bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Heute Deutschland! Marx as Provincial Politician
Authors: Felix David
Published: December 2008

Fully trained in the appropriate skills, Karl Marx, then in Brussels, went out to meet the revolutions sweeping Europe during 1848. He had already established himself as a genial thinker, inspiring or, if the circumstances required it, annihilating propagandist, and masterly leader. From London the Central Committee of the Communist League, recognizing Marx's quality and separated from the great events by the English Channel, entrusted him with the command of the organization. Up to then the bookman and journalist Marx had been simply and unofficially the league's chief ideologist. As leader Marx began badly. In his revolutionary optimism he lost himself in a fantasy of the great French Revolution repeating itself, tried to make a Belgian revolution in its image, and got himself arrested and expelled. In Paris at his next revolutionary station, however, he oriented himself immediately, and during the month he spent there acted with economic effectiveness. He made no mistakes in Paris. On the day of his arrival Marx spoke at a meeting of the revived Society of the Rights of Man, which he had joined: “I am a revolutionary. I want to march in the shadow of the great Robespierre.” This was sentimentality and diplomacy. He was not interested in France's revolution en soi. Enlisting a number of Germans he had found there, he proceeded to make use of it as a base for his revolution.
The German Resistance: Answered and Unanswered Questions
Authors: Deutsch Harold C.
Published: December 2008

In Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, resistance, save perhaps in the ranks of the SS, sooner or later manifested itself in every quarter and over a range of forms from mere footdragging to outright conspiracy. Of the many types that could be enumerated, however, there was only one that (1) had enough access to instruments of power to give promise of attaining a turnover; (2) represented, except for the Communists, a full range of social, political, and religious forces in German society; and (3) repeatedly produced concrete plans and preparations for seizing the reins of government.
“Patrimonial” Bureaucracy and “Rational” Policy in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Hessian Recruitment Reforms, 1762–93
Authors: Taylor Peter K.
Published: December 2008

Until the 1950s the historical reputation of the eighteenth-century rulers of Hesse-Cassel rested primarily upon their practice of financing state and court expenses by leasing conscripted and trained military units to Europe's major powers. Over the course of the last forty years another picture has emerged which stresses that these petty German absolutists participated in a movement of “Enlightened” reform. More recent attempts to reconcile apparent enlightenment with a military and financial system based on involuntary military servitude have noted contradictory labyrinths of means, ends, theory, and practice. What I offer in the following pages is not an attempt to soften these antinomies but an effort to highlight them through historical analysis of the military reforms of Landgrave Frederick II (1760–85). In this way I hope to contribute to a critical account of bureaucratic “rationality” as eighteenth-century absolutist princes practiced it.
More Trouble With Henry: The Historiography of Medieval Germany in the Angloliterate World, 1888–1995
Authors: Peters Edward
Published: December 2008

HorstFuhrmann's recent survey of medieval hostility toward Germans and their political structures, chiefly the Empire, has a subtitle (Origins of German Imperialism), that might very well be applied to the fate of the historiography of medieval Germany in the English-speaking world from its considerable prominence up to the eve of the First World War to its low point in the aftermath of the second.
The French Revolution and the Modernization of Germany
Authors: Blanning T. C. W.
Published: December 2008

Historians of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have always been spoilt for choice when needing to recommend a good general account of their period. Until recently, their colleagues working on the eighteenth century and the revolutionary-Napoleonic period have been less fortunate. The second volume of Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany contains much that is original, penetrating, and powerful but is also decidedly uneven in quality, patchy in coverage, and not an easy read. A.J.P. Taylor's The Course of German History is a wild mixture of insight and perversity, immensely stimulating but marred by an extreme Germanophobia and distorted by a teleological perspective which sees all German history since the dawn of time heading inexorably for 1933: “it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.” “Modern Germany” has usually been deemed to begin in 1815, so the period which immediately preceded the Vienna settlement has been studied with a view only to what it started.
The Habsburg Foreign Ministry and Political Reform, 1801–1805
Authors: Roider Karl A.
Published: December 2008

