A dramatic paradigm shift has occurred in European and German hate-speech laws, from their nineteenth-century origins in repressive campaigns against the Left to their present association with pluralism, tolerance, and minority rights. This article rethinks the timing and causes of that shift, arguing that, contrary to the prevailing scholarship, the decade of the 1890s—not 1945—constituted the first key turning point toward a human-rights model of hate-speech law. Departing from a more traditional legal historiography focused on formal legal institutions and laws, the article examines law “from below” as social and political practice. The results show how, in the 1890s, a new vision of hate speech began to take shape when a grassroots Jewish defense movement began to appropriate and reshape the law in order to oppose antisemites. In theoretical terms, the article's method of examining the interaction of law and politics shows that from the 1840s onward, the politics surrounding hate-speech law refutes simple binary constructions that cast German legal culture as “dignitarian” and distinct from U.S. “libertarianism.”

Fifty years ago Germany and her allies were crushed in war. The armistice and peace that followed defeat were held to be ruinous for her by many both inside and outside Germany. One might have expected Germany's removal as a major power in the European balance. Perhaps the time has come to take another look, and to examine how factors that operated to remove from the scene Germany's Austro-Hungarian ally had the opposite effect of maintaining and even strengthening Germany's position.

“You anti-Christian animal, what have you stung? I crush you, I the Lord crush you as you sit on My chair which you exalt up to the stars. I want to kick you into the deepest hell; now you are there and do not know what happened to you. On you, on you shall my soul take revenge; you God of the heathen who pray to you, who pray to you.” Thus began the letter dictated by Anna Margaretha Jahn and addressed to her confessor, Johann Christoph Wurtzler, pastor of the Moritz Church in Halberstadt, who had died three days earlier on 19 December 1692. The letter, transcribed by two men as Jahn spoke, closed with the commandment from God that the writing be delivered to Wurtzler's house and read aloud to his corpse, at which point he would become alive again, if that had not occurred already.

For those of us who were raised politically on the vicarious experience of National Socialism, its graduation into an apparently successful and overpowering regime was a cataclysm of unparalleled proportions. The movement seemed an enormous, overbearing force whose source was beyond time and the changes associated with time. It appeared not so much to grow and develop as to manifest in apparently different, but internally affinitive, ways the relentlessly consistent potentialities which had ever been in it. Nazi opportunism was well known to us, of course, but it did not so much define the movement as express it, generalizing National Socialism and equipping it to act characteristically on all kinds of objects in all kinds of situations. Nazism, in short, was a massive central reality, sui generis. We were uneasy about Italian fascism, saddened by the Spanish version, regretful at the east European varieties, and divided both within and among ourselves vis-à-vis the instrumental similarities of the Soviet dictatorship. But Nazism was in a class by itself, at once invincibly individual and supremely representative, an inimitable compound of Germanism, fascism, and regressive autocracy that was reducible to none of these ingredients and yet intensified each of them to its ultimate power. Thus Nazism was connected to the past and contemporary worlds sufficiently to make its impact universal, but in these connections it was ever Nazism that was the senior partner: it was not German history or fascism or absolutist tradition that made Nazism relevant to us but the other way around. Nazism abolished the limitations of time and space for us: the clutches of atavism and the tentacles of technology alike could now reach to any individual anytime anywhere. It was at once fact and symbol. It marked both the climax of German history and the point at which, as the ultimate authoritarianism, this German finality met the destiny of humanity.

Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.

As the founder of German East Africa, Carl Peters exercised a continuing hold on the German imagination in the 1890s despite the growth of a general “colonial-weariness” (Kolonialmüdigkeit) in the population. Among a group of colonial adventurers which had failed to produce any man of truly heroic proportions, he still seemed to many a man of unusual mettle, and the entire colonial effort was closely associated with his name. Knowing this, the Colonial Division for four years kept hidden from the public the story of Peters' misbehavior on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1891 and 1892. The Division did not simply refuse to pursue the case expeditiously but refused to admit the facts at all. It was a dangerous game, but one which the government felt it had to play in order to preserve the integrity of the colonial movement. The unfortunate result was that when the story did break in 1896 as a consequence of Social Democratic revelations, the Colonial Division found itself as much on the defense as Peters himself. Not only had a person of Peters's stature violated basic human rights, but the government had put itself in the position of implicitly condoning the brutal suppression of a colonial people. The “civilizing mission,” no one could deny, had been misused for private gain and pleasure, and the Social Democratic attacks on colonialism gained a new moral credibility which could be used to strengthen the party's popularity, much to the chagrin of government officials.

