In April 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky left Russia for central Europe, in part to celebrate his marriage to Anna Gregorovich Snitkina, the young stenographer who had helped him compose The Gambler the previous fall. While that book freed him from the clutches of the publisher Stellovsky, who had advanced him money in exchange for a lien on his future works, it did not remove the larger financial destitution that threatened the new family, and fear of the debtor's prison clouded Dostoevsky's subsequent four-year sojourn in Europe. Residing first in Berlin and Dresden, he began to entertain thoughts of escaping his financial difficulties through gambling. In May, he traveled briefly to Bad Homburg; later, both he and Anna proceeded to Baden-Baden. Contrary to his hopes, life imitated art, and Dostoevsky was soon as hopelessly beset by the gambling demons as his fictional anti-hero, Alexei, and with as little success. By the end of the summer, he had pawned many of his and Anna's belongings and systematically lost the gifts sent from Russia by friends to bail them out. Finally on August 23, he managed to tear himself away from the tables. Over the next four years, he would gamble sporadically, but never with the same fervor he brought to Baden-Baden that summer. After returning to Russia in 1871, he gave up gambling entirely.

For more than eighty-five years, Sudeten German communities have gathered together to commemorate the so-called “March Fourth Massacre.” On this date in 1919, Czechoslovak troops opened fire on crowds of Germans who were demonstrating for national self-determination in thirty-five towns across Czechoslovakia's western frontier. By day's end, the violence in seven towns across the border region had claimed a total of fifty-four lives and had left hundreds wounded. The bloodiest altercation took place in the northwestern Bohemian town of Kadaň (Kaaden), which left twenty-two dead and ninety wounded. On that fateful day in Kadaň, this violence was precipitated by an altercation between unruly German students and anxious Czechoslovak guardsmen, who were stationed in front of the town hall. This altercation triggered two minutes of sustained and indiscriminate gunfire upon the crowd of nearly 10,000, who found themselves trapped by Czechoslovak machine gun nests at opposing ends of the market square.

Since the end of the 1990s, the study of masculinity within German scholarship has made considerable progress, especially in moving beyond the close association made between German manhood and militarism.1 While the figure of the soldier remains crucial for an understanding of masculinity in Germany (as well as the rest of the Western world) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars have increasingly recognized that any culture includes multiple definitions and representations of manhood—even one so thoroughly saturated by the figure of the soldier as Germany was during the Nazi era.2 Increasingly, the goal of research has been to uncover how masculinity is not only represented in official discourse, but also constructed through social interaction and “performed,” to use Judith Butler's term, in the context of everyday life. Moreover, this research has increasingly taken into account “the relations between the different kinds of masculinity,” in the words of the sociologist Robert Connell—especially the relationships of power.3 In short, recent work has increasingly recognized that the meanings of manhood are constructed within a complicated socio-cultural matrix of gender whose points of reference include not only women and cultural definitions of femininity, but also various versions of masculinity that themselves very often reflect class distinctions and other kinds of social fissures.

If the French faced the 200th anniversary of the Napoleonic Empire with some trepidation about how to commemorate the infamous Corsican, the British celebrated the Battle of Trafalgar as an enduring national victory. A grand exhibit in the National Maritime Museum in London, “Nelson and Napoleon,” observed this event in 2005. In contemporary Germany, however, the commemoration of 1806 has occurred mainly among small circles of specialists and remained largely absent from popular historical consciousness. In recent times, besides the exhibition on the Holy Roman Empire in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, only small local exhibits and substantial articles in magazines like Die Zeit and Der Spiegel recall 1806. Past momentous occasions such as 1848, 1914–1919, 1933–1945, and 1949 clearly overshadow in contemporary historical memory the tumultuous decades that surrounded the Napoleonic Wars. This tendency to overlook and underestimate the significance of the early nineteenth century also remains evident among scholars who work on later periods of German history. In the shadow of World Wars and the Holocaust, the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between 1792 and 1815 seems distant to the contemporary audience. But why do historians also tend to disregard the importance of this era of warfare and domestic, social, and economic transformation—a period so rich in complexity—and its enduring consequences for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe?

Historians in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), unlike their western counterparts, could never allow themselves the luxury of studying the past for its own sake because, in this Marxist-Leninist state, history and politics were always inextricably linked. The GDR's leaders were committed communists who had long recognized history's apparent political power. They were convinced that, for the new “Workers' and Peasants' State” to acquire legitimacy among its own people, a German historical narrative, based on the ascertainable “scientific” laws of Marxism, was an essential requirement. East German citizens had endured twelve years of anti-communist Nazi rule and, consequently, the task of integrating them into a republic, where an entirely different set of political values predominated, was a fairly daunting undertaking.

