Since its creation in 1992 the journal Contemporary European History (CEH) has actively sought to bridge Cold War divides and to bring the histories of Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe into the same frame of analysis. In the journal's twenty-five-year history there has probably been no single institution that has played as significant a role in training new generations of historians as the Central European University in Budapest (CEU). Founded just a few months before the journal, CEU and CEH are products of the same sweeping changes set in motion with the fall of the Berlin Wall. CEU was founded with the explicit task to shed light on on-going processes of ‘democratisation’ and to train a new cohort of regional thinkers and leaders that could understand and direct them. CEH was created to provide a forum for the development of a new kind of history of Europe and its constituent parts, freed (at least in aspiration) from the shackles of Cold War divides.

Using a wide variety of European archival sources, this article analyses the development of financial policies after the First World War. Through studying French politics it demonstrates how, following the significant increase in direct fiscal charges in order to cover the costs of the conflict, international fiscal competition exercised strong pressure on the tax systems of large European countries and, as a result, contributed over the course of the 1920s to a process of lowering the taxes levied on high revenues and fortunes. Significantly, the stabilisation of the French franc in 1926 was supported by a simultaneous alignment of the French tax system and neutral tax havens which in turn enabled the return of previously exported assets.

This article adds to an on-going conceptual discussion on the usefulness of the ‘bystander’ term when applied to the Holocaust and its aftermath. This catch-all concept, mostly associated with Raul Hilberg, has been the subject of fierce criticism, leading some to apply it only with adjectives (‘innocent’, ‘active’ or ‘passive’) and others to dismiss the concept altogether. Taking the Jewish–Gentile relations in Topoľčany as a case study, it becomes clear that the concept has many shortcomings when applied to the microcosm of a particular event. On the basis of Giovanni Sartori's writings on concept formation and the ‘ladder of abstraction’, we argue against dismissing the concept altogether in exchange for limiting its degree of applicability. As shown, the ‘bystander’ concept can be useful when approached with discipline and while being aware of the level of its generalisation.

This article discusses the main lessons of the Marshall Plan's Technical Assistance Programme. The point of departure is the Danish case, but the perspective is wider, and the article aims at broadening the somewhat narrow chronology and geography often applied in studies on the history of the Marshall Plan. When following the Technical Assistance up until the mid-1950s in a Scandinavian country it becomes clear that American diplomats didn't just want the Europeans to work harder, but that their drive for productivity also promoted Americanisation in the form of an US-style business and consumer culture. The ‘American Way’ presented through the Technical Assistance Programme, though not uncontested, was a powerful and appealing model for prosperity applicable to all areas of the economy, from agriculture to retail.

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

This article analyses West German foreign policy towards state terrorism in Chile and Argentina and towards political refugees fleeing these regimes. Pressured by grassroots activists, Willy Brandt's government took a hard stance against the Chilean military junta and established an asylum programme for refugees from Chile. Under Helmut Schmidt, however, the official attitude towards state terrorism changed. West Germany welcomed the military coup in Buenos Aires, accepted the Argentinean junta's position that repressive measures were necessary to fight ‘subversion’, flatly refused to accept any Argentinean political prisoners and approved billions of Deutschmarks worth of weapons sales to the junta. This article argues that Bonn's ambivalence towards state terrorism and uneven interest in human rights was due to the different attitudes of both Social Democratic Chancellors towards economic strategising, grassroots activism and, most importantly, the threat of left-wing terrorism.

This article examines post-war (West) Germany's attempt to address national stigma and gain international acceptance. It surveys three domains: public relations, Foreign Cultural Policy (Auswärtige Kultur Politik) and bilateral relations with France and the United States. By the 1970s, although some images of ‘Germany’ were still negative, on a global scale its underlying reputation was remarkably positive. The complex of political actions involved was a pioneering example of ‘nation branding’.

The history of the subject, or, in a different parlance, genealogies of the self, has received increased attention in recent years. Numerous scholars, historians and cultural sociologists alike have inquired about the practices and discourses that shape the (post-)modern self. And while this is by no means an exclusively German debate – indeed, major influences come from French, British and Israeli scholarship –, it is a debate that is particularly thriving within German-speaking scholarship on recent (West) German history, perhaps in part due to how graduate training and networking function in German academia. Somewhat remarkably, East German subjectivities are barely ever addressed in this debate, which speaks to the fact that historiographies of East and West Germany are still rather separated, despite repeated calls to overcome this division. A possible historical (rather than historiographical) reason for this lack of interest that would deserve further inquiry might be that the self became important for historical actors in the Federal Republic during the 1970s, but not in East Germany. It would be equally interesting to know to what extent similar or different regimes of subjectivity emerged across the Iron Curtain and what happened to them after the end of communism – that is, if and how the ‘neoliberal’ regime of subjectivity that scholars have described for Western Germany spread to the East. Yet, these are open questions.

This review essay explores recent scholarship on the history of Jews in the post-Habsburg territories, before and after the Second World War. The impressive wave of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on European Jewish history shortly before, during and, increasingly, after the Holocaust, has only made historians more aware of how much they have left to do to reconstruct, at least in text, the lives of European Jews – a multilingual and culturally, economically and politically heterogeneous group – that the Holocaust so systematically and brutally destroyed. Aiming to overcome reductionist attempts that either subsume the history of Jews under a national narrative or parcel it into separate national units without comparative or transnational agendas, a growing number of scholars aim to reconceptualise Jewish history as being crucial to European and global history.

The global politics of sovereignty that developed after the Cold War, together with the catastrophic United States led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001, have furnished international, imperial and diplomatic historians with good, grim reasons to return to the interlocked histories of empire, internationalism and international institutions. A torrent of work on the Geneva based League of Nations (LON) has been one result, alongside writing on the United Nations (UN). In particular, scholars such as Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Glenda Sluga, already well versed in the archives and literature of European empires and their gender and economic politics, have led a systematic reappraisal of internationalism and international institutions after the First World War. They brought to this campaign heuristic tools sharpened in the 1990s, in the cultural historiography of empire, and they aimed broadly to understand the League's workings and variety, rather than to reassert its political failures. The parallel – and often intersecting – rise of historiographies on the modern and contemporary histories of economic development, human rights and humanitarianism, with their frequent attention to the role of international institutions, has further catalysed this renewal.