In 1898, the year before his death, the German missionary Ernst Faber reflected on his forty-year career in China. The account of his early missions work was suffused with a tone of failure and disappointment. He wrote openly about his difficulties in adjusting to the climate and environment of southern China, the diminutive numbers of converts to Christianity, his frustrations with learning Mandarin and the local dialects used in Guangdong, and the overwhelming feeling of loneliness that he encountered working in rural parishes.

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

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.

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). His Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigung or VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.

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.

Punctually at 4:05 on the morning of March 31, 1938, a new diesel locomotive left the Holzkirchen Bahnhof in Munich, pulling the first traveling “achievement exhibition” (Leistungsshau) of German technology. It had been nineteen days since the Anschluss, and on April 10 all Greater Germany would vote its approval of incorporating Austria into the Reich. Despite their use of terror to influence the Austrian vote and virtual assurance of electoral success, the National Socialists embarked on an extensive propaganda effort in Austria to ensure a wide margin of victory there. Hitler campaigned throughout Austria during the last ten days before the vote, making six major speeches, and other top Nazi officials made electioneering tours. Famous for constructing the Autobahn network, Fritz Todt, Inspector General for German Highways, and the engineers of the NSDAP Central Office for Technology, organized a traveling propaganda exhibit to display German technology under the motto “Austria's chimneys will smoke again.” It was the first of three “Voyages of Technology” undertaken by Todt and his Nazi engineers.

By the early 1970s, the West German Protestant churches became involved in the increasingly bitter conflict surrounding the production and use of nuclear energy. While the nuclear issue remains as controversial and divisive as ever in Germany today, no historical analysis has yet been offered to explain the reasons that the churches especially in West Germany have become avid participants in this debate for decades.

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.”

The politics of sexuality in modern Germany was complicated, contradictory, and multivalent. Reflecting on how to conceptualize that complexity is worthwhile, for doing so allows us to formulate multiple interpretive perspectives. After briefly sketching two of the most common scholarly interpretations, this article explores the usefulness of a third model, one in which the political dynamic of the broad and complex debate about sexuality is neither univalent (i.e., moving toward greater freedom or greater repression) nor binary (moving toward both), but “trivalent.” This perspective reveals the usefulness of seeing a political dynamic set up by conflicts and contrasts among three loose groupings that stand out among the many voices debating the nature and meaning of sexuality. At the same time, it uncovers and defines the productivity of multiple contradictions and conflicts, as well as the contingent coherences, they generated. Making use of particular readings of Foucauldian theory and the theory of complex systems, the article suggests the value of thinking about the politics of sexuality in terms of processes of change, as well as structures of power.

During the late nineteenth century, prostitution became the subject of controversy and debate because of an enormous increase in the number of prostitutes who walked the streets of all large European cities, including Hanover. This growth was a byproduct of rapid urbanization and of the frequent economic contractions that characterized urban economies. Young women who were drawn to the cities often found only low-paid or seasonal work. They turned to prostitution when other work was unobtainable, or, occasionally, prostituted themselves in order to supplement low wages or to support themselves when they were between jobs. The creation of a large market in prostitution was noted by many observers, some of whom estimated the population of prostitutes to be in the tens of thousands.

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

In the early 1930s German democracy was dying, mired in political gridlock, burdened by four million unemployed, and under assault by Nazis and Communists alike. In the midst of this crisis the Reich Association of Catholic Workers' Clubs and Working Youth (Reichsverband der katholischen Arbeitervereine und der Werkjugend) published a modest anthology entitled Die Arbeit (Work), “dedicated to the poetic glorification of labor.” Editorially justifying the decision to provide Catholic workers with verses at such a time, Ferdinand Göbel, one of the rising young leaders of the Catholic labor movement, argued that the poems, far from serving as a distraction or a momentary boost to morale, would enable workers to find the only true and lasting solution to their predicament. Poetry would lead to an inner, spiritual renewal, a rediscovery by workers that their labor was “not simply to earn bread, but… joyful participation in the act of creation, sacrificial service to humanity and a means of atonement that makes us strong and free within.” Because of this, said Göbel, The modern worker, this man of iron, has discovered his soul. He believes in loyalty and comradeship, in brotherhood and the courage to sacrifice. He hopes in a new humanity. Yes, out of his heavy everyday existence he hammers bridges to the eternal and the divine. He turns hard slave labor into an act of worship.