Recalling the bleak landscape of German higher education in the aftermath of World War I, Peter Gay described the “republican political scientists” of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, a school for political studies established in Berlin in October 1920, as “directly, deliberately—I am tempted to say defiantly—involved in the political life of the Republic…”1 Karl Dietrich Bracher was no less emphatic in pointing to the Hochschule für Politik as the only institution of its day to appreciate the significance of the multi-party system as the driving force in modern political life.2 Led for nearly thirteen years by its founder and only president, the liberal political publicist, Ernst Jäckh, the Hochschule launched innovative programs in civic education and public service training designed to meet the educational needs of an emerging democracy. The Hochschule was radical in its mode of operation, holding evening classes for men and women from all vocations and educational backgrounds, including those lacking the Abitur typically required for admission to graduate and professional schools. Jäckh and his three directors of studies, Theodor Heuss (1920-1925), Hans Simons (1925-1930), and Arnold Wolfers (1930-1933), recruited what Gay described as a “first rate” standing faculty; developed a graduated, state-certified diploma program, and established specialized schools and seminars for economists, social workers, diplomat trainees, trade union officials, journalists, and teachers.3 They also established the Hochschule as a major center for international intellectual exchange, attracting the attention of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which came to view the school as a partner in the Endowment's efforts to promote European rapprochement, and of the Rockefeller Foundation, which recruited Hochschule faculty to contribute dozens of articles to the first (1934) edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences and supported the school's research and publication efforts in political science, a field not then recognized as a distinct academic discipline at any German university.4 For Peter Gay, the contribution of the Hochschule to the spirit of Weimar lay primarily in the public engagement of its leadership and faculty. Their determination to “participate in the shaping of policy” “through deliberately cultivated ties to high government officials[,]” set the Hochschule apart from the Institute for Social Research (“a group of powerful intellects,” but perhaps not “a group of powerful intellectuals”).5 Their orientation was decidedly cosmopolitan—committed to the promotion of German recovery through international intellectual cooperation and the development of a scientifically based program of political studies.

In the “Year of Prussia” 2001, celebrated in Germany because of the three-hundredth anniversary of Prussia's becoming a kingdom in 1701, the editor of the culture section of Die Welt, Eckhart Fuhr, remarked in a review of recent publications, “The discourse (on Prussia) has long since lost all of its (former) severity, obstinacy, and passion. The Germans today,” he declared, “are perfectly comfortable with the ambiguity of the Prussian legacy.” His colleague, the historian and Die Zeit journalist Volker Ulrich, agreed. He observed that the discussion about Prussia lacked a critical edge and regretted that no “truly sharp anti-Prussian book” had appeared among the many new publications. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reached the same conclusion in his article, “‘A Mastered Past?’ The West-German Historiography on Prussia after 1945,” published in 2004 in the journal German History. He interpreted as a sign of “normalization” the fact that—unlike thirty years ago—Prussia is no longer the source of sharply formulated historical debates.

One of the first things that Hans Castorp, the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, learned upon his arrival at Berghof Sanitarium in Davos, was that there was a “good” Russian table and a “bad” Russian table. The bad Russians were characterized as barbarians, more or less uncivilized. Even the good Russians, while more polite, were considered to be an exotic and alien presence, quite different from anything that Castorp, the model of the German bourgeois class, had ever experienced. As Larry Wolff has noted, Russia was a place connected to the rest of Europe by postal routes, but which few Germans ever visited.

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

The dollars—and pounds, and francs—came pouring in. Speculators and small savers across Western Europe raced to exchange their currencies for the Deutsche Mark. “Hot money” flowed into Germany at astounding rates. The reserves of West Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, shot up by DM 9.4 billion ($2.15 billion) in the first three weeks of November 1968—with DM 7.3 billion arriving in just three days of trading. Airports in Germany barred exchanges of more than one hundred francs at a time; train stations in Zurich stopped accepting French notes altogether.

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.

On May 26, 1906, as German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow rested on the North Sea coast recuperating from a recent physical collapse, his administration suffered a resounding triple defeat in the Reichstag at the hands of his hitherto indispensable Catholic political partners in the Center party. In the course of a single day, the Centrists rejected the military justification for a railroad in wartorn Southwest Africa, ruled out further government compensation for settler losses in the Herero and Nama Uprisings, and then blocked the elevation of the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office to the status of an independent imperial office. Moreover, the intense interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the passage of each of these colonial measures rendered the Center's decisive contribution to the rout acutely embarrassing for the chancellor. Faced seven months later with a similar Centrist refusal to authorize more than twenty of the latest twenty-nine million marks toward suppression of the Nama, Bülow would then dissolve the Reichstag, putting a definitive end to nearly a decade of government-Center parliamentary cooperation.

“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.

