Despite the wealth of published studies on individual German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish communities of the early modern era, it is remarkable how rare have been the attempts to synthesize the material and reach an overall assessment of the impact of the Thirty Years' War on Central European Jewish life. This gaping lacuna was noted some years ago by S. W. Baron, whose own general discussion of this subject is virtually unique. Immensely erudite, Baron's piece not only reveals the vast scope of the relevant material but tentatively suggests that the great European conflict was a key formative episode in the development of German Jewry, reversing earlier trends and preparing the way for the “Court Jews” of the later seventeenth century. This it undoubtedly was. Even so, Baron's evaluation is open to criticism on several counts. In particular, he fails to bring out, or make clear, just how crucial and how favorable a phase the Thirty Years' War was for the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. Furthermore, while some effort is made in his essay to identify the key shifts of the period, such as an alleged drift of Jews from the countryside to the towns, it is arguable that this is not handled very convincingly or with sufficient precision. In any case, it is evident that a fuller, more systematic explanation is needed if we are to account for the singular fact that during this period of almost unparalleled disruption, turmoil, and suffering Christendom's perennial scapegoat fared considerably better than most of the rest of German society.

In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs's children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Blümchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children.

Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.

Demographic research is rapidly rewriting the history of the preindustrial European population. Numerous recent local studies contradict the common stereotype of geographical stability; European communities before 1800 housed highly mobile populations. Much of this new research concerns England and France, but significant migratory movement has also been found in early modern Sweden, Scotland, and Japan. This paper surveys the evidence on mobility in Germany since the later Middle Ages, and places it within a broad socioeconomic context.

Consideration of political life in modern Germany has often centered on two main issues: classically, the vicissitudes of the national state; more recently, the impact of the creation of an industrial society on existing structures of power and on the position of ruling elites. Without denying the centrality of these questions, an exclusive focus on them can obscure the importance of other factors in German political development, both in their own right, and in the way they mediated the experience of state-building and industrialization to different sections of the population. Two such relevant factors are regionalism and confessional identity.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

The ascension to power and twelve-year rule of National Socialism has had an enormous and continuing impact on the writing of German history. Since the early fifties, the leitmotiv of scholarship has been the search for the origins of Nazi successes in the peculiarities of Germany's or rather Prussia's history in the nineteenth century. Even with the emergence of social and economic history in the late sixties, the task of unearthing National Socialism's roots remained unchanged, although the tools altered and a more sophisticated strategy was adopted. A pervasive tendency developed to view all contemporary institutions as props of the authoritarian Prussian regime. Whereas pre–World War II scholarship glorified the Prussian past uncritically, the past two decades have witnessed across-the-board condemnation.

Much has been written about the events of 9 November 1918 at Spa, but little about the aftermath in Holland. Some studies present sketches, often inaccurate, of “the squire of Doorn”; others remark that answers to many questions must await the opening of Dutch archives. Since the Dutch documents have now been published in profusion, answers are for the most part available.

Historians have generally limited their interest in the Fashoda Crisis to the Anglo-French diplomatic confrontation, which they believe ultimately led to a general understanding on African matters and to the Entente Cordiale. The crisis itself, however, had ramifications which went far beyond the complexities of British-French relations and which historians have yet to appreciate fully. The incident on the Nile precipitated a complete, if temporary, turnabout in France's revanchist policy toward Germany, and equally important, it offered Germany two possible options to defuse the antagonism France had held toward her since the treaty of Frankfurt twenty-seven years before: Germany could encourage war between the two nations or she could join France in an understanding, if not an alliance, against Great Britain in order to counter British dominance in Africa.

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.

In a conversation with Charles Hardinge aboard H.M. Yacht Victoria and Albert in April of 1907, King Edward VII raised the question of inviting Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit England. In 1904, the British monarch had paid a state visit to Germany, and now he felt the time had come to return his imperial nephew's hospitality. Hardinge relayed the King's suggestion to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey. “The King thinks that this invitation should be greatly appreciated by the Emperor William and the German people,” the undersecretary wrote, “and would tend to improve the relations between the two countries without giving our friends any real cause for suspicion or alarm.” While Hardinge was unenthusiastic about the idea of the Kaiser coming to Britain, he nonetheless conceded that “this visit has to be paid sometime or other,” and supposed that it might “mitigate any ill-feeling” created by the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Russian entente.

Nearly four decades have passed since the collapse of the Greater German Reich, but the subject of Nazi rule in Hitler's homeland of Austria still remains something of a mystery. While the appearance of pioneering works by Karl Stadler, Radomir Luža, Gerhard Botz, and John Bernbaum, among others, has illuminated the landscape of what until recently was terra incognita, a great many dark valleys and ravines still remain. The purpose of this essay is to examine Nazi control in the Upper Austrian city of Linz as a means of addressing certain unresolved issues of Central European history such as the degree of Austrian participation, support, or acceptance of the Hitler regime, the role of the Roman Catholic Church, the extent of German penetration of Austrian institutions after 1938, and the impact of fascist industrialization in transforming and modernizing Austrian society. Linz should make a particularly interesting test case since it has long mirrored the currents and ambiguities of Central European history. The boyhood home of Hitler, Eichmann, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, it was a center of German Nationalist agitation before World War I, a model of democratic propriety during the 1920s, and a major battlefield of the Austrian Civil War of 1934. Rapidly evolving from a bastion of Social Democracy into a stronghold of National Socialism, it was a focus of the Anschluss in 1938 and the recipient of lavish aid from its Führer-son thereafter. What occurred in the Danubian city between 1938 and 1945 foreshadowed something of Hitler's intentions, not simply for Austria but also for much of the Greater German Reich.

Responding to a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them the Rechtsstaat (variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined the Rechtsstaat to make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.

The role of law in the totalitarian state is problematic. In principle, law and unfettered political authority are antithetical but, in practice, the two have coexisted in uneasy and unequal partnership. As the Third Reich neared its apex in terms of internal and external power, a German expatriate described it as a “dual state” in which law existed side-by-side with the dynamic, ideologically charged will of the Führer. Duality did not imply balance, however, for law survived largely as a discretionary tool of total power. Nevertheless, pretotalitarian legality was never entirely deprived of a residual potency, a fact illustrated by an unlikely agent—SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, judge in the judicial branch of the SS. But the organizational context of Morgen's career is sufficiently unfamiliar as to require elucidation.