bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Takeoff Point for the National Socialist Party: The Landtag Election in Baden, I929
Authors: Faris Ellsworth
Published: December 2008

Recent studies of the history of the National Socialist Party of Germany have produced much illuminating material on the k. party's organizational development and growth during its period of struggle up to the seizure of power. In addition, there are several studies of local or regional scope covering the same period, mostly dealing with areas in northern Germany, which provide a close-up view of the party and its tactics. This investigation will examine the nature of the Nazi voter appeal as it is revealed in the campaign and election to the state legislature (Landtag) in the south German state of Baden in 1929. The circumstance that the election fell in this year permits an examination of the development of the party midway between its failure in the Reichstag election of 1928 and its success in 1930; a close analysis of local statistics will show where the early converts to the National Socialist voting ranks came from, and will suggest some clues to the reasons for Hitler's early successes.
Germany and the Eupen–Malmédy Affair 1924–26 “Here Lies the Spirit of Locarno”
Authors: Grathwol Robert P.
Published: December 2008

Gustav Stresemann counted on the Locarno accords of October 1925 to pave the way for peaceful revision of the Versailles treaty. Yet just days before these agreements renouncing force as a means of modifying the Rhineland frontier were to come into effect, the German foreign minister spoke of a wake, at which “the hopes which arose in Locarno are laid to rest, under a tombstone bearing the inscription: ‘Here lies the Spirit of Locarno.’” Stresemann's remark to the French chargé d'affaires in Berlin was prompted by France's apparent veto of the restoration of Eupen and Malmédy to the German Reich. As an illustration of the fundamental governmental attitudes of the participating powers, and as a measure of just what each saw in the Locarno treaties, the case of Eupen-Malmédy presents several provocative revelations.
Reformed Irenicism and the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631
Authors: Nischan Bodo
Published: December 2008

Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century was a continent divided along confessional lines. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. While other countries, in particular France and the Netherlands, drifted toward religious war, the Empire seemed to have settled its religious problems with the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. The treaty, which Emperor Ferdinand I had negotiated with the German princes, permitted Catholic rulers to impose Catholicism upon all their subjects and Lutheran princes to impose Lutheranism. This was a religiopolitical compromise that worked temporarily but became increasingly difficult to preserve as Germany's confessional picture continued to change in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner'sRing
Authors: Windell George G.
Published: December 2008

A few months ago the musical world observed the centennial of the first complete performance of Richard Wagner'sDer Ring des Nibelungen, which took place in the then barely completed BayreuthFestspielhaus, August 13–17, 1876. Few works of art have had so long a gestation period; more than a quarter century separates Wagner's original sketches, which date from the fall of 1848, and the realization of the tetrology on the stage. The dramatic structure of the enormous music-drama became definitive by February 1853, when Wagner allowed to be printed privately the texts of the four operas. The music forDas Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the first two acts ofSiegfriedwas complete by the end of July 1857. There followed, however, an interval of almost twelve years before Wagner again took up work on theRingin March 1869. He composed the music for the final act ofSiegfriedand for all ofGütterdämmerungbetween then and November 1874.
The Partitions of Poland and the Crisis of the Old Regime in Prussia 1772–1806
Authors: Hagen William W.
Published: December 2008

The partitions of Poland can be likened to an assassination per-petrated on a victim who had long before succumbed to an al-most suicidal indifference to the dangers besetting him. Yet this episode in the “diplomatic slaughterhouse,” as Ludwig Dehio termed it, did not merely signify the demise, alternately ignominious and heroic, of an antiquated, quasi-medieval state which, at its height, had measured itself confidently against Habsburg Austria, striven for power in Russia, and scorned the pretensions of the Hohenzollern electors. The partitioning states soon discovered that by annexing large Polish territories and populations they had bequeathed to themselves a problem of political integration which, as modern nationalism spread through central Europe, proved to be increasingly intractable. The “Polish question,” settled in the treaty of 1797, and then again in 1815, never ceased to impinge on the minds of the governors of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, sometimes with the weight of an incubus, until their empires, antiquated in turn, collapsed in the wake of World War I.
The War Scare of 1831 and Prussian—South German Plans for the End of Austrian Dominance in Germany
Authors: Billinger Robert D.
Published: December 2008

