In the Third Reich a high percentage of the civil servants in the cadres of functionaries of the National Socialist Party on the local and district levels were teachers. It is thus not surprising that some historians who studied the elementary school teaching profession in the Weimar Republic began their research with assumptions about the “ideological affinities” of teachers to fascism and discussed “the specific predispositions that made it easy for them to identify with National Socialism.” The German Teachers' Association, one scholar wrote, “proved to be more a precursor than an opponent of fascism.” At its national congress in May 1932, another historian related, the representatives of the chapters voted for a policy which, in effect, abandoned the democratic republic and “indirectly helped those political forces that would create a dictatorship in Germany within a year.” In 1932 and 1933, on the other hand, recruiters for the National Socialist Teachers’ League often complained about “hard and difficult soil” and “unpenetrable” regions.

The Berlin Republic of the twenty-first century, writes W. R. Smyser, is destined to be unlike all previous German states. A status quo power and a stable democracy, it is neither the battleground of others nor dominant over them, neither reticent like Bonn nor arrogant like the Berlin of the late Hohenzollerns. The Cold War was “the essential incubator” of this “new Germany” (p. 402). It provided Germany with the tools of change—a role through which to overcome its past, and time to overcome old wounds. Aiding the incubation were contradictory Communist policies, astute Western statesmanship, and bravely pursued Eastern popular aspirations. Two Germans and two Americans, Smyser avers, stand at the heart of the eventual Communist defeat: East German leader Walter Ulbricht, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, President Ronald Reagan, and Smyser’s onetime mentor, General Lucius Clay. Mighty assists go to British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev, and the inspirational Polish Pope. Further down this idiosyncratic hierarchy stand Chancellors Adenauer and Kohl and U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

Hitler's takeover of power in January 1933 created a new and dangerous situation for German Jewry. Nazi policy developed gradually, but before the spring of 1933 was well advanced there could be little doubt that serious injury was intended toward the Jewish community. The “wildcat” anti-Semitic actions of undisciplined SA men were followed by the national boycott of Jewish businesses conducted on April 1. Legislative and administrative measures, preceded and accompanied by “unofficial” and “illegal” actions tending in the same direction, began the process that drove Jews from public employment, from medicine, law, and teaching, from cultural, political, and journalistic pursuits, and that severely hampered their economic activity in any form. Long before any sane observer could have glimpsed the outlines of the “final solution,” the leaders of the German Jewish community were faced with a situation demanding the utmost of their political and organizational talents. As a leading Jewish participant put it, the situation provided a classic case of Toynbee's “challenge” and “response.” To one German Jewish leader, Georg Kareski, it was a great and positive political opportunity.

On February 10, 1831, word reached Vienna that revolution had broken out in central Italy, first in the Duchies of Modena and Parma, then in the Legations, the northern provinces of the Papal State. The news was shortly followed by appeals from the threatened Italian princes for Austrian military intervention, and for Metternich, there could be no doubt as to the proper reply: these revolts were not merely another blow at the tottering conservative order, already hard hit by the July Revolution and its aftermath, but a “question of life and death” for the Habsburg Empire itself. At the Congress of Vienna, Metternich had established Austrian predominance in Italy as a fundamental component of her international position, vital for her status as a great power. Revolution in central Italy, if allowed to go unchecked, would end that predominance, for it would surely spread throughout the peninsula, to create in the end a united and independent Italian state.

It is now generally accepted that prior to the outbreak of the First World War German Social Democracy did not, as a rule, count foreign policy among its more central concerns. It is often further assumed that the right wing of the prewar German labor movement was still less interested in foreign policy problems than were left-wing or centrist party spokesmen. This assumption requires qualification, for the work of East German historians and others has shown that social imperialist thought had made heavy inroads into the revisionist wing of prewar Social Democracy. In fact, revisionists and reformists from Vollmar onwards frequently manifested a deep and enduring concern with the problems of Germany's position in the world. Yet there remains in the person of Eduard Bernstein—in many ways the father of revisionism and certainly its intellectual leader and chief publicist—one prominent revisionist whose pre-1914 foreign policy position continues to defy satisfactory categorization and generalization.

The 1970s were an interesting and significant decade for the historiography of contemporary Austria. Among Austrian scholars, the tradition of Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung, a reflection of the political and bureaucratic system of Proporz which reigned in the 1950s and 1960s, began to break down. With the triumph of Social Democracy under Bruno Kreisky, fewer historians—especially those of the “left”—were willing to continue sharing in the orderly division of responsibility for the recent past. Moreover, some of the controversy aroused in Germany by Fritz Fischer's work began to invigorate Austrian historical studies. Both in Austria and abroad, historians became less inclined to treat Austria as a unique case, and increasingly interested in the Alpine state as a study in the general development of contemporary central Europe. The publication of Norbert Schausberger's Der Griff nach Österreich in early 1978—the fortieth anniversary of the Anschluss—marked in some respects a milestone in this direction; it provides the opportunity to review a sampling of the more interesting recent literature, and to reflect, as well, on some general problems of conceptualizing contemporary Austrian history.

Wilhelmine Germany's Weltpolitik is widely regarded as a precursor to World War I, as a reckless break from the Bismarckian past, and as a counterproductive form of German deviation from European norms. Yet, when one reexamines certain German overseas expansion schemes between 1897 and the early 1900s, a strong intellectual continuity emerges between the methods of Weltpolitik and wider views about colonial sovereignty. Like Bismarck and other European imperial powers in the late nineteenth century, the actors producing Weltpolitik sought to enlist private businessmen in colonial governance, as well as to parcel and transfer sovereignty as a commodity in places like the Caribbean island of St. John. Counterintuitively, this way of treating sovereignty was highly imitative and compliant with norms, both at home and abroad. It also represented an alternative, at least at times, to a more aggressive course in foreign policy.