On 6 December 1800, a courier galloped through the gates of Vienna, rushed to the Hofburg, the winter palace of the Habsburgs, and presented to Emperor Francis II a bitter message from Archduke John, the emperor's brother and commander of the Austrian armed forces in Germany. The message read that three days earlier the archduke's troops had engaged the French army under Jean Moreau at Hohenlinden, had suffered serious losses, and were falling back to Salzburg with the officers struggling to maintain order in the ranks while they did so. The news was a crushing blow to Francis. In 1799 the Austrians had begun the War of the Second Coalition with high hopes of reversing the years of defeat at the hands of Revolutionary France. Russia and Britain had agreed to cooperate closely with Austria; France seemed weaker than ever domestically; and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had caused Vienna such grief in 1797, was far away in Egypt trying to inflict damage upon the British Empire. But these hopes turned to ashes. Russia abandoned the Coalition after its army suffered serious losses in Switzerland—indeed, in their wake the Russian ruler, Tsar Paul, had thundered so vehemently against what he saw as Austrian treachery that he had broken relations with Vienna—; Britain had been able to provide much needed funds but not more-needed soldiers; and Bonaparte had returned to work his magic on both the French army and the French people. The result was Hohenlinden, Austrian defeat, and in February 1800 the Treaty of Lunéville that ceded to France primary influence in Germany and Italy.
East German Higher Education Policies and Student Resistance, 1945–1948
Authors: Connelly John
Published: December 2008

Those who opposed Communist rule in East Germany often did so because Communism in practice strongly reminded them of the fascism they had experienced in the Third Reich. The new East German regime was also one that attempted total control of people's lives; therefore it became natural to describe it as totalitär. Most sensitive to the similarities between the old and new regimes were university students. They displayed stronger direct opposition to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the years from 1946–1949 than any other social group. This is reflected in the political battles that were fought in universities during these years, leading to SED election failures in the elections of the postwar years: 1946/47 and late 1947. The latter were the last freely contested elections in East Germany until 1989. It is also reflected in the disproportionate number of students arrested by Soviet and East German authorities in the early postwar years.
The Museum für Deutsche Geschichte and German National Identity
Authors: Penny H. Glenn
Published: December 2008

Notfar from the Brandenburger Tor on Unter den Linden, visitors to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (MfDG) entered Berlin's most beautiful Baroque building. Built by Europe's finest architects under the auspices of Prussia's Kings, the Zeughaus once held a collection of the nation's weapons and Prussia's trophies of war. But since its restoration in the 1950s, this eighteenth-century edifice's long sculptured hallways and high-ceilinged rooms housed the Marxist story of the German people's struggle; images of Prussian peasants, Silesian weavers, and hardened revolutionaries were arranged in glass cases, displayed upon walls and surrounded by Socialist banners, Communist papers, and early Protestant texts. Resurrected from the annals of Germany's past, these images were brought together to fashion a German history, to create the foundation for an East German national identity, and to provide legitimization for the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED).
Rudolf Hilferding and the Theoretical Foundations of German Social Democracy, 1902–33
Authors: Smaldone William
Published: December 2008

Rudolf Hilferding's appointment as finance minister in the newly formed coalition government headed by Social Democrat Hermann Müller in June 1928 marked the peak of an outstanding political career in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A prominent member of the Party Central Committee and its “chief ideologue,” Hilferding was an ardent supporter of the coalition tactic. He opposed those in the party's left wing, who demanded that the SPD remain in permanent opposition to the bourgeois state. Instead, he advocated a more flexible political strategy that did not rule out the formation of an SPD alliance with the moderate bourgeois parties. When the SPD leadership announced its willingness to form a coalition government in the wake of the successful Social Democratic electoral performance in May 1928, it reflected the strength of Hilferding and his supporters within the party.
Women as Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Northern Germany: The Case of Stralsund, 1750–1830
Authors: Rabuzzi Daniel A.
Published: December 2008

Thepurpose of this paper is to bring to our attention the important role of women in wholesale international commerce in eighteenth century northern Germany, using examples from Stralsund as a case study. (Stralsund, a port-city formerly in the Hanse, was at that time the capital of Swedish Pomerania and had a population, including garrison, of some 14,000 around 1800; it was an economic center of regional importance, specializing in the production of malt and the export of grain to Sweden and Western Europe). After sketching a social and economic profile of Stralsund's female merchants ca. 1750–1830, I will discuss the crucial issue of control, i.e., to what extent and how these women were able to operate independently within a political and legal system that favored men. In my conclusion, I suggest that women left, or were forced out of, the wholesale trade around 1850 as a result of political changes and a shift in the meaning of the concept ofBürger, rather than as a result of industrialization or market expansion. Throughout, I consider whether my observations about female merchants in Stralsund have any wider validity by comparing them with research on the commerce of other ports in Northern Europe and in North America.
Regimenting Revelry: Rhenish Carnival in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Spencer Elaine Glovka
Published: December 2008