The plan of theDeutschtümmlerhas been shattered…,” Metternich wrote exultantly to a subordinate in Berlin in November of 1831. Despite the advice of his foreign minister, Count Christian von Bernstorff, King Frederick William of Prussia had just agreed that any Prussian-South German military agreement had to be preceded by a preliminary political understanding between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was so relieved by this turn of events because he had been sure that current Prussian-South German military discussions were leading, not to plans for the defense of Germany in the face of the threatening French revolutionary government, but to the reorganization of the German Confederation along constitutional lines—under the aegis of Prussia. From Metternich's perspective such a change of politics and political leadership in Germany would only cause dissension among the German governments and benefit only their common enemy— “the all-devouring revolution.”
Class and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Center Party and the Social Democrats in Württemberg
Authors: Blackbourn David G.
Published: December 2008

Between 1890 and 1914 the Center party was, in Friedrich Naumann's words, “the measure of all things” in German politics. Throughout this period it possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and held the balance of power between left and right. Its importance from the standpoint of Bismarck's successors as chancellor stemmed from the electoral and parliamentary decline of the National Liberals and Conservatives, the parties which had formed theKartellthrough which Bismarck governed the Reichstag. After 1890 these no longer commanded a majority, and other parties had to be won over by the government. With the Social Democrats permanently hostile, this narrowed the government's choice down to the Progressives and Center, either of which would give theKartellparties a majority, and both of which were to be used to this effect. However, the Progressives were used only sparingly (above all during the Biilow Bloc of 1907–9) because of their increasing shift to the left. The historic reason for this was the party's antimilitarism; and this move to the left was reinforced by fears among Progressive leaders that their supporters might otherwise defect to the Social Democrats. The Center was therefore the only alternative. For most of the Wilhelmine period successive chancellors depended for their parliamentary majorities on the Center, which in turn showed itself willing to become a “party of government.”
Revolutionary Pomerania, 1919–20: A Study in Majority Socialist Agricultural Policy and Civil-Military Relations
Authors: Kohler Eric D.
Published: December 2008

In the past twenty years the German Revolution of 1918–19 has been the subject of an ongoing debate. In chronological order the discussion has focused on 1) the Majority Socialists' fateful alliance with the unreformed army officer corps for the purpose of suppressing Bolshevism; 2) the thesis that the republic's institutions were crippled from birth because they were “improvised” under pressure of military and governmental collapse; 3) the search for a “third way,” i.e., for an alternative to Bolshevism or bourgeois parliamentary democracy that would have provided a healthier start for the Weimar Republic.
Humanism and the Reformation in Germany
Authors: Kittelson James M.
Published: December 2008

The tendency of historians to characterize complex phenomena with some single commanding idea is nowhere more evident than in the status of current scholarship on the relationship between humanism and the Reformation in Germany. Beginning with the assumption that Martin Luther (or even his theology disembodied from the man) illustrates in an important sense what is meant by “Reformation,” scholars have analyzed this problem almost exclusively in theological terms. The result has been that, in the judgment of all but a few, the initial alliance between Luther and the humanists was founded upon a theological misunderstanding, and its ultimate breakup came because the likes of Erasmus, Zasius, Reuchlin, and Wimpheling decided to remain true to what had been their own religious convictions all along. Thus, with the queen of the sciences their guide, scholars have found and mapped a vast gulf between humanism and the Reformation, at least in Germany.
The Reich Government versus Saxony, 1923: The Decision to Intervene
Authors: Pryce Donald B.
Published: December 2008

