For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only was German Home Towns original and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.

Kaspar von Graffenried, the Landvogt or administrator in this polemic from ca. 1617, was a Bernese patrician serving for two years as highest authority in the Swiss subject territory known as the County (Grafschaft) of Baden. He acted as an agent not of the Bernese city-state that had appointed him, but of all eight of the cantons that shared possession of Baden and its surroundings; his tenure fit into a rotation of administrators from the other cantons according to a precisely determined two-year cycle that had been in place since the early fifteenth century. In many respects the Swiss Landvogt of Baden therefore looked far different from the local feudal nobles who had served the Habsburgs as administrators back when William Tell was supposed to have lived—though this evidently contributed nothing to Graffenried's standing with the author of the verses above.

In a talk delivered on 20 September 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the president of the League of German Women's Associations (BDF) likened the political status of German women to mothers who were forced to nurse their children with their hands tied behind their backs. They were thoroughly frustrated by the destructiveness of the war and were only able to fulfill their duties toward family and nation because they believed that the experience of the war would make the nation stronger.

Zygmunt Bauman's book, Modernity and the Holocaust, argues that the Holocaust was not an aberration from modernity, but rather the most extreme symptom of a distinctively modern pathology. Women are conspicuously absent from this indictment of modernity; Bauman, a socilogist, mentions neither gender as an issue nor women as individuals. This gap in Bauman's text is in fact full of meaning, for the absence of women as persons does not preclude the hidden presence of gender as a category of analysis. I shall use the absence and presence of gender in Bauman's text as a starting point for an examination of the historiography of women and gender and its relevance for our understanding of the Holocaust. First, I will tease out the hidden, gendered implications of Bauman's theory; second, I will look at the ways in which recent feminist scholarship has approached the question of women's responsibility for the Holocaust. Finally, I shall suggest that a consideration of the cultural construction of gender, as explored by recent scholarship in many fields, is necessary to our understanding of the historical and ethical concerns that Bauman and others have raised.

Within the voluminous literature on the Holocaust, a trend has emerged in recent years: a shift of focus from remembrance and commemoration of this horrible event to serious reflection about its significance in a variety of theological, philosophical, historical, and even aesthetic contexts. This shift has not been an easy one, for its practicioners have had to face the widely held view that the Holocaust is unintelligible or incomprehensible, and that the tools of scholarship are simply inadequate to grasp it in any meaningful way. This view is certainly understandable when uttered by those who have personally survived the Holocaust—voices which played a leading role in the literature of previous decades. But even as these voices recede in time, the obstacles which this event poses to intelligibility remain formidable to many scholars.

These words introduced a collection entitled Deutsche Wehrlieder für das Königlich-Preussische Frei-Corps (German Military Songs for the Royal Prussian Volunteer Corps), that appeared in March 1813 immediately after Prussia declared war on France. It was not only in this songbook that the patriotic national mobilization for the struggle against Napoleonic rule was closely linked to the propagation of “valorous manliness” (wehrhafte Mannlichkeit). In the period of the Wars of Liberation between 1813 and 1815, the press and topical literature teemed with similar phrases and cultivated a veritable cult of manliness. A new breed of “patriotically”-minded, “combat-ready” men was needed if, as intended, a “people's army” of conscripts was to fight a successful “national war” against France. This phenomenon has generated scant interest in the extensive historical literature about the time between 1806 and 1815, which is considered as the birth period of the German national movement.

For some time now, maternalism has been recognized as “one of women's chief avenues into the public sphere.” It has dominated the politics of women's movements in different countries, regardless of political persuasion, since at least the 1850s. The term maternalism has been used to describe “ideologies and discourses that exalted women's capacity to mother and applied to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality.”

This observation, registered by Marianne Enigl and Herbert Lackner, points to an incontestable and compelling feature of contemporary Austrian political culture: during the 1980s and 1990s, the first meaningful steps toward an Austrian Vergangenheitsbewältigung developed out of a discussion of Austrians' military service during the Nazi era and its highly problematic association with wartime atrocities and genocide. Exploration of this important theme had been avoided throughout the period of the Second Republic by a carefully cultivated expression of public memory. The inherent tension between the internationally sanctioned notion of Austrian victimization during the Nazi years and the pride of many Austrian veterans in having performed their soldierly duties (Wehrpflichterfüllung) had been a taboo subject.

Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German struggles with memory. In recent years, however, this state of affairs has begun to change. As the epochal events of 1989–90 have forced Germans to confront still another burdensome historical legacy—that of communism—the increasing calls for a “second” Vergangenheitsbewältigung have, for better or worse, broken the monopolistic hold of the Third Reich on the nation's historical consciousness. course of this new Vergangenheitsbewältigung by comparing it to the experience of coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism.

In February 1872, little more than a year after the founding of the new Reich, the National Zeitung, a leading National-Liberal newspaper, argued that Germans could no longer accept suppression at the Catholic Church. The German, the paper explained, will not tolerate a spirit that comes from Rome either among his people or in any of his churches. He does not want clerical rule and Volksverdummung. He wants, rather, enlightemnent, honest conscience [ehrlidzes Gewissen], and work.Attaining a new, as yet never achieved level of moral freedom, a morality arising from the people [eine volkstümliche Sittlichkeit] that is shared by Germany's churches and confessions, that is the task for this founding period of the new Reich.

Historians have generally interpreted the early years of the Weimar Republic as an important stage in the development of the German welfare state. For the first time in the history of Germany, the state established in the constitution not only its own wideranging responsibilities and opportunities for intervention, but also the political and social rights of its citizens. Apart from “fundamentally” equal citizenship rights for womenand men (Art. 108) these also included entitlement to state support for the family and maternity as well as special state protection for marriage which, the constitution proclaimed, was to rest on an “equality of the two sexes” (Art. 119).

Among the most haunting features of the culture of murder created by the Nazis are the ruthless efficiency and sheer scale of their success in killing millions of human beings. There are those who link both to the earlier efficiency and scale of death in the titanic and grinding battles of the Great War. And there are others who would associate both with the alternatives of quick or lingering death promised by nuclear war. Efficiency and scale seem common to the mass death produced or proposed in the twentieth century, and many observers view both as attributes of the process of modernity.

Historians have mostly, and with good reason, examined the industrial exploitation of concentration-camp prisoners from the standpoint of its injustice. Studies have covered either the politics which led to forced labor, the involvement of individual factories where prisoners suffered starvation and death, or the harrowing experience of the Victims. Yet few have considered forced labor as the perpetrators saw it: coldly, as a colossal managerial problem. A surprisingly small number, no more than 200 top and mid-level bureaucrats within the Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt of the SS (WVHA), brokered prisoners to labor sites across the Reich, and, after 1941, across the breadth of Europe. Of course, many more German managers were involved in the execution of forced labor programs, and an examination of the WVHA can by no means capture the whole picture.

The three papers collected here present important arguments concerning the gendered context and content of the Weimar welfare state. They unsettle our abilityto judge the origins, the efficacy, and the abstract political value of the welfare state and its democratic claims; they have much to say about twentieth-century women's history and the coordinates of feminist politics in the period between the early 1900s and the 1960s; they have vital lessons for a politics of democratic citizenship; and they all demonstrate the payoff of taking gender seriously as a useful category of historical analysis. In fact, gender seems to have acquired particular salience, in especially public and visible ways, in the period dealt with by these papers.

Holocaust literature is one of the richest devoted to a single event; it is also one of the newest. In the 1950s and '60s one could count on one's fingers the monographs that dealt with the destruction of the Jews. Then came a surge of interest in the 1970s, perhaps due to the arrival on the scene of a European generation innocent of this heinous crime. Since then, the production of books, articles, and films on the subject has continued unabated; in fact, it is growing. Yet the thousands of books and the tens of thousands of articles, many of them not only accurate and scholarly but also beautifully written, have not achieved their purpose. They may have persuaded other scholars but not the public. For when Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust was published, in 1996, with new claims, it was as if the previous literature had never existed.