This article focuses on compulsory psychiatric admissions in the early German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until 1968 there were no East German laws regulating such hospitalizations, a regulatory vaccuum filled by neither the police nor the judicial system. Instead, families made decisions in conjunction with medical personnel about sometimes unlimited stays in psychiatric institutions and clinics—a practice that calls into question popular scholarly characterizations of the relationship between state and society in the GDR. Previous research has explicitly argued that GDR citizens had agency and acted in a so-called eigensinnige manner in many areas, but has not examined this issue with regard to the sensitive practice of forced psychiatric admissions: where there was no state interest, no Eigensinn vis-à-vis authorities was necessary. This was an especially curious constellation given that psychiatric institutions were run by the East German state and that state interventions in this area had been well established under the Third Reich, as well as in the Soviet Union, which served in many areas as a model for the GDR. One might well have expected that continuing state intervention would have thus been path-dependent. This article suggests resurrecting the term Vergesellschaftung (socialization), only shortly discussed in the 1990s, as a way in which to understand the way in which agency on the part of patient families compensated for the absence of formal state regulations regarding such admissions. The term nicely captures such routine forms of compensation by East German society in areas where the state abdicated its responsibility—as was the case in the early GDR when it came to forced psychiatric hospitalizations.

This quotation fits the conference only if we agree that “still” connotes sitting, not silence. The “Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique” were voiced with only hints of controversy. All who might have disagreed were outside the room, though not necessarily excluded from the debate. Participants seemed to agree that old “fixities” had to be re-evaluated in the light of postmodern challenges. “Past and future” met in the guise of Young Turks and older veterans. Sessions of redefining and rethinking, as these were, hardly “ascend” to action, but neither were they content with “arrest” or “decline.” Eliot, the modernist, speaks to postmodern issues.

Considering all that is known about the place of anti-Semitism in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are relatively few studies of anti-Semitism within a religious context. This is surprising given that Germany was and is more evenly divided numerically between Catholics and Protestants than almost any other large European nation, (about 60 percent Protestant to 40 percent Catholic). Most studies of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries have focused on various secular motivations. When scholars do choose to investigate religious anti-Semitism, almost all concentrate on Evangelical Lutherans or on Catholics, but not on both. Likewise, many historians consider religious anti-Semitism to be anachronistic. Yet many study the incidence of secular or modern anti-Semitism within a religious context whether institutional or popular, seldom paying equal attention to that context. Additionally, studies of anti-Semitism emphasized Protestantism and the Protestant north of Germany in particular, because, after 1870, that was where anti-Semitic political parties, movements, and groups appeared to thrive.

Among the international community of scholars, journalists, and laymen who share an interest in the history of Nazi Germany, one of the most frequently discussed and persistently controversial subjects of that era is the Waffen SS. Attempts to define what the Waffen SS was lead invariably to questions about the extent to which the Waffen SS was or was not an integral part of the overall SS organization and the degree to which it was or was not involved in the criminal acts attributed to the Schutzstaffel.

Spurder Steine (Trail of Stones) is probably the best-known of the approximately two dozen East German films that were banned by state officials. Combining epic proportions with subversive humor, the picture still retains the ability to fascinate and amuse audiences well over three decades after its completion in 1966. In one scene, its most arresting protagonist, the foreman Balla, leads his small band of carpenters across the Iunar landscape of the chemical plant under construction, where the film is set. As martial music blares in the background, the “Ballas,” conspicuously dressed in the black corduroy suits traditionally associated with their trade in Germany, march against a sea of humanity streaming toward a political rally. They rudely shove people out of their way, grope women, and chug beer. Over a loudspeaker, the Communist functionary leading the rally proclaims, “We are already building the road leading into a bright future.” In response, Balla remarks to his cronies, “They comfort you with the future like the priests with the hereafter, but by the time you get there, you're already dead.”