Late in October 1923, troops of the German Reichswehr removed the government of Saxony and in the process touched off yet another political crisis in Berlin, one which nearly destroyed the Weimar Republic. This event in Saxony was not unprecedented, for the Reich had used force to remove state (Land) governments in 1919. But while the earlier interventions demonstrated a new republic's determination to enforce order, the intervention in 1923 reflected the weakness and confusion of a political system prematurely aged by five years of dissension and economic collapse. Gustav Stresemann's Great Coalition, in power at the time of the intervention, appeared to some knowledgeable observers, including Stresemann, the last chance to save the republic during the chaos produced by French intrusion into the Ruhr and the collapse of the currency. Talk of a dictatorship was in the air as men, groping for adequate words to measure catastrophe, went about gravely intoning “finis Germaniae.” Although this time both Germany and the republic escaped doom, the Saxon affair destroyed the Great Coalition and later ended Stresemann's career as chancellor. Since the men responsible understood something of the risks involved for the republic, it seems worthwhile to inquire into the way in which the dispute grew between Saxony and the Reich government and into the process by which the Reich reached its decision to intervene.
The Genesis of Youthful Radicalism: Hesse-Nassau, 1806–19
Authors: Wegert Karl H.
Published: December 2008

The murder of the minor reactionary poet and alleged Russian spy August von Kotzebue in March 1819 by the Jena student Karl Ludwig Sand was a clarion calling the forces of conservatism in Germany to unite against dissidents and extremists in the universities and in the student reform movement, theBurschenschaft. Metternich, reacting to what appeared to be a groundswell of opposition, wrote Friedrich von Gentz in June that the political stability of Central Europe would not be threatened by academics and professors; rather, any threat would likely come from the more practical-mindedAdvocaten, or counselors at law. Mathias Edler von Rath, Austrian member from April 1820 until June 1824 on the Mainz Central Investigating Commission, formed in September 1819 by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt on Main to investigate “revolutionary activities” in Germany since 1810, concluded that there were no more than eight key “facts” that deserved the Commission's attention: six of these had occurred in one specific area of the Southwest—the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Duchy of Nassau.
Democracy or Socialism? A Case Study ofVorwärtsin the 1890s
Authors: Dominick Raymond
Published: December 2008

Interpreters who would make Karl Marx a democrat argue that a correctly informed socialist agitation can combine with economic conditions to create majority support for a proletarian revolution and a communist society. When the agitators themselves disagree about socialist theory, however, a dilemma is created. Should party leaders pose as guardians of orthodoxy and muzzle intraparty dissent, to the obvious detriment of democracy, or should they tolerate criticism of socialist dogma, and thereby perhaps weaken the chance for a successful revolution? Before Lenin imposed his answer to these questions upon the communist movement, the world's first mass-based and avowedly Marxist party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), grappled inconclusively with this intraparty dilemma of democratic socialism.
Jacob Boehme and the Thirty Years' War
Authors: Weeks Charles Andrew
Published: December 2008

The Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, was occasioned, if not caused, by complex disputes over religion. Fought mainly in Germany, it was a European war, involving powers from Spain to Poland. The three decades of merciless warfare in the heart of Europe undermined the old awareness of a universal Christendom, shattered the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, and contributed to the consolidation of the territorial entity or nation state. The war ended with Germany weakened and divided, and with the once proud Kingdom of Bohemia bereft of its former national and confessionla identity.
Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur
Authors: Steinweis Alan E.
Published: December 2008

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany's most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society. With the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent social and political turmoil, the party stood ready to receive, organize, and mobilize Germans from all social strata.
OvercomingKleindeutschland: The Politics of Historical Mythmaking in the Weimar Republic
Authors: Suval Stanley
Published: December 2008

When in 1919 Friedrich Meinecke gave the highest priority to a “union with our Austrian brothers,” he was not alone in the historical profession. Implicit in this demand was a new political role for the Austrians that had been scarcely thought possible before 1918. This political conception quite naturally influenced historical writing. “TheAnschluss,” wrote Hans Herzfeld, “was one of the strongest forces in Weimar historical thought.” This was true although the acceptance ofAnschlussseemed to violate the heretofore preponderantkleindeutschtradition in German historiography. This paper traces the attempt of these new forces to undermine the oldkleindeutschhistory.
Local Authority and the SS State: The Conflict over Population Policy in Danzig-West Prussia, 1939–1945
Authors: Levine Herbert S.
Published: December 2008