Oneconsequence of the lively debates in the 1970s and 1980s centering on the concept of a peculiar German path (Sonderweg) to the twentieth century has been a reexamination of the nineteenth-centuryBürgertum, the closest Central European counterpart to the French bourgeoisie and the English and American middle and upper middle classes. The study of the educated and propertied urban dwellers who became the core constituents and leading spokesmen of theBürgertumhas flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures.1Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-centuryBürgertumshared at least modest economic security along with overlapping clusters of values, attitudes, and goals and a sense—highly mutable and often ill-defined, to be sure—of who they were. Using moral and behavioral as much as social and economic criteria, a mélange of career and property-owning-groups set itself apart from the aristocracy, the peasantry, urban laborers, and—more belatedly and less clearly—from artisans, tradesmen, and other elements of theMittelstandand claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement.2
Quantitative German History in the United States and the United Kingdom
Authors: Johnson Eric A.
Published: December 2008

What has happened to quantitative history? Is it dead? Any working historian alive today in the English-speaking world surely knows that it has come under heavy attack at least since Lawrence Stone, one of its former proponents, began sounding its death knell in a provocative and widely cited essay written at the turn of this decade by declaring scientific history a “myth” and calling for a “revival of narrative.” Georg Iggers, perhaps the leading historiographer of European and especially German history, wrote recently that “the past few years have seen a profound disillusionment with the quantitative approaches which were at the core of would-be scientific history…. The heady optimism of Marxists, Annalists, and American cliometricians that history would become a rigorous science has been shattered. What has taken its place in recent historical writing is a return from analysis to narrative, with a central focus, as Stone says, on ‘man not circumstances. Indeed many pioneering American cliometricians have turned conciliatory like Robert Fogel, irritable and combative like Charles Tilly, or downright depressed like J. Morgan Kousser.
The Leadership and Structure of the Tauber Band during the Peasants' War in Franconia
Authors: Vice Roy L.
Published: December 2008

The historiography of the Peasants' War is currently dominated by Peter Blickle'sThe Revolution of 1525. Blickle builds upon Günther Franz'sDer deutsche Bauernkrieg, long the standard history of the Peasants' War. Blickle uses the concept of “the Revolution of the Common Man” to describe the Peasants' War. The common men in both the towns and villages were united in a revolutionary effort to establish the “communal Reformation.” Blickle writes: “Evangelical doctrine gripped urban and rural communities alike, and the lay community claimed the right to decide right doctrine.… Thus, the Reformation's dependence on community erased the barriers between urban and rural communities, between burghers and peasants.”
Complete Families, Half Families, No Families at All: Female-Headed Households and the Reconstruction of the Family in the Early Federal Republic
Authors: Heineman Elizabeth
Published: December 2008

“Morethan any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.
Philosophical Anthropology on the Eve of Biological Determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the Moral Qualities and Biological Characteristics of the Human Race
Authors: Strack Thomas
Published: December 2008

Inthe late eighteenth century, any attempt to categorize humankind by race was necessarily tied to the controversy surrounding slavery as well as to the debate about the general perfectibility of humankind, which, in turn, focused on the potential of “primative” peoples to achieve higher (European) levels of civilization. The widespread glorification of the Pacific Islanders as unspoiled childern of nature in the wake of Rousseau's idealization of a natural state and Bougainville'sLa Nouvelle Cythèremade the debate even more complex; the enthusiastic reception of these texts in Europe bespoke an alienation from a polarized society and a dissatisfaction with rapid technological advances. Meanwhile, scientists were striving to avoid such rhetoric by attempting to define anthropology as a science, to collect data, and to categorize humankind free of political bias and the limitations of any particular philosophy of history.
Migration in Preindustrial Germany
Authors: Hochstadt Steve
Published: December 2008

Demographicresearch is rapidly rewriting the history of the preindustrial European population. Numerous recent local studies contradict the common stereotype of geographical stability; European communities before 1800 housed highly mobile populations. Much of this new research concerns England and France, but significant migratory movement has also been found in early modern Sweden, Scotland, and Japan. This paper surveys the evidence on mobility in Germany since the later Middle Ages, and places it within a broad socioeconomic context.
Law and Justice in the Nazi SS: The Case of Konrad Morgen
Authors: Weingartner James J.
Published: December 2008