The intensive involvement with the German bourgeoisie (Bürgertum) during the past decade has found scholars busy pasting labels on a social group that they sweepingly termed the “bourgeoisie.” Yet, the studies of a number of German and Anglo-American scholars have focused mainly on the urban Protestant bourgeoisie, while the rural (small towns and villages with less than 5,000 inhabitants) bourgeoisie and the Catholic bourgeoisie have received little attention. Considering the fact that rural society still comprised one of the main features of the European landscape, and that Catholics were approximately one third of the population during the second half of nineteenth-century Germany, the neglect of this group becomes even more surprising. Is it possible to write the history of the German bourgeoisie without its countryside elements (Bürgertum auf dem Lande) and without its Catholic bourgeoisie? Can so prominent a sector of German society be this casually dismissed? This article seeks to examine the issue from a number of different perspectives. Using a regional survey, it will show the existence of a Catholic bourgeois stratum in southern Germany (largely in the rural areas) and, through the presentation of a regional model, it will also attempt to sketch, albeit in broad strokes, some of the more pertinent aspects of the German Catholic bourgeoisie.

The commemoration and remembrance of war in modern Germany has played a potent political role in both undermining and legitimizing diverse German states, and war stories have been particularly salient to the formation of German national identity in the century that experienced two world wars and the Cold War. The public commemoration of war and war heroes designed to legitimize a German state, however, dates at least to the nineteenth century, when the Wars of Liberation, fought against Napoleon between 1813 and 1815, provided the new Kaiserreich with opportunities to foster specific visions of the past that highlighted national unity and dynastic loyalty. As recent studies have demonstrated, building national unity in a new state created from former independent polities required a patient process of reconciling the region to the nation. A careful examination of nineteenth-century commemorations illustrates that they actually advanced national allegiance as well as affirmed regional solidarity. Public commemorations of the Wars of Liberation in the former republican north German city-state of Hamburg reveals both growing appeals to national unity and a celebration of traditional civic culture and authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, these public festivities enabled Hamburg's growing population to practice national and local politics simultaneously.

Of the revolutionary transformations that shaped the nineteenth-century European world, no one of them touched more directly the lives of the broad masses than did the development of the schooled society. The effecting of state-directed systems of compulsory elementary education (schooling) introduced into Europe the age of mass pedagogy. In Prussia and several of the German states where schooling began early in the century, and in France and England where it came a generation or two later, it produced changes in the structure of individual life and society that were both celebrated and feared. Even where schooling was not effected—as in Russia—the debate surrounding it was clamorous and often strident. Some believed it to be the fount of greatness, whether in politics, arms, or production. Others thought it would open the floodgates of social upheaval. Where schooling came to be effected, as well as where it was not, the questions surrounding it were at the center of political and social controversy.

Babylon Berlin (henceforth BB) premiered in Germany on the pay channel Sky TV in October 2017 and in the United States on the streaming service Netflix in January 2018. It is based on Volker Kutscher's series of crime novels set in late Weimar Republic and early Nazi-era Berlin. At its center are the lives and investigations of the laconic and tormented police detective Gereon Rath and his charismatic and irrepressible assistant Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter. In anticipation of the series premiere on public television, marathon screenings took place in 150 cinemas across Germany, where audience members dressed up in 1920s fashion and enjoyed a Currywurst break. Its viewership in the Federal Republic was topped only by the global fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones. The series is clearly modeled on American series such as Mad Men (2007–2015) and The Wire (2002–2008) as it unfolds a complex web of characters and subplots with loving attention to the history and fashions of the time. Indeed, this collaboration of seasoned directors Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten is the most expensive German TV series to date. The fact that BB premiered on pay TV while having been largely produced with public funds drew some ire. German reviewers questioned both the circumstances of its production and its creative ambition. While Der Spiegel called it “a masterpiece,” one much debated blog review went so far as to call it “pure crap,” which neither reflected historical truth nor carried artistic merit. Many critics faulted the series for trading in postcard clichés and creating a 1920s “Berlin Disneyland.” The weekly Die Zeit complained that there was a little too much cute dialect, such as “icke” and “kiek ma,” which made the critic sometimes feel like wiping the dirt makeup off the proletarian faces. (And indeed, one of the numerous intertexts of this series are Heinrich Zille's unflinching depictions of proletarian misery.)