The notion that Hitler's Third Reich was a monolithic and efficient dictatorship has by now been safely buried, although it may persist in the popular imagination. This essay is intended as a contribution to the newer phase of the historical postmortem on National Socialism, the attempt to trace the precise mechanism of decision-making and internal policy-diversion in the Third Reich. Distortion of policy, as the result of disagreements among leaders or of bureaucratic sabotage, is a feature common to all modern political systems. In the grim context of the Third Reich, all attempts to distort or divert policy which tended to ameliorate inhuman aspects of Hitler's rule have been dignified by the term “resistance.” This study will show that successful local resistance was possible, even to the SS, perhaps the most powerful political force in the wartime Reich. The inquiry has its juridical aspects, since admission of the existence of successful resistance to policies and organizations declared by international and German courts to have been criminal, resistance even by those who accepted the basic premises of the regime, implies a varied distribution of criminal guilt. This distribution will not be attempted here, but the judicial analogy should not be forgotten. The historian is relieved of the responsibility of passing sentence, but, like the judge, he is concerned with more than the determination of individual actions. An understanding of the political system of Hitler's state requires as well an investigation of motivation.
Cotta and Napoleon: The French Pursuit of theAllgemeine Zeitung
Authors: Moran Daniel J.
Published: December 2008

In contrast to virtually every other aspect of Napoleon's German policy, his treatment of the German press has never been subject to much scholarly controversy. For good reason: on the one occasion when Napoleon had a German publisher entirely in his hands, he had him shot—an act whose simplicity, indeed finality, does not leave much room for quibbling as to details. The execution of J. P. Palm did not reflect Napoleon's entire policy; but it may serve as a reminder that, among the ruling personalities of Europe, it was the Emperor of the French who esteemed the power of the press most highly. Napoleon had seen an aroused nation first hand, and as the leader of Europe's first postrevolutionary society he brought to the regulation of public opinion a degree of determination unknown to the Old Regime. One of his first acts as First Consul had been to suppress most of the newspapers published in France, and he soon domesticated those that remained. His aim was not to expel public opinion from the political arena, but to remove it from the hands of the public, and to make it serve him. The same purpose guided his press policy in Germany. As the young Count Metternich noted in a dispatch from Paris, the new century would be “a century of words,” and Napoleon meant his word to be the last.
Eighteenth–Century German Opinions about Education for Women
Authors: Petschauer Peter
Published: December 2008

Fullyfive decades before Olympe de Gouges, Mary Woll–stonecraft, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel spoke out for the equality of men and women, Dorothea Christiane Leporin, Germany's first female medical doctor, challenged the readers of herThorough Investigation of the Causes which Prevent the Female Sex from Studyingto free themselves from the idea that all women are destined to serve husband, house, and children. As she put it: “If one admits that the female sex is capable of learning, then one must also admit that it has received a calling to go with it.” She reached this conclusion by accepting the assumption that men and women are equally suited for intellectual endeavors and then questioning all real and fictitious obstacles that were placed in the way of female study. Like all her known contemporaries, Leporin did not want to press all women into advanced study, which according to her would cause disorder, but she pleaded eloquently for the removal of prejudices and obstacles to talent.
State Power and Local Interests in Prussian Cities: Police in the Düsseldorf District, 1848–1914
Authors: Spencer Elaine Glovka
Published: December 2008

In late nineteenth-century Prussia, as in other industrializing societies, urban policing took on unprecedented significance with uniformed patrolmen becoming, before the century ended, the most visible and ubiquitous representatives of governmental authority. For both the leading officials of the Prussian state and the elites of that state's burgeoning industrial cities, the creation of large urban police forces in the decades between the revolution of 1848 and the First World War raised a number of vital questions. Of particular concern were the problems of defining and legitimizing the role of the new police and of determining the limits of police powers. Related debates centered on the questions of who should control and who should pay for the maintenance of greatly expanded urban police departments.
Lawyers, Liberalism, and Procedure: The German Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79
Authors: Ledford Kenneth F.
Published: December 2008

