bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Issue of Parliamentary Suffrage at the Frankfurt National Assembly
Authors: Rose Carol
Published: December 2008

Universal suffrage is a commonplace in today's political world. In modern Western states it seems self-explanatory that there should be a general right to vote, or at least the pretense of such a right; and it is rather the exception to universal suffrage that requires explanation—at best as a quaint local peculiarity, at worst as a sign of pigheadedness or paranoia. In our era of bland populism, it is easy to forget the nineteenth century's passion over suffrage matters. But passion there was: from the sanscullottes of the 1790's to the suffragettes of the 1910's, no decade of the nineteenth century, no part of the Atlantic world was entirely free from this all-important question. Indeed suffrage issues erupted regularly whenever and wherever internal political tensions ran highest. Anti-Bourbon agitation in Restoration France, Chartist demands in England, Negro emancipation in the United States, demands for reform of Bismarckian Germany's Prussian heartland—these issues spanned the century, and they all contained at least some taint of the suffrage question. The European revolutions of 1848–49 came roughly at the mid-point of this century-long suffrage debate, and these revolutions too raised in various ways the issue of the right to vote. And one of the most interesting discussions of the franchise question came in February and March of 1849, when Germany's abortive constitutional convention, the Frankfurt National Assembly, turned its attention to an Electoral Law for the lower house of the projected national representative body.
Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy before 1914
Authors: Mommsen Wolfgang J.
Published: December 2008

Gordon Craig recently deplored the fact that political history, and particularly diplomatic history, no longer attracts the attention of historians or the public as much as has been the case up to now. In his opinion there is no proper reason why this should be so; foreign relations and diplomacy matter very much indeed, and deserve to be studied by historians on their own merits, at least up to a point. However, there are valid reasons why diplomatic history nowadays is in a sort of crisis, and why more and more historians have come to believe that it is not enough to study the diplomatic files, however diligently this may be done, and to inquire about the deeds and motives of the fairly small groups that monopolize decision-making in foreign relations. Most historians nowadays are agreed upon the principle that foreign policy must be explained just as much by finding the social and economic factors conditioning it, as by analyzing the activities going on the level of official diplomacy.
Johannes Brenz and the Institutionalization of the Reformation in Württemberg
Authors: Estes James M.
Published: December 2008

Since World War II Reformation scholarship, both in Germany and outside it, has tended increasingly to turn away from an all too exclusive concentration on Luther and Saxony in order to look at other reformers and other areas. Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) is one of those reformers, and the Duchy of Württemberg, where Brenz's career reached its fulfillment, is one of those areas.
The History of the SS Totenkopfdivision and the Postwar Mythology of the Waffen SS
Authors: Sydnor Charles W.
Published: December 2008

Among the international community of scholars, journalists, and laymen who share an interest in the history of Nazi Germany, one of the most frequently discussed and persistently controversial subjects of that era is the Waffen SS. Attempts to define what the Waffen SS was lead invariably to questions about the extent to which the Waffen SS was or was not an integral part of the overall SS organization and the degree to which it was or was not involved in the criminal acts attributed to the Schutzstaffel.
Ministerial Responsibility and Impeachment in Prussia 1848–63
Authors: Hahn Erich
Published: December 2008

This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill theirRechtsstaatideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.
Occupational Origins of Prussia's Generals, 1871–1914
Authors: Hughes Daniel J.
Published: December 2008

Thesoul of die Prussian army is in its officers,’ wrote the Prussian general, military theorist, and writer Baron Colmar von der Goltz in his widely read bookThe Nation in Arms. These officers, he continued, must be recruited from the privileged social classes “who exercise even in ordinary life a natural superiority over the masses.’ Goltz went on to underline the army's concern over restricting its leadership to the better elements of society when he cautioned that the nation's merchants, manufacturers, and private gentlemen were unlikely to provide good long-term officers.
Liberalism, Nationalism, and Degeneration: The Case of Max Nordau
Authors: Baldwin P. M.
Published: December 2008

