An important element of urban planning as it has developed in Europe and North America is the provision of housing for classes of people who are poorly served by private housing markets. In the case of Germany one can trace this activity back to the 1920s, during the middle years of the Weimar Republic, when public authorities began to plan and build housing on a large scale. However, one can also see in the activity of German employers, dating back another half century or more, earlier efforts at urban residential planning for people with modest incomes.

The Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften (Law to Protect Youth from Trashy and Dirty Writings) was proposed at the cabinet meeting of 19 December 1923, passed by the Reichstag on 3 December 1926, and went into effect on 18 December 1926. Within ten years it was a dead letter, replaced by the 1935 guidelines of the Reichsschrifttumskammer. The law and the agitation surrounding it had many dimensions; the phenomenon was at once political, legal, sociological, psychological, and cultural. A classic example of moral censorship, it has many parallels with other censorship activity, such as the British campaign to protect youth from horror comics in the 1950s. Yet while it is a case study of censorship, this law is more than illustrative. The debate over its passage further politicized the already controversial issue of culture in Germany, and it can be credited with a small but definite contribution to the political alignments that eventually made possible the Nazi takeover of January 1933.

The recent revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe represent a mixed blessing for the United States and the western alliance as a whole. On the one hand, the West has had good reason to rejoice, witnessing the triumph of democracy and economic liberalism after more than forty years of Cold War tensions. On the other hand, the fall of the Eastern European communist governments in 1989, including that of the German Democratic Republic, once again brought the German question to the forefront. The Bush administration approached the issue of German reunification in a very cautious manner, insisting that a unified Germany guarantee the finality of its eastern borders and remain committed to the West. This caution clearly demonstrated the apprehension on the part of U.S. policy-makers that nationalism and the push for national unity might prove stronger than the German commitment to NATO and the western alliance.

It is often assumed, especially in the Anglo-American literature, that Frederick William I (1713–40), by establishing the “canton System” in 1733, lessened his need to rely on foreign mercenaries for military manpower and moved in the direction of a national, conscript army. As put by Robert Ergang: “The establishment of this so-called ‘canton system’ not only assured… a large permanent supply of recruits; it was also a long step toward making the Prussian army a national one. Recruiting abroad was still continued, but it was only supplementary. Native recruits now formed the backbone of the Prussian army.” This persistent assumption, stated in different ways by different authors, has even penetrated the textbook literature. A closely related assumption holds that Frederick the Great after 1740, by increasing the proportion of foreign manpower to as much as two-thirds of the total, “reversed” the trend toward making the army more national in character. The purpose of this essay will be to demonstrate that both of the above-mentioned assumptions are false; they depend on a misunderstanding of the real trends in Prussian recruiting bolstered, in the latter case, by faulty statistics.