There is an insatiable demand in the Federal Republic for accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Just about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the word Alltag in its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs, Volkshochschulen and youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” (Geschichtswerkstätten), inspired by the leftist-populism of the Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm, Alltagsgeschichte has not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses (die Vielen). Indeed, Alltagsgeschichte has challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of Strukturgeschichte within the German historical “guild” (Zunft) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research. Alltagsgeschichte originally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history (Strukturgeschichte) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As we enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.

Because of the politically sensitive and often quite unsavory aspects of their work, but also because they wish to protect their former agents, secret services usually do not like to say very much about their past activities and try to keep their records out of the hands of historians and other outsiders for as long as possible. The army intelligence service of Imperial Germany—officially known as the Geheime Nachrichtendienst des Heeres or, more simply, as the “N.D.”—was no exception to this rule. While the last chief of that organization, Walter Nicolai, and some of his former subordinates wrote a number of books and articles after 1918 in which they described the functions of the N.D. and some of its accomplishments, they remained studiously vague on many issues, particularly with regard to the espionage operations which had been conducted in the Entente countries in the years prior to the Great War. As might be expected, various other German publications on the background of the war which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, including Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette and other such editions of government documents, similarly maintained a discreet silence on this subject.

In the eighteenth century Germany as a unified, sovereign state was only a vague idea. The Holy Roman Empire provided only a loose framework for more or less independent small states. In an area of 660,000 square kilometers there lived twenty-seven million inhabitants, divided among 310 territories, 50 imperial free cities, and 1,500 imperial knighthoods. Large German provinces such as East Prussia, West Prussia, and Schleswig were situated outside the imperial boundaries. The emperor had no real power. Since 1648 the territories had possessed sovereignty, and looked upon each other as foreign countries. Even a move to a neighboring village lying on the other side of the frontier was considered as emigration.

How anyone today first comes to hear the name Max Nordau says much about his interests. He might, if his literary tastes so dictate, chance across him in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Mina Harker cites Nordau as evidence that the count is a criminal and therefore of imperfectly formed mind. For Dracula's and Nordau's contemporaries, however, no such fortuitous encounters were necessary. Nordau was a household name whose most popular books appeared in scores of editions in a dozen languages. As a personality he was as colossal as his reputation. As critic, philosopher, novelist, playwright, sociologist, versifier, orator, journalist, polyglot, Zionist, psychologist, and physician, his versatility is impressive even when measured against an age when many tried their hand at more than one thing.

Although Hitler placed primary emphasis in his propaganda on the “spoken word,” one of his earliest ambitions as a party leader was to own a newspaper. He succeeded in December 1920, little more than a year after he joined the Nazi Party, by purchasing a debt-ridden newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. It had started life in 1887 as the Münchener Beobachter, a local paper serving the Munich suburb of Haidhausen. After changing names and owners several times, the paper in 1918 came into the hands of Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who was acting for the Thule Society, a right-wing, völkisch group. Early in 1920, he changed the name to Völkischer Beobachter (VB).

The Jews who lived in the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto endeavored in a variety of written ways to document their experiences for later generations. Photographers who lived in the ghetto also helped capture on film the daily reality of those who lived there. In this way, the foundation was laid for a later investigation of the ghetto—one from the perspective of the victims, who wanted to ensure that the perpetrators would not be able to monopolize future interpretations of what had transpired there. After providing a brief overview of the history of the ghetto and of the archive set up by the Jewish ghetto administration specifically for this task, the article focuses on the activities of two photographers in particular: Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who secretly, and at great risk to their own lives, attempted to capture as many aspects of ghetto life as possible. The article discusses a number of their photographs, the way in which they came into being, and the likely motivation of those who made them.