The role of law in the totalitarian state is problematic. In principle, law and unfettered political authority are antithetical but, in practice, the two have coexisted in uneasy and unequal partnership. As the Third Reich neared its apex in terms of internal and external power, a German expatriate described it as a “dual state” in which law existed side-by-side with the dynamic, ideologically charged will of the Führer. Duality did not imply balance, however, for law survived largely as a discretionary tool of total power. Nevertheless, pretotalitarian legality was never entirely deprived of a residual potency, a fact illustrated by an unlikely agent—SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, judge in the judicial branch of the SS. But the organizational context of Morgen's career is sufficiently unfamiliar as to require elucidation.
Rational Means and Irrational Ends: Thoughts on the Technology of Racism in the Third Reich
Authors: Beyerchen Alan
Published: December 2008

Among the most haunting features of the culture of murder created by the Nazis are the ruthless efficiency and sheer scale of their success in killing millions of human beings. There are those who link both to the earlier efficiency and scale of death in the titanic and grinding battles of the Great War. And there are others who would associate both with the alternatives of quick or lingering death promised by nuclear war. Efficiency and scale seem common to the mass death produced or proposed in the twentieth century, and many observers view both as attributes of the process of modernity.
European Federation in the Political Thought of Resistance Movements during World War II
Authors: Lipgens Walter
Published: December 2008

The experiences and catastrophes of the second World War fundamentally affected European political attitudes. Particularly intensive was the reconsideration of fundamental problems that went on in the non-communist resistance groups in the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe. What were their political plans? Research on the resistance movements is still in its early stages; however, there is already general agreement that the resistance movements did not fight for a return to prewar conditions, but for a new European society. In particular, as several writers have pointed out, the goal of a democratic federation of all European nations appears repeatedly in the newspapers and proclamations of the Resistance. To describe the ideas of the Resistance on European federation requires a thorough study of the documentary material on the various European resistance movements, with particular attention to those texts concerned with the future relationships of the European states; the following pages are a first report of the findings of such a study.
Count Beust and Germany, 1866–1870: Reconquest, Realignment, or Resignation?
Authors: Schmitt Hans A.
Published: December 2008

On August 22, 1866, a month and a half after the disaster of Sadowa, Francis Joseph I of Austria wrote to his mother: “If you have the whole world against you and absolutely no friends, chances of success are few, but we must resist as long as we can, do our duty until the last, and finally perish honorably.” To his council of ministers he put it less dramatically and less plaintively on September I: For a long time to come Austria would have to eschew war in all forms and for all purposes.
“Love Your Enemies! Otherwise Bite Them!” Bismarck, Herbert, and the Morier Affair, 1888–1889
Authors: Hollyday Frederic B. M.
Published: December 2008

The semi-official Kölnische Zeitung of December 16, 1888, unleashed a violent attack upon Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador to Russia. After alluding to his friendly relations with the recently deceased Emperor Frederick, the article stressed Morier's hostility to Germany. This was substantiated by the charge that, in August 1870, he had sent news of the German crossing of the Moselle to the French commander, Marshal Bazaine.
Karl Haushofer and the German Academy, 1925–1945
Authors: Norton Donald H.
Published: December 2008

On February 10, 1944, a colorful ceremony took place in the great hall of the University of Munich. The occasion was the official inauguration of Reich Minister Arthur Seyss-Inquart as President of the German Academy. Under swastika banners lining the front of the auditorium sat the General Secretary of the Academy, Dr. Matthias Schmitz; Vice-President Professor Walther Wüst; Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels; and Dr. Seyss-Inquart himself. The organization which Seyss-Inquart had been chosen to head had in nineteen years achieved a predominant position in teaching the German language to foreigners and in promoting German culture at home and abroad. Its world-wide network of schools was particularly strong in southern and eastern Europe.
The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's Calculated Risk, July 1914
Authors: Jarausch Konrad H.
Published: December 2008

The responsibility for the outbreak of World War I weighed heavily upon Imperial Germany's fifth Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. “This war torments me,” he confessed to the Liberal Conrad Haussmann during the struggle. “Again and again I ask if it could have been avoided and what I should have done differently.” This soul searching led Bethmann to believe that “all nations are guilty; Germany, too, bears a large part of the blame.” Arguing that “our fate is too colossal to have its origins in singular events,” the Chancellor stressed the larger causes of the conflict. Imperialist rivalry, the anti-German coalition, the growing isolation of Berlin, and Vienna's relative decline, “all that forced us to adopt a policy of utmost risk, a risk that increased with each repetition, in the Moroccan quarrel, in the Bosnian crisis, and then again in the Moroccan question.” But he also admitted candidly: “Lord yes, in a certain sense it was a preventive war,” motivated by “the constant threat of attack, the greater likelihood of its inevitability in the future, and by the military's claim: today war is still possible without defeat, but not in two years! Yes, the generals,” he repeated. “It could only have been avoided by a rapprochement with England, that is still my conviction. But after we had decided for a [common] policy with Austria, we could not desert her in such danger.”
Hajo Holborn: Reminiscences
Authors: Gerhard Dietrich
Published: December 2008

