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.

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.”

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.

In 1966, a Radio Free Europe (RFE) report estimated that seven in ten Czechs and Slovaks listened to Radio Vienna, making it the most popular foreign station in Czechoslovakia. Yet conventional narratives of Western radio in socialist central Europe highlight the role played by runner-up RFE. By focusing on the practice of listening to German-language radio in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1969, this article shows that cross-border, German-language listening mattered not only between the Germanies, but also in central Europe, where listening habits were shaped by the region's multilingual heritage. In addition to highlighting German's significance as a language of regional communication, the article reveals the importance of cross-border contacts and the significance of light entertainment in Cold War central Europe. Rather than separating listeners out by citizenship, foreign radio listening fostered solidarities that cut across national boundaries and divided people by generation, geography, class, and technical dexterity instead.

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.