Between 1946 and 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent four representatives to Germany for extended visits to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They were particularly interested in reorganizing the educational and science systems in a democratic manner and in reintegrating the conquered aggressor into the “family of nations.” They held numerous meetings with leading representatives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), the successor to the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), which had received considerable amounts of funding from the RF until the late 1930s, even after the Nazis came to power. As a result of its evaluation, the RF declined to provide the same level of support for the postwar MPG as it had for the prewar KWG. Although an obvious reason for the RF to distance itself from the KWG would be the latter's involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, as suggested by Paul Weindling in his analysis of the RF's funding policy for biomedical research in Germany in general, neither the RF interviews nor the evaluation reports mentioned the involvement of KWG scientists in biomedical crimes during the Third Reich. The reports did not even mention the Nuremberg medical trial, which took place between December 1946 and August 1947.

The dual assignment of this presentation was to review some of the issues facing historians of Austria as they try to situate Austrian history within the wider cultural and social realm of “Central Europe” and to present some brief reflections to my colleagues who study Germany on the possible role of Austrian history in shaping the interpretive choices they may make in the future. Since these remarks were offered in a self-consciously “German” symposium (organized with the support of the DAAD), I took it as a given that internal interpretive problems of Hapsburg and/or successor state history peculiar to those arenas would not necessarily be relevant, even though they did intrude in any event. Although these brief comments were conceived in September 1989 and presented the following month, the events of November 1989 and October 1990 have only enhanced my concerns, and subsequent revisions to this text have not changed the basic character of my remarks.

If every German had had his own home,” wrote the National Socialist Karl Fiehler in 1932, “the revolution of 1918 would not have been possible.” Typical of the Nazi tendency toward exaggeration, Fiehler's assertion nevertheless recognized the role of housing in a stable society. Article 155 of the Weimar constitution of August 11, 1919, promised suitable housing for every German, but that promise remained unfulfilled. The Weimar regime, in fact, left many promises unfulfilled, and the collapse of the republic might be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in solving basic social and economic problems. Existing studies of the Weimar republic provide inadequate treatment of the problem-solving process employed to attack specific problems such as the housing shortage. Students of Weimar Germany have been fascinated with the beginning and the end of the republic, paying little attention to the relatively stable years from 1924 to 1929. Examination of the German housing problem will not explain why the republic fell. Historians have already supplied a rich variety of “explanations” for the fall of the republic: the burden of Versailles, reparations, inflation, depression, constitutional deficiencies, political fragmentation, and unhealthy compromises between the republic and the military, labor and management, and federal and state governments. Not everyone has been convinced. The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf criticizes “explanations that do not explain, statements that do not state anything.” Perhaps, as Michael Stürmer suggests, it is time to go beyond the origins and collapse of the Weimar republic. The historical significance of the Weimar republic lies in how it functioned as well as how it fell.

Languages evolve, and through the negotiations of public discourse, particular phrases acquire connotations and meanings beyond their grammatical structure. Occasionally, the meanings become contested and the resultant debate can be politically charged. The struggle to define language is fundamentally a struggle for power. This explains the current concerns of the French government to protect the French language from anglicisms. In recent years, the United States has become embroiled in debates over interpretations of the Constitution. Should our reconstruction of the eighteenth-century intent of the authors be the standard or should we reinterpret the language in the spirit of our present day context? The answer is fundamentally a political one. Perhaps nowhere has language been more highly contested than in postwar West Germany.

Building on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms—assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures, and symbiosis—this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

Over the course of the 1970s, West Germans fought one another in an attempt to defend democracy. Frustrated with the seemingly ineffectual speeches and demonstrations of the 1960s protest movements, militant groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF), June 2nd Movement, and the Red Cells took up arms. They declared war on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) for its failure to rid itself of the vestiges of fascism, for its hierarchical-authoritarian structure, and for the abuses of western consumer society. Inspired by national liberation movements in the formerly colonized world, the groups aimed both to raise revolutionary consciousness among the West German population and to demonstrate the state's vulnerability through illegal action. The RAF, in particular, stressed the importance of violence as a simultaneous act of emancipation and defense—the latter understood as counterviolence necessitated by state-initiated violence. The repeated violation of norms would, its members argued, undermine Germans' traditional “habit of obedience” and, at the same time, force the state to reveal openly its fascism. These tough-love tactics, in short, aimed to save West Germans from themselves and thereby save German democracy.