How anyone today first comes to hear the name Max Nordau says much about his interests. He might, if his literary tastes so dictate, chance across him in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Mina Harker cites Nordau as evidence that the count is a criminal and therefore of imperfectly formed mind. For Dracula's and Nordau's contemporaries, however, no such fortuitous encounters were necessary. Nordau was a household name whose most popular books appeared in scores of editions in a dozen languages. As a personality he was as colossal as his reputation. As critic, philosopher, novelist, playwright, sociologist, versifier, orator, journalist, polyglot, Zionist, psychologist, and physician, his versatility is impressive even when measured against an age when many tried their hand at more than one thing.
Update on the Captured Documents in the Former Osoby Archive, Moscow
Authors: Browder George C.
Published: December 2008

In the summer of 1992, I was able to return to the Osoby Archive, now the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections. At that time, we completed the selection process for microfilming for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive and reviewed many of the opisi, or finding aids. Consequently, I can report corrections on some errors that inevitably resulted from our first, rushed review and can provide more accurate German-language titles for some of the agencies described obscurely in English in my original report.
Infirmative Action: The Law of the Severely Disabled in Germany
Authors: Jackson Christopher R.
Published: December 2008

Disabled veterans were certainly in a rotten mood following World War I, and not without reason. A lost war, unrest at home, and physical pain were not things to celebrate. Most aggravating of all, however, were the problems associated with obtaining an adequate pension: for years after the end of the war the pension system caused bitterness among people who felt wronged by the very government that was supposed to take care of them.
Imperial Taxes and German Politics in the Fifteenth Century: An Outline
Authors: Rowan Steven
Published: December 2008

Germany in the fifteenth century was the scene of an extended struggle over the nature and scale of imperial institutions, and much of this conflict boiled down to the question of who was to pay taxes and how much. In the first half of the century, two alternative methods of financing the Reich emerged, and in the years around 1500 only one of these two methods proved to be politically practical. The style of imperial taxation which won out, the Matrikel, has long been studied in detail, and its workings are well known to any student of imperial institutions.1 From the first Matrikel in 1422 until the end of the Old Reich in 1806, negotiated quotas were the basis for payments to the Reich made by each of the three-hundred-odd estates. Paying the listed quota in men or money fell in principle on the government of the individual estate, which had to find its own way of raising the money or of passing the costs on to subjects. This method of raising public revenues was not, however, the only system of taxation which contemporaries thought to be possible or desirable. The Matrikel won out only after princely estates tried and failed to gain the adoption of a monetary tax paid directly by the population in proportion to individual wealth or income. I will first consider the development of imperial direct taxes in the fifteenth century, and then I will show that the defeat of that tax helped to determine the structure and scale of Reich institutions throughout the early modern period.
German Women and the Revolution of 1848: Kathinka Zitz-Halein and the Humania Association
Authors: Zucker Stanley
Published: December 2008

TheRevolution of 1848 has proven to be a continuously interesting field for historical research. Whether one sees it as a turning point where German history failed to turn, as an uprising bungled by a bunch of impractical professors, as a revolution undermined by ethnic hostility, or as a revolution which failed because it ignored the problems of the lower classes, the question of its failure has been almost as fruitful a focus of research as other countries' successful revolutions. Historians have also been attracted to it because it seems to provide outlines and previews of future events in German history. It marks, we are told, the growing politicization of the masses, the birth of social conflict, the inception of national struggles, or the first sign of the liberals' political cowardice.
The Emotional Side of Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany (Theory and Example)
Authors: Trepp Anne-Charlott
Published: December 2008

Fora long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.
Introduction to the Theme
Authors: Harris James F.
Published: December 2008

Consideringall that is known about the place of anti-Semitism in German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are relatively few studies of anti-Semitism within a religious context. This is surprising given that Germany was and is more evenly divided numerically between Catholics and Protestants than almost any other large European nation, (about 60 percent Protestant to 40 percent Catholic). Most studies of anti-Semitism in the last two centuries have focused on various secular motivations. When scholars do choose to investigate religious anti-Semitism, almost all concentrate on Evangelical Lutherans or on Catholics, but not on both. Likewise, many historians consider religious anti-Semitism to be anachronistic. Yet many study the incidence of secular or modern anti-Semitism within a religious context whether institutional or popular, seldom paying equal attention to that context. Additionally, studies of anti-Semitism emphasized Protestantism and the Protestant north of Germany in particular, because, after 1870, that was where anti-Semitic political parties, movements, and groups appeared to thrive.
The Great Berlin Beer Boycott of 1894
Authors: Turk Eleanor L.
Published: December 2008

