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.

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.

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.

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.

Responding to a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them the Rechtsstaat (variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined the Rechtsstaat to make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.

It is often assumed, especially in the Anglo-American literature, that Frederick William I (1713–40), by establishing the “canton System” in 1733, lessened his need to rely on foreign mercenaries for military manpower and moved in the direction of a national, conscript army. As put by Robert Ergang: “The establishment of this so-called ‘canton system’ not only assured… a large permanent supply of recruits; it was also a long step toward making the Prussian army a national one. Recruiting abroad was still continued, but it was only supplementary. Native recruits now formed the backbone of the Prussian army.” This persistent assumption, stated in different ways by different authors, has even penetrated the textbook literature. A closely related assumption holds that Frederick the Great after 1740, by increasing the proportion of foreign manpower to as much as two-thirds of the total, “reversed” the trend toward making the army more national in character. The purpose of this essay will be to demonstrate that both of the above-mentioned assumptions are false; they depend on a misunderstanding of the real trends in Prussian recruiting bolstered, in the latter case, by faulty statistics.

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.

Disabled veterans were certainly in a rotten mood following World War I, and not without reason. A lost war, unrest at home, and physical pain were not things to celebrate. Most aggravating of all, however, were the problems associated with obtaining an adequate pension: for years after the end of the war the pension system caused bitterness among people who felt wronged by the very government that was supposed to take care of them.

Over the years, scholars have identified the Weimar period as among the most pivotal in the development of the German social state (Sozialstaat). Noting what appears to have been an almost unbroken pattern of expansion in the compass of social work since the late nineteenth century, social scientists and historians have recognized the 1920s as a time of especially acute growth in public assistance. Government expenditures from the First World War onward show a particularly marked increase in three areas: public housing, public health, and social insurance. Together, these three spheres constituted the primary sites of Weimar social interventionism. Analysts have found it more difficult, however, to agree on the historical significance of these interventions, with discussion largely centered on the question of whether, and to what extent, the social programs of the Reich and municipalities overburdened the social state and thus contributed to the demise of the Weimar political order.

One of the ironical facts in the history of the Jews in Germany is that it was not until after Hitler came to power that they united and formed for the first time a central organization to represent their interests in politics. Before 1933 German Jews made several attempts to create a separate political platform or pressure group. The first venture had perhaps the best prospects of success. It started around 1900, a time when the ideological divisions that later polarized the German Jews into liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist camps were not yet strongly felt, and when cooperation between liberal and Zionist leaders was possible. Despite what appeared to be an opportune moment, all efforts came to naught. Historians can argue at length over whether or not German Jews committed a grave error in failing to form an independent political front, and whether or not it was possible in Germany for Jews to follow the example of Russian Jews and form an autonomous party. A more fruitful discussion will begin only when historians consider why Jewish leaders, who had stood within the existing party framework since 1848, decided in the late 1890's to organize independently of the liberals to whom they felt indebted for emancipation, and why they never achieved their goal. This essay attempts to answer these questions and to shed light on the political behavior of Jewish notables in Wilhelmian Germany.

The soul of die Prussian army is in its officers,’ wrote the Prussian general, military theorist, and writer Baron Colmar von der Goltz in his widely read book The Nation in Arms. These officers, he continued, must be recruited from the privileged social classes “who exercise even in ordinary life a natural superiority over the masses.’ Goltz went on to underline the army's concern over restricting its leadership to the better elements of society when he cautioned that the nation's merchants, manufacturers, and private gentlemen were unlikely to provide good long-term officers.

In the wake of Germany's military defeat in 1918, social and economic programs that previously could have been left to academicians or party theoreticians suddenly acquired a new urgency and immediacy. One of the more interesting—and controversial—of these was an ambitious proposal by the engineer Wichard von Moellendorff, who served in 1918 and 1919 as Under State Secretary in the Reich Economics Office (later the Economics Ministry), to redesign the entire edifice of the German economy through the implementation of a system of economic “collectivism” or “planning” (Gemeinwirtschaft or Planwirtschaft). With the assistance of his superiors, the right-wing Social Democrats August Müller and Rudolf Wissell, Moellendorff endeavored to institutionalize his plans in the months after the November Revolution, until a negative cabinet decision in July 1919 precipitated his resignation.

Our Topic is a complex one and therefore necessarily subject to certain limitations. They recommend themselves not only for practical reasons, namely the brief time at our disposal, but, more important, for logical ones as well. In the first place we want to discuss the issue precisely as stated, the problem of change in the balance of power, without injecting into it any value questions of whether such changes are to be welcomed or not from different ideological viewpoints.

In the East German Marxist-Leninist analysis of German history the role of Prussia, of the Prussian state and the Junkers, of Prussian militarism and agrarianism have received a great deal of attention. Since they are regarded as major causes of the catastrophes that subsequently befell Germany, this concern is of course not surprising. Moreover, class interests, special socio-economic configurations, the transition from feudal conditions to a capitalist-industrial system played so manifest a role in Prussia's rise that Marxist scholars, if only for that reason, were bound to turn to the investigation of these developments.

Fully five decades before Olympe de Gouges, Mary Woll–stonecraft, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel spoke out for the equality of men and women, Dorothea Christiane Leporin, Germany's first female medical doctor, challenged the readers of her Thorough Investigation of the Causes which Prevent the Female Sex from Studying to free themselves from the idea that all women are destined to serve husband, house, and children. As she put it: “If one admits that the female sex is capable of learning, then one must also admit that it has received a calling to go with it.” She reached this conclusion by accepting the assumption that men and women are equally suited for intellectual endeavors and then questioning all real and fictitious obstacles that were placed in the way of female study. Like all her known contemporaries, Leporin did not want to press all women into advanced study, which according to her would cause disorder, but she pleaded eloquently for the removal of prejudices and obstacles to talent.