My friendship with Hajo Holborn lasted through a lifetime, almost fifty years to be exact. Holborn used to reminisce about the rather unconventional manner of the beginning of our friendship: as neighbors in one of Meinecke's courses we fell into a conversation—quite contrary to the customary conduct of German students at the time. It so happened that I could be present when, on what was to be his last day, Holborn received the German Inter Nationes award at Godesberg. In a very direct and informal manner he spoke as to friends about his life and his work, thankful “für das, was ich insgesamt als ein glückliches Leben betrachte.”
Otto Hintze: His Work and His Siginificance in Historiography
Authors: Gerhard Dietrich
Published: December 2008

When in spring 1914 Otto Hintze was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Science he indicated in his inaugural address that his publications in the field of Prussian history most likely had earned him this honor. He added, however, that the history of Prussia was by no means the exclusive aim of his work as a historian. Alluding to the fact that his professorship at the University of Berlin was a chair for general constitutional, administrative, and economic history as well as for political science (Politik), he continued: “The real goal towards which my scholarly endeavors are directed has always been a universal comparative constitutional and administrative history of the West [der Neueren Staatenwelt—a term which for Hintze, as in Ranke'sEpochen der Neueren Geschichte, comprised both medieval and modern Europe], especially of the Romance and Germanic speaking nations. It is in this context that Ranke's lifework could and should be complemented.”
The Attempt to Form a Jewish Bloc: Jewish Notables and Politics in Wilhelmian Germany
Authors: Lamberti Marjorie
Published: December 2008

One of the ironical facts in the history of the Jews in Germany is that it was not until after Hitler came to power that they united and formed for the first time a central organization to represent their interests in politics. Before 1933 German Jews made several attempts to create a separate political platform or pressure group. The first venture had perhaps the best prospects of success. It started around 1900, a time when the ideological divisions that later polarized the German Jews into liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist camps were not yet strongly felt, and when cooperation between liberal and Zionist leaders was possible. Despite what appeared to be an opportune moment, all efforts came to naught. Historians can argue at length over whether or not German Jews committed a grave error in failing to form an independent political front, and whether or not it was possible in Germany for Jews to follow the example of Russian Jews and form an autonomous party. A more fruitful discussion will begin only when historians consider why Jewish leaders, who had stood within the existing party framework since 1848, decided in the late 1890's to organize independently of the liberals to whom they felt indebted for emancipation, and why they never achieved their goal. This essay attempts to answer these questions and to shed light on the political behavior of Jewish notables in Wilhelmian Germany.
Hajo Holborn'sHistory of Modern Germany
Authors: Kohn Hans
Published: December 2008

A few hours before his sudden death last year in Bonn, Hajo Holborn remarked that in spite of the ill health of his last years his life had been a happy one. He had an unusually successful career in his beloved profession, first as a young man in Germany, then as a leading scholar in his field in the United States; and he was able to finish his magnum opus,A History of Modern Germany, before his death. Its first volume appeared in 1959; its third and last, in 1969. As a disciple of Wilhelm Dilthey and of Friedrich Meinecke, Holborn gave special attention to the “realm of ideas,” to the religious, intellectual, and artistic achievements of Germany. While he wrote primarily political history and succeeded in ordering the mass of information which he provides into a meaningful narrative which holds the reader's interest, the high points are his discussion of the thinkers and poets from Germany's rapid cultural rise in the late eighteenth century to its decline after the mid-nineteenth century. One of the best of these subchapters is the one on Marx and Engels, a masterpiece of objectivity. It is to be found in the second volume of theHistory, though chronologically Marx and Engels belong in the third volume, which covers the period from 1840 to 1945. (After all, the two young men met and their public activity began only after 1840 and their thought and dedicated life began to exercise their impact only decades later.) By 1945, when Holborn's History ends, Marx had become the most widely known German, whose influence shaped history on a worldwide scale and to a degree surpassing by far that of the other great German with whom Holborn starts hisHistory, Martin Luther.
Austria and the Papal Election of 1823
Authors: Reinerman Alan J.
Published: December 2008

