During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.

Throughout its history, the East German Communist Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, hereafter SED) organized campaigns to overcome the economic and political challenges facing it and to launch new program initiatives. Whether the aim was to increase factory safety, beautify a village, or raise standards of living, the party and the East German government used mass mobilizations to shape society, or at least certain social groups. Communist campaigns were directed attempts to improve diverse sectors of society by concentrating resources on arenas marked as economically deficient and socially resistant. By directing their efforts at revolutionizing narrowly defined critical areas, Communist leaders felt that they could enact overarching societal changes. Campaigns thus served as a means to initiate new policies and to correct problems that developed later. They were an essential part both of the state planning so prevalent in Communist systems, and of the often hectic short-term initiatives endemic in such economies. These mobilization efforts were so critical to the regime that one scholar has declared that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) possessed a campaign, rather than a command economy.

It is widely accepted that the inter-German border was constructed by East German authorities to halt the emigration to the west, which had damaged the East German economy and undermined the East German state agencies' power. This article argues that this is an inaccurate understanding, which mistakenly treats perceptions and insights gained from studying the Berlin Wall as representative of the mostly rural border between East and West Germany. It emphasizes crucial transformations of frontier society during the 1950s, highlighting the important role of western as well as eastern policy in shaping them.

This article explores Allied intelligence officers’ encounters with and interrogations of German civilians from autumn 1944 onwards, psychological warfare operations directed at civilians, and their wider ramifications. Focusing especially on the officers serving with the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), I will demonstrate that field intelligence officers’ stance towards German civilians was fluid and often ambiguous, with the encounter causing considerable distress to some of them. Their reports and correspondence further suggest that in this period, Germans readily professed knowledge of atrocities. But contrary to intelligence officers’ expectations, they failed to accept any guilt or responsibility. Finally, I will argue that the very foundations and techniques of Western Allied psychological warfare may have reinforced and legitimised justification strategies that separated between “real” Nazis and everyone else. This was at odds with one of the central aims of Military Government, i.e. to inculcate a sense of culpability in Germans.

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.

Johannes Kepler's most important publication on questions of religion and confession, his Profession of Faith appeared in 1623 when the universal scholar Matthias Bernegger had an edition of one hundred copies printed in Strasbourg — at Kepler's expense — under the title: Glaubensbekandtnus vnd Ableinung allerhand desthalben entstandener vngütlichen Nachreden. With this booklet, Kepler intended to demonstrate that his religious convictions did indeed stand in harmony with the Bible; in addition, he strove to refute the accusations of heterodoxy brought against him, the “gossip” or “Nachreden” as he called it. His argument peaks in the next passage: “It is indeed quite an irksome matter, and one very much a matter of great agitation for the average, uninformed man, that someone could be so foolhardy, proud, and swollen-headed as to join no [religious] party. But I swear by God that I have not found joy in the situation nor found any peace therein. It causes me great grief that the three large factiones have torn the truth so terribly among themselves that I am forced to search and piece the truth together where I find it.”

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.

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern of Central European History (CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968, CEH emerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of the Journal of Central European Affairs in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsored CEH, as well as the recently minted Austrian History Yearbook (AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor of AHY, sat on the editorial board of CEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May's The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year, East European Quarterly published its first issue.

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.

During the past decade and a half there has been considerable interest shown by economic and social historians in the problems of unemployment in the Weimar Republic, although we still await a work with the comprehensiveness and mastery of W. R. Garside's British Unemployment 1919–1939. Much of the literature on Germany has been devoted to the controversy over government studies of unemployment insurance and business and trade union attitudes toward work creation schemes. Social historians have engaged in a good deal of history from below and history of everyday life dealing with the unemployed themselves and have demonstrated, among other things, the devastating consequences of long-term unemployment and the welfare system on labor solidarity. Such historians are understandably more inclined to work on, and sympathize with, those who are fired rather than with those who do the firing, and are unlikely to lose much sleep about the effects of bad business conditions on capitalist behavior and solidarity. Nevertheless, I would argue that the everyday problems and decisions of Germany's bankers and industrialists have suffered from undeserved neglect.

Since the turn of the millennium, major political figures around the world have been routinely compared to Adolf Hitler. These comparisons have increasingly been investigated by scholars, who have sought to explain their origins and assess their legitimacy. This article sheds light on this ongoing debate by examining an earlier, but strikingly similar, discussion that transpired during the Nazi era itself. Whereas commentators today argue about whether Hitler should be used as a historical analogy, observers in the 1930s and 1940s debated which historical analogies should be used to explain Hitler. During this period, Anglophone and German writers identified a diverse group of historical villains who, they believed, explained the Nazi threat. The figures spanned a wide range of tyrants, revolutionaries, and conquerors. But, by the end of World War II, the revelation of the Nazis' unprecedented crimes exposed these analogies as insufficient and led many commentators to flee from secular history to religious mythology. In the process, they identified Hitler as Western civilization's new archetype of evil and turned him into a hegemonic analogy for the postwar period. By explaining how earlier analogies struggled to make sense of Hitler, we can better understand whether Hitler analogies today are helping or hindering our effort to understand contemporary political challenges.

German-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.