Romania entered World War I at a difficult moment for the Central Powers. The offensive against Verdun had been an extraordinarily bloody stalemate, one that sapped the officer corps' confidence in the leadership of General Erich von Falkenhayn. In June, Russia launched its great Brusilov offensive, pushing Austria-Hungary to the verge of capitulation. Soon thereafter, the British offensive against the Somme, itself a blood-soaked disaster, nonetheless revealed an astounding Entente advantage in war material. The first part of 1916 had not been kind to the armies of the Dual Alliance.

G. W. F. Hegel's “Commentary on the Published Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Württemberg, 1815–1816” is the notoriously recondite philosopher's most lucid account of Germany's political transformation after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Written in a punchy, polemical style, yet brimming with philosophical distinctions, the 130–page essay features concrete analyses of political institutions, social groups, and parliamentary debates in Hegel's home state. He published it in the 1817 Heidelberg Yearbooks, hoping to reach the educated public and influence the shape of Germany's constitutional order after Napoleon's defeat. The work has never been fully translated or adequately interpreted; it earns but a few, albeit astute, remarks in Terry Pinkard's recent biography. The 1999 Cambridge edition of Hegel's Political Writings omits it entirely, citing its focus on “esoteric and antiquarian matters peculiar to the political history of Württemberg.” As Hegel himself realized, however, Württemberg's experience dramatized the most profound civic upheaval of the age: the shift from a corporate society composed of particular estates (Stände) to a civil society governed by universal precepts and a “rational” state.

That many German intellectuals greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but showed little interest in importing it across the Rhine, is a well-known paradox in German history. For Jacques Droz this paradox resulted from the preoccupation of most German intellectuals with the purely ethical implications of the Revolution—in other words, the Germans dealt with the Revolution in the realm of thought but ignored it in the realm of politics. Behind this argument lay the assumption that because the Germans were for the most part “monarchists” rather than “republicans,” they were apolitical.

One of the views most widely encountered in the literature on the Crimean War is that Austrian policy aimed at acquiring the Danubian Principalities in one form or another. Austria's purposes were not merely defensive, but expansionist. She wanted to replace the existing Russian protectorate by an exclusive protectorate of her own, to make herself the heir to the Ottoman Sultan's suzerain rights, and thereby pave the way to ultimate annexation. Or, if this proved impossible, she wanted at least to exercise an exclusive political influence in the Principalities, and to incorporate them permanently into her economic sphere and military system. The evidence for this view seems, on the surface, quite impressive. For Austria did force Russia to evacuate the Principalities by diplomatic ultimatum and military demonstration in the summer of 1854, and immediately moved in to occupy them herself. Her military commanders attempted to exclude the Turks from a share in the occupation, and failing this, tried to limit the Turkish role as much as possible. During the occupation, they interfered in matters of local administration and supported officials friendly to Austria against the wishes of the Turks and the local magnates. Austria also undertook the development of roads and a telegraph system, surveying, and other projects designed to aid her economic penetration of the territory. Her occupation was prolonged until 1857, and ended then only under heavy pressure from the Western Powers.

In May of 1948 a letter from Major J. C. Thompson, chief of the Religious Affairs Section of the American Military Government in Berlin, arrived at the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists in Washington, D.C. Major Thompson's office was responsible for seeing that all Nazis were removed from leadership positions, and his letter was part of an ongoing correspondence about the denomination's need to come to terms with its Nazi past. The Adventist denomination, he complained, was “one of the very few in Berlin which have not cleaned house politically to date. Most of the denominations finished this task long enough ago to have forgotten about it.” The letter must have been particularly embarrassing to Adventist leaders as it went on to compare Adventists to Catholics, who “actually had little housecleaning to do because of their strong opposition during the reign of Hitler to the entire Nazi regime.”

The three articles of this symposium contribute to a vital debate about the nature of modern German politics. The works by Barbara Anderson, Loyd Lee, and Lawrence Flockerzie discuss the political culture upon which the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Germany rested. This political culture transcended the conventional concepts “liberal” and “conservative.” It was based on bourgeois ideals.

In a talk delivered on 20 September 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the president of the League of German Women's Associations (BDF) likened the political status of German women to mothers who were forced to nurse their children with their hands tied behind their backs. They were thoroughly frustrated by the destructiveness of the war and were only able to fulfill their duties toward family and nation because they believed that the experience of the war would make the nation stronger.