In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.

In a pamphlet published in 1932 entitled “Women's Status and Women's Vocation,” the chairwoman of the German Women Teachers' Association, Emmy Beckmann, looked back at how the position of women in German society had developed since the founding of the Weimar Republic. She painted a pessimistic picture:

It is well known how things have developed since the Weimar Constitution came into force. How little it has been possible for women to make their views and their goals count in the machinery of party politics, which quickly srestabilized itself and slipped back into old patterns; how soon the rise of unemployment made women's paid employment come to be viewed merely in terms of competition. At the same time, a new generation of women has grown up, equipped with the education which a previous generation had fought for so hard, and with new rights and freedoms. These young women now see the tasks and lifestyle which await them as an unwanted burden and responsibility, a cold and empty substitute for the fulfillment to be gained from a peaceful home and the close family ties of husband, wife, and child. And, just as among the German people generally over the last ten years the concepts of liberty and the individual personality have faded like waning stars in the firmament of our values while other stars have begun to outshine them, so for these young women the ideal of liberation into a condition of enlightened humanity, which the previous generation followed with such conviction, has faded away.

In 1900, the Encyclopedia Britannica requested an original, previously unpublished portrait from Kaiser Wilhelm II for its forthcoming edition. The German emperor denied the request, instead advising the British publishers to find an existing photograph on the open market. A few years later, when a Berlin-based association for hunting dogs needed a cover shot for its journal, the Kaiser gladly sat for the picture. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Wilhelm's choice seems a bizarre case of misplaced priorities: the Kaiser took care to position himself among the hounds, but left his encyclopedia image in the hands of foreign publishers. Was this gaffe an example of what Wilhelm II's grandson, Louis Ferdinand, later criticized as the Kaiser's “deficient” sense of public relations, his feeling that “the imperial family stands high above the need to worry about publicity”? In England, mused the royal heir, “publicity is taken much more seriously”—after all, as early as the 1860s, Queen Victoria had courted public support by publishing her family portraits and private diaries.

In 1981, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, the official society of German musicologists, held its first formal session on the subject of “Music in the 1930s.” Rudolf Stephan, then president of the society, concluded his opening remarks with the following admonition

During the 1950s, a team of Göttingen sociologists led by Helmut Plessner undertook a systematic survey of all faculty who taught at German university-level institutions during one or more of eleven selected sample years between 1864 and 1953. Drawing upon university catalogues (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse), scholarly handbooks (Minerva, Kürschners, Poggendorfs), and a variety of encyclopedias, members of the Göttingen group collected biographical and career data for almost twenty-four thousand individuals, which they entered by hand (though much of it in code) on manuscript sheets that were preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin.

Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.

The Revolution of 1848 has proven to be a continuously interesting field for historical research. Whether one sees it as a turning point where German history failed to turn, as an uprising bungled by a bunch of impractical professors, as a revolution undermined by ethnic hostility, or as a revolution which failed because it ignored the problems of the lower classes, the question of its failure has been almost as fruitful a focus of research as other countries' successful revolutions. Historians have also been attracted to it because it seems to provide outlines and previews of future events in German history. It marks, we are told, the growing politicization of the masses, the birth of social conflict, the inception of national struggles, or the first sign of the liberals' political cowardice.

In January 1915, Sir William Grenfell Max-Müller, an intelligence officer in the British Foreign Office, recorded the following remark from a German trade journal.

Those discovering the growing number of writings on the religious history of the Federal Republic of Germany might be forgiven for thinking that they had entered a parallel universe. To use the terminology popularized by M. Rainer Lepsius, Christian milieus have largely disintegrated and their members been integrated into the mainstream of political and economic life. Yet until recently, research on German Catholicism and Protestantism has remained confined to confessional ghettos that many members of these religious subcultures once sought to escape. The dozens of monographs that have appeared in the last five years have yet to be incorporated into the central narratives that dominate the secular histories of the postwar era. Many have still to be reviewed in non-religious journals. Edited volumes that purport to analyze the many facets of the Federal Republic include few if any chapters on religion.