In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Whether it was his prodigious publication rate or the untiring help he extended to his students, the remarkable generosity he showed to colleagues or the anger he occasionally displayed over what he considered to be problematic scholarship, or merely his outsized appetite for good food, Gerry Feldman was a titanic force in the field of German history for more than forty years. His fascination with the past, love of the present, and concern for the future transformed his spacious home in the Oakland hills and his cramped office at the University of California at Berkeley into international destinations for itinerant intellectuals. His writing and his personal relations were infused with an exuberant delight in the most mundane of things and a wry appreciation of life's greatest challenges. With his passing, we have lost a great advocate of transnational scholarly relations, one of the profession's most talented economic historians, and our foremost expert on the Weimar Republic, its antecedents, and the men who dug its grave.

This article revisits the interplay between enterprise, technology, science, and the state in the latter stages of Prussia's “early industrialization.” Tracing the footsteps of Werner Siemens as he sought to establish a business in Berlin during the 1840s, it highlights the social networks that enabled individuals and ideas to circulate between the military establishment, administrative departments, scientific circles, and entrepreneurial communities. At heart, these abstract entities constituted dense clusters of individuals who shared strong connections to one another, but whose contacts with other groups also enabled them to mobilize resources. During the 1840s, fostered by the dynamism of Berlin's expansion, social networks stepped into the breach caused by the Reform Era's upheaval of traditional employment structures and the emergence of a market economy. They provided a means of negotiating the uncertain socioeconomic circumstances that characterized Vormärz Prussia.

In January 1919, the Bürgertum of the Bavarian town of Hof voted overwhelmingly for the left-liberal German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei, DDP). But the following summer, in the Reichstag elections of June 1920, the Democrats sustained significant losses against the right-wing nationalist Bavarian Middle Party (Bayerische Mittelpartei, BMP). This article explores the rise and fall of the DDP in Hof by showing that a pro-republican politics initially proved popular among the local Bürgertum, until its credibility was undermined and ultimately destroyed by a series of devastating crises: the Bavarian Räterepublik of April 1919, the publication of the Versailles Treaty a month later, and the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary convulsions triggered by the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. This article concludes that political violence and a burgeoning confrontation between bürgerliche and socialist milieus were the key factors in explaining the eclipse of left-liberalism in Hof during the first years of the Weimar Republic.

This article examines the impact of Nazi persecution on the gender identity of German-Jewish veterans of World War I. National Socialism threatened to erase everything these Jewish men had achieved and sacrificed. It sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the Fatherland, as well as the high status they had earned as Frontkämpfer (front-line fighters) in the Great War, upon which their sense of masculinity identity rested. Although diminished and disempowered by Nazi terror, Jewish veterans were able to orient themselves toward hegemonic ideals of martial masculinity, which elevated military values as the highest expression of manhood, giving them a space to assert themselves and defy the Nazi classification Jew. For the Jewish men who fought in World War I, the Nazi years became a battle to reclaim their status and masculine honor. They believed that the manner in which they handled themselves under the Nazis was a reflection of their character: as men who had been tried and tested in the trenches, their responses to persecution communicated their identity as soldiers, as Jews, and as Germans.

Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980) can be read as a central European imaginary retelling Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). The film constructs a dark meditation on the human condition not only through its formal and thematic focus on Mann's novel but also through the lens of works by numerous other central European artists and scholars. Consequently, The Shining presents historical comprehension as the product not only of knowledge, but of experience, memory, and artistic representation/reception. Just as The Magic Mountain addressed itself to the crisis of European civilization that had culminated in the First World War, a deep-laid historical subtext in The Shining concerns the more desperate crisis facing the West in the wake of the Second World War. At its dark center, Kubrick's horror film reflects its creator's and its era's struggle with the reality and representation of the Holocaust.

On October 10, 1941, the soldiers of the 3rd Company, 691st Infantry Regiment were uneasy. The task ahead of them was something new. They were to kill the entire Jewish population of Krucha, a town in central Belarus. A few hours later, Private Wilhelm Magel stood with another soldier in front of four Jewish women and an old man with a long, white beard. The company First Sergeant, Emil Zimber, ordered the Jews to turn away from the shooters, but they remained facing the German soldiers. Zimber gave the order to fire but Magel and his colleague, a former divinity student, did not aim at their targets. They requested to be relieved from the execution detail and were assigned to guard the remaining Jews who were waiting in the village square for their turn. This German Army unit without assistance of any other organization murdered a minimum of 150 Jewish men, women, and children in Krucha that day.

