Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the “middle.” That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the “primacy of foreign policy,” that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: “Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern,” in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: “Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.” But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?

When we think about the Third Reich, the first images that come to mind are not those associated with buying and selling. Though an increasing number of studies have appeared on consumer habits and policies toward consumers, the literature on the Nazi period has been dominated by a focus on production, specifically war production. For every study of the consumer economy, there have been dozens on the Four-Year Plan, the use of foreign and slave labor, and heavy industry. In recent years a number of historians have begun to question this imbalance. Hartmut Berghoff and Wolfgang Koenig have argued that the regime encouraged “virtual consumption” through images of a future postwar era of peace and prosperity: the people's car, the people's refrigerator, and other products that would be available to all once victory had been achieved. Nancy Reagin and Irene Guenther have provided compelling material on the responses of female consumers to the decreasing availability of many household items, starting with the introduction of the autarkic Four-Year Plan. Nonetheless, this recent wave of interest in issues of consumption has tended to concentrate on the prewar years of the regime; after 1939, most historians merely emphasize the growing shortage of goods as the war dragged on. One exception is Goetz Aly, who has maintained that allegiance to the regime was secured through the dissemination of goods stolen from Jews and the occupied territories. But his arguments have not convinced everyone, and his focus on the distribution of goods merely as a means of generating political support says little about how it fit in with wider patterns of consumer expectations and long-term economic thinking.

The era of the French Revolution and the Napoleon Wars left a deep mark not only on political, social, and cultural life in German-speaking Europe, but also on German academic historiography as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Both before and after the formation of the Kaiserreich, professional historians like Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke sought in their scholarship to justify Prussia's leadership role in Germany, and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic years figured centrally in this effort. For Friedrich Meinecke, writing in the Wilhelmine years, a remembrance of this era was crucial if Germany was to retain its intellectual and moral bearings: “One thing is clear: the survival and continuity of German intellectual life is somehow related to the events between 1807 and 1815—the liberation of Germany from foreign rule, and the transformation of Prussia, her most powerful state, into a freer, more national political entity.” In Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung (1906), Meinecke related the process by which the formerly apolitical, individualistic musings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were given practical, political implementation in the reforms of Karl vom Stein, Karl von Hardenberg, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and then in the Wars of Liberation: “By descending to the state, the spirit not only preserved its own endangered existence as well as that of the state, it secured a reservoir of moral and psychological wealth, a wellspring of creative power for later generations.”

In 1780 Christian Dohm, a ranking Prussian civil servant, collaborated with the Berlin Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on a memorandum submitted on behalf of the Jews of Alsace to the French Council of State. A year later Dohm issued his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, a treatise on the civil improvement of the Jews, which contained a comprehensive program for increasing the general utility of the Jewish population. By that time, the European debate over the Jews was already long in progress. The seventeenth century had dealt with the question of readmission and the first half of the eighteenth century less successfully with naturalization. Both debates had centered in England, although the issues involved were pertinent to Holland, France, and to some extent Italy as well. Both debates had also produced a considerable number of polemics. Most recently, a 1753 bill sponsored by the Pelham government sought to facilitate the process of naturalization for Jewish immigrants. The so-called Jew Bill precipitated a wide-ranging public debate on the status of the Jews in England.

Before Hans Rosenberg reached his thirtieth year, the National Socialist seizure of power, abetted and applauded by disproportionate numbers of his contemporaries, drove him into exile. Many years later he wrote of the “curiosity and anxiety” he felt toward the catastrophe of German fascism, which had “disfigured and besmirched the wrinkled historic face of my native land beyond recognition,” giving it “the most sordid and brutal expression in its entire past.”

“More than any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.

While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung, and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was part of a significant, coordinated effort to undermine a small but influential faction of radical social critics. This wave of intellectual persecution radicalized the left, sowing the seeds for Marx's thoroughgoing assault on the foundations of European state and society. Understanding these cases in the context of a broader process of the transformation of censorship practices in modern Germany, however, remains an incomplete project for historians.

