalistic optimism (Gotthard Jasper) of the republican forces led to a “consequential underestimation of the integrative power of state symbols” (Klaus Wippermann).

On May 26, 1906, as German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow rested on the North Sea coast recuperating from a recent physical collapse, his administration suffered a resounding triple defeat in the Reichstag at the hands of his hitherto indispensable Catholic political partners in the Center party. In the course of a single day, the Centrists rejected the military justification for a railroad in wartorn Southwest Africa, ruled out further government compensation for settler losses in the Herero and Nama Uprisings, and then blocked the elevation of the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office to the status of an independent imperial office. Moreover, the intense interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the passage of each of these colonial measures rendered the Center's decisive contribution to the rout acutely embarrassing for the chancellor. Faced seven months later with a similar Centrist refusal to authorize more than twenty of the latest twenty-nine million marks toward suppression of the Nama, Bülow would then dissolve the Reichstag, putting a definitive end to nearly a decade of government-Center parliamentary cooperation.

Defeat after the Second World War was complete for Germany, and life for the civilian population was grim. In one of Erich Kästner's poems, read at a 1947 theater production, a war widow laments that “ganz Deutschland ist ein Wartesaal mit Millionen von Frauen.” Indeed, in 1945 there were approximately seven million more women in Germany than men. More than three million German soldiers were killed in the war. Seven million German soldiers were still prisoners of war, leaving their wives and families to fend for themselves in the rubble heaps of the German cities. Adding to the hardship of the rural areas were the twelve million refugees who had been expelled from the territories conquered by the Soviet army and then had streamed into the American and British zones of occupation to resettle. Defeated Germany was split into four zones of occupation ruled by military governments. German men who had been promised the conquest of the world returned from the war and found their treasured patriarchy undermined in the home and in the state.