In early December 1945, the Communist Party functionary Karl Lewke sent an alarming report to the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD). It was entitled “One million anti-Bolshevists are approaching. The democratic reconstruction of Germany is threatened by greatest dangers!” The report referred to the thousands of returning German POWs from the Soviet Union who daily entered the Soviet zone of occupation through Frankfurt an der Oder. Lewke's description of the mentality and the attitudes of these returning POWs was not very comforting for his party superiors in Berlin.

For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only was German Home Towns original and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.

In this essay we are presenting results from the research project, “Literacy, School Visitation, and Written Culture in Northwest Germany from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries.” The essay begins with a discussion of research problems and methodological procedures and then moves on to discuss the results of our inquiries by region. The conclusion is in the form of a comparative synthesis which also indicates the future direction of our research.

On February 10, 1944, a colorful ceremony took place in the great hall of the University of Munich. The occasion was the official inauguration of Reich Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart as President of the German Academy. Under swastika banners lining the front of the auditorium sat the General Secretary of the Academy, Dr. Matthias Schmitz; Vice-President Professor Walther Wüst; Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels; and Dr. Seyss-Inquart himself. The organization which Seyss-Inquart had been chosen to head had in nineteen years achieved a predominant position in teaching the German language to foreigners and in promoting German culture at home and abroad. Its world-wide network of schools was particularly strong in southern and eastern Europe.

Many historians have taken an interest in the last few months of the Weimar Republic. The relationship between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the General Confederation of Labor (ADGB) has become a subject of particular attention, as scholars sought a way in which working-class organizations might have stopped the Nazi movement before Hitler became chancellor. Some scholars have written about a bitter feud between socialist party and union officials that weakened the left's resistance to Nazism. Others have described in tones of condemnation secret agreements supposedly concluded by union leaders behind the backs of union members, and without the approval of the SPD leaders. However, two articles published recently have undermined the main pieces of evidence for the latter version—protocols of two meetings in the second half of 1932 attended by top union officials and figures in the government. The incriminating documents are shown to have been forged. These two new articles also contain genuine evidence regarding union attitudes and conduct toward General Schleicher. Yet the SPD had its own contacts with the general, a fact that scholars have not emphasized sufficiently.

One of the oldest commonplaces about the German Revolution of 1918 is that the leadership of the revolutionary left was ineffectual—that the revolution never found its Lenin. Yet anyone who seeks insight into particular leaders of this revolution will find little to go on. Apart from the peripheral but ever-popular Spartacist leaders and Kurt Eisner, only a handful of leading radicals and revolutionaries have been studied in any depth. Others, however important they were then, are shadowy figures to history. Among these is Ernst Däumig, intellectual leader of the Berlin Executive Council, foremost spokesman of the German workers' council movement, and sometime chairman of two important political parties during the revolutionary years: the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the United Communist Party (VKPD).

EIKE von Repgow commented around 1225 in the Sachsenspiegel: “Now do not be amazed that this book says so little about the law of the ministerials. It is in fact so diverse that no one can fully comprehend it. Under every bishop, every abbot, and every abbess the ministerials have a distinct law; therefore, I cannot describe it.” Eike identified here a fundamental problem in studying German social history: how does one generalize about diverse social institutions that were both a cause and a consequence of Germany's political fragmentation? How different things could be is illustrated by the structure of the estates in the eastern Alpine principalities. In the duchies of Austria and Styria the nobility was divided into two estates, the lords and the knights; but while there were about seventy or eighty families of lordly rank in Austria in 1280, there were so few lineages of lords in Styria—about twenty-five in 1300, of whom only ten survived by 1400—that they could not meet by themselves.

This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill their Rechtsstaat ideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.

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.