For Adolf Hitler the problem of constructing a loyal and reliable instrument of force for employment not only against external enemies but also for intra-party discipline was a frequently recurring one. In the summer of 1921 what was to become the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops, “SA”) had its genesis under the camouflage of so-called “gymnastic societies.” The SA, however, soon developed into a mass organization with an internal dynamism of its own which sometimes operated in opposition to Hitler's own aims. Friction between Hitler and Ernst Roehm began, in fact, at least as early as 1925 and precipitated Roehm's temporary self-imposed exile in Bolivia. The problematical loyalty of the SA prompted Hitler during the general party reconstruction of that year to order the organization of a special troop under the command of one of his bodyguards, Julius Schreck. This new body, at first termed Stabswache (Staff Guard), was assigned the tasks of protecting Hitler and other prominent Nazi personages and, somewhat anomalously, of securing new party members and subscriptions to the Völkischer Beobachter. Other similar groups, always small and carefully selected, made their appearance and were accorded the collective designation Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads, “SS”).

On November 28, 1904, a new commercial treaty was signed between Germany and Serbia. Though limited in economic impact, the treaty carried political implications which greatly magnify its historical importance. For both signatories this treaty proved consequential to their respective relations with Austria-Hungary. Indeed, for Serbia it became one of the bases from which to carry on the struggle for the fulfillment of her national ambitions. But while its final importance is political, and emphatically so, the treaty can scarcely be understood without an appreciation of the economic motivation behind it. It will not do to dismiss the treaty as merely another manifestation of German expansionism; money, not empire, seems to have lured Germany into this rockiest part of the Balkans. The Serbo-German commercial treaty, therefore, must be studied against the background of two rivalries, separate both in membership and in kind— one the rivalry, mainly political and national, between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and the other the commercial rivalry between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. In the pages that follow an attempt will be made to pursue the second aspect in some detail; the first can here only be summarized.

Shortly after the turn of the century a Social Democratic newspaper characterized middle-class liberals as forming at best the “tail” (Schwanz) of Social Democracy, at worst the “tail of the Prussian Conservatives.” If the remark reflects the contempt which Marxists as well as radical rightists have manifested toward the middle parties, it also suggests the precariousness, the uncertain orientation of the middle posture. Flanked on one side by the still politically dominant landed aristocracy and the influential industrial magnates, on the other side by an inexorably growing industrial working class was a variety of social and occupational groupings weakly unified by a claim to some degree of status and a consciousness of being bürgerlich. In the imperial period the meaning of bürgerlich was shifting from “nonaristocratic” to “nonlaborer” without having attained the intermediate connotation of “civic.” The bürgerlich social and occupational groupings found their political representation primarily in the liberal and Catholic parties, secondarily in allegedly nonpolitical institutions and an array of regional, peasant, and anti-Semitic parties, increasingly in economic pressure groups.

In September of 1894, Emperor William stood before his Junkers in Königsberg. He reprimanded them for their outspoken opposition to the policies of his government, particularly to the treaties leading to lower duties on grain. He called it a “thing of nonsense” for Prussian noblemen to oppose their king, though, he said, as a good father he was willing to forget such unruly behavior. The Prussian nobility, he declared, must gather now about the House of Hohenzollern “in the struggle for religion, morality, and order against the parties of revolution.”

In March 1920 the German Reichstag passed legislation which fundamentally altered the country's tax system. The tax package, known as the Erzberger taxreform after its chief architect, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Center Party, soughtto stabilize the chaotic financial affairs of the young Weimar Republic. Not unexpectedly, the effort provoked intense opposition from many segments of the population. Resistance to the tax plan was particularly strong among the working class, and when it was implemented in July and August, large-scale protests and strikes occurred in various parts of the country. Although an enormous literature exists on labor problems in the Weimar Republic, the tax protests of 1920 have been largely ignored.

As the French Revolution lurched toward the Terror in the early 1790s, the reaction of the German educated public shifted from qualified approval to horrified condemnation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few German intellectuals who defied the trend. In the spring of 1793, at age thirty-one, Fichte denounced the governments of Europe for their reliance on secrecy and censorship and appealed for unconditional freedom of public expression. It was a fitting irony that this brief but impassioned Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit had to appear anonymously, with its place of publication given as “Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness.”