AlthoughFranz Schnabel described the nineteenth century as the “century of the formalRechtsstaat,” most political and social historians of the GermanKaiserreichhave paid surprisingly little attention to the legal aspect of the development of society and polity. Textbooks in German history contain only brief mention of the enactment of legal reforms, either naming them without comment or subsuming them under administrative initiatives of the National Liberal party. More importantly, even standard works on the history of liberalism give precious little space to the important legislative reforms that are the focus of this essay; James J. Sheehan devotes only a paragraph to the adoption of the Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79, and Dieter Langewiesche stresses the importance of legal unity and these reforms to liberals, but also in only one paragraph. In general, historians of German liberalism have left efforts to examine the development and unification of the German legal system after 1848 to legal historians, who are housed in Germany in the separate legal faculties and focus their work primarily on the history of legal doctrine. By failing to examine law as a historical artifact, however, political and social historians have also overlooked the Weberian message that law is a crucial analytical entry point into any understanding of modem society. Contemporary legal scholars stress that legal and social systems are inextricably intertwined, and that neither can be understood without a grasp of the other. Understanding legal discourse helps historians understand broader social discourse.
Luxury or Public Investment? Productivity and Planning for Weimar Recovery
Authors: Lieberman Ben
Published: December 2008

The late Detlev Peukert noted that historians of the Weimar Republic have tended to devote their attention to the republic's first and last years. They have much to say about the Weimar Republic up to the end of the inflation in 1923 and 1924. However, they tend to jump from Weimar's troubled early years to its catastrophic disintegration between 1929 and 1933. Skirting the middle years, historians have generally overlooked the problem of recovery in Germany during the 1920s. In doing so, they have ignored a topic of central concern to Germans during the twenties.
The End of the “Final Solution”?: Nazi Plans to Ransom Jews in 1944
Authors: Breitman Richard , Aroson Shlomo
Published: December 2008

It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.
Rehearsal for “Reinhard”?: Odilo Globocnik and the Lublin Selbstschutz
Authors: Black Peter R.
Published: December 2008

The essential goal of Hitler's National Socialist ideology and its implementation by Heinrich Himmler's SS was the military conquest of “living space” from the eastern borders of the Reich to the Ural Mountains. Within this newly won territory, peoples perceived to be of “alien” race—and hence a danger to the future German Reich—were to be eliminated entirely or intellectually decapitated through the elimination of their political, cultural, and religious elites, leaving a “residue” to provide manual labor for German settlers. Himmler's appointment as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums—RKFDV) on 7 October 1939, in the wake of the successful Blitzkrieg against Poland, established his SS and police as the primary executive apparatus for this project. The elimination of the Jews formed an integral part of this “racial restructuring of Eastern Europe.”
Some Reflections on the Problem of Austria, Germany, and Mitteleuropa
Authors: Boyer John W.
Published: December 2008

The dual assignment of this presentation was to review some of the issues facing historians of Austria as they try to situate Austrian history within the wider cultural and social realm of “Central Europe” and to present some brief reflections to my colleagues who study Germany on the possible role of Austrian history in shaping the interpretive choices they may make in the future. Since these remarks were offered in a self-consciously “German” symposium (organized with the support of the DAAD), I took it as a given that internal interpretive problems of Hapsburg and/or successor state history peculiar to those arenas would not necessarily be relevant, even though they did intrude in any event. Although these brief comments were conceived in September 1989 and presented the following month, the events of November 1989 and October 1990 have only enhanced my concerns, and subsequent revisions to this text have not changed the basic character of my remarks.
Political Sociology and the “Linguistic Turn”
Authors: Childers Thomas
Published: December 2008

Aswe enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.
Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From Below”?
Authors: Crew David F.
Published: December 2008

