History textbooks speak of an American, an English, a French, and a Russian revolution, but historians do not recognize a “German Revolution.” For this reason the formation of a German national state was long described as an aspect of a German “divergent path” (Sonderweg) or exceptionalism. While this concept established itself in post-1945 West Germany, German historical scholarship had even earlier insisted on a uniquely German transition from the Old Regime to the modern state, fundamentally different from what took place in the other western European countries. Still earlier, German idealist thinkers had declared the national state (Reich) to be the German people's historical objective. Around 1900 the Reich was understood to be not a rational community based on a contract between independent individuals, as were France and England, but a national community of destiny. The German ideal was not a republic split up into political parties but an organic community between the Reich's people and its rulers. This is why German history had never known a successful revolution from below. During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, this alleged unity was seen in a positive light, but after 1945 it inspired an explanation, which quickly became canonical, of why German history had led to a catastrophe. German exceptionalism was now understood, especially by German social historians, as a one-way street toward the National Socialist regime.

The 1905 Kalender für das Erzgebirge und Vogtland described an apparently spontaneous shift in the relationship between the German state of Saxony's mountainous southern borderlands and its rapidly urbanizing lowlands. Yet from the 1870s to the 1930s, the Kalender, the Erzgebirgsverein that published it, and a host of similar Heimat (homeland) and tourist organizations pushed, prodded, and cajoled lowlanders into visiting the borderlands. In the process, they repeatedly reframed the ways in which they portrayed the landscapes they championed, rethought their reasons for enticing travelers to the southern regions, and redirected their efforts to new audiences. Saxon Heimatler and tourism promoters succeeded in defining southern Saxony's regions, and eventually Saxony as a whole, in terms of three important characteristics: the interplay of nature and industry in their landscapes; the diversity of those landscapes; and proximity to and interactions with Bohemia. So powerful were these themes that they continue to shape ideas about southern Saxony to the present.

On March 10, 1972, a little-known Auschwitz trial came to a rather unremarkable conclusion with the release of Fritz Ertl and Walter Dejaco. Both had served as SS architects in the Central Construction Directorate(ZBL)-Auschwitz. Both were part of a team responsible for designing and building the gas chambers of Birkenau. The District Attorneys' Office of Vienna had prepared the case against them with great ambition nearly a decade before. Prosecutors originally had in mind something like the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in the Federal Republic of Germany, which included more than twenty defendants. Such plans were speedily curtailed. The court had only grudgingly agreed to try three defendants and then readily granted a motion to dismiss charges against one (Hermann Töfferl, a construction foreman). That left only two. “The public interest for this monster trial appears to be slight. The benches in the great jury court remain empty,” the Wiener Zeitung reported upon the opening of the trial. Less than two months later, the paper recorded the defendants' release, and no public debate followed.

In the writing of the German Reformation, there has long been a strong association between urban history and the evangelical movement. The sentiment has been around since the days of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), but it was the publication of Bernd Moeller's Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1962) that turned the rather casual notion into a research paradigm. Moeller imagined the Reformation in terms of the medieval cityscape. “It is important to recognize,” he wrote, “that the Reformation was introduced almost everywhere according to the forms prescribed by the city constitution, and that it had its foundation in the city's communal mentality.” Constitutionally, there was a clear filiation of development to account for the later Protestant church. Throughout the medieval period urban communes had been securing rights and privileges extending the claims and functions of local sovereignty, from the regulation of the immediate economy, the control of taxation, and the administration of lesser jurisdiction, to the guardianship of parish religion. In a similar manner, when Moeller spoke of the collective mentality of the German city, he did so in order to draw attention to the norms and values of urban governance and the similar reserve of norms preached in early evangelical theology. In its origins, the Imperial city was characterized as a political association, bound by oath, joined by common will, created in order to preserve the peace. The urban values underwriting this myth of community were those that placed collective welfare above the interests of the individual—concord, unity, justice, love, peace, and the common good (Gemeinnutz). Further legitimation of the communal ideal was provided by the medieval affinity to imagine the city in terms of a sacral corporation (corpus Christianum), with the religious standing of each member of the union bearing upon collective salvation. Little separates this cast of mind from evangelical theology and its stress on brotherly love, peace, and the community of believers. God's Word, to use the phrasing of the town clerk of Nördlingen, heals the divisions of the commune as it heals the divisions of the soul.