Consider the subject of beer. For millennia this homely brew has been a staple of the human diet and a central ingredient of our social activity. Records dating as far back as 2800 B.c. show that there were four types of beer brewed in the Babylonian culture, and that the ancient Egyptians were often sealed into their tombs with a ceremonial supply of the frothy beverage. But of all the cultures producing beer, the Germans are the most closely associated with it in modern times. It was the Germans who perfected the practice of adding wild hops to the brew to give it its characteristic tang, and also to help preserve it. Whereas elsewhere in northern Europe brewing was usually a cottage activity, the Germans began very early to treat brewing as an important commercial activity. In 1146, even before the founding of the great city of Munich, the abbey in Weihenstephan in Bavaria received a patent from the local duke to brew beer. In 1516 the Bavarian dukes instituted the brewing code which stipulated that thereafter beer must be brewed naturally with grain, hops, water, and yeast. This has since been the standard for purity in brewing throughout Germany.
Assignment to Armageddon: Ernst Jünger and Curzio Malaparte on the Russian Front, 1941–43
Authors: Evans Arthur R.
Published: December 2008

Close contemporaries, heroes of the Great War for which they volunteered in their teens, both becoming officers when they were barely twenty, then gravely wounded and decorated for outstanding valor, Ernst Jünger (1895– ) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) spent the period of “l'entre deux guerres” in roughly the same circumstances. Malaparte began as a combat observer with the Italian legation in Poland where he saw Trotsky's army lay siege to Warsaw in 1920, Jünger as a Reichswehr officer moving between Hanover and Berlin during the deep unrest of the immediate postwar years; both men at this time wrote books based on their war experiences which excited attention, Jünger's memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920), and Malaparte's polemic account of the retreat from Caporetto, La Rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921); the Italian became an early and militant Fascist, no stranger to the hooliganism of Mussolini's squadristi; the German a national bolshevist, militarist, and a friend of such street fighters as Ernst von Salomon and Otto Strasser. Jünger like Malaparte was, for a time, a journalist, and his editing of the weekly Standarte, with its strong nationalist ideology, found its parallel in Malaparte's editorship of the radical Fascist Conquisto dello stato.
Social Control and the Volksschule in Vormärz Prussia
Authors: Barkin Kenneth
Published: December 2008

The ascension to power and twelve-year rule of National Socialism has had an enormous and continuing impact on the writing of German history. Since the early fifties, the leitmotiv of scholarship has been the search for the origins of Nazi successes in the peculiarities of Germany's or rather Prussia's history in the nineteenth century. Even with the emergence of social and economic history in the late sixties, the task of unearthing National Socialism's roots remained unchanged, although the tools altered and a more sophisticated strategy was adopted. A pervasive tendency developed to view all contemporary institutions as props of the authoritarian Prussian regime. Whereas pre–World War II scholarship glorified the Prussian past uncritically, the past two decades have witnessed across-the-board condemnation.
Schopenhauer, Austria, and the Generation of 1905
Authors: Luft David S.
Published: December 2008

Despite the substantial scholarly interest in Austrian intellectual history during the past decade, what we have learned about Austrian intellectual life remains isolated from our received models of Central European German culture. Scholars who study Austrian philosophy and literature are inclined to emphasize the “diachronic constants” of an intellectual tradition that is unfamiliar to most students of German philosophy, literature, and history. Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century frequently ignore key Austrian figures altogether; major literary figures, such as Grillparzer or Stifter, are often regarded as peripheral in discussions of German literature; and political historians continue to imagine German history in terms of Prussia and the achievements of Bismarck. Thus, our knowledge of the German culture of the Habsburg Monarchy or of Vienna at the turn of the century still has not been brought into relation to a model of German culture that is dominated by Northern, Protestant, and idealist traditions. The relations within this wider realm of German culture are far too complex to submit to easy summary, and any honest attempt at empiricism confronts a staggering mass of potential evidence, even in the case of the more limited question of the influence of North German culture in nineteenth-century Austria.
Private Equity, Social Inequity: German Judges React to Inflation, 1914–24
Authors: Hughes Michael L.
Published: December 2008

