The Treaty of Rapallo, concluded between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic on April 16, 1922, has been interpreted by Western historians as a logical result of the process of the reestablishment of the close economic ties which Germany and Russia had shared before the First World War. “A long tradition built on a solid foundation of common interest,” writes Edward Hallett Carr, “favoured the rapid development of commercial relations. … Links so strong and so profitable to both parties were not easily broken.” Strengthened by the limitations imposed on German exports by the Allies after the war, this natural tendency “impelled the whole of German industry to face east.” The revival of a substantial commerce between the two countries was forestalled, however, by the Allied blockade, until it was lifted in January 1920, and by German hopes for the collapse of the Soviet regime and fears of Bolshevism. These last two obstacles, it is claimed, disappeared in early 1921, at the same time that the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia was stimulating even greater German interest in the restoration of trade with her. “During the rest of 1921 there took place a steady thickening of the Russo-German link. … At first this took a predominantly economic form,” in which “rapid strides” were made. Opening up “the Russian market became a major preoccupation of German policy” in the latter half of that year. Thus economic goals were an important reason —one historian calls them “the real inducement”—for the Rapallo Treaty.

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.

At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the traditionally close relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia appeared as cordial as ever. Russia had an alliance with France but, except for its lucrative financial advantages for the Russians, this Dual Alliance remained largely an untested one vis-à-vis Germany. Less than a year after the conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan meaningful friendship between Russia and Germany ceased to exist. Within another year, Russia settled her major Asiatic differences with Great Britain, thus completing the process of isolating Germany diplomatically. The culminating period in this deterioration of Russo-German friendship occurred during the seven-month interval between the end of the Portsmouth Peace Conference in September 1905 and Germany's refusal to participate in the international loan to Russia in April 1906. This paper seeks to examine the causes of Russo-German estrangement within the framework of interrelated and often conflicting considerations of German Weltpolitik, Russian military defeats, the Revolution of 1905, and the international aspects of the Moroccan question.

Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen's Pillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on the Communist Manifesto without indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.

Recent German scholarship on the old Reich underscores the strength of the corporate loyalties at work within the ranks of the imperial knights. The carefully drawn analyses of Gerhard Pfeiffer and Dieter Hellstern, to name but two examples, point up the success which attended these sovereign aristocratic families as they worked aggressively through a well-organized system of circles (Kreise) to combat the persistent threat of encroachment by their more powerful neighbors. This emphasis on the success of the knights is squarely on target. The imperial barons do survive, their rights more or less intact, right down to the dissolution of the empire. This essay seeks to draw attention to yet another dimension of this success, to document some of the tensions arising within the corps of knights and to demonstrate the knights' determination to contain these pressures and to prevent them from shattering their corporate unity. In the case of the Reichsritterschaft, not only did corporatism provide the occasion for rivalry among various groups within the corps. It also defined the outer limits to which internal rivalries could safely be pursued.

The decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.

Beginning with Ferdinand I's Polizeyordnung of 1552, the Habsburgs’ state inserted itself into the regulation of welfare for the poor. To manage the homeless, there emerged after the 1720s a state-driven but locally administered system (Schubsystem) of police surveillance to discover, arrest, and physically remove those without a provable birth place (or a ten-year residence in one place) to a to-be-determined Heimat, a “home” community declared responsible for their welfare. In practice, the system's specific self-contradictions and conflicted agendas, its brutalization of those who served it, its several social-relational and language figures that emerged as the actualizations of the state's vision, together placed a significant number of the homeless on forced marches toward indeterminate destinations until they collapsed and could be removed from the road to die “in the straw.” The essay suggests that the interplay between Heimat and Schubsystem serves as a foreshadowing dimension in modern Austro-German history.

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.

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.

The Allied defeat of the German Wehrmacht in May 1945 brought the military struggle against fascism in Europe to an end. Yet with the occupation of Germany the struggle against fascism was to continue on other fronts. Germany was to be “demilitarized,” the economy “decartelized,” and the society “denazified. ” Ultimately Germany was to be “democratized.” The newly established media were to play a major role in the transformation of German attitudes, in this attempt to “reeducate” the Germans.

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.

On 6 December 1800, a courier galloped through the gates of Vienna, rushed to the Hofburg, the winter palace of the Habsburgs, and presented to Emperor Francis II a bitter message from Archduke John, the emperor's brother and commander of the Austrian armed forces in Germany. The message read that three days earlier the archduke's troops had engaged the French army under Jean Moreau at Hohenlinden, had suffered serious losses, and were falling back to Salzburg with the officers struggling to maintain order in the ranks while they did so. The news was a crushing blow to Francis. In 1799 the Austrians had begun the War of the Second Coalition with high hopes of reversing the years of defeat at the hands of Revolutionary France. Russia and Britain had agreed to cooperate closely with Austria; France seemed weaker than ever domestically; and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had caused Vienna such grief in 1797, was far away in Egypt trying to inflict damage upon the British Empire. But these hopes turned to ashes. Russia abandoned the Coalition after its army suffered serious losses in Switzerland—indeed, in their wake the Russian ruler, Tsar Paul, had thundered so vehemently against what he saw as Austrian treachery that he had broken relations with Vienna—; Britain had been able to provide much needed funds but not more-needed soldiers; and Bonaparte had returned to work his magic on both the French army and the French people. The result was Hohenlinden, Austrian defeat, and in February 1800 the Treaty of Lunéville that ceded to France primary influence in Germany and Italy.

My first encounter with Hans Rosenberg was in the fall semester of 1952 when I switched from evening classers to day sessions full-time at Brooklyn College. His presence in the classroom was both fascinating and intimidating. He constantly took pains to engage each student in the room, and he still serves me as a model of teaching-effectiveness. Short and slightly pudgy but with ramrod posture, he had an expressive, unusually lively face and a profoundly serious but good-natured demeanor; he spoke with a slight impediment, with the heavy accent of his native Rhineland, and with an English vocabulary that was dazzling in scope. He was the epitome of the learned European professor, respected and esteemed by his colleagues. Some of his reputation as a teacher who demanded much of himself and of his students had preceded my entry into his class, and had conveyed a picture of a man who often literally got drunk on ideas in front of his students.

A Literature designed to express discontent with political or social conditions, rally public support, and sometimes threaten revolution has as much of a tradition in Germany as in other countries, and it was not the German authors' fault that their efforts remained on the whole without decisive achievements. Until 1918, this genre of literature had been nearly exclusively the preserve of what may loosely be called the political Left. But with the establishment of the republic the forces of the Right appropriated to themselves this time-honored intellectual weapon in their efforts to destroy the hated "Weimar System." Under these circumstances, no responsible independent left-wing journal could afford to do more than criticize the new German state for its shortcomings, and while in this respect some of them were less restrained than others, all of them wanted to reform and strengthen, not overthrow, the republic.