EIKE von Repgow commented around 1225 in the Sachsenspiegel: “Now do not be amazed that this book says so little about the law of the ministerials. It is in fact so diverse that no one can fully comprehend it. Under every bishop, every abbot, and every abbess the ministerials have a distinct law; therefore, I cannot describe it.” Eike identified here a fundamental problem in studying German social history: how does one generalize about diverse social institutions that were both a cause and a consequence of Germany's political fragmentation? How different things could be is illustrated by the structure of the estates in the eastern Alpine principalities. In the duchies of Austria and Styria the nobility was divided into two estates, the lords and the knights; but while there were about seventy or eighty families of lordly rank in Austria in 1280, there were so few lineages of lords in Styria—about twenty-five in 1300, of whom only ten survived by 1400—that they could not meet by themselves.

Subsistence and property. ”This paper looks at an enduring subject from a Central European perspective. It is an historiographical variation of an old matter of dispute: to whom do the goods of the world legitimately belong, to those who need them, or to those who possess them legally, but do not need them? In this paper “subsistence” stands for the legitimizing power of the idea of “need,” and “property” for justification through an appeal to freedom. In theory more than two thousand years ago the question was already answered in favor of the primacy of property.

During the 1950s, a team of Göttingen sociologists led by Helmut Plessner undertook a systematic survey of all faculty who taught at German university-level institutions during one or more of eleven selected sample years between 1864 and 1953. Drawing upon university catalogues (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse), scholarly handbooks (Minerva, Kürschners, Poggendorfs), and a variety of encyclopedias, members of the Göttingen group collected biographical and career data for almost twenty-four thousand individuals, which they entered by hand (though much of it in code) on manuscript sheets that were preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin.

The revolution that began in March 1848 continues to fascinate historains, becoming a two-way lens used to examine later as well as earlier German history. It has become central to the “emplotment” of the broader historical narrative of German history. Historians commonly describe the ultimate failure of the revolution as reflecting the unhealthy and anachronistic hold of premodern society over the state in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany and, therefore, see it as a cornerstone of the Sonderweg thesis. Because the revolution is used to explain later acts in the German historical drama, it is necessary to be as clear as possible about what actually happended in 1848 and 1849.

On 12 November 1745, the ad hoc militias of two peasant factions collided near Schmitzingen, a small village in the Black Forest country of Hauenstein, which constituted the southeastern quarter of the Habsburg province of Outer Austria. Several days before, the larger of the two forces had laid siege to Waldshut, the administrative seat of Hauenstein. The smaller band of peasants, recruited from cantons in the north of Hauenstein, had marched through the night to relieve the town. As it approached Waldshut, this relief force was ambushed, encircled, and routed. Two peasants died from wounds suffered in the melee, and many more were severely wounded.

At the height of the Cold War in 1962, U.S. Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, raised the possibility of introducing legislation to “restore the patent system, in at least some measure, to its traditional role of rewarding the inventor, in order the better to carry out the constitutional objective of ‘promoting the progress of science and useful arts.’” The rise of the corporate research establishment, McClellan stated, had caused the employer to interpose “himself between the individual inventor and the patent system, with the former appropriating the patent rights and the latter often being rewarded by nominal monetary grants or other recognition.”

The emergence of commercial investment banks after the revolution of 1848 was an institutional breakthrough for modern capitalism and one of the central factors in the accelerated development of the Industrial Revolution in Germany between 1848 and 1871. The accumulation and mobilization of capital in concentrated and accessible forms was indispensable for underking such large-scale projects as railroads, coal mines, and iron works. Long-term promotional loans that enabled entrepreneurs to start up new business became a self-evident necessity in the growth of modern business. As one bank director noted, “capital, more than water, steam, or electricity, put the machines into motion.”

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.”

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

Long before Melanchthon and Erasmus drew their parallels, paternal and political authority had enjoyed a long and successful association in Greco-Roman thought. The apparent resurgence of this patriarchal metaphor in sixteenth-century European literature and polemic, however, has led some historians to suggest a more socially significant transformation in the actual legal or moral authority of one or both of these father figures. Beginning with the pioneering work of Phillippe Ariès many historians of the family, particularly Lawrence Stone, have identified the sixteenth century as a time of greater paternal authority within the household and the beginning of the modern nuclear family throughout most of Europe. Others, expanding on references by Aries and Stone to a new state paternalism, have focused on the political half of the patriarchal analogy, especially the almost ubiquitous association among sixteenth-century German authors of the Hausvater (head of the household) with the Landesvater (political ruler). For most of these scholars, paternalistic language was a natural and even necessary component of the ambitious absolutist state-building of early modern Europe.

On 19 June 1844, two weeks after the Silesian weavers' uprising, the Vossische Zeitung ran an article on Langenbielau's (one of the centers of the uprising) leading textile manufacturer and the remains of his once stately mansion. “No windows, only the debris of the window pane, mullions and transoms of window crosses are broken or pulled out, where windows were barred, the bars are smashed, here and there doors are crashed or broken up, wrecked equipment is piled up in front of houses, walls are strewn with distinct signs of stone throws … We walk on rubble wherever our foot turns … Furniture, hardly recognizable in the small pieces into which it has been smashed, torn papers and torn wall papers everywhere, beds are cut open, stoves broken apart.”

The essential goal of Hitler's National Socialist ideology and its implementation by Heinrich Himmler's SS was the military conquest of “living space” from the eastern borders of the Reich to the Ural Mountains. Within this newly won territory, peoples perceived to be of “alien” race—and hence a danger to the future German Reich—were to be eliminated entirely or intellectually decapitated through the elimination of their political, cultural, and religious elites, leaving a “residue” to provide manual labor for German settlers. Himmler's appointment as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFDV) on 7 October 1939, in the wake of the successful Blitzkrieg against Poland, established his SS and police as the primary executive apparatus for this project. The elimination of the Jews formed an integral part of this “racial restructuring of Eastern Europe.”

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

During the past decade and a half there has been considerable interest shown by economic and social historians in the problems of unemployment in the Weimar Republic, although we still await a work with the comprehensiveness and mastery of W. R. Garside's British Unemployment 1919–1939. Much of the literature on Germany has been devoted to the controversy over government studies of unemployment insurance and business and trade union attitudes toward work creation schemes. Social historians have engaged in a good deal of history from below and history of everyday life dealing with the unemployed themselves and have demonstrated, among other things, the devastating consequences of long-term unemployment and the welfare system on labor solidarity. Such historians are understandably more inclined to work on, and sympathize with, those who are fired rather than with those who do the firing, and are unlikely to lose much sleep about the effects of bad business conditions on capitalist behavior and solidarity. Nevertheless, I would argue that the everyday problems and decisions of Germany's bankers and industrialists have suffered from undeserved neglect.