Thereis an insatiable demand in the Federal Republic for accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Just about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the wordAlltagin its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs,Volkshochschulenand youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” (Geschichtswerkstätten), inspired by the leftist-populism of the Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm,Alltagsgeschichtehas not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners ofAlltagsgeschichtehave never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses (die Vielen). Indeed,Alltagsgeschichtehas challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony ofStrukturgeschichtewithin the German historical “guild” (Zunft) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research.Alltagsgeschichteoriginally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history (Strukturgeschichte) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Visions of Utopia: Social Emancipation, Technological Progress, and Anticapitalism in Nazi Inventor Policy, 1933–1945
Authors: Gispen Kees
Published: December 2008

Inthis paper I would like to relate some of the results of my specialized research on Nazi inventor policy to themes and interpretations with which many students of the Third Reich already are familiar. One of those themes is the relationship between big business and the Nazi state. An influential hypothesis in this area centers on the notion of a “power cartel,” based on the insight that Nazi Germany was not a dictatorship in which all sectors of society were suppressed with equal force. According to the “power-cartel” interpretation, which incorporates elements of the Marxist perspective on the relationship between capitalism and National Socialism, the Third Reich was governed by an informal coalition of the Nazis, the military, and big business. This fundamental idea is then qualified by two additional observations. First, the Nazi movement is broken down into factions comprising the party, Labor Front, and SA on the one hand, and the Gestapo and SS on the other hand. The former are seen to lose power as time went by while that latter gained it, which helps explain the regime's increasing brutality and its accelerating descent into barbarism. Second, the idea of a changing balance of power is also applied to the power cartel as a whole. The point here is to account for the gradual loss of power by the military and big business. Their relatively advantageous positions in the regime’s early years steadily eroded, producing a very different weighting among the cartel’s members by the time World War II ended, without, however, ever completely destroying it.
Constructing the Mythic Present in the East German Cinema: Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine and the 11th Plenum of 1965
Authors: Feinstein Joshua
Published: December 2008

Spurder Steine (Trail of Stones) is probably the best-known of the approximately two dozen East German films that were banned by state officials. Combining epic proportions with subversive humor, the picture still retains the ability to fascinate and amuse audiences well over three decades after its completion in 1966. In one scene, its most arresting protagonist, the foreman Balla, leads his small band of carpenters across the Iunar landscape of the chemical plant under construction, where the film is set. As martial music blares in the background, the “Ballas,” conspicuously dressed in the black corduroy suits traditionally associated with their trade in Germany, march against a sea of humanity streaming toward a political rally. They rudely shove people out of their way, grope women, and chug beer. Over a loudspeaker, the Communist functionary leading the rally proclaims, “We are already building the road leading into a bright future.” In response, Balla remarks to his cronies, “They comfort you with the future like the priests with the hereafter, but by the time you get there, you're already dead.”
Company Housing As Urban Planning in Germany, 1870–1940
Authors: Honhart Michael
Published: December 2008

Animportant 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 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy
Authors: Stieg Margaret F.
Published: December 2008

TheGesetz 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 U.S. High Commission and German Nationalism, 1949–52
Authors: Buscher Frank M.
Published: December 2008

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.
The Discourse of Usury: Relations Between Christians and Jews in the German Countryside, 1880–1914
Authors: Smith Helmut Walser
Published: December 2008

Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the essay that follows, I do not intend to further document the history of this prejudice in the realm of print culture. Rather, I will explore the way in which its central assumption (namely that Jews and Christians possessed radically different and religiously specific conceptions of work and trade) configured, entered into, and also obfuscated rural relations between Christians and Jews.
National History—National Imagery: The Role of History in Postwar Austrian Nation-Building
Authors: Thaler Peter
Published: December 2008

By all accounts, the Austrians of the late twentieth century live in a stable Western European country with a secure sense of self. The concept of Austrian nationhood finds solid support in the country's population, which consistently displays stronger signs of national pride than its German neighbors. When the Austrian republic was reestablished from the ruins of the Third Reich in 1945, however, historical tradition did not inherently favor the development of a distinctly Austrian national consciousness. Austrians had commonly placed their Austrian identity into a wider German context, not least of all with regard to historical tradition. Thus, the contribution of historical images to the development of an Austrian national identity in the postwar era raises important questions about the interrelationship of history and society.
Who Were the German Independent Socialists? The Leipzig City Council Election of 6 December 1917
Authors: Mckibben David
Published: December 2008