In the introduction to his 1915 book Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk, Otto Hintze ruefully quoted an Englishman's observation that, “Prussian history is endlessly boring because it speaks so much of war and so little of revolution.” As the “Great War” entered its second year, and with Germany's hopes for a quick and decisive victory fading, Hintze saw history repeating itself. Like Frederick the Great's Prussia, he wrote, “The German Reich, under a Hohenzollern Kaiser, [now] battles for its existence against a world of enemies.” Since the beginning of the war, Entente propaganda had mobilized the home front by depicting the war as an epochal struggle against the enemy of all civilized men: the savage “Hun,” the jack-booted, spike-helmeted despoiler of innocent Belgium. The crudity of this propaganda caricature aside, its power to persuade nevertheless drew on a widespread conviction that the story of war constituted the core of German history and that the disease of “militarism” was a peculiarly German deformation of the national psyche. In response to the censure of their nation's enemies, the German intellectuals rejected that diagnosis while defending the role war had played in their nation's history. Published in the Kölnische Zeitung on October 4, 1914, the hastily drafted manifesto “To the Civilized World!” was endorsed (if not read) by ninety-three of the Second Reich's most prominent scholars, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, including Peter Behrens, Lujo Brentano, Adolph von Harnack, Max Lenz, and Gustav von Schmoller. They vehemently repudiated the distortion of Germany's history: “Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated.” “The word militarism,” the liberal jurist Gerhard Anschütz defiantly declared in 1915, “which is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for us a badge of honor.” As Hintze, Anschütz, and their contemporaries understood the course of German unification (and Germany's rise as a great power under Prussian leadership), the modern German nation-state owed its very existence to what Hintze called “the monarchical-military factor.” If we are to advance our understanding of how a nationalist discourse obsessed with foreign and domestic threats supported a foreign policy that ignited two world wars in the space of twenty-five years, we must be prepared, I believe, to re-think the “Sonderweg thesis,” not in its relation to the putative immaturity of German liberalism or an atavistic predilection for autocratic rule, but as it was rooted in German military culture. The books under discussion in this essay reframe the militarism/“Sonderweg” debate by examining the unique connection between modern German visions of the nation and the waging of war as revealed in the experience of the First World War. Representing the maturation of the new intellectual and cultural history of war, they pose two fundamental questions: What kind of war did the Second Reich's military, political, and intellectual leadership envision that would “complete” the German nation? And how did they define Germany's enemies?

As Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has argued, any thorough assessment of religious change in the twentieth century has to pay attention to the interplay between the established churches and social forces in fields of society as different as the media, the economy, the arts, and the sciences. It is the aim of this article to stress both the emergence and the importance of hybrids between organized religion and the human sciences in the decades since the 1950s. I take the Catholic Church in the Federal Republic as a perhaps somewhat unlikely but also illuminating example, although all major Christian denominations both in Germany and in other Western European countries have made ample use of social science methods such as statistics, sociology, and opinion-polling during that period. From the broad range of scientific approaches employed by the Catholic Church, the focus of this article is on the use of psychological techniques used for purposes of therapeutic intervention, or, in Anglo-Saxon parlance, counseling. The emerging psychologization of religious topics and pastoral action is seen as merely one example of the immense significance that the “psy disciplines” of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychology have attained within the forms of knowledge and practice deployed to describe the “Self.” This process can also be interpreted as a particularly striking example of the “scientification of the social” in the twentieth century, that is, of the process in which human science concepts have shaped new terms and categories for the description of social contexts and offered forms of practical intervention in social problems.

Travelers strolling through Stuttgart's Old Town who pause before Württemberg's royal residence can hardly fail to notice the Victory Column. Thirty meters high, it towers over the square and proclaims Crown Prince Wilhelm's victories against the armies of Napoleon in 1814. Erected in 1841, the Victory Column marked the Silver Jubilee of Wilhelm's reign, by that time a much-loved regent. Eight years earlier, at the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, the Bavarian king Ludwig I dedicated a memorial to the dead of the Russian Campaign. Evidently cast from the metal of French cannons, the massive obelisk dominates a crossroads in Munich—roads named after victorious battles fought during the Wars of Liberation. With their military campaigns engraved in stone, the two monarchies, Württemberg and Bavaria, demonstrated their zealous opposition to the French Emperor.

One of Rosamond McKitterick's laudable contributions to medieval studies has been the attention she has focused on the importance of manuscript evidence as a fundamental and fruitful source for doing history. Another has been the imagination, creativity, and enthusiasm she has brought to that evidence, most famously in her provocative work on literacy. In this manifesto, McKitterick turns her interest to another topic that has received much attention in the last decade and a half, memory, and joined it to the larger issue of the writing and reading of history in Carolingian times. Here again we see McKitterick daring to get behind the critical editions by going to the manuscripts themselves and thus introducing us to the vibrancy of Carolingian historical culture too often cloaked by the published sources. It is her underlying contention that the particular Carolingian emphasis on chronology, as the means by which Christian, Frankish, Roman, and local histories were united and brought into a synthesis, contributed fundamentally to the development of a European identity.

Measured against its subject, German history from the ancient forests to the “Berlin Republic,” A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People by Steven Ozment is a very short book. Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) required some 6,000 pages in twelve volumes to cover the subject, and he had no twentieth century to master. Ozment's book is readable. It moves along in the athletic style and at the brisk pace we expect from him and is largely free of the sarcasms that pepper some of his earlier (though not the earliest) writings. The most surprising thing about A Mighty Fortress is that it was written at all. Why no German historian would tackle the subject today needs no explanation, but it is truly curious that a foreigner would essay the task. Yet Ozment has done just that. The product is a book easy and fun to read, in many respects better entertainment than history. A Mighty Fortress' point of view is so obstinately personal, its attitude toward established scholarship so brusque, and its narrative so broken and at times opaque, that only generous quotations can supply a fair impression of the book.