In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic political parties and affiliated organizations were formed in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. These movements, variously referred to as “subcultures,” “ghettos,” the Dutch Catholic “pillar,” and the German “tower,” have only begun to break down and become integrated into national society within the last thirty or forty years. The best known of these parties, the German Center, has been called “a strange product of German history and … of conditions in Europe around 1870,” an ill-assorted alliance of interest groups who, if not actually the “mobilization against the state” of Bismarck's rhetoric, were opposed to the way in which the Bismarckian Reich was created: an alliance which was given an extension of life by Bismarck's decision to wage war against the party and the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf. Several recent interpretations have seen the Center as a byproduct of Germany's transition from a precapitalist agrarian society to a modern capitalistic society, representing those peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and traditional preindustrial bourgeoisie whose interests were being injured by liberal economic and social policies introduced after 1867. According to these interpretations, the party is defined primarily by its anticapitalism and antiliberalism, rather than by ethnic allegiance. Any satisfactory analysis of the Center's place in the German political spectrum, however, must account for the striking parallel provided by the history of similar Catholic parties in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Only a minority of Germans involved in Nazi crimes were prosecuted after the war, and the transnational history of trials is only beginning to be explored. Even less well understood are the ways in which those who were tainted by complicity reframed their personal life stories. Millions had been willing facilitators, witting beneficiaries, or passive (and perhaps unhappily helpless) witnesses of Nazi persecution; many had been actively involved in sustaining Nazi rule; perhaps a quarter of a million had personally killed Jewish civilians, and several million had direct knowledge of genocide. How did these people re-envision their own lives after Nazism? And how did they reinterpret their own former behaviors—their actions and inaction—in light of public confrontations with Nazi crimes and constructions of “perpetrators” in trials? Going beyond well-trodden debates about “overcoming the past,” this paper explores patterns of personal memory among East and West Germans after Nazism.

An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

In April 1809—less than four years after Austerlitz—Austria declared war on France and entered the field as the champion of a vanquished German Empire. In their analyses of the Habsburg bid to restore the old order in the Germanies, historians have stressed certain internal developments within the Austrian Empire that made war possible: a revitalized army, a strong feeling of German nationalism, an embittered émigré lobby, and a powerful war party. This article explores the importance of the factions within the imperial family in relation to these events and points up an irony in the Austrian decision. For while the emperor Francis viewed the war as a final effort to save the dynasty, Count Philipp Stadion, his chief minister and leader of the war party, capitalized on the divergent points of view within the family to attain his own ends. His principal concern was to restore the old political order, to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Pressburg (1805), and to reconstruct the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. By skillful manipulation of ideology and dynastic ambition, he won most of the imperial princes to his side. They, in turn, persuaded the emperor to commit himself to a foreign policy that jeopardized his monarchy for the sake of a war whose diplomatic goals interested him scarcely at all.

Considered in isolation, the experiences of the ethnic German minority of Slovakia hardly warrant more than a footnote in the history of East-Central Europe during the years of World War II. The wartime experiences of this numerically small German minority, known as the Carpathian Germans, do, however, stand out in vivid contrast to those of the other German minority group of Czechoslovakia, the much-publicized Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia. And it is this glaring contrast that lends significance to a study of the Slovakian German experiences, both with the Third Reich and with the ephemerally independent Slovak state. The juxtaposition of the estimated 130,000 Carpathian Germans of Slovakia and the more than 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans of central and western Czechoslovakia suggests a natural and dramatic comparison, which reveals that no blanket generalization can be offered regarding the wartime experiences of any of the German minorities of Europe.

In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.

This article looks at the experiences and perspectives of homosexual men in Nazi Germany—in particular, at homosexual veterans of World War I. How did homosexual men perceive “hegemonic masculinity” and ideals of comradeship during the Third Reich? The central argument is that the Nazi regime's emphasis on heterosexuality as an essential masculine trait was contested by homosexual veterans, who attempted to exert agency by actively defining notions of “masculinity,” the nature of their homosexuality, as well as their status in the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). The ways in which homosexual men perceived homosexuality in relation to hegemonic masculine norms were diverse: whereas some tried to argue for the compatibility of homosexuality and martial masculinity, those who were arrested often distanced themselves from their homosexual identity. The testimonies of veterans, available in Gestapo police interrogation records, suggest how subjective constructions of sexual identity both undermined and reinforced hegemonic masculine ideals.

In the introduction to his 1915 book Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk, Otto Hintze ruefully quoted an Englishman's observation that, “Prussian history is endlessly boring because it speaks so much of war and so little of revolution.” As the “Great War” entered its second year, and with Germany's hopes for a quick and decisive victory fading, Hintze saw history repeating itself. Like Frederick the Great's Prussia, he wrote, “The German Reich, under a Hohenzollern Kaiser, [now] battles for its existence against a world of enemies.” Since the beginning of the war, Entente propaganda had mobilized the home front by depicting the war as an epochal struggle against the enemy of all civilized men: the savage “Hun,” the jack-booted, spike-helmeted despoiler of innocent Belgium. The crudity of this propaganda caricature aside, its power to persuade nevertheless drew on a widespread conviction that the story of war constituted the core of German history and that the disease of “militarism” was a peculiarly German deformation of the national psyche. In response to the censure of their nation's enemies, the German intellectuals rejected that diagnosis while defending the role war had played in their nation's history. Published in the Kölnische Zeitung on October 4, 1914, the hastily drafted manifesto “To the Civilized World!” was endorsed (if not read) by ninety-three of the Second Reich's most prominent scholars, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, including Peter Behrens, Lujo Brentano, Adolph von Harnack, Max Lenz, and Gustav von Schmoller. They vehemently repudiated the distortion of Germany's history: “Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated.” “The word militarism,” the liberal jurist Gerhard Anschütz defiantly declared in 1915, “which is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for us a badge of honor.” As Hintze, Anschütz, and their contemporaries understood the course of German unification (and Germany's rise as a great power under Prussian leadership), the modern German nation-state owed its very existence to what Hintze called “the monarchical-military factor.” If we are to advance our understanding of how a nationalist discourse obsessed with foreign and domestic threats supported a foreign policy that ignited two world wars in the space of twenty-five years, we must be prepared, I believe, to re-think the “Sonderweg thesis,” not in its relation to the putative immaturity of German liberalism or an atavistic predilection for autocratic rule, but as it was rooted in German military culture. The books under discussion in this essay reframe the militarism/“Sonderweg” debate by examining the unique connection between modern German visions of the nation and the waging of war as revealed in the experience of the First World War. Representing the maturation of the new intellectual and cultural history of war, they pose two fundamental questions: What kind of war did the Second Reich's military, political, and intellectual leadership envision that would “complete” the German nation? And how did they define Germany's enemies?