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
State and Society in Pre-March Prussia: The Weavers' Uprising, the Bureaucracy, and the Association for the Welfare of Workers
Authors: Beck Hermann
Published: December 2008

On19 June 1844, two weeks after the Silesian weavers' uprising, theVossische Zeitungran an article on Langenbielau's (one of the centers of the uprising) leading textile manufacturer and the remains of his once stately mansion. “No windows, only the debris of the window pane, mullions and transoms of window crosses are broken or pulled out, where windows were barred, the bars are smashed, here and there doors are crashed or broken up, wrecked equipment is piled up in front of houses, walls are strewn with distinct signs of stone throws … We walk on rubble wherever our foot turns … Furniture, hardly recognizable in the small pieces into which it has been smashed, torn papers and torn wall papers everywhere, beds are cut open, stoves broken apart.”
From Enlightenment to Revolution: Hertzberg, Schlözer, and the Problem of Despotism in the LateAufklärung
Authors: Melton James Van Horn
Published: December 2008

That many German intellectuals greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but showed little interest in importing it across the Rhine, is a well-known paradox in German history. For Jacques Droz this paradox resulted from the preoccupation of most German intellectuals with the purely ethical implications of the Revolution—in other words, the Germans dealt with the Revolution in the realm of thought but ignored it in the realm of politics. Behind this argument lay the assumption that because the Germans were for the most part “monarchists” rather than “republicans,” they were apolitical.
Imperial Cities and the Peasants' War in Germany
Authors: Sea Thomas F.
Published: December 2008

The shock administered to the power structure of southern and central German lands by the Peasants' War of 1524–25 had many ramifications. Among the most interesting was the further deterioration in the always tense relationship between the imperial cities of the area and the princes and nobility. This deterioration stemmed directly from a feeling on the part of the latter two groups that the imperial cities had not supported the suppression of the rebellion as fully as they might have. Indeed, despite the fact that only a few imperial cities actually cooperated in any way with the peasants, some princes charged the leadership of all imperial cities with secret support for the rebels.
From Second to Third Reich: The Problem of Continuity in German Foreign Policy
Authors: Jarausch Konrad H.
Published: December 2008

Ever since Heraklites' dictum “panta rhei,” historians have debated the relative priority of continuity and change. Although Nazi and Allied propagandists saw the Third Reich as the fulfillment of earlier traditions, postwar scholars stressed the unprecedented nature of its genocide, political repression, and external aggression. Sensitive to charges of “collective guilt,” many German historians preferred to see the Nazi era as somethingsui generis, an aberration from and not the culmination of German history. Handicapped by language, culture, and access to sources, American scholars often tended to concentrate on problems and themes within one of several airtight compartments such as the Wilhelmian Empire, Weimar Republic, or Third Reich. Because of efforts to restore the “historical consciousness of [the German] people,” the critical implications of Ludwig Dehio's and Hajo Holborn's revisionism were largely ignored. Hence the scholarly community reacted with anger and disbelief when Fritz Fischer drew attention first to the continuity of German expansionism and then to the continuity of historical apologetics in his provocative book onGerman Aims in the First World War.
Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance
Authors: Philliou Christine
Published: December 2008

Phanariots were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impediments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their participation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political arenas between the 1660s and 1821. Their rise came about just as the larger imperium was undergoing profound military and political crises precipitated by both internal threats and periodic invasions by the Russian and Habsburg Empires. While some Phanariots were stalwart servants of the sultan, others exacerbated these crises, allying with Russian officials and planning a secessionist uprising that would later unfold into the Greek War of Independence. Their ascendancy, however, is an Ottoman story—a specific outcome of Ottoman responses to the dilemmas of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
QUIVERS, LONG EXACT SEQUENCES AND HORN TYPE INEQUALITIES II
Authors: CHINDRIS CALIN
Published: December 2008

