In 1962, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faced an uncertain future. The governing party within the Federal Republic of Germany since the state's founding in 1949 (along with its Bavarian partner, the Christian Social Union, known collectively as the CDU/CSU or Union), the CDU had endured a bruising election campaign through the summer of 1961. The combination of a dynamic young Social Democratic challenger, Willy Brandt, and the building of the Berlin Wall had exposed frustration with the leadership style of octogenarian Chancellor and CDU Chair Konrad Adenauer, and cost the Union its absolute majority in the Bundestag. Electoral disappointment was followed by protracted coalition negotiations with the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which nearly doubled its vote totals by promising voters a coalition “with the Union but without Adenauer.” The coalition negotiations dragged on well into late autumn and exposed internal divisions. Adenauer, the only chancellor the Federal Republic had ever known, had been forced to agree to retire before 1965 to allow his successor to prepare for the next campaign.

The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the possibility of a suicide is disturbingly present. In Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, one character asks himself, “My God, does everyone now have his tea cup of veronal ready?” Tales of suicide also surfaced in the tabloid press which presented them as human interest stories. Partisan papers supported their respective stances by tying individual actions to political narratives, a strategy pursued by both Nazis and Communists as well as liberal reformers. Even schools' reports on pupils who had taken their own lives and farewell notes themselves echoed a general feeling that suicide was a sign of the times.

In summer 1546, armed conflict erupted in the Holy Roman Empire. The war pitted the Catholic Emperor Charles V against the Schmalkaldic League, an alliance of Protestant imperial estates led by Landgrave Philip of Hesse and Prince-Elector John Frederick of Saxony. While the conflict's most famous and final battle took place in Thuringia at Mühlberg, the Schmalkaldic War's first military action occurred in southern Germany in the Danube River basin. This area housed numerous evangelical imperial cities, several of which sat south of the Danube in eastern Swabia. When hostilities began in July 1546, magistrates throughout the region ordered their forces to occupy the local countryside. With their soldiers came the Reformation, as city councils sent preachers to reform the seized parishes. For councilors in Augsburg, Ulm, and elsewhere, evangelization complemented the general war effort, since true believers must “first and foremost consider God's word and honor … and let God's word be preached. … Such a thing should not be delayed until after the war, for if one undertakes the Christian work of improving the corrupted churches of these poor subjects now, God will grant us victory more quickly and allow the newly won Christians to remain with us.” Closely tied to the religious goals of this wartime program of reform, therefore, was the concrete political objective of spreading urban jurisdiction to areas formerly controlled by Catholic lords.

In the history of the Burschenschaft published in 1939, Georg Heer wrote that with the coming of the National Socialists to power “the goals of the German Burschenschaft had been achieved; the National Socialist German Student Union had now taken over its tasks.” Of course Heer was not free to write what he wished about the 1935 dissolution of the Burschenschaft, but his interpretation is consistent with the ideas of many historians about this important organization within the history of German nationalism. Something had gone terribly wrong with this organization, despite its clear liberal and middle-class origins.

Since so much of what distinguishes Germany's social-economic development from that of other advanced capitalist societies derives from the prominence of the handicrafts (Handwerk) and their institutional legacy, it is regrettable that artisan sightings have become so rare in recent central European scholarship.1 It is especially so because disparaging postwar historiographic portrayals of “backward” late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artisans leave us without a way to understand the emergence of a prosperous Mittelstand of small and medium-sized craft producers in the postwar years. Moreover, inasmuch as the existence of a vibrant, legally distinct class of handicraft firms constitutes one of the most striking features of the modern German political economy, we need an account of how it evolved and why.2 Furthermore, without this, we have no way to explain several other distinctive “peculiarities” of German institutional arrangements: an educational system that directs a majority of young Germans to practically oriented, work-based apprenticeships supplemented by part-time schooling instead of academically oriented, full-time secondary schools; a labor market that effectively professionalized all occupations and limited the creation of mere “jobs”; and a training system that, as it diffused from the craft to the industrial and service sectors, reinforced Germany's historic manufacturing preference for producing diversified, high-quality goods and services.3 In short, no history of modern German economic, social, or political development can afford to dispense with artisans or their institutions.

In January 1915, Sir William Grenfell Max-Müller, an intelligence officer in the British Foreign Office, recorded the following remark from a German trade journal.