In September 1929, a group of Russian German farmers who were dissatisfied with conditions under Soviet rule traveled to the suburbs of Moscow and demanded that they be allowed to emigrate. The gathering of ethnic Germans, most of whom were Mennonites, grew rapidly and numbered more than 13,000 people at its height. Their demands were widely reported in the German press and brought the subject of Soviet collectivization into the public eye in Germany. The effect of this event on German-Soviet diplomatic relations, which became increasingly strained as Stalinism took hold, is well known. Although studies of the gathering mention the public outcry in the press, they have generally assumed that the German public's identification with the Russian Germans was self-evident and not in need of explanation. In fact, public interest in and government concern for the Russian Germans was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the post-World War I era, Germans came to understand the Russian Germans as emblematic of Germany's fate—as innocent, hard-working farmers who were loyal to Germanness and who worked tirelessly to expand German culture in the world. The Russian Germans also came to represent the larger crisis of legitimacy that affected the Weimar Republic in which parliamentary government was increasingly perceived as not being able to protect the German people and its interests, whether in Germany or abroad.

The German Peasants' Revolt of 1525 represented an unprecedented challenge to the princes and other petty political rulers of the areas involved. While localized uprisings had occurred with increasing frequency in the decades prior to the 1525 revolt and an uneasy awareness of growing levels of peasant discontent was widespread among most rulers of southern and central German lands, the extent of the major rebellion that developed in early 1525 took everyone by surprise. No one was prepared to respond, either militarily or through more peaceful means. Even the Swabian League, the peacekeeping alliance of Imperial princes, prelates, nobility, and cities that eventually assumed primary responsibility for suppressing the revolt, did little to mobilize its resources for almost six months after the first appeals for help from its members against disobedient subjects reached it. When the League did mobilize, its decision created further problems for League members, since most sent their required contingents to the League's forces only to discover that they needed the troops badly themselves once the revolt spread to their own lands. Since the Council of the Swabian League adamantly refused to return any members' troops because this would hinder the League's own ability to suppress the peasant disorders, many members found themselves virtually defenseless against the rebels.

This article has a twofold aim: first, to explain the concept of confessionalization that has been developed in recent decades in German historiography as an interpretive tool for the period and to review the main lines of its critique, which raise important questions for the discussion of “confessionalization and literature”; and second, to explore the connections between confessionalization and literature as well as the applicability of the concept of confessionalization to the history of literature, a little-understood but increasingly important question for early modern cultural history. The understanding of the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is greatly enhanced by the cooperation between literary scholars and historians. First, the literature of the age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation was not yet an autonomous entity in society and therefore requires historical contextualization, particularly with regard to its social origins. Second, Germanists have extended the definition of early modern literature to include all kinds of Gebrauchsliteratur (functional literature), which are often important sources for historians. “Literature” and “confessionalization,” however, are difficult terms representing very complex phenomena. “Literature” is understood here as encompassing all printed works of the period, of which this article can of course only explore a sample; “confessionalization” denotes an interpretive concept, which has been criticized and modified in recent research. Given the exploratory purpose of this discussion, a good many questions will be raised for which we have no clear answers at the present time; we hope above all to further the exchange of ideas between literary scholars and historians working on the confessional age.

In 1981, the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, the official society of German musicologists, held its first formal session on the subject of “Music in the 1930s.” Rudolf Stephan, then president of the society, concluded his opening remarks with the following admonition

In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”

Historians have conventionally depicted the Habsburg Monarchy as the largest modern European imperial polity to disappear from the map because of its inability to accommodate the national aspirations of its peoples. It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynastic empire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identity and loyalty to the state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. For later historians as well as many contemporary observers of the frequent internal crises after the 1890s, this was already a failed state even before World War I brought on the tragic denouement. In this perspective the monarchy's participation in the war was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to the polity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that the monarchy's entry into the war came largely because of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power, defend its position in the Balkans, and counter the challenges of its own nationalist political movements, some of them allied with political forces beyond the borders. Older western European and North American histories also tended to view nationalist politics in Habsburg central Europe, in contrast to western European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic force that helped doom hopes for parliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post-1918 successor states.

The relationships between German intellectuals and politics at the turn of the nineteenth century have been much debated, with the nature of the German liberal tradition at the core of controversy, and with questions about the interconnections between liberalism, nationalism, and neohumanist Bildung circling not far beyond that core. Prominent in such discussions stands the figure of the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt. Best known today variously for his part in overhauling the Prussian educational system during the “reform era” of Chancellors Stein and Hardenberg, or for helping to establish the disciplines of classical philology and comparative linguistics, Humboldt also authored one of the seminal texts in the European liberal tradition and was actively involved in the diplomacy, constitutional planning, and nationalist upheaval surrounding Napoleon's expulsion from Germany and the subsequent construction of the German Confederation.