We study the set of all m-tuples (λ(1), . . ., λ(m)) of possible types of finite abelian p-groups Mλ(1), . . ., Mλ(m) for which there exists a long exact sequence Mλ(1) → ⋅⋅⋅ → Mλ(m). When m=3, we recover W. Fulton's (Eigenvalues of majorized Hermitian matrices and Littlewood-Richardson coefficients (Special Issue: Workshop on Geometric and combinatorial Methods in the Hermitian Sum Spectral Problem), Linear Algebra Appl. 319(1–3) (2000), 23–36) results on the possible eigenvalues of majorized Hermitian matrices.
CONSTANT SCALAR CURVATURE HYPERSURFACES WITH SECOND-ORDER UMBILICITY
Authors: COLARES ANTONIO GERVASIO , ECHAIZ-ESPINOZA FERNANDO ENRIQUE
Published: December 2008

We extend the concept of umbilicity to higher order umbilicity in Riemannian manifolds saying that an isometric immersion is k-umbilical when APk−1(A) is a multiple of the identity, where Pk(A) is the kth Newton polynomial in the second fundamental form A with P0(A) being the identity. Thus, for k=1, one-umbilical coincides with umbilical. We determine the principal curvatures of the two-umbilical isometric immersions in terms of the mean curvatures. We give a description of the two-umbilical isometric immersions in space forms which includes the product of spheres $S^{k}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}})\times S^{k}(\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}})$ embedded in the Euclidean sphere S2k+1 of radius 1. We also introduce an operator φk which measures how an isometric immersion fails to be k-umbilical, giving in particular that φ1 ≡ 0 if and only if the immersion is totally umbilical. We characterize the two-umbilical hypersurfaces of a space form as images of isometric immersions of Einstein manifolds.
COMPACT TOEPLITZ OPERATORS WITH CONTINUOUS SYMBOLS
Authors: LE TRIEU
Published: December 2008

For any rotation-invariant positive regular Borel measure ν on the closed unit ball $\overline{\mathbb{B}}_n$ whose support contains the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}_n$, let L2a be the closure in L2 = L2($\overline{\mathbb{B}}_n, dν) of all analytic polynomials. For a bounded Borel function f on $\overline{\mathbb{B}}_n$, the Toeplitz operator Tf is defined by Tf(ϕ) = P(fϕ) for ϕ ∈ L2a, where P is the orthogonal projection from L2 onto L2a. We show that if f is continuous on $\overline{\mathbb{B}}_n$, then Tf is compact if and only if f(z) = 0 for all z on the unit sphere. This is well known when L2a is replaced by the classical Bergman or Hardy space.
Diagnosis of schistosomiasis using recombinant fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase from a Formosan strain ofSchistosoma japonicum
Authors: Peng S.-Y. , Tsaihong J.C. , Fan P.-C. , Lee K.-M.
Published: December 2008

Schistosoma japonicumobtained from Taiwan is a zoophilic strain that only infects domestic and small animals. Recombinant fructose-1,6-bisphosphate aldolase (FBPA) derived from this strain was used as an antigen in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the diagnosis of human schistosomiasis. The full-length DNA sequence of FBPA was found to be 1092 bp, encoding a protein of 363 amino acid residues, with a molecular mass of 39.6 kDa. A total of 120 participants were recruited from China and Taiwan to evaluate the diagnostic value of this recombinant protein. In these participants, 34 were found to be infected withS. japonicum, 16 withAscaris lumbricoides, 15 with hookworm, 13 withParagonimus westermaniand 13 withClonorchis sinensis, whereas 29 had no ova on faecal examination. Western blot analysis showed that the recombinant FBPA reacts strongly with schistosome ova-positive sera. The sensitivity and specificity of ELISA with FBPA were found to be 85.3% and 93.0%, respectively. These results indicate that FBPA derived from the Formosan strain ofS. japonicumcan be used for the diagnosis of human schistosomiasis.
Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy
Authors: Kirkland Kenneth
Published: December 2008

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.