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

A twenty-first-century visitor must find it difficult to imagine that the Thuringian city of Eisenach, lately known for its shopping, once held a place in the collective memory of Germans. On October 18, 1817, 450 students descended upon Eisenach for the Wartburg Festival, a two-day commemoration of the tricentenary of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses and the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. Drawing on the symbolic power of nearby Wartburg Castle, best known as Luther's hideout in 1521, the festival witnessed a number of songs and speeches calling peacefully for the introduction of reforms by German governments. But that was only part of the story. In a sideshow to the official proceedings, a handful of students also claimed to throw “reactionary” literature into a bonfire, thus interesting police across Europe.

Hamburg, as any tourist guide will tell you, occupies a unique position within Germany. Now, every city can make this claim, so what constitutes Hamburg's uniqueness? Natives would say it is the harbor (Germany's largest) and the water that flows through the metropolis that claims more bridges than Venice. But ask an outsider, German or not, and he or she will likely say the Reeperbahn, Hamburg's notorious red-light district, known also to music fans as the incubator of The Beatles. Historically speaking, the harbor has been this Hanseatic city's source of trade and prosperity, as well as a major transit point for overseas travelers; the nearby Reeperbahn has long been a magnet for those seeking pleasure and distraction from the cares of life. In the 1950s and 1960s—the years of West Germany's “Economic Miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder)—Hamburg saw greater numbers of visitors than ever before. These guests included Germans from west and east (before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961); international tourists, particularly from neighboring countries; British NATO troops stationed in the northern Federal Republic; and seamen from around the world. Some chose Hamburg specifically as their destination, others passed through on their way to someplace else.

Romania entered World War I at a difficult moment for the Central Powers. The offensive against Verdun had been an extraordinarily bloody stalemate, one that sapped the officer corps' confidence in the leadership of General Erich von Falkenhayn. In June, Russia launched its great Brusilov offensive, pushing Austria-Hungary to the verge of capitulation. Soon thereafter, the British offensive against the Somme, itself a blood-soaked disaster, nonetheless revealed an astounding Entente advantage in war material. The first part of 1916 had not been kind to the armies of the Dual Alliance.

The early career of Herbert Blankenhorn (1904–1991) illustrates important trends in the transition from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic. During the 1930s and 1940s he served as a diplomat in the German Foreign Office and also joined the Nazi Party in 1938. After 1945 he would play a very public role in the creation of a new political culture in West Germany. Konrad Adenauer thought that the exceptional political sense of his young personal assistant, who also served as Secretary General of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the British Zone, helped him become chancellor of the Federal Republic in 1949. Through the mid-1950s Blankenhorn remained one of Adenauer's most intimate advisors, especially on matters concerning foreign policy. From late 1949 to mid-1950, he also oversaw the creation of what became the West German Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), and thereafter he was the head of its Political Division and deputy to State Secretary Walter Hallstein until 1955. He went on to serve as West German ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (1955–1958), France (1958–1963), Italy (1963–1965), and the United Kingdom (1965–1970). After retiring from the diplomatic service in 1970, Blankenhorn functioned as the West German representative in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Executive Council until 1976.

Why another article about the “new woman” in Weimar Germany, which for at least twenty-five years has been a favorite topic of historical scholarship in various disciplines? Earlier studies in history, art history, and German and Gender Studies unmasked the “new woman” as a media construction unrelated to the life-world of women after World War I, and newer studies emphasize the liberating tendencies, especially for younger women in Weimar Germany. Broadening these perspectives, I will argue that the concept of the “new woman” and its specific temporal structure can be seen further as a paradigm case for Weimar political and intellectual debates in general. “New women” were conceptualized as anticipations of the future and thus need to be situated and understood in front of the broader horizon of expectation, in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, of Weimar Germany. Because the realm of politics is constituted by expectations of the future, of what will happen and of what may be done, an analysis of the “new woman” and concurring anticipations of the future can, in turn, elucidate the structure and dynamics of political discourse in Weimar Germany.

In the months and years following ratification of the Versailles Treaty, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland became a focal point of German nationalist propaganda. The campaign against the so-called “black shame on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), a racist slogan referring to the stationing of soldiers from northern Africa, Senegal, and Madagascar in the French zone of occupation, was one of the ugliest outgrowths of German opposition to the peace treaty. Support for the movement against France's African troops was disquietingly broad. An interpellation to the Reich government of May 1920 launched by the Majority Social Democrats (SPD) and endorsed by all parties in the national assembly except the Independent Socialists (USPD) is illustrative of the racist fears motivating “black horror” protests: “Even after the armistice, the French and Belgians continue to use colored troops in the occupied territories. … For German women and children, men and boys, these savages pose a horrifying danger. Their honor, health and life, purity and innocence are being destroyed. … This situation is disgraceful, humiliating, and insufferable!”

