Since the early 1960s, social and economic historians of modern Germany have increasingly turned their attention to the study of the First World War and the postwar revolution. Yet of all the ink that has flowed extremely little has trickled down to the peasantry. Excellent monographs examine the wartime experience of several cities. Historians looking for the origins of proletarian radicalism in the revolution of 1918–19 have carefully scrutinized workers of all sorts, and those in pursuit of the birth or perhaps adolescent crisis of “Organized Capitalism” have studied industrialists and the changing role of the state. But no one has looked very closely at the country cousin. When historians have turned to the agricultural sector, they have with few exceptions focused on estate owners and their workers east of the Elbe.

On New Year's Eve 1890 Hildegard, Baroness von Spitzemberg recorded these reflections in her diary:

The end of 1890: the year in which Bismarck left the global stage, not called by death but dismissed against his will. That in itself would be sufficient to make this year unforgettable; who knows if this experience, this past year will become a milestone in German history.… We confront the last decade of the century under the banner of a new generation which rushes with full sail into the heavy sea of time, its impetuous emperor prematurely in command. Towards what? That we may know all too soon—or better all too late—when the reefs rise threateningly before us and there is no experienced mariner at the helm.

Horst Fuhrmann's recent survey of medieval hostility toward Germans and their political structures, chiefly the Empire, has a subtitle (Origins of German Imperialism), that might very well be applied to the fate of the historiography of medieval Germany in the English-speaking world from its considerable prominence up to the eve of the First World War to its low point in the aftermath of the second.

A MOST significant development has been taking place in the field of German history in the last half dozen years or so. Although largely overshadowed, especially in this country, by such emotion-laden issues as the Fritz Fischer debate and the ever popular history of Nazism, it has been quietly changing the terrain of German history and touching the historical consciousness of West Germans in essential ways. It is the maturation of the postwar period from 1945 to 1949 into a significant and sophisticated area of historical inquiry. In a larger West German cultural-political context this has meant the reclaiming of a piece of German history long regarded as lost together with the war and assorted eastern territories.

For a long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.

Scholars often depict the 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students—or, more colloquially, the Red Woodstock—as a momentary “departure” or “break” from everyday life, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) briefly opened its borders to the youth of the world. Similarly, they suggest that, when the festival's nine days of festivities came to an end, the “pathos of revolution” disappeared just as quickly as it had come about, resulting in a return to the restraints of everyday life behind the “Iron Curtain.” By contrast, this article reconsiders the festival's significance by adopting an analytical framework from postsocialist theorists. In doing so, it reconceptualizes the Red Woodstock as a moment of globalized influences and youth engagement that not only reflected shifting societal norms, but also the East German state's commitment to international socialist solidarity. Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the “upside-down” nature of the carnival, as well as on society’s “grotesque body,” is useful in this regard, as it sets in sharp relief the extent to which one of the East German state’s greatest challenges resulted from its own embrace of international socialism. This was the case as young people from the GDR and beyond transformed the East German capital through a subtle appropriation, transformation, and even subversion of the state-generated discourse on international solidarity, in ways that had a lasting effect during the late socialist period.

On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.

On November 27, 1918, Konrad Haenisch, the newly installed education minister (Kultusminister) and Majority Social Democrat, issued arguably the most radical decree in the history of Prussian schooling. The “Appeal to Male and Female Pupils in Secondary Schools,” as the edict was titled, aimed to redress the alleged rampant “demons of morbid subservience, mistrust, and lies” in secondary schools. Its proposed solution was for every school to hold an assembly by the end of the year to introduce democratic governance. Each teacher and each pupil in the ninth grade (Obertertia) and higher would have an equal vote on whether they wanted to form a school parliament (Schulgemeinde), a pupil council (Schülerrat), or both. In the school parliament, all teachers and pupils would have equal rights to have an “entirely open discussion” about their school affairs, including matters of discipline, and equal votes to pass resolutions pertaining thereto. In addition, pupils alone would elect a teacher and pupil council that would be standing liaisons to the director and the other teaching staff. Most controversially, the school parliament or the standing pupil council could appoint a representative empowered to bypass the school director and teaching staff and hold conversations with the ministers in Berlin about how to redress inequities in their particular school and change youth policy in the new republic more generally. A last measure in the decree gave pupils the unlimited right to join any association, provided it was “not political.” This new right abrogated the requirement that pupils in secondary schools get permission from their directors to found or join associations in or outside school. Haenisch required that schools post this decree on all blackboards. There were similar decrees issued in December 1918 in Saxony, Württemberg, and Bavaria.

Recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine has begun to consider the diversity of sites, markets, and audiences for scientific knowledge. This article investigates a single publicly accessible location: Vienna's Prater park. At a time when the Second Vienna Medical School led the world in anatomy and pathology, two case studies demonstrate how knowledge about human anatomy entered the fin-de-siècle Viennese public sphere in a noninstitutional setting. Josef Hyrtl, an anatomist, and Hermann Präuscher, a showman, employed targeted marketing strategies for their anatomical preparations to facilitate the circulation of anatomical knowledge among the socially diverse audiences that congregated on the fairground. Examining how anatomy was visualized and discursively constructed, alongside questions of site, accessibility, and audience response, sheds light on a pivotal historical moment when the meaning of the human body was undergoing significant transformation in Austrian society.