Respondingto a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them theRechtsstaat(variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined theRechtsstaatto make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.
The Berlin Socialist Trials of 1896: An Examination of Civil Liberty in Wilhelmian Germany
Authors: Turk Eleanor L.
Published: December 2008

Punctually at 8:00 A.M. on 26 November 1895, teams of police officers in Berlin began to search the homes of nearly eighty members of the Social Democratic Party, and the city offices of their organizations. These surprise raids, over by 10:00 a.m., were ordered by the Prussian Minister of Interior, Ernst Köller, to obtain evidence that the Socialist organizations had been working with one another to promote their political goals. In 1895 it was illegal in Prussia, and in most of the other states of the German Empire, for political associations of any kind to work together. Yet the evidence so efficiently confiscated on that gray November morning ultimately put not only the Socialists on trial, but government policy and the fundamental political rights of German citizens as well. Neither the national constitution nor the federal law codes provided protection for the rights of association or assembly at that time. In the absence of such guarantees, the political organizations had to cope with the particularities of the various state laws.
The “Skeleton Key” — American Foreign Policy, European Unity, and German Rearmament, 1949–54
Authors: Schwartz Thomas A.
Published: December 2008

An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?
“Ehe Türckisch als Bäpstisch”: Lutheran Reflections on the Problem of Empire, 1623–28
Authors: Headley John M.
Published: December 2008

No question today … either among learned men is more discussed or among the highest princes of the Christian world is more controversial than that of monarchy.…” Few persons in early seventeenth-century Europe could have spoken with greater authority on the matter of emperor and empire than that archival miner and assembler of political texts, Melchior Goldast. In his dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Bremen the political publicist proceeded to accuse the Papacy, more wolf than pastor, of having intruded upon both church and secular authority, arrogating to its own monarchy the supreme Sacerdotium and the supreme Imperium. The disturbed publicist concluded his account of papal usurpation and artifice: “If there were no Roman emperors, there would be no Roman pope: if there were no Roman pope, Roman emperors would still flourish.
Fritz Roessler and Nazism: The Observations of a German Industrialist, 1930–37
Authors: Hayes Peter
Published: December 2008

In the summer of 1985, I visited a number of German corporate archives in search of reflective writings, diaries, memoirs, private commentaries on economic or political affairs, and the like by important German businessmen of this century. Much of the trip proved disappointing, probably because little of the sort of material I wanted ever came into being, let alone remains to be found. Executives are not given as a rule, regardless of their day or domicile, to ruminative prose. At the Degussa AG in Frankfurt, however, the archivist pointed me toward a discovery: the Biographische Unterlagen of Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Roessler (1870–1937), the son of Degussa's founder, member of its five- to six-man managing group (Direktion) from 1901 to 1924, and chairman of its supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) from the latter date until his death.
Salus publica suprema lex: Prussian Businessmen in the New Era and Constitutional Conflict
Authors: Brophy James M.
Published: December 2008

On26 October 1858 I attended the swearing in of the country's leader, just as I did on 6 February 1850. In 1850, I attended as a deputy of the lower house and rebellious councillor third class; now I took part as a loyal councillor first class and even a possible ministerial candidate. This time the act had something uncommonly captivating. The prince spoke plainly but with a dignified voice and conveyed to the world the feeling that such an oath was truly not meaningless, that the Constitution had finally attained its true confirmation, and that we further stand on firm ground—as if the confusions of 1848 had never disturbed the path of legal development started in 1847.
Vienna, the 1890s: Jews in the Eyes of Their Defenders. (The Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus)
Authors: Kornberg Jacques
Published: December 2008