At a session of the December 1968 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Professor Gerhard Weinberg Suggested during the discussion that the entire history of German reparations needs to be restudied. He further remarked that the key question is not how much but, rather, who paid. Professor Weinberg is of course right on both counts but perhaps a brief second look should also be given to the question of how much. Both the world in general and the historians in particular have tended to be mesmerized by the figure of 132 billion marks. The assumption has been that this sum, by definition outrageous, was brutally imposed at gunpoint upon a prostrate Germany by greedy and vengeful victors. The fact that the 1921 Schedule of Payments soon collapsed and was revised downward by the Dawes Plan is often presented as proof of the unreasonableness of die Allied powers and of their Schedule of Payments. It is not surprising diat world opinion has never penetrated the arcane mysteries of Reparations Commission prose, particularly since die public was meant to be fooled, but there is no excuse for the historians. The relevant documents, memoirs, and monographic studies have been available for thirty and forty years. A close examination of them clearly indicates that Germany was never in fact asked to pay anydiing remotely resembling 132 billion marks and that, in actuality, the London Schedule of Payments of May 1921 constituted a tremendous German victory.

The process of urbanization is treated by most historians as intimately related to other changes in the economic, cultural, and social life of societies and individuals. In some societies the growth of cities is one of the first steps in the processes of industrialization, secularization, cultural change, economic growth, and other changes often labelled “modernization.” A study of urbanization and other societal changes in German Jewry, however, suggests a different sequence.

At the end of 1918, Harry Graf Kessler, the astute German observer of domestic and international affairs, summarized the essential conflicts that Germany would face in the years following World War I. Considering the demands of the German revolution along with the urgency of economic recovery from the war, Kessler responded to his compatriot, Hermann Graf Keyserling, that “The crucial point is how we are to combine broad social measures without reducing production. If we can solve this problem, we really shall be ahead of the rest of the world. What Kessler perceptively anticipated in the dying days of the last year of the Great War would be Weimar's effort to create a social welfare state predicated on private sector economic recovery and prosperity. Germany after the First World War was the first industrial nation in the twentieth century to broach this agenda, one which would become more familiar and successful following the Second World War.

How did the inter-German border, created in 1945, become one of the most formidable boundaries in the world by 1952? The early boundary was not fenced, but just years in the wake of National Socialism's “Thousand Year Reich” Germans on both sides broadly accepted and enforced it against other Germans. These early divisions made possible the GDR's physical closure and fortification of the border after 1952. The hastily drawn demarcation line between Allied zones of occupation had rather quickly expanded into a legal, economic, political, and social boundary—in which both East and West developed a stake.

We could be more liberal if we had no social democrats.” This was one axiom of German electoral politics with which the overwhelming mass of non-socialist (bürgerlich) German voters agreed unrservedly, wrote Lothar Schücking, a liberal critic of Prussian officialdom, in 1908. Nevertheless, continued Schücking, the aims and ideals of the social democratic movement were completely unfamiliar to most educated Germans. “One knows a few slogans,” wrote Schucking: “‘free love,’ ‘religion a private matter,’ ‘impoverishment of the masses,’… ‘republic.’” Everything else was subsumed under the specter of the “red international.” Disapprovingly, Schucking concluded that “the burgerlich parties have gradually come to recognize only ‘national questions.’”

Does air have value? In the first volume of Capital, Marx suggested it did not: “A thing can be a use-value, without having value,” he explained. “This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c.” Because it has no value, understood by Marx in this context to mean labor value, air cannot be a commodity: “Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two fold, both object of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value.” Marx's materialist focus on human labor and industrial production made it hard for him to imagine air as a commodity—at least when he published the first volume of Capital in 1867.

Twenty years and a day after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, Hanover county administrator Helmut Janssen declared to an assembly of East Prussian expellee leaders that Germany was still destined to recover all of the territory it had possessed in 1937. One day, he claimed, the roughly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from the lost eastern territories and eastern Europe in the wake of the war would return home. Although by 1965 this political goal seemed “further away than ever before,” he repeated an expellee declaration of March 1960, which pledged that all expellees “still want to return to the Heimat [homeland]—now, in the future, and forever.”