On August 27, 1823, a courier from Rome brought word to Metternich of the death of Pope Pius VII a week before. The news, though long expected, was nonetheless unwelcome, as Pius had in general been a most satisfactory pope from the Austrian standpoint. Now the cardinals would meet in conclave to elect his successor, and Metternich was convinced that their choice was “of the greatest significance for the tranquility of Europe and the interests of our Court.”
Bismarck in Perspective
Authors: Stürmer Michael
Published: December 2008

Whenin July 1944 the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, one of the leaders of conservative resistance against Hitler, visited Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's former country-seat in the Sachsenwald, no one with open eyes could doubt that Bismarck's Germany lay in its death-throes. Hassell wrote—and his words are worth quoting in full, since shock at the imminent collapse of Prussia-Germany as a Great Power also signalled the turning point in the national-conservative interpretation of Bismarck
History in the Service of Politics: A Reassessment of G. G. Gervinus
Authors: McClelland Charles E.
Published: December 2008

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.
Reparations Reconsidered: A Rejoinder
Authors: Marks Sally
Published: December 2008

In the issue of June 1971, there appeared David Felix's “Reparations Reconsidered with a Vengeance,” which constitutes an assault upon my article, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” in the December 1969 issue. Unfortunately, Mr. Felix has attacked an article which I did not write rather than the one which I did write. My brief ten-page essay addressed itself exclusively to the question of how much Germany was initially asked to pay and consisted of little more than a close textual analysis of the London Schedule of Payments of May 5, 1921. My main point, which Mr. Felix accepts, was that this document established the German reparations debt at a nominal value of 50 billion gold marks, not the figure of 132 billion gold marks widely cited in the general literature concerning the period. Secondly, I pointed out that Germany had offered to pay a considerably larger amount less than two weeks before. Mr. Felix ignores this point while attacking my conclusion based upon it to the effect that the London Schedule constituted a victory for the Germans. Finally, I remarked briefly that, with a high ostensible figure and much lower actual payments, the Germans had an excellent propaganda position and made the most of it, leading the English-speaking world to believe that the reparations burden was both outrageous and unpayable. I concluded that “We shall never know what Germany could have paid, had she seen any reason to do so, but we can easily demonstrate that the settlement was not outrageous, even in German eyes” (p. 365).
Problems and Potentials of the Berlin Document Center
Authors: Browder George C.
Published: December 2008

Although most students of contemporary German history, especially of the National Socialist period, are aware of the United States Document Center at Berlin (BDC) and its general holdings, that archive is not being exploited to its potential. This is primarily because the Document Center was created and organized for the political purpose of compiling information on the activities of individual Nazis. For this reason, the holdings lend themselves most readily to the study of individual involvement and to quantitative research on the personnel of various groups and agencies of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, this same organizational arrangement makes it extremely difficult and time-consuming to pursue a non-biographical or non-quantitative research problem. Nevertheless, the collections contain information to be found nowhere else—information on institutional, political, social, and economic problems which go well beyond the scope of an individual's involvement or beyond the sociological data which might be compiled from the personnel files. Unfortunately, there are no adequate finding aids for the Document Center, and a general vagueness of knowledge about the full extent of its holdings seems to plague even veteran users and the document center personnel themselves.
The Rise of Religious Liberty in the Czech Reformation
Authors: Zeman J. K.
Published: December 2008

In his book,George of Bohemia: King of Heretics, Frederick G. Heymann characterized the early Hussite movement as “the first and thus the most daring and pioneering of the great European revolutions,” “one of the greatest dynamic movements for socio-political and spiritual freedom in all history”
The German People and the Destruction of the European Jews
Authors: Stokes Lawrence D.
Published: December 2008

Since 1945 and the worldwide revelation of the horrible brutalities culminating in mass murder perpetrated against Europe's Jews and other groups in Nazi camps and by the mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Heinrich Himmler's SS, there has been considerable contention regarding the extent to which the German people knew about these crimes while they were being committed. The various responses given to this question, and their implications, have significantly influenced historical interpretations of Nazism and, in turn, popular attitudes among foreigners toward postwar Germans. Although doubtless a definitive answer will never be possible, it is therefore all the more important that the question of general German knowledge and hence at least passive complicity in Hitler's crimes be posed precisely and that all of the surviving documentary evidence bearing upon it be brought to light. A recently uncovered report in the voluminousRecords of the Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police offersboth an opportunity to redefine the issue and perhaps a partial solution to it.
Water of Life, Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg
Authors: Tlusty B. Ann
Published: December 2008

