The Councils of many Imperial Free Cities struggled throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to establish their position as “Obrigkeit,” enjoying the same kind of recognized authority as that exercised by the other petty political rulers within the Empire. The struggle resulted in increasingly authoritarian trends in city government, as some Councils sought to extend their control over more and more aspects of citizens' lives in an effort to win the respect of other ruling groups. Although sporadic violence marked the growing polarization between governed and governing which developed from such efforts, city Councils still justified their actions on the basis of benefit to the community—a community which included both Council and citizenry. This unitary concept of the urban community was subjected to further severe strains by the introduction of the ideas of Luther and Zwingli into the cities.

The murder of the minor reactionary poet and alleged Russian spy August von Kotzebue in March 1819 by the Jena student Karl Ludwig Sand was a clarion calling the forces of conservatism in Germany to unite against dissidents and extremists in the universities and in the student reform movement, the Burschenschaft. Metternich, reacting to what appeared to be a groundswell of opposition, wrote Friedrich von Gentz in June that the political stability of Central Europe would not be threatened by academics and professors; rather, any threat would likely come from the more practical-minded Advocaten, or counselors at law. Mathias Edler von Rath, Austrian member from April 1820 until June 1824 on the Mainz Central Investigating Commission, formed in September 1819 by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt on Main to investigate “revolutionary activities” in Germany since 1810, concluded that there were no more than eight key “facts” that deserved the Commission's attention: six of these had occurred in one specific area of the Southwest—the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Duchy of Nassau.

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between Jewish emancipation and the revival of Catholic neoorthodoxy in the years preceding the revolutions of 1848/49. My focus is on the Grand Duchy of Baden, renowned as the most liberal of all the nineteenth-century German states. The rise of neoorthodoxy in Baden provoked political liberals to rethink the relationship between church and state and, consequently, through a conjunction of circumstance, to make Jewish emancipation a central plank in their political platfrom. The Jewish emancipation implemented by the liberals in the revolutionary years, however, would be heavily burdened from its inception by the manner in which the new Catholic “religious right” deployed anti-Jewish rhetoric in its struggle for religious and political influence.

Communist countries are notably history-minded. Since they see mankind as advancing toward socialism and communism as part of a law-determined historical process, they base their legitimacy in large part on historical antecedents. East Germany, being faced with the opposing claims of West Germany, has been particularly concerned with establishing its historical legitimacy. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) traces its roots back into a distant past, along a road on which medieval peasant risings, socioreligious upheavals, Reformation and Peasants' War, the War of Liberation against Napoleon I, and the revolutions of 1848 and 1918 stand as significant milestones. Perhaps no Communist leadership ever did its homework in history more thoroughly prior to its assumption of power than did the East German leaders. From the mid-1930s on, in their Moscow exile, they devoted considerable attention to the exploration of historical questions from the Marxist perspective; later, Marxist historians and Communist party officials began drawing up plans for historical study programs, textbooks, and monographs in preparation for the day when they would be able to take over power in Germany. They knew it would be important to prepare the way “historically,” too, for the transformation of Germany from a capitalist into a socialist society.

We still do not have a satisfactory synthesis of the history of resistance to National Socialism. A new history with different chronology, continuities and perspectives, different geography and range of activity or behavior, is increasingly necessary because of recent scholarship on numerous aspects of the subject. A new history should commence before 1933 as well as extend beyond 1945; give greater emphasis to resistance inside Germany between 1933 and 1938, and also to the efforts of Germans in exile during the entire Nazi period; minimize the role of the churches; provide another view of the conservative political-military resistance from 1938 to 1944; include youths who were active in gangs and individual Germans whose irreverent and nonconformist behavior was correctly viewed by the regime as subversive; examine resistance from July 20, 1944, until the end of the war; survey the contribution to the two postwar Germanies of the surviving internal groups and the returned exiles; sketch the changing treatment of the history of the resistance in public life, the military, journalism, and academic historiography since 1945.