Until very recently, almost no serious research into the history of feminism and female emancipation in modern Germany has been published. This neglect is indeed far deeper than that from which women's history in Britain, France, or the United States has suffered. In some measure, it is connected with the reasons for the general neglect of social history in modern Germany—the concern of German historians with questions of political power, foreign policy, and intellectual development, the perversion of historical studies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the dominance in West German historiography of a close professional elite whose intellectual roots went back to the period before 1933. This situation is now changing, and there is growing interest in both West and East Germany in women's role in the German past. Yet, so far at any rate, this interest has not inspired in Germany any major work of research or synthesis. Even more surprising is the fact that the numerous recent American discussions of women and modernization in Europe almost entirely fail to discuss Germany, confining themselves instead to taking examples from Britain and France. In view of the centrality of the German model to more general discussions such as that in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, it seems astonishing that so little has been done to investigate the German dimension of women's history.

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

In 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing:

This forum explores from multiple perspectives the often stated impression that the nineteenth century is “vanishing” from German and European history. It asks how one can explain this trend, what consequences it has for the development of historiography and public historical knowledge, if and why the nineteenth century matters for the present, and what the future of nineteenth-century history might be. Fourteen experts on different regions and historiographical approaches to European history from the United States and Germany discuss these questions. We sought contributors from these two countries in order to illuminate differences in the historical profession on either side of the Atlantic, and are sure that a broader regional comparison would point to more varieties in the state of historical research on the nineteenth century.

Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of a unified Germany, was an active participant in the Anglo-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. Even though Germany had no direct interests there and was never involved on the ground during the two decades of his chancellorship, Bismarck invested considerable resources in working to shape the course of events in that part of the world, stoking the flames of conflict whenever it suited the dictates of Realpolitik. Over a twenty-year period, he actively pursued a consistent strategy that focused on tying down Russian troops in the remote Asian steppes, i.e., as far away from Central Europe as possible. At the same time, he manipulated Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia to achieve various foreign policy goals that would further German interests. This article explores in detail all of these objectives, as well as their interrelationship. In particular, it unravels the perplexing mystery of how Bismarck was able to influence the politics of Central Asia from his distant headquarters in Berlin.

On January 21, 1727, several communes in the Nordbrookmerland region of East Frisia, a small principality located on the North Sea coast of Germany and hard by the Dutch border, were granted what amounted to immunity from prosecution for acts of rebellion. How and why this happened is a story that has a great deal to tell about the influence ordinary people could exert, through petitioning, on the practice of state power in early modern Europe. In the months and years before 1727, the prince of East Frisia, Georg Albrecht, had become embroiled in an increasingly hostile confrontation with the Estates of his province for control over the administration of taxes in the land. In their efforts to gain the upper hand, both the prince and the Estates had tried to forge alliances among the rural population and mobilized these networks against each other. The Nordbrookmerlanders tended to ally with the prince, but felt increasingly isolated and endangered. Throughout the autumn of 1726, they had been petitioning the chancellor, Enno R. Brenneysen, for protection against attacks perpetrated by the Estates' allies on their “wives and children, houses and farms.” In light of the chancellor's inability to preserve them from further destruction, the village elders asked that they be allowed to obey the Estates' commands until order was restored. Doing this, they pointed out, would force them to commit several “rebellious” acts, such as signing manifestos, supplying recruits for the rebels' militia, and paying an extraordinary war tax that had been levied by the Estates, the so-called Wochengeld.

Studies of the East German historical profession and what became of it after 1990—which are now numerous—have primarily dealt with institutes in Berlin affiliated with the Akademie der Wissenschaften or the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). Little attention has been paid to the academic institutions where most of the German Democratic Republic's historians and history teachers received their scholarly and political training, namely the history departments of the country's universities and the teachers' colleges (pädagogische Hochschulen). In this essay, in which I draw in part upon my personal experiences, I will therefore be less concerned with the well-researched “nerve centers” of the East German research establishment than with the long-neglected “academic provinces” and the everyday realities of academic life that, however absurd they might seem in hindsight, shaped the experiences of countless students, instructors, and professors.

Andrej Angrick's definitive work on Einsatzgruppe D is more than a history of the mobile killing unit, for the latter did not operate in a vacuum, but cooperated with the German military authorities to realize Nazi occupation policy in the south Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Angrick's words, Einsatzgruppe D was the “first and most radical instrument for the formation of the to-be-conquered Lebensraum” (p. 732). German determination to recast the ethnic composition of the U.S.S.R. was no “desk fantasy,” as reflected in the priority placed on settlement planning, which required the disappearance of Soviet Jews. Unlike Jewish communities in the western U.S.S.R., where survival of some was guaranteed by the need for labor, survivors in areas “worked” by Einsatzgruppe D were “minutely few”(p. 733). Angrick notes that his work is “perpetrator history”: his perpetrators permitted few victims to survive; and those who did were primarily peasants and Red Army soldiers whose stories were not told after the war. Nevertheless, postwar statements of the perpetrators assist the historian to “reconstruct … the internal history of the unit, down to the individual,” although cautions about judicial and historical “truth” should be well taken.