Advocatesfor minority rights make stringent demands upon those they defend. The relationship between the persecuted and their defenders is often a minefield of conflicting agendas, made even worse by patronizing attitudes on the one side and wounded pride on the other. One example is the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus (The Association for Defense Against Antisemitism), founded in Vienna in 1891 to combat the alarming rise of political antisemitism, unmistakable in the stunning electoral successes of the Christian Social Party led by Karl Lueger. Abwehrverein members came from Austria's elite of education and property (Bildung und Besitz): Liberal politicians, large-scale industrialists and merchants, members of the free professions, and artists. Most members were Austro-German liberals, and Liberal Reichsrat deputies sat on its board. Its founder and president was Baron Arthur Gunduccar von Suttner (1850–1902), a writer, and husband of Bertha von Suttner, recipient of the Noble Peace Prize in 1905. My intention is to explore the attitude of the Abwehrverein to Jewry, and to raise the question of whether it served Jewish interests well. But before that, a word or two must be said about the association.
Between “Investigative History” and Solid Research: The Reorganization of Historical Studies about the Former German Democratic Republic
Authors: Ernst Anna-Sabine
Published: December 2008

Thedays are gone when conferences on GDR studies were limited to a small community of cognoscenti gathered far from the bright lights of public scrutiny. The fall of the Berlin Wall changed this situation drastically. After a brief moment of panic in which the entire field threatened to disappear along with its object of study, the now historical GDR has become an attractive area of research and, with the expansion of scholarly interest, one so broad as to make recently undertaken by the University of Mannheim's program in GDR histry lists no fewer than 759 projects in progress. Although it was never completely apolitical, the field is more contested than ever nowadays. The media have been only too happy to use research results as ammunition in daily political battles. Scholars themselves are still hotly debating who should be authorized to reappraise the history of the GDR, and how they should be doing it. This conflict has long since moved beyond scholarly circles and is being carried out aggressively on the culture pages of the tone of this debate appears no less peculiar than the particular fronts and alliances that have developed around it. In the following essay I shall try to shed some light on the background of this new outbreak of scholarly politics, which is in many ways reminiscent of theHistorikerstreitof the 1980s, and then go on to introduce some of the newly founded institutions for the study of GDR history, all of them located in and around Berlin-Brandenburg.
The Soviet Union and the Renner Government of Austria, April–November 1945
Authors: Piotrowski Harry
Published: December 2008

When the Red Army moved through Eastern Europe in 1945, it faced the problem of creating what the men in the Kremlin called “friendly” governments. In several countries, Joseph Stalin in short order resolved the dilemma by putting into power Communists who had arrived in the van of his army. In the Western mind, Stalin represented a force inexorably driven by a logic inherent in all totalitarian systems. Stalin became the reincarnation of Hitler, a dictator who sought to impose his system on all territories under his sway—and whose appetite could not be sated. Such a view left little ambiguity in interpreting Stalin's foreign policy. It offered no room for an assessment that Soviet foreign policy was driven by a mix of motives, not only by aggression steeped in Communist ideology, but also by considerations of national security, opportunism, and compromise.
Self-Help and the State: Rural Cooperatives in Imperial Germany
Authors: Peal David
Published: December 2008

The consolidation of territorial states in Central Europe undermined the local customs and institutions that had shaped village life since the Middle Ages. By the end of the eighteenth century unitary law codes overrode rural customs. By distinguishing between public and private law, these codes stripped the organized village community of legal substance. Police and judicial functions once performed within the community were assumed by bureaucrats, and the state meddled with the use of local resources by liberalizing marriage and residence laws. Deprived of political autonomy, the village did remain the core economic and social unit in rural life, controlling access to communal forests and enforcing the rules of three-field agriculture. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century this limited autonomy was undermined as well. Freedom of contract, security of individual property, free transmission of property between generations, and commercialization of landed property struck at the ability of villages to control their material world in customary ways.
Gutsherrschaftin East Elbian Germany and Livonia, 1500–1800: A Critique of the Model
Authors: Melton Edgar
Published: December 2008

