The failure of Hitler's 1923 Putsch relegated the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) to the periphery of German politics until the end of the decade, but these years of relative obscurity were nevertheless of crucial importance for the party. The reshaping of the NSDAP which took place during this period enabled Hitler to take advantage of the general crisis of the early thirties in a fashion that would have been impossible earlier, for in the interim a new and far more effective political instrument had been created. In large measure this was the result of little-publicized organizational work and political struggle, much of it at state and local levels.

In 1892, an artisan from Cologne stated that “the reintroduction of the Befähigungsnachweis (proof of qualification) was always the most important issue—a vital question for the representatives of the artisans.”

The fall of the Dual Monarchy in October 1918, after a half-century existence, gave rise to a Schuldfrage which prolonged by another fifty years the polemics begun in 1867 about the constitutional foundations of the reformed Habsburg state. Both before and after 1918 the pivotal problem of the controversy had to do with the political wisdom and implementation of the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the dispute over the Compromise in its successive historical settings through four generations of critics and, with benefit of their insight, to attempt a reassessment of the 1867–1918 edifice from a centennial vantage point.

Among the more durable tenets of postwar West German historiography was the widespread conviction that Catholicism and Nazism were, at some most basic level, mutually exclusive entities. While a flood of critical studies in the 1960s began to erode this conviction at least around the edges — as scholars subjected to greater scrutiny the actual responses of Catholic opinion leaders, the German episcopate, and the Vatican to the Nazi regime — the image of a fundamental, albeit not quite perfect, incompatibility between Catholicism and Nazism has remained essentially intact to the present day. The durability of this image has been due to some degree to the steady stream of primarily apologetic monographs produced by a large and energetic Catholic scholarly community in Germany, whose works have stressed the heroic oppositional stance and victimhood of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich.

There are many ways to approach the history of the welfare state, and one's understanding of the subject depends to a large degree on the path one takes and the questions that are asked along the way. This paper will take as its point of entry the social programs created to prosecute the war on tuberculosis and infant mortality in Germany from the turn of the last century through the 1920s, specifically the work of the tuberculosis welfare and infant welfare centers (Tuberkulose- and Säuglingsfürsorgestellen). Preventive social hygiene or medical relief programs (Gesundheitsfürsorge) to combat tuberculosis and infant mortality are central to the history of public health not only because of their role in the epidemiological transition in Germany and other western countries. These programs also have a much broader relevance because the refiguring of the rights and duties of citizenship entailed by the preventive project raises a set of questions concerning the relation between preventive social hygiene, individual freedom and well-being, and modernity that are paradigmatic for understanding the modern welfare state.

In the epilogue to his authoritative 1957 intellectual history, The German Idea of Freedom, Leonard Krieger concluded his exploration of German political thought from the Reformation to the Second Empire by excoriating the German liberal middle class, and especially the National Liberal Party, for its compromise with the authoritarian state and the landed aristocracy. He singled out for particular scorn the Rechtsstaat theory of Rudolf Gneist: Rudolf Gneist's doctrine of the Rechtsstaat, from which all oppositional elements had now been removed, set the tone for the adaptation of the old liberal political ideal to cover the legal reality of the new national state … The concept of Rechtsstaat, that barometer of 19th-century liberalism, was no longer defined in terms of a state which permitted to the individual rights apart from the state. It became now simply the kind of state whose power was articulated in legal modes of action — that is, in measures which conformed to general rules.

German interactions with Latin America have a long history. Indeed, early modern historians have demonstrated that people from German-speaking central Europe took part in all aspects of the European conquest of Central and South America. They have shown that these people were critical to mining operations and publishing in sixteenth-century Mexico; they have found them among Portuguese and Spanish sailors and soldiers almost everywhere; and they have located them playing important roles in a wide range of professions from Mexico to the south of Chile.

This article deals with early efforts to facilitate steam navigation between Vienna and Constantinople along the Danube. In addition to analyzing the complex negotiation processes that enabled the first regulation project at the so-called Iron Gates, a narrow gorge situated at the Austrian-Ottoman border, it assesses ways in which the new shipping connection transformed the cultural and spatial perceptions of travelers. The article argues that even though the plan for making the Iron Gates navigable was set out on the drawing boards of engineers and in the cabinets in Pest and Vienna, local circumstances changed its practical implementation in a number of important ways. The success of this major engineering operation relied on close cooperation among hydrological experts, state representatives, and entrepreneurs, all of whom had different stakes in the project but still shared a common interest. Establishing a shipping connection to the Black Sea along the Danube was thus the result of an alignment of interests among Hungarian, Viennese, and local Ottoman authorities; a careful match between theoretical knowledge and practical engineering work; and, last but not least, the surmounting of a mental separation between “Orient” and “Occident.”

In recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cultural historians, as has the response of the social elite to this form of popular culture. Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the history of what must surely be one of the most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object; stigmatization and repression of pornographic literature helps define and uphold the authority of socially sanctioned sexual norms, while at the same time revealing something about how stable or vulnerable that society imagines its established values to be.

In 1912 the Catholic lawyer, real estate speculator, and Center Party politician, Karl Trimborn wrote to his wife about a visit he had made to their Belgian relatives:

Their Catholicism, this demonstrative insistence on the Catholic point of view, this goingthrough thick and thin while excluding all criticism is not sympathetic to me. It encourages me to contradict them and to demonstrate my liberal point of view … In no way did we have an argument, but as we said good-bye, we knew: we are different people.

In 1886, the National Association of Animal Protection Societies petitioned the German Reichstag to protest “the deplorable state of affairs surrounding the method of slaughtering, the role of the butcher, and finally the demoralizing effect that the sight of this albeit necessary killing of livestock must have, particularly on the youth.” Calling for a nationwide law to prohibit the killing of livestock without prior stunning, animal protectionists insisted that only nationwide state intervention could alleviate the widespread problems with slaughter, which, by extension, would guarantee the advancement of humanity. Yet, butchers and Jewish communities vehemently disagreed and in more than two thousand counterpetitions, they appealed to the Reichstag to refrain from proposing such a law. Why did a relatively minor issue like the slaughter of livestock spark so much controversy, and, more importantly, why did it become such a politicized agenda when it was deliberated in the Reichstag in 1887 and again in 1899?

Something important happened in the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main between 1612 and 1616. Nobody doubts that. The Fettmilch Uprising, as it is generally known, involved a complex and turbulent series of events which culminated in the dramatic execution of the ringleader, Vincenz Fettmilch, and six of his comrades. But why exactly were they executed—and what was the uprising all about? This depends on what you read. It is a commonplace, of course, that historical events are subject to different interpretations, but here a much deeper problem of historical perception seems to be at stake. For we come across descriptions of the uprising so different in substance as to make one question whether they even refer to the same event. And the differences between these accounts are generally related to one of the most sensitive and troubling aspects of German history: the status and treatment of the Jews. In fact the Fettmilch Uprising illustrates with disturbing clarity the difficulties that both Germans and Jews have long experienced—and continue to experience—in attempting to understand and give meaning to some important aspects of their common past.

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

The investigations into the crimes of the Auschwitz perpetrators by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office began in 1958. The trial opened in 1963. Why did it take five years? In the 1960s, scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, and Hannah Arendt emphasized West German reticence, indifference, or even unwillingness to confront the Nazi past as explanations for the late start of investigations of Nazi criminals. They argued that the 1950s were dominated by a collective silence about Nazism and crimes against the Jews in Germany. According to them, politically, culturally, and also legally, the new West German state refused to acknowledge the Nazi past of anyone but the highest ranking Nazis, whose trial at Nuremberg marked the Schlussstrich (drawing the line) under the topic of National Socialism and its crimes against humanity. Recent historiography of postwar German trials has also pointed to lingering Nazi beliefs not only on the part of judges and lawyers but in the minds of the public as well.

What did it mean when an teenth-century monarch intervened in a legal struggle between social unequals, and decided on behalf of the weaker party? How do historians interpret such an event? In the example under examination here—the cause célèbre of the millers Christian and Rosine Arnold in Brandenburg-Prussia (1770–1779)—the dominant opinion of two centuries has been that King Frederick II's intervention violated justice and the rule of law. Explaining this remarkable continuity of historical attention is easy, for the affair's effects on state-formation in Prussia were far–reaching. On the very day that Frederick ruled in the millers' favor, the king also sacked his chancellor (Grosskanzler), Carl Joseph von Fürst, as well as three members of Brandenburg's supreme tribunal, the Chamber Court (Kammergericht), all for ruling against the millers. In Fürst's place as chancellor, Frederick installed Johann Heinrich Casimir von Carmer, under whom began the process of legal reforms that resulted in the provisional Corpus Juris Fridericianum (1781) and ultimately the General Prussian Code (Allgemeines Preussisches Landrecht, or ALR) of 1794. To some extent, then, Frederick's intervention was the founding act of codification. But it is more difficult to explain the unanimity: with few exceptions, historians and biographers have pronounced the intervention a “judicial catastrophe” (Justizkatastrophe) and declared the millers mere “troublemakers.” This essay will argue that such conclusions are misguided: by framing their questions within the parameters of legal and administrative history, most historians have focused on the legal merits of the Arnolds' suit. In so doing, they have operated on the assumption that a unitary definition of justice prevailed in eighteenth-century Prussia; as a result, most historical appraisals reflect highly partisan contemporary interpretations of the case. But there were at least three distinct “discourses” on justice at work as the case unfolded, each of them corresponding to one of the principal sets of actors in the drama.

