As the sovereign of a newly fashioned kingdom facing uncertain prospects, King Ludwig I of Bavaria launched a sprawling building program to transform his capital city, Munich. Ludwig believed that the patronage of art and architecture would enhance his political authority and foster a sense of historical legitimacy in his kingdom. He regarded this building program as a way of expressing and impressing on the public his own views of politics, culture, and history, but the associated financial burden became a source of public discontent, a focal point for political opposition, and, ultimately, a factor in Ludwig's later abdication. Public sentiment and scholarly opinion toward Ludwig nevertheless underwent a broad rehabilitation after his reign. Many soon came to view Ludwig's projects as expressions of the monarch's cultural sophistication and generosity, rather than as instruments of political and ideological calculation.

Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of a unified Germany, was an active participant in the Anglo-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. Even though Germany had no direct interests there and was never involved on the ground during the two decades of his chancellorship, Bismarck invested considerable resources in working to shape the course of events in that part of the world, stoking the flames of conflict whenever it suited the dictates of Realpolitik. Over a twenty-year period, he actively pursued a consistent strategy that focused on tying down Russian troops in the remote Asian steppes, i.e., as far away from Central Europe as possible. At the same time, he manipulated Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia to achieve various foreign policy goals that would further German interests. This article explores in detail all of these objectives, as well as their interrelationship. In particular, it unravels the perplexing mystery of how Bismarck was able to influence the politics of Central Asia from his distant headquarters in Berlin.

History conjures up an image of the past and transports it into our present. Photographs both facilitate and, at times, markedly determine this historical process, especially for the twentieth century. For better or worse, they have irrevocably shaped the way we imagine the characters and sites of modern history. From infamous dictators to mass political rallies, from radical protests to everyday leisure pursuits: photographs form powerful frames through which we historians represent the past to ourselves and to our audiences.

Building on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms—assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures, and symbiosis—this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

Beginning with Ferdinand I's Polizeyordnung of 1552, the Habsburgs’ state inserted itself into the regulation of welfare for the poor. To manage the homeless, there emerged after the 1720s a state-driven but locally administered system (Schubsystem) of police surveillance to discover, arrest, and physically remove those without a provable birth place (or a ten-year residence in one place) to a to-be-determined Heimat, a “home” community declared responsible for their welfare. In practice, the system's specific self-contradictions and conflicted agendas, its brutalization of those who served it, its several social-relational and language figures that emerged as the actualizations of the state's vision, together placed a significant number of the homeless on forced marches toward indeterminate destinations until they collapsed and could be removed from the road to die “in the straw.” The essay suggests that the interplay between Heimat and Schubsystem serves as a foreshadowing dimension in modern Austro-German history.

The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.

German-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.

A dramatic paradigm shift has occurred in European and German hate-speech laws, from their nineteenth-century origins in repressive campaigns against the Left to their present association with pluralism, tolerance, and minority rights. This article rethinks the timing and causes of that shift, arguing that, contrary to the prevailing scholarship, the decade of the 1890s—not 1945—constituted the first key turning point toward a human-rights model of hate-speech law. Departing from a more traditional legal historiography focused on formal legal institutions and laws, the article examines law “from below” as social and political practice. The results show how, in the 1890s, a new vision of hate speech began to take shape when a grassroots Jewish defense movement began to appropriate and reshape the law in order to oppose antisemites. In theoretical terms, the article's method of examining the interaction of law and politics shows that from the 1840s onward, the politics surrounding hate-speech law refutes simple binary constructions that cast German legal culture as “dignitarian” and distinct from U.S. “libertarianism.”

In the final months of World War II, more than a million German children took to the roads in search of family and home. Although the majority returned home with little institutional support, hundreds of thousands of other German children could not. Some were orphaned; others remained in camps, children's homes, or foster families in areas that no longer belonged to Germany. Most challenging for authorities were those who were alone and too young to know their own names. This article explores the struggle to locate, identify, and provide for missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. It argues that despite a general agreement that children were in peril, Allied denazification policies and the decision by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) not to help “enemy children” compromised care for children. The division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War further handicapped efforts to aid children by preventing the creation of a unified search service. Yet, despite the many postwar impediments, the effort to care for these children was remarkably successful in the end.

