Many aspects of the German-American encounter during the Second World War remain deeply engraved in the American mind. One of them is the story of the German “werewolves,” Hitler's last underground fighters, who challenged the occupying armies in the war's closing months. The werewolf threat made a lasting impression on American troops and media at the time, and on American collective memory up to today. This article traces how the Nazi insurgents became part of an older mythical narrative that continues to infuse not only American popular culture, but even contemporary elite and political discourse. One of the more recent examples is Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld's effort to compare the Nazi werewolves with the Iraqi insurgents whose attacks have plagued the occupied country since the American invasion.

Georg Herwech was preeminently the German political poet of the 1840's. With youthful arrogance and unstable talent he burst onto the literary and political stage in 1841 with the publication of his Gedichte eines Lebendigen. The contagious excitement generated by this work showed that he both touched and epitomized the revolutionary aspirations of Germany's intellectuals. Gottfried Keller described the immediate impact of Herwegh's work on him: “The new tone struck me like a trumpet blast which suddenly arouses a large camp of the people's army.” And his reaction was typical: Herwegh was feted by literary circles and political coteries impatient for the revolution that his poetry impelled. When the revolution did come in 1848, Herwegh led a battalion into battle, only to flee precipitately in defeat. But the poet outlived his reputation. He spent most of the years after 1848 in exile, growing increasingly estranged from Germany, his infrequent later poetry never equalling the vigor of his first verse. He had lived for revolution, and when that revolution failed he passed the rest of his life in futile and impotent grasping for the past or some imagined future. “They were like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died,” wrote Alexander Herzen, describing the empty lives of the exiled revolutionaries of 1848 like Herwegh. “And like the clock, they had not been wound up since the death of Louis XVI.”

Although Gilbert Allardyce's recent article in the American Historical Review is useful in reminding us of “What Fascism Is Not,” even he recognizes the Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, as one of the few ideas common to all fascist movements in Europe during the interwar years. The fascists had little difficulty in deciding what they were against: “Marxism,” liberalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, and often, but not always, Judaism. They could also agree that they favored such vague and general ideas as a “‘new world,’ love of power and the dramatic appeal of youth, elite consciousness and mass influence, revolutionary ardor and veneration of tradition.” They were ultranationalistic and hoped to reunite their socially divided people into “people's communities.” In common with many nonfascist regimes they limited civil liberties and tolerated the existence of only one, all-encompassing political party. They stressed emotion and sentiment over reason, action instead of words, violence in place of peace.

In the last decade the field of studies focusing on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist period of German history has been invaded and nearly overrun by an international throng of journalists, essayists, memoirists, apologists, cultists, and hucksters busily engaged in advancing various interpretations, analyses, and portraits of Hitler. Among this group who are not scholars or professional historians, there seems a wide disparity of ability and expertise and an obvious dissimilarity of motives and objectives. It is, therefore, difficult to specify common points of similarity or agreement that might characterize this particular genre of Hitler studies (or enterprises). On one point only do the efforts seem to tally, in the unspoken but apparent agreement on an injunction by now axiomatic: Adolf Hitler sells.

With the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, National Socialist Germany aimed to destroy the Polish nation and Polish national consciousness. The Nazi regime attempted to accomplish this in a variety of ways, including the destruction of Polish cultural institutions, forced resettlement, forced labor, incarceration in prisons and camps, random and systematic roundups of prisoners, and mass murder. To the German authorities in occupied Poland and to many Poles, it was obvious that the occupation would target the Polish Catholic Church with vigor and brutality. Catholicism was the religion of approximately 65 percent of interwar Poland's population: it dominated religious life, held tremendous wealth and political power, and its clergy were widely respected as members of the intelligentsia. More importantly for the Germans, the Catholic Church was a locus and symbol of Polish national identity.

In the early 1990s, reunified Germany faced surging numbers of asylum seekers and a wave of far-right violence against foreigners. In letters that German citizens wrote to President Richard von Weizsäcker, it is clear that some Germans feared that the arrival of large numbers of non-Germans would bring about the collapse of the state or the destruction of the German people. This article engages with the history of fear in postwar Germany by examining Germans’ post-reunification fears of migration and foreigners. I argue, first, that a biological understanding of race was still surprisingly widespread as late as the early 1990s. Second, I call for a substantially more nuanced understanding of German reunification, one that emphasizes uncertainty and the terrifying openness of the future. Finally, I highlight the intersection of race thinking and memory by showing that racial fears were frequently shaped by memories of Germany's dark past.

In a recent issue of Central European History, David Wetzel published a wide-ranging review of the first two volumes of my documentary edition on the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne, the immediate pre-history of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71. It goes without saying that I read this review by the author of A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War (2001) with particular interest. My first—and lasting—impression is that here was the discussion of a specialist, one that—precisely because of Wetzel's roots in a different historiographical tradition—represents a model of scholarly fairness. In German historiography since the nineteenth century, and primarily for political reasons, comparably fair treatment of works that deal with a central historical figure such as Bismarck has not been the rule. I am no less grateful for the opportunity offered by his critical objections to make some more general and precise points.