The study of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history, was not an invention of the postwar era. But it was in the wake of the Second World War that it carved out a space in the historical professions of the United States, Great Britain and, most pronouncedly, West Germany. In each country, it came with similar definitions: in West Germany as “the era of those living, and its scholarly treatment by academics”; in the United States as “the period of the last generation or two”; and in Britain as “Europe in the twentieth century” or “the histories of yesterday which are being written today.” Such definitions contained a generational component and left contemporary history open to continuous rejuvenation. Yet during the postwar decades, the above definitions steered interest clearly toward the history of National Socialism, the Second World War, and foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s. The horrific cost in human lives of Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies gave an instant relevance to all aspects of Germany's past. The German grip on much of Europe had made National Socialism an integral component in the history of formerly occupied countries, and the Allied struggle to defeat Nazism added yet more countries to the list of those that had seen their histories become entangled with that of Germany. Hence, the academic writing of German contemporary history was never an exclusively German affair. Scholars outside Germany, especially in Great Britain and the United States, were part of the endeavor from the outset. Their involvement was facilitated by the fact that the Western Allies had captured an enormous quantity of German records and archives at the end of the war, part of which would become available to historians over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1995, before the Leitkultur debate about a hegemonic German culture to which immigrants might aspire, disputes over the wearing of headscarves, and September 11, a federal German court effectively banned Muslims from slaughtering animals without prior stunning. The court ruled that the practice was not required by their religion and was thus not protected by the constitution's guarantee of freedom of religious expression. In January 2002, however, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the right to freedom of religious expression and choice of occupation did in fact ensure the entitlement of Germany's Muslims, or at least those responsible for their provision with halal meat, to resume stunningless methods for such ends without the threat of legal action. Religious slaughter has been problematic throughout Germany's history and the reemergence of opposition to it late in the twentieth century was not without precedent. The issue throws up numerous areas for possible examination. But what does it have to do with the Greens and with their positions on animals and human society?

“In all of economic history, the foreigner appears everywhere as the trader, or the trader as foreigner.”

The debate over “what should be done with Germany after Hitler” became so intense in America in 1943–44 that competitive organizations were created to influence public opinion and official postwar planning. German refugees fought on both sides in the crossfire of opinion. Recent historical scholarship has discussed the failure of the German political emigration to gain formal political recognition from the United States government and the right to participate in Allied planning for postwar Germany. Though correct, this contention should not obscure the significant role that some of the anti-Nazi exiles played in framing the public debate on the treatment of Germany. They swam against the tide of extreme anti-German sentiments at the height of the Second World War, and their views found considerable resonance among American intellectuals. The public debate on the Allied policy for postwar Germany was more extensive than many historical accounts suggest in focusing on the proposals of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the infighting within President Roosevelt's administration. German antifascist emigrants in America devised the arguments and rhetorical tools against the movement for a draconian peace long before the political controversy over the Morgenthau Plan in September 1944. Their contribution to the wartime debate on Germany's future helped to prepare Americans to accept the modification of Washington's tough policy for occupied Germany before the Cold War turned a onetime enemy into an ally. By the terms in which they cast this debate, they contributed also to the marginalization of the Holocaust in the wartime discourse on Germany more than historians have hitherto recognized.

Studies of the East German historical profession and what became of it after 1990—which are now numerous—have primarily dealt with institutes in Berlin affiliated with the Akademie der Wissenschaften or the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). Little attention has been paid to the academic institutions where most of the German Democratic Republic's historians and history teachers received their scholarly and political training, namely the history departments of the country's universities and the teachers' colleges (pädagogische Hochschulen). In this essay, in which I draw in part upon my personal experiences, I will therefore be less concerned with the well-researched “nerve centers” of the East German research establishment than with the long-neglected “academic provinces” and the everyday realities of academic life that, however absurd they might seem in hindsight, shaped the experiences of countless students, instructors, and professors.

How did the inter-German border, created in 1945, become one of the most formidable boundaries in the world by 1952? The early boundary was not fenced, but just years in the wake of National Socialism's “Thousand Year Reich” Germans on both sides broadly accepted and enforced it against other Germans. These early divisions made possible the GDR's physical closure and fortification of the border after 1952. The hastily drawn demarcation line between Allied zones of occupation had rather quickly expanded into a legal, economic, political, and social boundary—in which both East and West developed a stake.

Dealing with the Nazi past has become a permanent component (some would say obsession) of contemporary German national identity. Almost every day, the German print and visual media carry stories related to Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Each new major anniversary sets in motion another round of discussion, argument, and controversy. Each new autobiography and each new film on Nazism generates extensive media commentary. Among the most interesting aspects of recent discussions of the Nazi past is the new prominence afforded to depictions of Germans as victims of “Hitler's War.” Nowhere has this predilection for presenting Germans as victims been more apparent and pronounced than in the flood of recent popular books and made-for-TV documentaries about the bombing war.