“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.
The Reformation and the Decline of German Art
Authors: Christensen Carl C.
Published: December 2008

Scholars upon occasion have spoken of the “crisis” of the arts in Reformation Germany. It has become increasingly clear, however, that such terminology, when left unqualified, may be excessively ambiguous, and perhaps even misleading. At least one influential historian is arguing today that the true crisis situation is that where a threat is followed by a final regaining of strength, or where there is a “successful resistance or adaptation to a vital challenge.”
Divided Loyalties: The German Reich and Austria-Hungary in Austro-German Discussions of War Aims, 1914–1916
Authors: Kapp Richard W.
Published: December 2008

InhisThe Man Without Qualitiesthe Austrian writer Robert Musil examines the declining state patriotism of the Austro-Germans in 1913–1914. He describes a fictional Patriotic Campaign (Parallelaktion) in a land he calls Kakania because the Habsburg ruler was Kaiser (emperor) in Austria and König (king) in Hungary and the state's joint institutions were labeled “k. u. k.” The organizers of this Campaign hoped ostensibly to discover a Kakanian idea or mission for the upcoming celebration of the ruler's seventy-year reign in 1918, but in fact their real objective was to put a stop to the growing enthusiasm of the Austro-Germans for the German Reich. As the head of the Campaign, His Highness the Imperial Liege-Count Leinsdorf put it, he hoped “to win over precisely that section of Kakanians of German descent who felt less allegiance to their country than to the German nation.” This was no easy task as the Austro-Germans were even less loyal to their government than the other peoples of Austria-Hungary. As a result Leinsdorf planned first to gain the support of the other nationalities, “for only when one had been successful in this would all the German circles see themselves compelled to join in, since, it is, of course, much more difficult to hold aloof from something that everyone else is doing than to refuse to be the first to begin.
War Aims and the Liberal Conscience: Lujo Brentano and Annexationism During the First World War
Authors: Menze Ernest A.
Published: December 2008

Thispaper examines the war aims advocated during the First World War by Lujo Brentano, one of the founding members of theVerein für Sozialpolitik, the organization serving as the forum for the sociopolitical activities of theKathedersozialisten. Though Brentano's career has been surveyed, James J. Sheehan's necessarily brief account of his attitudes and conduct during the First World War does not fully explore the impact of wartime annexationism on Brentano. A lifelong Anglophile and advocate of liberal ideals in social, economic, and political questions, Brentano serves as a case study of the impact of nationalism in times of stress on individuals who, on the basis of their previous record, might have been expected to be more resistant to its appeals.
A Collapse in Weimar Scholarship
Authors: Feldman Gerald D.
Published: December 2008

The purpose of these remarks is to contribute to the exposure of the egregious errors, tendentious misconstruals, and outright inventions contained in David Abraham's Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, 1981). Clearly, therefore, this is not a normal book review. I would not consider it appropriate to review this book in any case, since I read two versions of the manuscript for the Princeton University Press in 1979 and recommended its publication. I did so despite severe disagreements with the methodology and the argument. I assumed, however, that the scholarship on which the argument was based was sound and respectable and that the argument of the book would stimulate fruitful discussion. Since publication, the book has been widely reviewed, and while reviewers have divided over the theses of the book, most have praised its scholarship. The notable exception was Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., who must be credited with first drawing attention to the book's deplorable scholarship. Turner, as well as another scholar whose review is soon to appear, Ulrich Nocken, had the advantage of knowing many of the documents with which Abraham “worked,” and thus had reason to be suspicious. Most other reviewers, as was true in my own case, operated under the usual assumptions, namely, that a scholar with a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from a respected institution who was teaching at Princeton University, where high tuitions are paid for instruction by carefully chosen persons of demonstrated competence, would operate in conformity with accepted scholarly standards.
On Professor Feldman' Insistence: Some Closing Remarks
Authors: Abraham David
Published: December 2008

