The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the possibility of a suicide is disturbingly present. In Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, one character asks himself, “My God, does everyone now have his tea cup of veronal ready?” Tales of suicide also surfaced in the tabloid press which presented them as human interest stories. Partisan papers supported their respective stances by tying individual actions to political narratives, a strategy pursued by both Nazis and Communists as well as liberal reformers. Even schools' reports on pupils who had taken their own lives and farewell notes themselves echoed a general feeling that suicide was a sign of the times.

In acknowledging the congratulations of Lord D'Abernon, British Ambassador to Germany, upon the successful outcome of the Locarno negotiations, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, wrote: “… we have owed much to your action and influence in Berlin—exactly how much I want some day to learn. I have been discreet in asking no questions about the origins of Stresemann's initiative.” Lord D'Abernon has long been recognized as the god-parent of the 1925 reciprocal security pact between Germany, France, and Belgium, guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which appeared to have stabilized the West European status quo. He and Carl von Schubert, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, were in the habit of referring to it in its initial stages as “das Kind,” and the Ambassador watched over its development with tender care. This paper examines D'Abernon's role in the drafting of the proposals which were to lead to the West European security pact.

The Revolution of 1848 is a favorite subject for historians of Germany because, in so many ways, it inaugurated contemporary German history. It is a Significant “watershed” in political, social, and even intellectual history. But our understanding of this great upheaval is nonetheless still vexingly deficient. In particular, the political impact of pre-March social change, though it is the subject of much recent inquiry, is not well understood. German society was so complex, so diverse, and in such a bewildering state of tranistion that general observations are hard to make; what is true in one place is often false in another. So there is no comprehensive study. for example. of the agrarian uprisings of 1848, and opinions differ widely on their scope, intensity, and siginifcance. The role of the working class is also murky and unclear, partly because that class was beginning its long-term transformation from a traditonal guild artisante to a modern factory proletriat, a process which gratly complicates sociological definitions.

Germany in the fifteenth century was the scene of an extended struggle over the nature and scale of imperial institutions, and much of this conflict boiled down to the question of who was to pay taxes and how much. In the first half of the century, two alternative methods of financing the Reich emerged, and in the years around 1500 only one of these two methods proved to be politically practical. The style of imperial taxation which won out, the Matrikel, has long been studied in detail, and its workings are well known to any student of imperial institutions.1 From the first Matrikel in 1422 until the end of the Old Reich in 1806, negotiated quotas were the basis for payments to the Reich made by each of the three-hundred-odd estates. Paying the listed quota in men or money fell in principle on the government of the individual estate, which had to find its own way of raising the money or of passing the costs on to subjects. This method of raising public revenues was not, however, the only system of taxation which contemporaries thought to be possible or desirable. The Matrikel won out only after princely estates tried and failed to gain the adoption of a monetary tax paid directly by the population in proportion to individual wealth or income. I will first consider the development of imperial direct taxes in the fifteenth century, and then I will show that the defeat of that tax helped to determine the structure and scale of Reich institutions throughout the early modern period.

The year 1924 marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the Weimar Republic. After months of deep crises in 1923, which included foreign occupation, hyperinflation, and attempted coups d'état by both communists and Nazis, the German economy and polity entered a phase of relative stability, and social peace loomed on the horizon. Recognizing the dramatic shift in the sociopolitical landscape, the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) also underwent a significant transformation. On the political front, the most notable event was the ousting of Ruth Fischer and Arkadij Maslow, under the heavy hand of Moscow, in favor of Ernst Thälmann.

On October 6, 1866, in Hanover and on October 8 in Kassel, Wiesbaden, and Frankfurt am Main, civil and military ceremonies completed the Prussian annexations of the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse-Kassel, the Duchy of Nassau, and the Free City of Frankfurt. Together with the subsequent incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein on January 12, 1867, this augmentation of King William I's realm transferred more than five million German subjects and twenty-eight thousand square miles to Prussia and closed the physical gap between the east and central German main body of the kingdom and its prosperous Westphalian and Rhenish districts. For the first time a Hohenzollern subject could travel from the Russian border at Memel to the old Carolingian capital of Aachen on the Belgian frontier without setting foot on the territory of another German state.