In October 1936, Herbert Levy, a thirty-year-old German Jew living in Breslau, the capital of Silesia, moved to the eastern stretches of the region in order to become a doctor. Against all odds and repressive trends in Nazi Germany at the time, Levy applied for a spot to study medicine in Hindenburg, a mining town near the Polish-German border. While his application was predictably rejected based on his Jewish identity, Levy's response was less predictable, at least to an outsider. He appealed his case, arguing that he had the law on his side. Levy was right. Although more than three years of Nazi decrees and persecution had driven many Jewish doctors out of the practice and made the study of medicine all but impossible, Levy enjoyed the protections of international law.

The shock administered to the power structure of southern and central German lands by the Peasants' War of 1524–25 had many ramifications. Among the most interesting was the further deterioration in the always tense relationship between the imperial cities of the area and the princes and nobility. This deterioration stemmed directly from a feeling on the part of the latter two groups that the imperial cities had not supported the suppression of the rebellion as fully as they might have. Indeed, despite the fact that only a few imperial cities actually cooperated in any way with the peasants, some princes charged the leadership of all imperial cities with secret support for the rebels.

Intellectual history has always been a bit embattled in the English-speaking world, especially the sort of intellectual history that deals with cosmic moods and ideas. There always been those who have tried to place the practitioners of this kind of intellectual history on the defensive. However, the great masters of this discipline— a Dilthey or a Burckhardt or a Lovejoy—continue to cast their spell over many of us. Even in this most utilitarian and political of decades, their achievement remains breathtaking. But it is no use pretending that the approach to history that focuses on “Geistesgeschichte” has no “blind spots.” As with any human enterprise, it has its strengths and weaknessess, its keen insights, its narrowness of vision. This paper is an attempt to point to some of the sources of both the abiding greatness and the blind spots of this approach to history, and to explain why this sort of intellectual history still speaks to many of us.

The recent controversy over Germany's war aims during World War I has centered primarily around the positions taken by the Kaiser, the Foreign Office, and the army high command. The views of the navy have been largely neglected. This is unfortunate because the navy was, in a way, the status symbol of the German Empire. It was not, like the various armies, a divisive, particularist force, but rather a national Reich institution—the “melting pot” of Germany. It flew the Imperial black-white-red banner, was funded by the Reichstag, had a state secretary in the Imperial cabinet under the chancellor, recruited its officer cadets from all the German states and cities, trained them in the national naval school at Mürwik, and swore an oath of allegiance to the German Kaiser. Yet as the junior service, the navy struggled to escape from the shadow of the Prussian army and to establish its own identity. The issue of war aims provided it with just such an opportunity.

“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.

The Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften (Law to Protect Youth from Trashy and Dirty Writings) was proposed at the cabinet meeting of 19 December 1923, passed by the Reichstag on 3 December 1926, and went into effect on 18 December 1926. Within ten years it was a dead letter, replaced by the 1935 guidelines of the Reichsschrifttumskammer. The law and the agitation surrounding it had many dimensions; the phenomenon was at once political, legal, sociological, psychological, and cultural. A classic example of moral censorship, it has many parallels with other censorship activity, such as the British campaign to protect youth from horror comics in the 1950s. Yet while it is a case study of censorship, this law is more than illustrative. The debate over its passage further politicized the already controversial issue of culture in Germany, and it can be credited with a small but definite contribution to the political alignments that eventually made possible the Nazi takeover of January 1933.

Germany's interwar Social Democratic movement was anything but the monolithic structure often presented in the literature. Indeed, the standard teleology—which portrays the movement as conservative and petit bourgeois, doing its best to fend off Nazism, but ultimately not up to the task—obscures more than it illuminates. It imposes a top-down frame on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that characterizes it and its affiliates as an undifferentiated mass, making a nuanced analysis difficult. As is true of most political movements, interwar German Social Democracy presented multiple faces to the world. While its core was a political party that worked to win elections, the SPD also formed the heart of an alternative culture, one that allowed its largely working-class membership to take part in cultural and social functions, as well as in political meetings to express class solidarity.