Since so much of what distinguishes Germany's social-economic development from that of other advanced capitalist societies derives from the prominence of the handicrafts (Handwerk) and their institutional legacy, it is regrettable that artisan sightings have become so rare in recent central European scholarship.1 It is especially so because disparaging postwar historiographic portrayals of “backward” late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans leave us without a way to understand the emergence of a prosperous Mittelstand of small and medium-sized craft producers in the postwar years. Moreover, inasmuch as the existence of a vibrant, legally distinct class of handicraft firms constitutes one of the most striking features of the modern German political economy, we need an account of how it evolved and why.2 Furthermore, without this, we have no way to explain several other distinctive “peculiarities” of German institutional arrangements: an educational system that directs a majority of young Germans to practically oriented, work-based apprenticeships supplemented by part-time schooling instead of academically oriented, full-time secondary schools; a labor market that effectively professionalized all occupations and limited the creation of mere “jobs”; and a training system that, as it diffused from the craft to the industrial and service sectors, reinforced Germany's historic manufacturing preference for producing diversified, high-quality goods and services.3 In short, no history of modern German economic, social, or political development can afford to dispense with artisans or their institutions.

National identity is a complex political equation that is nevertheless often represented in a single image. Historically, nation-states have erected monuments to display their power and legitimacy in material form. Yet, despite their apparent physical stability, the meaning of such structures is subject to alteration and reinterpretation. Thus they provide the intriguing possibility of exploring the ambiguities that emerge when a multi-dimensional social phenomenon like the nation is given a unified representation.

This article examines writings on the Zigeuner (“Gypsies”) by three prominent Hungarian-German scholars—Johann Schwicker, Anton Herrmann, and Heinrich von Wlislocki—as responses to Magyarization pressures, which divided Hungarian-Germans by threatening the traditional privileges of some while offering others opportunities for social advancement. Hungarian and German elites alike cast Zigeuner as primitive Naturvölker in an effort to legitimize reform efforts. By writing about the Zigeuner, scholars asserted competing Magyar and German models for modernization and reform. Passionate German nationalist Johann Schwicker called for the Zigeuner to assimilate into Hungarian and Romanian culture, arguing that Germanization was beyond their reach, thereby asserting German culture's supposedly superior status as an elite culture. By contrast, Hungarian nationalist Anton Herrmann urged the Magyarization of the Zigeuner to strengthen the Hungarian nation-state, denigrating the role of German and Romanian culture. Finally, Heinrich Wlislocki rejected all nationalist modernizing efforts, presenting the Zigeuner as a romantic symbol of the premodern age. In all three cases, Schwicker's, Herrmann's, and Wlislocki's Zigeuner bore very limited resemblance to Romani lived experience. Collectively, the writings of these three scholars illustrate both the range of Hungarian-German responses to nationalist modernization, as well as the role of national disputes in shaping Zigeunerkunde (“Gypsy Studies”).

In interwar Germany, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of an era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Historians’ interest in internationalism has primarily focused on liberal and cooperative actors and on some selected examples demonstrating the dark sides of internationalism. Fewer historians, however, have analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of liberal internationalism and the perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in internationalist discourses. Ernst Jäckh, best known as the founder of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, perhaps best represented this collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. Jäckh's internationalism permeated all his endeavors and served the goal of reintegrating Germany in the international community.

Albert Ballin was one of Imperial Germany's most successful business leaders. He early recognized the impact and possibilities of the expansion and integration of global markets. Within little more than a decade after he had joined the management of the Hamburg-Amerikanische-Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) in 1886, he turned an already significant enterprise into the world's largest steamship line. As a leading manager and later as HAPAG director general, Ballin was a major force behind Hamburg's rise to Imperial Germany's second largest city. Due in no small part to HAPAG's spectacular growth, Hamburg emerged as a key global port for passengers and freight by the turn of the century. But Ballin was not just a gifted business leader in a highly innovative economic sector; he also had access to some of the highest figures in Berlin. Ballin repeatedly met with the Kaiser and government members, and he used his long-standing contacts in England on several diplomatic missions to ease rising tensions between the two powers, albeit without lasting success.

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.

A curious photograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaper Junge Welt (Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.

An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?

When asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location.” While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation. Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.” Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.