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

On January 15, 1919, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, recently appointed foreign minister of the German Republic, concluded a press conference with the following appeal:

We demand a policy of reconciliation …, a policy which realizes a genuine … League of Nations. But we will be asked whom we are introducing into this League. Then we must be able to say: “We are introducing a united people that wants peace in the world and is willing to enter the lists for every progress of mankind. …”

With these words the German minister gave expression to an ideal that had inspired many left-wing liberals and pacifists in Germany during the war, and that had been taken up by the spokesmen of the newly proclaimed German Republic immediately after the armistice. To them, as well as to Brockdorff, the future League of Nations, in the way it was going to be constituted, was to become the test of the spirit in which the peace would be concluded. The crucial point was whether, and if so on what terms, it would include the new German Republic. If it admitted Germany on equal terms, it would thus demonstrate that it would be a universal organization, open to all democratic nations and in line with the aspirations of the moderate Left of Europe.

Over the last two decades historians of early modern Europe have adopted the paradigm of confessionalization to describe the religious, political, and cultural changes that occurred in the two centuries following the Reformation.1 As an explanatory model confessionalization has often been portrayed as the religious and ecclesiastical parallel to the secular and political process of social discipline, as formulated by Gerhard Oestreich.2 In its simplest form, the process of confessional and social discipline is depicted as hierarchical and unidirectional: the impulse to discipline and control came from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the laity, particularly the peasants at the bottom of the hierarchy, had little possibility of exerting counterpressures on those seeking to shape their beliefs and behavior. The inevitable result of the disciplinary process was the gradual suppression of popular culture and the imposition of new standards of belief and behavior on the subjects of the territorial state.

On May 24, 1704, at about ten in the morning, Agnes Catherina Schickin, a thirty-year-old serving woman from the town of Schorndorf in Württemberg arrived at the village of Krumhard. After asking for and receiving a glass of milk from a local peasant woman, Agnes was on her way out of the village when she saw four, in her words, “beautiful little boys” playing together by the roadside. She approached the children and asked for directions to Schorndorf. When one of the boys, Hans Michael Furch, the seven-year-old son of the local cowherder, said he knew the way, she offered him a gift and asked him to walk with her. The three other boys wanted to come along, too, but she dissuaded them. Agnes and the seven-year-old walked off into the forest alone.

The Great War is not a historical episode that easily lends itself to studying the subtleties of religious belief systems. Believers on opposite sides claimed that they were engaged in a just war of defense against aggression. They argued that God was on their side, and they prayed for victory of their nation—even if that meant the destruction of their fellow believers who were now considered the enemy. Despite Catholic claims to internationalism and universalism, the overwhelming majority of Catholic bishops and prominent clerics in the public sphere devoted themselves to national causes. Clerical nationalism seemed to overwhelm Christian fellowship, and the clerical nationalist paradigm often served as scholarly shorthand for the experience of religion during the war, especially for long-term studies of Christianity and war. The implacable hostility between French and German Catholic bishops became a convenient symbol of European national enmity in an age of total war.

During the last several decades, the history of the self, its nature, essential shifts, and trajectory have undergone considerable re-examination. The Western Civilization textbook premise that the history of the West and the rise of individualism correlate closely with each other is being critically examined. There are a number of different historical, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses about bodies, memory, conscience, subjectivity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and gender, which have developed separate narratives about the self, frequently (mostly) in isolation from one another. Some recent feminist theory finds the thesis of individualism irrelevant for women and suggests that the self as a continuing story (autobiography) is gendered. Some theorists counter the creative possibilities of forgetting to a self constructed around a memory core. Multiple selves, schizoid selves, and decentered selves challenge older ideas of identity. The dialectic between public and private produces new problems about who “owns” the self, its image, and its location. Bodies, sexualities, and desire turn out to be shaped and disciplined within hidden forms of power. Old ideas about the rise of the individual and new ones about the pathologies of the self make the self and its history a central issue for contemporary debate.