In 1995, before the Leitkultur debate about a hegemonic German culture to which immigrants might aspire, disputes over the wearing of headscarves, and September 11, a federal German court effectively banned Muslims from slaughtering animals without prior stunning. The court ruled that the practice was not required by their religion and was thus not protected by the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religious expression. In January 2002, however, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the right to freedom of religious expression and choice of occupation did in fact ensure the entitlement of Germany's Muslims, or at least those responsible for their provision with halal meat, to resume stunningless methods for such ends without the threat of legal action. Religious slaughter has been problematic throughout Germany's history and the reemergence of opposition to it late in the twentieth century was not without precedent. The issue throws up numerous areas for possible examination. But what does it have to do with the Greens and with their positions on animals and human society?

Historians have mostly, and with good reason, examined the industrial exploitation of concentration-camp prisoners from the standpoint of its injustice. Studies have covered either the politics which led to forced labor, the involvement of individual factories where prisoners suffered starvation and death, or the harrowing experience of the Victims. Yet few have considered forced labor as the perpetrators saw it: coldly, as a colossal managerial problem. A surprisingly small number, no more than 200 top and mid-level bureaucrats within the Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt of the SS (WVHA), brokered prisoners to labor sites across the Reich, and, after 1941, across the breadth of Europe. Of course, many more German managers were involved in the execution of forced labor programs, and an examination of the WVHA can by no means capture the whole picture.

Contemplating with dread the slide toward war between Japan and the United States in the autumn of 1941, Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Tokyo, noted gloomily in his diary: “Facilis descensus averni est”—the descent into Hell is easy. Events in Europe and China had already given eloquent testimony to that grim axiom, confirming all too clearly that among the first casualties of war are peacetime notions of morality. Grew's foreboding was more than justified. Before the Second World War would come to a close in the summer of 1945, it had become the most destructive conflict in human history, with fifty-five million dead, millions more broken, either physically or psychologically, thirty million refugees, and still millions more who had simply vanished. Continents had been ravaged, great cities laid waste, and a tidal wave of destruction left behind a landscape of unparalleled human suffering. A war that began with the major powers pledging to refrain from “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities”—Hitler piously committed Germany to conduct the war “in a chivalrous and humane manner”—ended with a mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.

It is a commonplace that the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany in 1933 was to a large extent made possible by a clever manipulation of irrational fears provoked by the economic, social, and political tensions of the time. More than once since the Frankfurt School's famous study on authority and the family it has been suggested that the authoritarianism of the German family contributed to the susceptibility of the population to the siren call of the leadership principle and that threats to the traditional structure of society, especially the family, made people fearful and desperate enough to see a savior in Hitler. Certainly his call for women to return to hearth and home found a responsive audience. The Kinder, Küche, Kirche issue in Nazi propaganda implied that women were deserting their homes, their children, and their morality, challenging men's authority by asserting their independence and by flooding the labor market to such an extent that honest Familienväter found themselves without “work or bread,” to use the compassionate terms of the otherwise dispassionate 1933 census. Carl Gustav Jung, in his pamphlet Die Frau in Europa, was only one of the more distinguished spokesmen for the widely held view that women's emancipation was responsible for endangering not only the institution of marriage but also the whole spiritual balance between the masculine and feminine principles.

The purpose of this paper is to bring to our attention the important role of women in wholesale international commerce in eighteenth century northern Germany, using examples from Stralsund as a case study. (Stralsund, a port-city formerly in the Hanse, was at that time the capital of Swedish Pomerania and had a population, including garrison, of some 14,000 around 1800; it was an economic center of regional importance, specializing in the production of malt and the export of grain to Sweden and Western Europe). After sketching a social and economic profile of Stralsund's female merchants ca. 1750–1830, I will discuss the crucial issue of control, i.e., to what extent and how these women were able to operate independently within a political and legal system that favored men. In my conclusion, I suggest that women left, or were forced out of, the wholesale trade around 1850 as a result of political changes and a shift in the meaning of the concept of Bürger, rather than as a result of industrialization or market expansion. Throughout, I consider whether my observations about female merchants in Stralsund have any wider validity by comparing them with research on the commerce of other ports in Northern Europe and in North America.