Since the early 1960s we have witnessed in West German historical writing noteworthy changes in the interpretation of the causes of the First World War and, therefore, of the meaning of that war for Germany. One is particularly struck by the refreshing debate which ensued among German scholars on Germany's war aims specifically and on Imperial Germany's foreign policy prior to the World War in general. The so-called captured German documents of the Foreign Office and other branches of the government were returned to Germany, and a younger generation of historians eagerly examined the newly available material. Remarkable, if at times controversial, studies were the result of the scholarly reexamination of the German imperial era. Yet, in all the commotion and controversy, there was one area of German foreign policy which conspicuously remained ignored or treated with astonishing marginality

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.

The question Wer ist schuld am Krieg?, the focus of a propaganda battle already during the Great War, has obsessed German historians unlike any other issue in their recent history. In America the publishing success of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, the acclaim of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, and the continual appearance of paperback introductions testify to an abiding interest in the outbreak of the First World War. But with the exception of the memorable debate between Sindey Fay and Bernadotte Schmidt, there have been no major American contributions because the issue of causes and responsibilities has been seen primarily as an academic problem.

Resistance under conditions of close to total control is fraught with enormous, almost insurmountable, difficulties. And in the Germany of 1933–45 they were compounded by the fact that the “totalitarianism” of the state was effective not merely by virtue of controls it exercised, but also of the consensus it had managed to whip up. But the most agonizing difficulties were of an ethical order: unlike the Resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied countries, the German Resistance was bound to come into conflict with the “national interestü and it thus got involved in the dilemma of risking the charge of treason in order to assert the prerogatives of higher laws, natural or divine. The “foreign policy” of the German Resistance, involving contacts abroad before the war and during the war, takes us to the most exposed aspects of our problem.

The essential goal of Hitler's National Socialist ideology and its implementation by Heinrich Himmler's SS was the military conquest of “living space” from the eastern borders of the Reich to the Ural Mountains. Within this newly won territory, peoples perceived to be of “alien” race—and hence a danger to the future German Reich—were to be eliminated entirely or intellectually decapitated through the elimination of their political, cultural, and religious elites, leaving a “residue” to provide manual labor for German settlers. Himmler's appointment as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFDV) on 7 October 1939, in the wake of the successful Blitzkrieg against Poland, established his SS and police as the primary executive apparatus for this project. The elimination of the Jews formed an integral part of this “racial restructuring of Eastern Europe.”

This article shows how the material culture of nationhood can reveal a different perspective on the problem of nationalism. Using simple time graphs and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the article considers temporal and spatial dimensions of “nation objects” in an effort to understand the allusive phenomenon of banal, everyday national identity. Specifically, it brings together quantitative evidence for the pervasiveness of veterans monuments, Kaiser Wilhelm I and Otto von Bismarck monuments, as well as monuments to Germany's great intellectuals, and then examines the world of objects, largely kitsch, that these monuments brought forth. The article argues that, especially in small-town Germany, objects signifying the nation point to a national sentiment governed less by the sharp logic of ideology than by the harmonizing tendencies of kitsch.

Dieser Aufsatz zeigt, wie die materielle Kultur der nationalen Einheit eine andere Perspektive auf das Problem des Nationalismus bieten kann. Durch die Verwendung einfacher Zeitgraphiken und Geographic Information Systems (GIS) werden die zeitlichen und räumlichen Dimensionen von “Nationalobjekten” betrachtet, um das anspielungsreiche Phänomen banaler, alltäglicher Nationalidentität zu begreifen. Konkret werden quantitative Nachweise weit verbreiteter Kriegsdenkmäler, Denkmäler für Kaiser Wilhelm I. und Otto von Bismarck sowie Denkmäler für Deutschlands führende Intellektuelle zusammengeführt und im Anschluss daran die Welt der Objekte – größtenteils Kitsch –, die diese Denkmäler hervorgebracht haben, untersucht. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass diese die Nation repräsentierenden Objekte vor allem im kleinstädtischen Deutschland auf ein Nationalgefühl verweisen, das weniger durch klar definierte Ideologie als vielmehr durch die harmonisierenden Tendenzen von Kitsch bestimmt ist.

The emergence and general acceptance of polycentrism in the communist world since the late 1950's has brought the difficulty of defining communism in either ideological, organizational, or programmatic terms out into the open. That difficulty had always existed but had been concealed since the early 1920's largely by the impact of the successful Bolshevik Revolution and by the subsequent bolshevization and Soviet domination of most non-Russian communist groups and movements through the Comintern and the Cominform. The Western cold-war theory of the monolithic nature of a Moscow-centered and -controlled expansion of world communism has perpetuated a widespread identification of communism as such with bolshevism.