In Jakob Burckhardt's classic vision of the emergence of a new, individualistic consciousness in Renaissance Italy, the artist took his place behind the tyrant as one of the early escapees from the crumbling prisons of medieval corporate institutions. Although the picture of his progress from craftsman to free professional is more nuanced and qualified in the recent literature, the Italian artist continues to enjoy his reputation as one of the few permanent beneficiaries of the Renaissance. As the Wittkowers have written: “But the new day came when artists began to revolt against the hierarchical order of which they were an integral part—a day when they regarded the organization meant to protect their interests as prison rather than shelter.”1 At Florence, where artists first achieved a new self-consciousness as theorists and men of letters, private patronage supplied the wealth for a new level of status, higher than that of the craftsman, and weakened the ties of guild life. Not that Florentine artists of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries invariably became either successful businessmen or bohemians—though both types could be found there and elsewhere in Italy—nor did they revolt against corporate institutions altogether. But their new organization, the Accademia del Disegno, resembled the old guild structure only superficially and was, as its name suggests, a professional association uniting the artistic crafts rather than a type of guild.2 If the sixteenth century Italian artist lacked the social prestige of the lawyer, the notary, or the physician, neither was he any longer lumped together with the cobbler, the stonemason, or the apothecary.

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.

Surveying the German political situation in the spring of 1913, the chairman of the National Liberal Party in Baden, Edmund Rebmann, could only see “black,” the adjective commonly used to describe the Catholic Center Party. The Center was systematically tightening its grip on the states of south Germany: Bavaria had already fallen under its domination; Württemberg and Alsace-Lorraine were wavering; even Baden, the last stronghold of liberalism south of the Main, was threatened. Rebmann was deeply concerned. “A united south Germany with purely black governments,” he warned a meeting of National Liberal leaders in Karlsruhe, Baden's capital, “would be an enormous prize for the Center” and might ultimately undermine the unity of the German empire. His assessment was shared by other political observers who had witnessed at first hand the way in which the Center Party had insinuated itself into a virtually impregnable position in German politics. While there is no evidence of a conspiracy to break up the empire, the Center, with its solid block of votes in the Reichstag, its growing representation in the Landtage of south Germany, and its famous tactical flexibility, was able to exert considerable influence over government policy both nationally and regionally in the decade before World War I. The party once designated by Bismarck as an enemy of the Reich had become a conservative friend of the status quo.

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.

The dissolution of the German party system during the Weimar Republic was well advanced long before either the world economic crisis descended upon Germany with all of its intensity in the early 1930s or the National Socialists scored their first decisive breakthrough into the ranks of Germany's middle-class parties. While both the onset of the depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, their principal effect was not so much to catalyze this process as to intensify disintegrative factors that had been present ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic. The ultimate cause of the dissolution of the bourgeois party system during the Weimar Republic lay precisely in the inability of established bourgeois parties such as the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP), the German People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP), the German National People's Party (Deutsdmationale Volkspartei or DNVP), and to a somewhat lesser extent the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) to integrate the diverse and increasingly antagonistic social and economic interests which constituted their material base into a viable and effective social force. The emergence of special-interest parties in the second half of the 1920s bore dramatic testimony to the failure of Germany's nonsocialist parties to provide the more traditional elements of the German middle class with the effective political representation they needed in order to maintain their social and economic position in the face of mounting economic adversity. Not only did the formation of such parries reflect the process of social and political decay that was at work within the German party system, but the increasing fragmentation of Germany's established bourgeois parties greatly facilitated the penetration of National Socialism into the ranks of the German middle strata.

Although Franz Schnabel described the nineteenth century as the “century of the formal Rechtsstaat,” most political and social historians of the German Kaiserreich have paid surprisingly little attention to the legal aspect of the development of society and polity. Textbooks in German history contain only brief mention of the enactment of legal reforms, either naming them without comment or subsuming them under administrative initiatives of the National Liberal party. More importantly, even standard works on the history of liberalism give precious little space to the important legislative reforms that are the focus of this essay; James J. Sheehan devotes only a paragraph to the adoption of the Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79, and Dieter Langewiesche stresses the importance of legal unity and these reforms to liberals, but also in only one paragraph. In general, historians of German liberalism have left efforts to examine the development and unification of the German legal system after 1848 to legal historians, who are housed in Germany in the separate legal faculties and focus their work primarily on the history of legal doctrine. By failing to examine law as a historical artifact, however, political and social historians have also overlooked the Weberian message that law is a crucial analytical entry point into any understanding of modem society. Contemporary legal scholars stress that legal and social systems are inextricably intertwined, and that neither can be understood without a grasp of the other. Understanding legal discourse helps historians understand broader social discourse.