For over a century now, scholars have viewed the divergent paths of agrarian development east and west of the Elbe river as a watershed in German history. In the west, according to this view, peasants from the late Middle Ages on enjoyed increasing freedom from direct seigniorial interference in their social, economic, and judicial affairs. Seigniorial obligations (often commuted to cash rents) remained, as did a degree of seigniorial control over peasant lands in many regions, but peasants west of the Elbe increasingly shed the more onerous seigniorial obligations, and could generally move without the lord's permission.
The Long Reign and the Final Fall of the German Conception of History: A Historical-Sociological View
Authors: Weber Wolfgang
Published: December 2008

The study of history in Germany differs from its counterparts in other lands in that from the very beginning it possessed a unique theoretical and methodological conception, called “historicism,” to which German historians held with great tenacity until the 1960s. This point, which is hardly controversial, has recently been reinforced by Georg G. Iggers.
Mitteleuropa zur See? Austria and the German Navy Question 1848–52
Authors: Sondhaus Lawrence
Published: December 2008

The German navy of 1848–52 was born in the stormy sessions of the Frankfurt Parliament and died amid equally acrimonious debates in the diet of the restored German Confederation. Denmark's blockade of the North Sea and Baltic ports during the Schleswig-Holstein war inspired this first attempt to create a German battle fleet, and the temporary resolution of German-Danish differences, combined with the Confederation's unwillingness to assume responsibility for the warships, brought it to an early end. The scant scholarly literature on the first German navy tends to view it purely as a north German concern, but on this question, as in all other activities of the Frankfurt Parliament and German Confederation, Austria had a considerable voice in determining the outcome. During its four years of existence the fleet became a pawn in the greater Austro-Prussian struggle for hegemony over Germany.
The Local Politics of the Prussian State: Nation-Building in Kempen of the Rhine Province, 1833–48
Authors: Sackett R. E.
Published: December 2008

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.
The Thirty Years' War, the “General Crisis,” and the Origins of a Standing Professional Army in the Habsburg Monarchy
Authors: Mears John A.
Published: December 2008

One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century state building was the formation of standing armies. Kings and princes throughout Europe, responding to conditions of almost constant strife, were compelled to transform ineffective feudal levies and unruly bands of mercenaries into regularized bodies of professional troops, making ever larger and more costly military establishments instruments of rational foreign policy rather than the preserves of the old nobility or freebootingcondottieri. In building armies of the new type, European monarchs had to surmount determined opposition from two sources: the local representative bodies (estates) which were reluctant to grant rulers the powers of taxation necessary for the maintenance of permanent troops, and the mercenary colonels who were expected to relinquish their rights as independent recruiting masters and subordinate themselves to the state. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, various territorial sovereigns were successfully mastering this opposition to their political authority and were able to take an essential step in the direction of true standing armies by routinely keeping strong military forces under their command at the conclusion of a campaign, thereby diminishing their reliance on contingents approved by the provincial estates or soldiers hastily raised by private entrepreneurs to meet specific emergencies.
Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice
Authors: Jones Larry Eugene
Published: December 2008

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). HisDie Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigungor VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volksparteior DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.
Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism
Authors: Sabean David Warren
Published: December 2008

During the last several decades, the history of the self, its nature, essential shifts, and trajectory have undergone considerable re-examination. The Western Civilization textbook premise that the history of the West and the rise of individualism correlate closely with each other is being critically examined. There are a number of different historical, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses about bodies, memory, conscience, subjectivity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and gender, which have developed separate narratives about the self, frequently (mostly) in isolation from one another. Some recent feminist theory finds the thesis of individualism irrelevant for women and suggests that the self as a continuing story (autobiography) is gendered. Some theorists counter the creative possibilities of forgetting to a self constructed around a memory core. Multiple selves, schizoid selves, and decentered selves challenge older ideas of identity. The dialectic between public and private produces new problems about who “owns” the self, its image, and its location. Bodies, sexualities, and desire turn out to be shaped and disciplined within hidden forms of power. Old ideas about the rise of the individual and new ones about the pathologies of the self make the self and its history a central issue for contemporary debate.
Ultramontanism, Liberalism, Moderation: Political Mentalities and Political Behavior of the German CatholicBürgertum, 1848–1914
Authors: Thomas Mergel
Published: December 2008

