In early December 1945, the Communist Party functionary Karl Lewke sent an alarming report to the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD). It was entitled “One million anti-Bolshevists are approaching. The democratic reconstruction of Germany is threatened by greatest dangers!” The report referred to the thousands of returning German POWs from the Soviet Union who daily entered the Soviet zone of occupation through Frankfurt an der Oder. Lewke's description of the mentality and the attitudes of these returning POWs was not very comforting for his party superiors in Berlin.

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.

Increasingly, historians have been turning their attention to the effects of Nazi racism. In recent years major studies have appeared on forced sterilization, euthanasia, theft of “racially valuable” children, and “antinatalism,” as well as the destruction of “racially undesirable” groups: the handicapped, certain foreign laborers, and homosexuals.

Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the essay that follows, I do not intend to further document the history of this prejudice in the realm of print culture. Rather, I will explore the way in which its central assumption (namely that Jews and Christians possessed radically different and religiously specific conceptions of work and trade) configured, entered into, and also obfuscated rural relations between Christians and Jews.

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.

In this paper I would like to relate some of the results of my specialized research on Nazi inventor policy to themes and interpretations with which many students of the Third Reich already are familiar. One of those themes is the relationship between big business and the Nazi state. An influential hypothesis in this area centers on the notion of a “power cartel,” based on the insight that Nazi Germany was not a dictatorship in which all sectors of society were suppressed with equal force. According to the “power-cartel” interpretation, which incorporates elements of the Marxist perspective on the relationship between capitalism and National Socialism, the Third Reich was governed by an informal coalition of the Nazis, the military, and big business. This fundamental idea is then qualified by two additional observations. First, the Nazi movement is broken down into factions comprising the party, Labor Front, and SA on the one hand, and the Gestapo and SS on the other hand. The former are seen to lose power as time went by while that latter gained it, which helps explain the regime's increasing brutality and its accelerating descent into barbarism. Second, the idea of a changing balance of power is also applied to the power cartel as a whole. The point here is to account for the gradual loss of power by the military and big business. Their relatively advantageous positions in the regime’s early years steadily eroded, producing a very different weighting among the cartel’s members by the time World War II ended, without, however, ever completely destroying it.

In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

One of the major events in the history of German anti-Semitism has been, if not entirely overlooked, then misunderstood and misrepresented. In the 1870s, the professor of medicine, liberal politician, and anthropologist, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), directed a study of the skin, hair, and eye color of 6,758,827 German school children, a study that marked “Jews” and “Germans” as racially different and trained a generation of Germans to perceive these differences both as real and as of political significance. Historians have been virtually unanimous in viewing this study as a blow against anti-Semitism, as a demonstration that there was neither a Jewish nor a German “race.” This interpretation has survived, I believe, because it supports and rests on a commonly held conception of racism as primarily an intellectual phenomenon, as a set of more-or-less explicit propositions held in the minds of individuals. Virchow, a well-known opponent of political anti-Semitism, was never motivated by hostility to Jews in conducting this research. Indeed, he understood his focus on Jews as simply a race (rather than as a religion or a culture) to indicate that the study was not anti-Semitic. Paradoxically, the study that Virchow designed and oversaw may have unintentionally provided an important practical basis for German racial anti-Semitism. By considering anti-Semitism as a set of skills rather than a philosophy, as hands-on practical knowledge more akin to riding a bicycle than to philosophical exposition, I hope to offer a new explanation of both Virchow's study of race and the place of that study in German history.

In March 1922, with spring planting imminent, the Agricultural Chamber of the Saxon Freestate surveyed 790 local agricultural associations, seeking information on the character and dimensions of the rural labor shortage. 640 reports were returned within six weeks, signaling Saxon farmers' desperation to be heard. According to their estimates, Saxon agriculture lacked a minimum of 7,834 men and 11,164 women, or just under 19,000 workers. Despite the substantial number of men needed, farmers overwhelmingly bemoaned the lack of young, single women willing and able to work in Saxon agriculture, and warned of dire consequences for both agricultural producers and the general public if the crisis were not resolved. Indeed, small and medium-sized Saxon farmers' testimonies about the postwar labor shortage linked agriculture's potential for recovery to the preservation of prewar gender divisions of labor, and drew an absolute correlation between the postwar shortage of women's labor and the impending ruin of family farms.

Wares are consigned to the Leipzig merchants year round from all corners of Europe and then sold during the trade fairs. Leipzig has three fairs: the first begins the Monday after New Year's and lasts two weeks counting the last week for the settling of accounts (Zahlwoche); the spring fair (Jubilate) begins the third Sunday after Easter and runs a total of three weeks; while the autumn fair (Michaelis), likewise three weeks long, begins the fourth Sunday of September. An indescribable wealth of goods is on offer at the fairs. With the foreign merchants and royal personages, the throngs of visitors are so great that it is usually difficult to find lodging in the city. The conflux of sellers and buyers is very advantageous, and during peacetime virtually every order is filled. Many thousands have never even considered provisioning their trade or selling their products other than in Leipzig, though the source of their purchases might lie closer to home. This is because of the commercial services and security provided by such a large fair, including the selection and quality of goods, the strong credit, a reliable circle of customers, a ready supply of bullion, and the efficient Exchange.

Spurder Steine (Trail of Stones) is probably the best-known of the approximately two dozen East German films that were banned by state officials. Combining epic proportions with subversive humor, the picture still retains the ability to fascinate and amuse audiences well over three decades after its completion in 1966. In one scene, its most arresting protagonist, the foreman Balla, leads his small band of carpenters across the Iunar landscape of the chemical plant under construction, where the film is set. As martial music blares in the background, the “Ballas,” conspicuously dressed in the black corduroy suits traditionally associated with their trade in Germany, march against a sea of humanity streaming toward a political rally. They rudely shove people out of their way, grope women, and chug beer. Over a loudspeaker, the Communist functionary leading the rally proclaims, “We are already building the road leading into a bright future.” In response, Balla remarks to his cronies, “They comfort you with the future like the priests with the hereafter, but by the time you get there, you're already dead.”

One of the difficulties in thinking about postwar German history comes in trying to explain the apparent absence of a paramilitary effervescence accompanying the collapse of the Third Reich. Independent military formations—Freikorps—had played a role during the 1806–1813 period, and such units had appeared again during the stormy years from 1918 to 1923, so the seeming absence of such formations in 1944/45 is quite noticeable. Charles Maier called it one of the major surprises of postwar European politics. To some extent, this perception is illusory; in truth, there were a number of Freikorps launched in 1944/45, although they failed to make a military or political impact and were therefore quickly forgotten. Considering the integral connection between previous Freikorps and the development of modern German nationalism, their relative absence in 1944/45 warrants the historian’s attention.

I first met George Mosse in late August 1967. That summer I carried my worn copy of his book on the roots of Nazi ideology, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (1964), with Hubert Lanzinger's bizarre painting of Hider as a German knight on the cover, to Salzburg where I studied German before going on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. Though I admired the book, it did not prepare me for meeting the man. In 1967 I drove out to the Midwest from New York in my VW bug. To my surprise, as soon as I arrived in Madison, someone pointed him out, sitting on the Terrace of the Wisconsin Memorial Union in his short sleeve shirt, smoking his pipe, and arguing intensely with a group of students who were planning to sit in to block the Dow Chemical Company campus recruiter in the Fall (Dow was chosen because the company was manufacturing napalm).