Those who opposed Communist rule in East Germany often did so because Communism in practice strongly reminded them of the fascism they had experienced in the Third Reich. The new East German regime was also one that attempted total control of people's lives; therefore it became natural to describe it as totalitär. Most sensitive to the similarities between the old and new regimes were university students. They displayed stronger direct opposition to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the years from 1946–1949 than any other social group. This is reflected in the political battles that were fought in universities during these years, leading to SED election failures in the elections of the postwar years: 1946/47 and late 1947. The latter were the last freely contested elections in East Germany until 1989. It is also reflected in the disproportionate number of students arrested by Soviet and East German authorities in the early postwar years.

Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was a relatively simple operation; it took only a few weeks for Prussian armies to rout the French forces. But integrating this prize of war into Imperial Germany proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. It is indeed a rather pathetic spectacle. While some of the highest civilian officials of the territorial administration sought to integrate the Reichsland into the Reich, the highest military officers sought to impose a military dictatorship; and on the sidelines, powerful German textile, tobacco, and iron and steel interests hoped to minimize competion from Alsace-Lorraine by sabotaging all government efforts at conciliation and integration. It is this latter aspect of the problem, what one might term the economic subversion of political integration, which we shall examine here.

Iregret that David Abraham's lengthy, bizarre, obfuscating, and often mendacious reply to my charges requires me to impose on the generosity of CEH once again, but readers will understand why I insisted that Abraham not be allowed to have the kind of “last word” granted him in the AHR. In my article, I deliberately refrained from a discussion of the various circular letters sent around by Abraham, myself, and others for the simple reason that most readers would have no direct means of checking the evidence for themselves, that the whole affair had been utterly confusing, and that it was most appropriate in this journal to concentrate on what had appeared in print. This is not a tabloid, but a scholarly journal, and I find the airing of Abraham's personal grievances against me inappropriate in this forum. The way in which I treated Abraham can have no bearing whatever on the reliability of his book or other writings. Although I initially contemplated writing a detailed reply to Abraham's plaints, I have concluded that this would be an abuse of CEH's hospitality. Since this is a historical journal, however, falsifications of the historical record and certain charges should not go totally without comment, and I will now make a number of brief responses to certain of Abraham's charges for that purpose.

Consideration of political life in modern Germany has often centered on two main issues: classically, the vicissitudes of the national state; more recently, the impact of the creation of an industrial society on existing structures of power and on the position of ruling elites. Without denying the centrality of these questions, an exclusive focus on them can obscure the importance of other factors in German political development, both in their own right, and in the way they mediated the experience of state-building and industrialization to different sections of the population. Two such relevant factors are regionalism and confessional identity.

Gustav Stresemann counted on the Locarno accords of October 1925 to pave the way for peaceful revision of the Versailles treaty. Yet just days before these agreements renouncing force as a means of modifying the Rhineland frontier were to come into effect, the German foreign minister spoke of a wake, at which “the hopes which arose in Locarno are laid to rest, under a tombstone bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies the Spirit of Locarno.’” Stresemann's remark to the French chargé d'affaires in Berlin was prompted by France's apparent veto of the restoration of Eupen and Malmédy to the German Reich. As an illustration of the fundamental governmental attitudes of the participating powers, and as a measure of just what each saw in the Locarno treaties, the case of Eupen-Malmédy presents several provocative revelations.

When the First World War ended, Germany experienced an unprecedented period of political revolution, economic turmoil, and social upheaval. Among the myriad problems facing the nation was one concern that cut across party lines and prompted attention at both the national and local levels. Lawmakers, doctors, clergy, and ordinary Germans across the political spectrum agreed that the breakdown of the family had weakened the nation, contributed to military defeat, worsened economic misery, and exacerbated societal conflict. High divorce and illegitimacy rates together with an alarmingly low birth rate created a picture of families in crisis. The belief was widespread that only by creating policies that strengthened families would Germany stand a chance of regaining its historical strength. Because both Weimar and National Socialist policymakers saw the family as essential to rejuvenating the battered nation, the interwar era witnessed a wide variety of family-directed policies. Social welfare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and maternity benefits were just the beginning of a series of programs designed to strengthen Germany and support families. While state programs targeted many different groups within society, children stood out as especially worthy recipients. Policymakers in both the Weimar and National Socialist eras recognized that children, the most vulnerable members of society and the nation's future, required special attention.

Historians in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), unlike their western counterparts, could never allow themselves the luxury of studying the past for its own sake because, in this Marxist-Leninist state, history and politics were always inextricably linked. The GDR's leaders were committed communists who had long recognized history's apparent political power. They were convinced that, for the new “Workers' and Peasants' State” to acquire legitimacy among its own people, a German historical narrative, based on the ascertainable “scientific” laws of Marxism, was an essential requirement. East German citizens had endured twelve years of anti-communist Nazi rule and, consequently, the task of integrating them into a republic, where an entirely different set of political values predominated, was a fairly daunting undertaking.

Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not the strongest) field in modern European history. Whether measured anecdotally by the number of job openings, the number of historians hired, the stream of published books, or the share of German history articles in academic journals, it always seems that German historians and German history are at the forefront. In fact, though, historians of Germany have always made up the smallest cohort of historians of the major European history fields (that also include British, Russian, and French history). According to the latest figures available from the American Historical Association (AHA), in 2010 there were 990 historians of Britain, 668 historians of Russia, 605 historians of France, and 592 historians of Germany in the United States.