It is a commonplace of German historiography and the history of economic thought in particular that German economists pursued a Sonderweq in the second half of the nineteenth century, rejecting the theoretical bases of laissez-faire doctrines that were common in Britain and France in favor of a study of economic history. This is generally viewed as taking place in two stages: first, an “older German historical school” that began to question the accepted dogmas of Smithian economics beginning in the 1840s, with the work of Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies. This allegedly preceded the “younger historical school” of the 1870s and after, dominated by Gustav Schomoller, Lujo Brentano, and Georg Friedrich Knapp. In calling the existence of this older school a myth, I want to draw on the currently fashionable connotation of the word “myth”: to say, in other words, that this received notion contains some important elements of truth—but masked in such a way as to distort its significance.

The function and importance of welfare in the industrial state is usually inversely proportional to the degree of commitment to progressive social reform. The greater the concern of government with solving the problems of economic dislocation and endemic poverty, the less the need for welfare as an economic equalizer. Conversely, an unwillingness to redress the socioeconomic consequences of industrialization—by allocating an increasing share of the national income to social services—forces a heavy dependence on relief and related financial support systems, if only to avoid the political repercussions of poverty. Welfare policies therefore deserve closer attention as useful barometers of national priorities. An analysis of the economic and political implications of Nazi welfare will not shake the consensus that labor was low on the regime's list of priorities, but it will shed light on its handling of the sensitive issue of labor relations within a command economy. For a state attempting to achieve a political basis for an expansionist foreign policy, the implications of welfare posed a particular problem: how to reap the political benefits of progressive social services—which could justify the necessary labor regimentation—without a heavy commitment of public revenues; that is, how to shift the financial burden of an embattled welfare system not easily dismantled during the economic crisis of the thirties.

An important element of urban planning as it has developed in Europe and North America is the provision of housing for classes of people who are poorly served by private housing markets. In the case of Germany one can trace this activity back to the 1920s, during the middle years of the Weimar Republic, when public authorities began to plan and build housing on a large scale. However, one can also see in the activity of German employers, dating back another half century or more, earlier efforts at urban residential planning for people with modest incomes.

On March 21, 1931, the German and Austrian governments informed interested foreign governments that they had agreed on a plan to form a customs union. They presented the scheme, not as a step towards the fulfillment of a revisionist aim long held in the two countries, but as a purely economic contribution to European recovery from the depression. However, opinion at home and abroad greeted the project as the prelude to a political union; and the alarm was raised in those countries, notably France and Czechoslovakia, to whom the idea of such a union was inadmissible. Financial and political pressures were brought to bear, the more easily because, as a result of the collapse in May of the great Credit–Anstalt Bank, Austria desperately needed new international support; and the scheme was effectively quashed even before the Permanent Court of International Justice, in September, by a narrow majority pronounced it incompatible with Austria's international obligations.

For many Germans in the immediate postwar period, all that remained of their country was its art. Subjugation, destruction, the pain of unfathomable guilt: these had ripped away at the national psyche, severing nation from nationalism, person from people, the present from the past. “We are,” wrote Wolfgang Borchert in 1946, “a generation without a homecoming, because we have nothing to which we can return.” Nation: what would that word now mean? An occupied state no longer possessing statehood, a conquered people starved even of the moral strength that might come from resisting. Even if the institutions of national governance could be recreated, they could have no historical legitimacy; if Bonn were not to be Weimar, it would equally not be the kaisers' or the Führer's Berlin. For many, refuge from the shaming of the nation lay, as Theodor Heuss reflected, in a “decentralizing of the emotions,” in a “flight” to those fields “where the violence of the great political world shake-up is not felt so directly.” This drove literate Germans back to Goethe and music lovers to the endlessly-performed postwar symphonic cycles of Brahms and Beethoven. And yet, escaping into what Jost Hermand aptly termed “the protective wall of self-absorption” did not completely preclude connection to the national community of Germans. In fact, a powerful communion with the whole might still come through the personal enjoyment of a shared art or culture. In art might reside the essence of the national community, a stateless collectivity, without territories perhaps, but with borders and guardians nonetheless