During the brutal factory raid at the end of February 1943, the Gestapo rounded up thousands of Berlin Jews at their forced labor sites and brought them to various collection points. The Gestapo immediately singled out two thousand Jews in “mixed marriages” and transferred them to a separate building in the Rosenstrasse. The traditional view of the events, which Stoltzfus promotes, is that after a week-long demonstration by their relatives, Goebbels ordered the release of the inmates on March 6, 1943. Based on a variety of hitherto overlooked documents, I provided the reader with a different interpretation in my Central European History article: that special Gestapo orders at this point still exempted the Jews in mixed marriages from deportation. I argue that the real purpose of the arrest was to facilitate the deportation of hundreds of employees of Berlin's Jewish institutions who would be replaced by the Jews in mixed marriages. This interpretation forces us to reconsider key elements of the traditional account.

In the nineteenth century, caryatids saw an unprecedented renaissance in European architecture. This article explores the cultural history of these female column-statues in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. The focus is on central Europe, and three cities—Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, and Vienna—play a particularly important role in this exploration. Through a reading of historical, visual, and literary sources, the article probes how these statues came to embody, on both a material and a metaphorical level, the social aspirations and societal rifts that marked the bourgeois age. The nexus, real and imagined, between caryatids and Jews is particularly illustrative here. In tracing antagonistic and largely forgotten discourses, the article seeks to shed light on a larger subject that is still underexplored: the complex entanglement of architecture, religion, and race in the long nineteenth century.

German commemorative culture is clearly in flux. Over the last year or so, a series of seemingly never-ending controversies have made it abundantly clear that, more than seventy-five years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust is not only very much present in contemporary Germany but also remains deeply contested. The list of controversies is familiar to everybody who has followed German public debates over the last three years: first the debate over the planned appearance of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe at the 2020 Ruhr-Trienale in the spring of 2020; then the publication of the German translation of Michael Rothberg's book Multidirectional Memory in March 2021 and the heated controversy around A. Dirk Moses's “catechism” blog article a few months later; and finally, the recent debate about antisemitism at the documenta art exhibition curated by an Indonesian artist collective.

In the two centuries since its dissolution in 1806, the Holy Roman Empire has usually been viewed as an antiquated relic of the medieval past, a dysfunctional polity that hindered Germany's development into a modern, liberal nation-state. In the wake of its demise, a chorus of famous intellectuals and statesmen—including Voltaire, James Madison, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leopold von Ranke, and Heinrich von Treitschke—derided the Empire as a “monstrosity” hampered by outmoded institutions and backward policies. More recently, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, advocates of the so-called Sonderweg thesis blamed the Empire for Germany's belated unification and for the Germans’ supposedly “authoritarian” bent. In Heart of Europe [the American title of the study—Ed.], a bold and sweeping account of the Holy Roman Empire's thousand-year history, Peter Wilson sets out to supplant these anachronistic interpretations by explaining “what it was, how it worked, why it mattered, and its legacy for today” (5). With this important book, the best single-volume history of the Holy Roman Empire currently available, Wilson succeeds in answering these fundamental questions and provides fascinating insights into European politics from the early Middle Ages to the present. I would like to focus first on what I see as Wilson's most significant contributions to the existing scholarship on the Empire, and then examine how he treats the Protestant Reformation as a case study of the merits (and drawbacks) of his approach.

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

Recent scholarship concerning the Wehrmacht leadership in Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union (1941–1945) has provided a much more nuanced picture of the motivation and responsibility of the uppermost strata of general for the brutalization of the conflict. The generals just outside this inner military circle, however, continue to be largely ignored. Questions on the mentality of lower-ranking, frontline commanders toward the war of annihilation and what latitude they reserved for themselves in carrying out orders remain, like the war on the front itself, one of the least researched topics of World War II.

This article considers the fate of Prussian buildings and memorials in East Germany between 1945 and 1961. Analyzing a number of case studies from Berlin and Potsdam, it places the treatment of these structures within the broader contours of history management practices. Although this era was characterized by a strong anti-Prussian sentiment in the GDR's historical discourse, it also witnessed a complex interaction between the SED and its historical inheritance. This interaction often influenced decisions about the fate of Prussian structures in the GDR as much as any animosity toward Prussia as a historical entity did.