This article explores the significance of photography and photo-album making as practices that many Germans used to record their lives during the Third Reich. Millions of photos not only offer insights into everyday life under National Socialism: mass photography itself had a transformative effect, turning seemingly mundane actions into performances for the camera and into conscious acts of self-representation. The article also considers the relationship between amateur snapshots, on the one hand, and propagandistic and commercial photographs, on the other. Identifying connections between the genres, it argues that these are best understood as two-way processes of borrowing and (re-)appropriation, in which private subjectivity and public ideology constantly commingled. Particularly important in linking the two were photos of emotional or affective states, such as relaxation, exploration, introspection, and even melancholy, which were often defined or underscored by the ways in which both civilians and soldiers positioned themselves in relation to particular landscapes. The photographic archival record is highly varied, but such variation notwithstanding, photos helped cement immersive “experience” as the basis for individual and collective identity; this was central to the ideology of the National Socialist regime, even if it never wholly controlled its meanings.

For more than eighty years there has been controversy about who set the fire that destroyed the plenary chamber of the Reichstag fire on the evening of February 27, 1933—thereby handing the Nazis a pretext to gut the democratic Weimar constitution through the emergency “Reichstag Fire Decree.” Since the 1960s there has been a consensus among historians that the fire was set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a twenty-four-year-old Dutch journeyman stonemason supposedly acting alone—with no Nazi involvement. Few historians, however, have been inclined to investigate the motives behind the development of this single-culprit narrative, or the reasons for its generally positive reception among postwar German historians. With the aid of newly discovered sources, this article examines the legal and political interests that have underpinned this narrative. The single-culprit narrative was developed by ex-Nazis, whereas accounts of the Reichstag fire stressing Nazi complicity came almost invariably from former resistance fighters and victims of Nazism. Postwar historians responded to these accounts in much the same way they have responded to perpetrator and victim accounts of the Holocaust: with a markedly greater preference for those of the perpetrators. This tendency has shaped the debate over the Reichstag fire in the same way it has shaped other areas of research on the Third Reich.

This article focuses on the joint campaign of “remigrés” and American authorities to “westernize” the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin during the early Cold War. The years 1948 to 1958 witnessed one of postwar Germany's most bitter intraparty struggles for leadership within the Berlin SPD, where a faction of remigrés led by Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt wrestled for control with the so-called Keulenriege around Franz Neumann. Examining clandestine American support for the remigré faction, which included favorable media coverage and considerable financial contributions, this article focuses in particular on the political maneuvering of a German-American network around Shepard Stone, political advisor to U.S. Commissioner John McCloy. An investigation of the postwar power struggle within the Berlin SPD offers fresh perspectives on three related subjects: the role of remigrés in postwar Germany history; the political clout of informal German-American networks; and West Berlin as an alternative laboratory of German democratization.

This article examines images of Germany's “working world” in the 1930s and 1940s. Analyzing photos from three different genres—factory photography, special-occasion industrial photography, and the work of nonprofessional photographers—it addresses a series of questions: How was the “working world” depicted in photographs from this period? What were the different modes, functions, and effects of visual representations of work and workers in these three genres? In what ways did these photographs contribute to the (visual) production and “shaping” of memory—in terms of worker experiences, as well as with respect to attempts by the National Socialists to promote ideological notions of community-building (Vergemeinschaftung)? The main argument is that photography served as an important tool for the mobilization and self-mobilization of German workers under the Nazi regime.

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have called into question the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult. This article paints a different picture. First, virtually all Nazi leaders appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and “border-scientific” thinking across the German population and within the Nazi Party itself. Second, although Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and even Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo consistently advocated anti-occult policies or pro-enlightenment campaigns during the first six years of the Third Reich, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. Third, the regime's reticence to eradicate even popular or commercial occultism—indicated by the fact that the environment for professional debunkers became more hostile with the outbreak of World War II––reflected the popularity of supernatural and border-scientific thinking within the German population. Indeed, whereas some Nazis intervened on the side of occultism for reasons of public opinion, many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value.

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.