On May 23, 1908, Frau Treppens, the proprietress of a Gasthaus near the agricultural estate Klein Ziethen contacted the governing council of Steglitz regarding an urgent concern about water damage. Steglitz was five kilometers south of Berlin's southern boundary; Klein Ziethen was twelve kilometers southeast of Steglitz. Writing on the advice of attorney Georg Hillman, Frau Treppens urgently inquired what the council was going to do about the water on her property, which had already caused “enormous damage.” Like many other property owners near Klein Ziethen, she had been battling water in her basement; for some this had been going on for two years. Frau Treppens inquired what steps Steglitz was taking against Rixdorf, another rapidly growing suburb, located on Berlin's southeast perimeter sixteen kilometers from Klein Ziethen. Why was Frau Treppens turning to the officials of Steglitz, and why did she and her attorney assume that Steglitz and Rixdorf bore responsibility for her water-soaked cellar?

This article aims to temper the fetishization of the events of 1989–1990. It explores how the historical framing of the Federal Republic transforms when 1989–1990 becomes peripheral, and argues that the force of 1989–1990 as a mythic ending relies on two interpretive paradigms: on a temporal sensibility based on a belief in the progressive development of politics and society, and on a conception of identity and difference understood in terms of a Cold War global order. The article highlights how these twentieth-century paradigms guided the historiography that made 1989–1990 the climax of the history of the Federal Republic. The precondition of any new master narrative for the Federal Republic is the recognition that these paradigms have lost their purchase. Viewed instead through the new temporal sensibility of presentism and the lateral power politics of globalization, 1989–1990 assumes a new position amid longer arcs of historical change that do not hinge on the fate of the Berlin Wall.

Dieser Aufsatz zielt darauf ab die Fetischisierung der Ereignisse von 1989–1990 abzuschwächen. In diesem Sinne wird untersucht, wie sich der historische Rahmen der Bundesrepublik verändert, wenn 1989–1990 an die Peripherie gerückt wird; dabei wird argumentiert, dass die Kraft von 1989–1990 als ein mythisches Ende auf zwei interpretativen Paradigmen beruht, nämlich zum ersten auf einer temporalen Sensibilität, die auf einem Glauben an eine fortschrittliche Entwicklung von Politik und Gesellschaft beruht, und zum zweiten auf einem Konzept von Identität und Unterschiedlichkeit, das auf der globalen Ordnung des Kalten Krieges fußt. Der Aufsatz hebt hervor, wie diese Paradigmen des 20. Jahrhunderts die Historiographie bestimmten, die 1989–1990 zum Höhepunkt der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik gestaltete. Die Vorbedingung eines jeden neuen Masternarrativs für die Bundesrepublik ist somit die Erkenntnis, dass diese Paradigmen ihre Kraft verloren haben. Wenn man 1989–1990 dagegen vom Blickwinkel der neuen temporalen Sensibilität des Presentismus und der lateralen Machtpolitik der Globalisierung betrachtet, nimmt es eine neue Position ein: eine Position inmitten längerer historischer Veränderungsprozessen, die nicht vom Schicksal der Berliner Mauer abhängen.

In April 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky left Russia for central Europe, in part to celebrate his marriage to Anna Gregorovich Snitkina, the young stenographer who had helped him compose The Gambler the previous fall. While that book freed him from the clutches of the publisher Stellovsky, who had advanced him money in exchange for a lien on his future works, it did not remove the larger financial destitution that threatened the new family, and fear of the debtor's prison clouded Dostoevsky's subsequent four-year sojourn in Europe. Residing first in Berlin and Dresden, he began to entertain thoughts of escaping his financial difficulties through gambling. In May, he traveled briefly to Bad Homburg; later, both he and Anna proceeded to Baden-Baden. Contrary to his hopes, life imitated art, and Dostoevsky was soon as hopelessly beset by the gambling demons as his fictional anti-hero, Alexei, and with as little success. By the end of the summer, he had pawned many of his and Anna's belongings and systematically lost the gifts sent from Russia by friends to bail them out. Finally on August 23, he managed to tear himself away from the tables. Over the next four years, he would gamble sporadically, but never with the same fervor he brought to Baden-Baden that summer. After returning to Russia in 1871, he gave up gambling entirely.