In1912 the Catholic lawyer, real estate speculator, and Center Party politician, Karl Trimborn wrote to his wife about a visit he had made to their Belgian relatives:

Their Catholicism, this demonstrative insistence on the Catholic point of view, this goingthrough thick and thin while excluding all criticism is not sympathetic to me. It encourages me to contradict them and to demonstrate my liberal point of view … In no way did we have an argument, but as we said good-bye, we knew: we are different people.
A Source Analysis in German Women's History: Factory Inspectors' Reports and the Shaping of Working-Class Lives, 1878–1914
Authors: Quataert Jean H.
Published: December 2008

Sources are the building blocks of the historical narrative. The search for source materials and their critical cross-examination are integral parts of the historian's task. Yet these efforts usually are hidden from view: historians favor presenting the completed narrative rather than discussing the important steps in research. In some fields of history, the question of appropriate sources is exceedingly critical. Women's history is one such field, quite simply because the secondary literature has tended to neglect women's lives and the more common primary archival sources similarly are mute. Societal prejudices that kept women out of our documented history also have limited their appearance in the original sources. For example, Saxon officials in the textile villages of the Oberlausitz drew up detailed lists of wage-earning weavers around the mid-nineteenth century. These lists are remarkable for the absence of women, who were very active in home weaving, due to an administrative decision to limit the survey to those with the franchise.1 In the history of lower-class women are found the same complications that social historians experience in tracking the lives of people who left sketchy and incomplete records. And much of the published material that exists on working-class women challenges the historian for its class as well as gender and ideological biases.
“My Name is Ozymandias” The Kaiser in Exile
Authors: Marks Sally
Published: December 2008

Much has been written about the events of 9 November 1918 at Spa, but little about the aftermath in Holland. Some studies present sketches, often inaccurate, of “the squire of Doorn”; others remark that answers to many questions must await the opening of Dutch archives. Since the Dutch documents have now been published in profusion, answers are for the most part available.
Coming to Terms with the State: Maternalist Politics and the Development of the Welfare State in Weimar Germany
Authors: Eifert Christiane
Published: December 2008

For some time now, maternalism has been recognized as “one of women's chief avenues into the public sphere.” It has dominated the politics of women's movements in different countries, regardless of political persuasion, since at least the 1850s. The term maternalism has been used to describe “ideologies and discourses that exalted women's capacity to mother and applied to society as a whole the values they attached to that role: care, nurturance, and morality.”
Maternalism and Citizenship in Weimar Germany: the Gendered Politics of Welfare
Authors: Eley Geoff , Grossmann Atina
Published: December 2008

The three papers collected here present important arguments concerning the gendered context and content of the Weimar welfare state. They unsettle our abilityto judge the origins, the efficacy, and the abstract political value of the welfare state and its democratic claims; they have much to say about twentieth-century women's history and the coordinates of feminist politics in the period between the early 1900s and the 1960s; they have vital lessons for a politics of democratic citizenship; and they all demonstrate the payoff of taking gender seriously as a useful category of historical analysis. In fact, gender seems to have acquired particular salience, in especially public and visible ways, in the period dealt with by these papers.
“The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned to Nature”: The Movement to Preserve the NaturalHeimatfrom the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich
Authors: Williams John Alexander
Published: December 2008

Inthe early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about theHeimat(homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.
Franz Mehring and the Problems of Liberal Social Reform, in Bismarckian Germany 1884–90: The Origins of Radical Marxism
Authors: McDougall Glen R.
Published: December 2008

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.
“Das Kind”—Lord D'Abernon and the Origins of the Locarno Pact
Authors: Stambrook F. G.
Published: December 2008

