To order an untidy past, historians identify and interpret significant pivots in the development of nations. One such pivot in the fractured history of twentieth-century Germany was the period between 1945 and 1949. In these brief postwar years, a remarkable “mutation” of German politics and society began under Allied tutelage. In this interregnum between Hitler and Adenauer, a war-devastated West Germany started on the path “from shadow to substance.” As the Bonn Republic endured, historians started to trace its origins back to certain political and economic structures first erected in the postwar years. Increasingly, they emphasized postwar Weichenstellungen, or turning points, which influenced later events. By the 1980s, this structuralist view strongly suggested that contemporaries of the years 1945–1949 had actually lived through the Vorgeschichte, or prehistory, of the Federal Republic, and of affluence.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

After an agreement between Nazi Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley and Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach on December 8, 1993, providing the necessary organizational background, one of the most curious experiments in National Socialist educational policy was launched. The first Reichsberufswettkampf, or Reich Vocational Contest, brought more than half a million young people3 between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one together and encouraged them to compete against each other in fifteen professional fields, between April 9 and 14 of 1934. At the end of the month, fourteen boys and six girls were summoned to Berlin to be declared “Reich Victors,” in the presence of highest government and party plenipotentiaries.

In the midst of the upheaval created by military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and other German monarchies, and the threat of radical social revolution, a movement that had been taking shape for some time became a visible presence in German public life. Intellectuals, writers, visual artists, and numerous others declared that they would no longer remain aloof from the world of politics, social reform, and even revolution. On the contrary, they would seek to merge the arts and politics into a synthesis that would help to mold a new and greatly improved society. They issued manifestos and programs, founded organizations and journals, joined political parties — primarily on the left — and went to the streets, at least to observe if not also to act. The majority of the participants in this movement were, at some point in their careers, part of new artistic trends and, as such, contributors to the formation and advancement of aesthetic modernism in Germany.

The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over the longue dureé. The authors—Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin—all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it—the “green fields” (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title. Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.

This article focuses on the joint campaign of “remigrés” and American authorities to “westernize” the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin during the early Cold War. The years 1948 to 1958 witnessed one of postwar Germany's most bitter intraparty struggles for leadership within the Berlin SPD, where a faction of remigrés led by Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt wrestled for control with the so-called Keulenriege around Franz Neumann. Examining clandestine American support for the remigré faction, which included favorable media coverage and considerable financial contributions, this article focuses in particular on the political maneuvering of a German-American network around Shepard Stone, political advisor to U.S. Commissioner John McCloy. An investigation of the postwar power struggle within the Berlin SPD offers fresh perspectives on three related subjects: the role of remigrés in postwar Germany history; the political clout of informal German-American networks; and West Berlin as an alternative laboratory of German democratization.

The politics of history and memory culture have recently been the topic of increased discussion again—and this discussion has by no means been cool-headed, but hot, with a high potential for conflict. An argument is ongoing in the public sphere over which (hi)stories are present and visible and which are not, who is being recognized and who is not, as well as what is being forgotten, repressed, or tacitly accepted in this context. Corresponding to this general development, a debate is currently ongoing in the German press that has been dubbed “Historikerstreit 2.0,” or “the historians’ debate reloaded.” The controversy was initially sparked by a discussion about the Cameroonian intellectual Achille Mbembe, his position toward the State of Israel, and his involvement with the BDS movement, before continuing on to a discussion about Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory when it was published in a German translation. Finally, the debates deepened with the controversy surrounding Dirk Moses's polemics concerning an ostensible “German catechism” with regard to Holocaust commemoration.

To a large extent, master surveys of the Federal Republic's history have failed to weave into their narratives the rise of female emancipation or challenges to male domination. This article addresses the reasons for this failure, as well as the implications of its reversal. It analyzes the role of women activists during West Germany's “1968,” underlining the gender bias of common narratives of the West German Sixties. The addition of feminist agency to West German history necessarily changes the definition of “success” in the Westernization narrative of the Federal Republic, and also the way in which we define generations and engage in public forms of commemoration.

Die Emanzipation der Frauen und die Infragestellung männlicher Dominanz spielen in den Überblickswerken zur Geschichte der Bundesrepublik nur eine untergeordnete Rolle. Warum dies so ist, und welche Folgen eine Umkehr dieser Tendenz hätte, ist Thema dieses Aufsatzes. Am Beispiel feministischer Aktivistinnen des westdeutschen “1968” wird aufgezeigt, wie geschlechtsspezifisch verzerrt die gängigen Narrative der Protestbewegung und des Wertewandels in den 1960er Jahren sind. Sobald wir die Narrative der westdeutschen Geschichte mit feministischer “agency” zusammendenken, verändert sich notwendigerweise die Definition von “Erfolg” in der “Erfolgsgeschichte” der Bundesrepublik. Zudem werden die Kategorien des “Westens” und der “Verwestlichung”, der “politischen Generation” und des “Generationskonflikts” als geschlechtsspezifische Konstrukte erkennbar, die bislang eine männliche Perspektive in der Geschichtsschreibung wie in der öffentlichen Erinnerungskultur privilegiert haben.

Sudden defeat on the battlefields of Jena and Auerstädt in 1806 inflicted a crushing blow on the Hohenzollern state. The ensuing devastation resulting from the Napoleonic war left Prussia with a crushed military organization, a bankrupt treasury, a shattered economy, and a government in chaos. The Treaty of Tilsit, dictated by Napoleon, humiliated Prussia and made it a rump state with half its former territory. To all observers, the defeat represented not only Prussia's military weakness, but also her social, political, and economic backwardness compared to Napoleonic France. Liberals inside and outside the government saw the crisis as a long-awaited opportunity to reform their government and society. The situation was so critical that it convinced the timid, indecisive King Frederick William III to summon Baron Karl vom Stein, whom all Prussia knew as a resolute advocate of reform, to head a new ministry. Stein's government, which lasted from October 1807 through November 1808, produced volumes of draft legislation designed to restructure the civil and military administration as well as the economy and society of Prussia.

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy found the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the word culture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even the raison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

Theodor Mommsen called him “the most German man.” The Israelit noted that he had never stepped forward as a Jew. Ernest Hamburger writes that he was the only Jewish deputy who omitted the usual declaration about his religious allegiance in the parliamentary manual. “It was without significance for him.” In his will he requested that “no religious ceremony take place since this is absolutely contrary to my conviction.” And even after his death, when his brother Rudolf established a fund of ten thousand marks for the Berlin Jewish community, it was specified that books could be distributed to talented children except those who attended religious schools. Thus we have a picture of Ludwig Bamberger, the most German man or at least a completely emancipated Jew.

In the summer of 1985, I visited a number of German corporate archives in search of reflective writings, diaries, memoirs, private commentaries on economic or political affairs, and the like by important German businessmen of this century. Much of the trip proved disappointing, probably because little of the sort of material I wanted ever came into being, let alone remains to be found. Executives are not given as a rule, regardless of their day or domicile, to ruminative prose. At the Degussa AG in Frankfurt, however, the archivist pointed me toward a discovery: the Biographische Unterlagen of Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Roessler (1870–1937), the son of Degussa's founder, member of its five- to six-man managing group (Direktion) from 1901 to 1924, and chairman of its supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) from the latter date until his death.