There can be little doubt that the German military leadership played an important role in the events leading up to the outbreak of World War I. Although there may be some disagreement as to the extent of the general staff's influence, its assessment of the European situation is known to have carried great weight in the decision-making councils in Berlin. Much significant research has been done on the activities of the German military hierarchy in the prewar period, but certain subjects remain to be explored. One of these is the relationship of the Berlin general staff with its counterpart in Rome. A great deal of evidence exists which indicates that in the period from December 1912 until August 1914 the chief of the general staff, Helmuth Graf von Moltke, and other military leaders in Berlin were greatly concerned about their southern ally. The German generals, probably influenced by the theories of Clausewitz with his great emphasis on the value of numerical superiority, saw Italy, with her large mass-conscripted army of over thirty divisions, as the balance of power in any conflict between the Central Powers and the Franco-Russian Alliance.

Utopian visions that produced distinctly dystopic projects are rightly associated with the catastrophically violent and repressive first half of twentieth-century European history— “the age of extremes” in Eric Hobsbawm's apt phrase. National Socialism, fascism, communism, and European colonialism represented totalizing, highly ideological visions of how politics and economics, society and culture should be dramatically reorganized. Each of these projects deployed gendered rhetorics and representations; each was explicitly preoccupied with redefining masculinity and femininity, marriage and family, domesticity and sexuality. Each sought to subordinate individuals to an overarching social project, integrating some, excluding others, always elaborating complex hierarchies of gender, race, and culture.

The purpose of this essay is not to provide a review of the extensive literature on women's history, gender history, or feminist scholarship, but to reflect on the implications that these three vantage points have for the practice of writing German history. The framework for these reflections is the charge of the conference at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, namely, to consider the interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological challenges to historiography raised by “postmodernism.” These challenges are roughly similar for all national historiographies, though Germany's historians, it could be argued, have distinguished themselves by their especially intense focus on state institutions, national events, aggregated socioeconomic structures, large organizations, and the theories and methods appropriate to these concerns. Such foci stand in particular danger of being dissolved by alternate historiographic interests, like feminist, women's, and gender history. When the center no longer holds, that is the “postmodern” condition; their part in dissolving the center is what links feminist, women's, and gender history to “postmodernism.” Rather than rehearsing specific examples of how, say, women's history has challenged the received picture of German history, and thereby implicitly to suggest methods of damage control, this essay instead attempts to discuss some of the broader theoretical and methodological issues that feminist scholarship poses to historians and to do so within the context of the “postmodern.” References to the specific German context are mostly in the footnotes.

Consider the subject of beer. For millennia this homely brew has been a staple of the human diet and a central ingredient of our social activity. Records dating as far back as 2800 B.c. show that there were four types of beer brewed in the Babylonian culture, and that the ancient Egyptians were often sealed into their tombs with a ceremonial supply of the frothy beverage. But of all the cultures producing beer, the Germans are the most closely associated with it in modern times. It was the Germans who perfected the practice of adding wild hops to the brew to give it its characteristic tang, and also to help preserve it. Whereas elsewhere in northern Europe brewing was usually a cottage activity, the Germans began very early to treat brewing as an important commercial activity. In 1146, even before the founding of the great city of Munich, the abbey in Weihenstephan in Bavaria received a patent from the local duke to brew beer. In 1516 the Bavarian dukes instituted the brewing code which stipulated that thereafter beer must be brewed naturally with grain, hops, water, and yeast. This has since been the standard for purity in brewing throughout Germany.

On February 12, 1942, Adolf Hitler, eulogizing his renowned highway builder Fritz Todt, proclaimed that the Westwall, Todt's Wunderwerk, would protect the Reich's western borders “under any circumstances” and “against any attack.” “No power on earth,” the Führer contended, would be able to break through “this most gigantic fortified zone of all time.” Like many of Hitler's declarations of confidence in military technology, this was a mixture of propaganda, intimidation, and obsolete information. Conveniently obscured, for example, was the neglect of the Westwall since the defeat of France in 1940. In fact, the vaunted line was to be no match for enemy forces superior in numbers and matériel. In the fall of 1944 American troops penetrated the Westwall south of Aachen and captured this westernmost city in the fortified line. Further advance was halted by the surprise Ardennes counterattack in December (Battle of the Bulge), but by February 1945 breakthroughs in the Eiffel mountains initiated the drive to the Rhine and the final defeat of Germany.