In opening this exchange, Gerald Feldman accused me of “egregious errors,” systematically “tendentious misconstruals,” “outright inventions,” and “fabrications.” In my reply, I made what I believe to have been a good faith effort to address and evaluate these charges. Because an understanding of the arguments in my book was essential to that evaluation, I first restated those arguments, and my overall thesis. In the face of a fantastic portrayal of business-Nazi conspiracy, it was necessary to set the record straight. Making repeated reference to what I actually said in my book, as opposed to what Feldman insinuates that I said, the substance of my reply was this: First, I openly acknowledged my commission of error. I did not trivialize or minimalize my mistakes. I apologized for them, and said they were “inexcusable.” Second, and not inconsistently, I argued that Feldman was nonetheless wrong to claim that the errors undermined the fundamental arguments of my book. Third, I showed that there was no consistent pattern to the errors—the correction of some hurt the argument; the correction of many others strengthened it—and that there was, therefore, no systematic tendentiousness evident in my mistakes. Fourth and finally, I refuted the many charges of mendacity, invention, fabrication, and fraud, and provided a variety of sorts of evidence to show that these charges—surely the most serious that Feldman made—were utterly baseless.
Introduction
Authors: Kaufmann Thomas DaCosta
Published: December 2008

This issue of Central European History may at first seem some-what unexpected. All the following papers pertain to the early modern period. All of them moreover originated in connection with an exhibition of works of art, “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680. A Selection from North American Collections,” its published catalogue, and a symposium, “The Culture of the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680,” held on the occasion of the exhibition's opening. The papers published in this issue are accordingly essays in art, literary, intellectual, and, more generally, cultural history; some words may be needed to explain how they come to appear here now.
The Seventeenth-Century Literary Text: Aesthetic Problems and Perspectives
Authors: Parente James A.
Published: December 2008

Seventeenth-century literature in the Holy Roman Empire has rarely been discussed in general cultural histories about the European Baroque. The dramatic achievements of Shakespeare, Calderon, and Corneille, the inimitable poetry of the Metaphysicals and Marino and the mischievous adventures of the Spanish picaro have long overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the German Baroque. Even today many scholars are still content to dismiss the German seventeenth century as derivative while, in the opposite camp, loyal Germanists currently defend its uniqueness. As is generally known, literary developments in the Empire were slowed by a number of unfortunate circumstances. Geographical, confessional, and linguistic disunity strongly contributed to the parochialism of German Baroque letters. Local literary societies were widely scattered throughout the Empire from Silesia to the Rhine and communication between them was greatly hampered. The lack of a main cultural center similar to the artistic hubs of Paris or London further isolated the writers from each other. In addition, confessional differences not only segregated Catholic and Protestant poets, but also resulted in the simultaneous development of a Batoque Latin and German literature.
A Census of Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680, in North American Collections
Authors: Kaufmann Thomas Dacosta
Published: December 2008

The following checklist contains references to drawings by artists active in the lands comprised by the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680, regardless of their place of birth. All drawings found in North American collections of which the compiler is aware have been included. This census is intended to complement the exhibition and catalogue Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540–1680: A Selection from North American Collections (Princeton, 1982). The choice of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a framework for the selection of drawings is explained in “Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540–1680: An Essay Toward Historical Understanding” (ibid., 3–30). An asterisk (*) marks works that were presented in the exhibition, and discussed at length in the accompanying catalogue.
The Prague Uprising of 1611: Property, Politics, and Catholic Renewal in the Early Years of Habsburg Rule
Authors: Palmitessa James R.
Published: December 2008

In1618, members of the Bohemian estates threw Habsburg officials out of a window of the Prague castle. The Prague defenestration, which has been viewed as the catalyst for the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, is one of the best known acts of uprising in early modern Europe. Less well known is an earlier popular uprising that took place below the castle in the Old and New Cities of Prague on Carnival Tuesday, 15 February 1611. In the midst of a bizarre diplomatic and military episode during which foreign troops led by the Bishop of Passau invaded the city, mobs plundered cloisters and monasteries and, in a few cases, threw members of religious orders from church towers.
The Debate about Foundling Hospitals in Enlightenment Germany: Infanticide, Illegitimacy, and Infant Mortality Rates
Authors: Ulbricht Otto
Published: December 2008

The German Enlightenment has often been described as a philosophical or literary movement. This is certainly true to some extent; however, it is far from being an adequate description. It seems more justified to regard it as a general reform movement, even though many reforms that were suggested were not introduced. In the second half of the eighteenth century, social and economic problems became increasingly important for the enlightened thinker. First the emancipation of the peasants was demanded, then that of the Jews, and towards the end of the century, some even asked for the emancipation of women, to name just a few major groups. The enlightened reformers advocated the abolition of the guilds, the introduction of free trade and agricultural reforms. The old penal law was to be brought up to the standards of the time, and the system of poor relief to be reorganized. Groups that needed special care, like the blind, the deaf, and the insane, now received more attention. For the first time, public health became a matter of general concern. Educational reforms were proposed, not only to improve schooling, but also in order to change society through an educative process.