When one hears that the vote of the socialistic party of Germany rose from 312,000 in 1881 to 1,725,000 at the last election of the Reichstag, the question naturally arises, What is the true significance of this? How far have the economic theories of Socialism really penetrated the masses of Germany? Such questions are apart from the more usual inquiries as to the scientific soundness of the official manifestoes of this party, or the personal aims of Bebel, Liebknecht or von Vollmar. Nevertheless, the inquiry into the real economics beliefs of the nearly two million German voters usually classed as “socialists,” is certainly of deep interest to the sociologist and statesman.

TheOstpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to isolate the GDR and its satellite allies and to avoid granting unilateral concessions to the Soviet bloc. Although such Staatsräson considerations were very significant for the Federal Republic's policymakers, they do not tell the whole story. Movement on Eastern policy was also significantly hindered by domestic factors, the most important of which was the influence of the Vertriebenenverbände—the pressure organizations purporting to represent the millions of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The role of these organizations has typically received passing reference in general studies of Ostpolitik, but the specialized literature on the topic has remained weak.

In the longer continuity of German history, the year 1945 will always, in part, represent the “Stunde Null” (zero hour), of catastrophic military defeat and complete moral disgrace and bankruptcy following Nazism and the Holocaust.1 The term “Stunde Null” evokes the need for a new beginning, a moral and political break with disastrous and ultimately criminal national traditions. Yet, because the Third Reich lasted only twelve years, and because there were non- and anti-Nazi traditions and leaders that survived in inner and external emigration, the postwar rejection of Nazism took the form of multiple restorations of these still extant German political traditions. In the first postwar years, the turn away from Nazism in both Germanies, as well as the break with totalitarian dictatorship in general in Western Germany, was taken by political leaders who had been active in Weimar politics and who returned to take center stage in German politics after 1945.2 To be sure, they were all deeply affected in their lives and thinking by the Third Reich. But what changes it did bring about in their political views amounted to rearrangements and different emphases of long-held convictions rather than to wholly new beginnings.

The consolidation of territorial states in Central Europe undermined the local customs and institutions that had shaped village life since the Middle Ages. By the end of the eighteenth century unitary law codes overrode rural customs. By distinguishing between public and private law, these codes stripped the organized village community of legal substance. Police and judicial functions once performed within the community were assumed by bureaucrats, and the state meddled with the use of local resources by liberalizing marriage and residence laws. Deprived of political autonomy, the village did remain the core economic and social unit in rural life, controlling access to communal forests and enforcing the rules of three-field agriculture. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century this limited autonomy was undermined as well. Freedom of contract, security of individual property, free transmission of property between generations, and commercialization of landed property struck at the ability of villages to control their material world in customary ways.

For more than a year and a half Gerald Feldman has waged an unrelenting campaign against my work and character. By his own declaration, the object of this campaign has been to deny me employment as a professional historian, and to establish within the historical profession that my work is a fraud, and that I am a liar. Hitherto Professor Feldman has used private correspondence, countless phone calls, irregularly circulated “open” letters, and lapel-grabbing confrontations with interested (and some not so interested) colleagues to advance these ends. After much of that, he has availed himself of the services of a scholarly journal. I am pleased with his decision to do so, and grateful to this journal's editor for the opportunity given me to respond. But there is no escaping history. And to understand the present exchange, some history is required.

In his poem “Our Military!” published in 1919, Kurt Tucholsky describes the great enthusiasm that he, or rather his pseudonym Kaspar Hauser, felt as a boy before World War II for the sis–boom–bah of martial music when the soldiers marched by. Only when he was a soldier himself “in the Russian wind” of the First World War were the young man's eyes opened to the barbarity, desperation, and despair of war and the actual power relations in the army. While the poem's antimilitaristic intentions are readily apparent, Tucholsky nevertheless also managed to capture a view widely held during the interwar years: that before 1914 there still existed in the population an unbroken enthusiasm for the army and its colorful displays, but that the experience during the war of death on such a massive scale put an end to it. Walter Rathenau echoed precisely these sentiments in his 1919 treatise Der Kaiser: Eine Betrachtung, seeing the prewar society of the German Empire as a “militarily-drilled mass” that sought “to display their acquired military arts in grand public spectacles.” The stereotypical image of a bygone prewar era of military glory and pageantry received a more popular, less “critical” treatment in the 1934 film “Frühjahrsparade,” a musical that evoked “the good old days” of the Habsburg Empire and the k. u. k. army, and not least the passion of women for “the man in uniform.”