When we think about the Third Reich, the first images that come to mind are not those associated with buying and selling. Though an increasing number of studies have appeared on consumer habits and policies toward consumers, the literature on the Nazi period has been dominated by a focus on production, specifically war production. For every study of the consumer economy, there have been dozens on the Four-Year Plan, the use of foreign and slave labor, and heavy industry. In recent years a number of historians have begun to question this imbalance. Hartmut Berghoff and Wolfgang Koenig have argued that the regime encouraged “virtual consumption” through images of a future postwar era of peace and prosperity: the people's car, the people's refrigerator, and other products that would be available to all once victory had been achieved. Nancy Reagin and Irene Guenther have provided compelling material on the responses of female consumers to the decreasing availability of many household items, starting with the introduction of the autarkic Four-Year Plan. Nonetheless, this recent wave of interest in issues of consumption has tended to concentrate on the prewar years of the regime; after 1939, most historians merely emphasize the growing shortage of goods as the war dragged on. One exception is Goetz Aly, who has maintained that allegiance to the regime was secured through the dissemination of goods stolen from Jews and the occupied territories. But his arguments have not convinced everyone, and his focus on the distribution of goods merely as a means of generating political support says little about how it fit in with wider patterns of consumer expectations and long-term economic thinking.

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Between 1946 and 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) sent four representatives to Germany for extended visits to investigate how it could become involved in reconstructing the country. They were particularly interested in reorganizing the educational and science systems in a democratic manner and in reintegrating the conquered aggressor into the “family of nations.” They held numerous meetings with leading representatives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG), the successor to the world-famous Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), which had received considerable amounts of funding from the RF until the late 1930s, even after the Nazis came to power. As a result of its evaluation, the RF declined to provide the same level of support for the postwar MPG as it had for the prewar KWG. Although an obvious reason for the RF to distance itself from the KWG would be the latter's involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime, as suggested by Paul Weindling in his analysis of the RF's funding policy for biomedical research in Germany in general, neither the RF interviews nor the evaluation reports mentioned the involvement of KWG scientists in biomedical crimes during the Third Reich. The reports did not even mention the Nuremberg medical trial, which took place between December 1946 and August 1947.

In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.

Enno Edward Kraehe, William M. Corcoran Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, died at the University of Virginia Medical Center on Thursday, December 4, 2008, five days before his eighty-seventh birthday. He was the leading American scholar on the Congress of Vienna and of its most important and colorful participant, Prince Clemens von Metternich.

During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in an intensive effort to appeal to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. It did so by presenting the Nazi regime as a champion of secular anti-imperialism, especially against Britain, as well as by a selective appropriation and reception of the traditions of Islam in ways that suggested their compatibility with the ideology of National Socialism. This article and the larger project from which it comes draw on recent archival findings that make it possible to expand on the knowledge of Nazi Germany's efforts in this region that has already been presented in a substantial scholarship. This essay pushes the history of Nazism beyond its Eurocentric limits while pointing to the European dimensions of Arabic and Islamic radicalism of the mid-twentieth century. On shortwave radio and in printed items distributed in the millions, Nazi Germany's Arabic language propaganda leapt across the seemingly insurmountable barriers created by its own ideology of Aryan racial superiority. From fall 1939 to March 1945, the Nazi regime broadcast shortwave Arabic programs to the Middle East and North Africa seven days and nights a week. Though the broadcasts were well known at the time, the preponderance of its print and radio propaganda has not previously been documented and examined nor has it entered into the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Nazi regime during World War II and the Holocaust. In light of new archival findings, we are now able to present a full picture of the wartime propaganda barrage in the course of which officials of the Nazi regime worked with pro-Nazi Arab exiles in Berlin to adapt general propaganda themes aimed at its German and European audiences to the religious traditions of Islam and the regional and local political realities of the Middle East and North Africa. This adaptation was the product of a political and ideological collaboration between officials of the Nazi regime, especially in its Foreign Ministry but also of its intelligence services, the Propaganda Ministry, and the SS on the one hand, and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin on the other. It drew on a confluence of perceived shared political interests and ideological passions, as well as on a cultural fusion, borrowing and interacting between Nazi ideology and certain strains of Arab nationalism and Islamic religious traditions. It was an important chapter in the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Nazism during World War II and comprises a chapter in the history of radical Islamist ideology and politics.