In acknowledging the congratulations of Lord D'Abernon, British Ambassador to Germany, upon the successful outcome of the Locarno negotiations, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, wrote: “… we have owed much to your action and influence in Berlin—exactly how much I want some day to learn. I have been discreet in asking no questions about the origins of Stresemann's initiative.” Lord D'Abernon has long been recognized as the god-parent of the 1925 reciprocal security pact between Germany, France, and Belgium, guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which appeared to have stabilized the West European status quo. He and Carl von Schubert, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, were in the habit of referring to it in its initial stages as “das Kind,” and the Ambassador watched over its development with tender care. This paper examines D'Abernon's role in the drafting of the proposals which were to lead to the West European security pact.
Sepp Dietrich, Heinrich Himmler, and the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, 1933–1938.
Authors: Weingartner James J.
Published: December 2008

For Adolf Hitler the problem of constructing a loyal and reliable instrument of force for employment not only against external enemies but also for intra-party discipline was a frequently recurring one. In the summer of 1921 what was to become the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops, “SA”) had its genesis under the camouflage of so-called “gymnastic societies.” The SA, however, soon developed into a mass organization with an internal dynamism of its own which sometimes operated in opposition to Hitler's own aims. Friction between Hitler and Ernst Roehm began, in fact, at least as early as 1925 and precipitated Roehm's temporary self-imposed exile in Bolivia. The problematical loyalty of the SA prompted Hitler during the general party reconstruction of that year to order the organization of a special troop under the command of one of his bodyguards, Julius Schreck. This new body, at first termed Stabswache (Staff Guard), was assigned the tasks of protecting Hitler and other prominent Nazi personages and, somewhat anomalously, of securing new party members and subscriptions to the Völkischer Beobachter. Other similar groups, always small and carefully selected, made their appearance and were accorded the collective designation Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads, “SS”).
The British Orientation of Austrian Foreign Policy, 1749–1754
Authors: Browning Reed
Published: December 2008

This essay seeks to defend the contention that in the years between 1749 and 1754 Austria actively and successfully sought to retain its ties of friendship with Great Britain. The operative words in the preceding sentence are “actively” and “successfully.” They are used to emphasize certain positive aspects of Vienna's policy in these years and to dispel the notion that the Anglo-Austrian entente persisted after 1748 merely because a nascent diplomatic revolution had not yet matured. It is well known that Britain sought Austria's friendship at this time; it is likewise well known that in Vienna Count Kaunitz urged an Austrian rapprochement with France. But it is less widely realized that Austria acted with some skill and considerable patience, uncomplainingly enduring a variety of apparent insults, to maintain and then fortify its traditional bonds of cooperation with the island kingdom. What Max Braubach has demonstrated for the Franco-Prussian alliance in 1753 may also be said of the Anglo-Austrian entente in 1754: at no time since the conclusion of the peace had the two powers acted so closely and unitedly.
Hajo Holborn: A Memoir
Authors: Gilbert Felix
Published: December 2008

I MET Hajo Holborn for the first time in the fall of 1923 in the archives of the German Foreign Office. Holborn then was finishing his dissertation and editing the Radowitz papers. This first encounter was followed by many brief and hurried talks amid the files of the German Foreign Office: Holborn showed me an exciting note by Bismarck which he had just discovered, or we talked about German politics. I remember vividly a gloomy morning after the election of Hindenburg as President, which gave a severe shock to those who had set their hopes on the development of a democratic Germany. On walks in Heidelberg where Holborn became a Privatdozent in 1926 I could observe how the southern softness of this corner of Germany enchanted this quiet and deliberate North German and I felt happily confirmed in my pride in my native Baden. Perhaps because of the striking difference my next clear recollections of meetings with Holborn are again those of walks, this time in Hyde Park in London on summer afternoons of 1934. The Londoners' joyful surrender to the rare pleasures of sunny weather stood in sharp contrast to the disquieting news from the Continent on which conversation inevitably turned and which confirmed—more convincingly than anyone could have wished—the correctness and necessity of the decision to leave Germany. But I remember that I admired Holborn's ability to shake off the worry about the events in Germany and to study attentively the English life which surrounded him.