In May 1917 twenty-seven residents of Landau (Württemberg) sent a long petition to the German Reichstag. The group, which included doctors, pastors, teachers, and industrialists, demanded that the state put an end to the “immoral” behavior of women who had romantic relationships with foreign prisoners of war. The petition included more than one hundred examples of such affairs, gleaned from newspapers, court records, and eyewitness accounts. The petitioners lamented the “sinking morality” of the countryside and the damaged reputation of German women. They also had more immediate concerns. These affairs were threatening the happiness of families, “complicating” the feeding of the nation, weakening the strength of the people, and heightening the fear of espionage. The petitioners went on to warn the Reichstag deputies that “good German citizens are full of anger at such events,” and that the common person's “sense of sacrifice” was dwindling now, in the third year of the war.

In 1783, Friedrich Gedike wondered whether the city of Berlin was growing disproportionately to the rest of the country. Like any good enlightened observer of the city, Gedike praised the open vistas of newly planned suburbs over the cramped streets of the medieval city core. But, though a spacious city allowed for healthy use and recreation and Berlin remained much smaller than great capitals such as Paris and London, Gedike feared that Berlin's growth was becoming too rapid to control. Something, he worried, was out of proportion. Hundreds of buildings had been erected in place of the city's now demolished ramparts. This newly won land had not sufficed, however, and new suburbs with thousands of new buildings arose, streets irregularly placed, without adequate linkages to the inner city. This immoderate growth was evident in the failure to overcome the boundary between the city core and newly developed suburbs. The number of streets broken through the former fortifications land proved inadequate. This continued division, Gedike feared, would impede the city's ongoing development.

Over the past few decades, a flood of historical scholarship has been spawned by the groundbreaking works of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and others who have illustrated how a host of traditions were creations invented in the recent past to inform modern identities. The rituals of the British monarchy, the trappings of Scottish Highland culture, and many other traditions were revealed to have anything but ancient origins. Examination of such inventions, Hobsbawm argued, provided, among other things, a means to observe broader historical shifts. The intention of this article is not to illustrate another example of a tradition invented in the recent past. Rather, it seeks to examine how longer-standing traditions have been subject to related processes of reinvention. Some recent work, even if not written to theorize on reinvention, could be read through such a lens. Work in memory studies, for example, has shown how broad notions of national, regional, or local “tradition” could be reshaped based on how and which historical events were remembered. Works on “sites of memory” have similarly shown how conceptions of traditional objects and places can shift due to the fluctuation of memories attached to them. Beyond memory studies, scholars of theological traditions, often confronted with themes of universal truth and intergenerational change, have also produced works that could be viewed through the prism of reinvention. Kurt Schori demonstrates, for example, how the transmission of theological tradition through the written word could lead to submerged reformulation as different generations constructed linguistic meanings according to temporally specific circumstances. While such work could be read through the lens of reinvention, I would argue that more explicit consideration of the dynamics of reinvention is needed both to expand our knowledge of such processes and to develop theoretical models that characterize its diverse occurrences. I would also suggest, as Hobsbawm does with invented traditions, that examination of reinvention provides a means to lay bare symptoms of broader historical shifts.

By all accounts, the Austrians of the late twentieth century live in a stable Western European country with a secure sense of self. The concept of Austrian nationhood finds solid support in the country's population, which consistently displays stronger signs of national pride than its German neighbors. When the Austrian republic was reestablished from the ruins of the Third Reich in 1945, however, historical tradition did not inherently favor the development of a distinctly Austrian national consciousness. Austrians had commonly placed their Austrian identity into a wider German context, not least of all with regard to historical tradition. Thus, the contribution of historical images to the development of an Austrian national identity in the postwar era raises important questions about the interrelationship of history and society.

“The fate of Europe sits on a razor's edge, if war starts now, it will be dreadfully feared. Neutrality will be impossible,” worried Hamburg enlightened merchant and philanthropist Caspar Voght in April 1803. He added, “Should war come, Bremen and Hamburg will be occupied by the French or the Prussians, and the rivers will be blockaded. God give us peace.” His fateful words preceded the French occupation and annexation of northern Germany and the corresponding imperial Continental System, which shattered the north German coastal economy. When he returned to Hamburg in September 1812, Voght shared his impressions in another letter: In what misgivings, with what spirits did I approach the city from Harburg, the once fortunate shores, the towers of the once so prosperous city! I landed. Everything I saw and heard demonstrated the ruin of earlier prosperity, [the city] stripped of its attributes, cloaked in the fog of a threatening future. How my heart bled … The city empty and desolate, benefactors of the poor impoverished, the poor without help, my life's work destroyed.