At the height of the Cold War in 1962, U.S. Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to “restore the patent system, in at least some measure, to its traditional role of rewarding the inventor, in order the better to carry out the constitutional objective of ‘promoting the progress of science and useful arts.’” The rise of the corporate research establishment, McClellan stated, had caused the employer to interpose “himself between the individual inventor and the patent system, with the former appropriating the patent rights and the latter often being rewarded by nominal monetary grants or other recognition.”

This article situates the establishment of the Bundeswehr and the implementation of compulsory military service in the 1950s and early 1960s within contemporary efforts to define a “sexual-moral order” for the Federal Republic of Germany. It argues that West Germany's rearmament offered contemporaries an opportunity to stipulate not only acceptable soldierly behavior, but also adequate male behavior in general. In the context of heightened concerns about juvenile delinquents (so-called Halbstarken), female prostitution, homosexuality, and the distribution of pornographic materials, West German citizens became interested in the social and sexual conduct of Bundeswehr soldiers and officers. Whereas some still considered the military to be a “school of the nation” and of proper masculinity, others worried about the armed forces as a possible breeding ground for immorality. Partly sharing these concerns, government representatives, members of the Bundestag, church officials, and military commanders sought to guide soldiers’ behavior, emphasizing the ideal of the “complete” (vollkommene) Christian male-breadwinner family.

Established in spring 1928, the Sturmabteilung's (SA's) Sturm 33 was known in the Berlin area for its bloody street fighting. Four years after its founding, the well-known journalist Gabriele Tergit observed in the Weltbühne that “People know it—when Sturm 33 is involved, . . . there is terror. But no newspaper says as much any longer, no police pass it on as news—it is civil war as habit.” The Berlin-Charlottenburg district's SA-Sturm represented the Nazi movement's systematic application of violence in an especially acute manner, as both social experiences and the way of living within the unit were closely tied to violent action. In that respect, I will here argue that in Sturm 33, only an internal sociohistorical dynamic of violently plotting camaraderie made it possible to fulfill Nazism's ideological promise of integration, rendering it plausible within the organizational unit's particular cosmos.

This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe.

In the aftermath of World War II, Christian leaders in Germany embraced the political ideology of Christian Democracy. Viewing Nazism as a form of materialism and atheism, which they blamed on the ongoing secularization and moral decay of German society, both Protestant and Catholic leaders argued that only the society-wide renewal of Christian faith and Christian values could provide a solid foundation for the future. Enjoying a privileged position in the eyes of the western Allies (particularly the Americans), the churches took on a leading role in the reconstruction of German society. And, working to overcome the postwar disillusionment of many of their members, church leaders urged their followers to take active, personal responsibility for political life in the new German states.

A man
Who sets a house ablaze is an
Arsonist who is prosecuted and punished
Under the law.
A man
Who turns entire cities to
Debris and ash is a
Conqueror
Who is hailed as a hero.

Many elements were woven into this rather sneering assertion by Ferdinand Avenarius, founder and editor of the leading cultural journal of Wilhelmine Germany, Der Kunstwart. Toys, by then thoroughly commercialized consumer goods, had “true value.” By extension, consumer goods could have value. Unfortunately for Avenarius, that value stands in “inverse ratio to its dazzle.” Dazzle did not simply obscure or even eliminate value, but rather maintained a complicated link. “Value” was the mirror image of “dazzle,” varying in equal and opposite proportion. That “inverse ratio” was also connected to the power that dazzle had over “weak minds.” The values and assumptions that informed and united Avenarius' broadside represent the subject of this essay. For Avenarius was not piecing together ideas at random, nor were they applicable to toys alone. Rather, this outburst was but one example of a persistent effort by German cultural elites to assess the problems as well as the possibilities of an increasingly commercial, even consumerist society. In that effort, Avenarius and others would mobilize the Romantic suspicion of vision and reemphasize the central importance of creativity and autonomous self-expression in the construction of genuine subjectivity. In this way, important elements of the Romantic tradition worked to authorize, even promote, certain types of consumer items while stigmatizing others, suggesting a nuanced and historically specific response to the challenges of modern consumerism.

In opening this exchange, Gerald Feldman accused me of “egregious errors,” systematically “tendentious misconstruals,” “outright inventions,” and “fabrications.” In my reply, I made what I believe to have been a good faith effort to address and evaluate these charges. Because an understanding of the arguments in my book was essential to that evaluation, I first restated those arguments, and my overall thesis. In the face of a fantastic portrayal of business-Nazi conspiracy, it was necessary to set the record straight. Making repeated reference to what I actually said in my book, as opposed to what Feldman insinuates that I said, the substance of my reply was this: First, I openly acknowledged my commission of error. I did not trivialize or minimalize my mistakes. I apologized for them, and said they were “inexcusable.” Second, and not inconsistently, I argued that Feldman was nonetheless wrong to claim that the errors undermined the fundamental arguments of my book. Third, I showed that there was no consistent pattern to the errors—the correction of some hurt the argument; the correction of many others strengthened it—and that there was, therefore, no systematic tendentiousness evident in my mistakes. Fourth and finally, I refuted the many charges of mendacity, invention, fabrication, and fraud, and provided a variety of sorts of evidence to show that these charges—surely the most serious that Feldman made—were utterly baseless.