bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The novel heme oxygenase‐like protein from Plasmodiumfalciparum converts heme to bilirubin IXα in the apicoplast
Authors: Okada Ken
Published: December 2008

The metabolic pathways in apicoplasts of human malaria parasites are promising drug targets. The apicomplexan parasites exhibit delayed cell death when their apicoplast is impaired, but the metabolic pathways within apicoplasts are poorly understood. A nuclear‐encoded heme oxygenase (HO)‐like protein with an apicoplast‐targeted bipartite transit peptide was identified in the Plasmodium falciparum genome. Purified mature recombinant PfHO protein converted heme into bilirubin IXα as confirmed by high‐performance liquid chromatography. In addition, PfHO required an iron chelator such as deferoxamine for complete activity. These observations lead to the conclusion that a novel enzymatic heme degradation system is present in human malaria parasites.
Outcomes of pregnancies complicated by beta‐thalassemia/hemoglobin E disease
Authors: Luewan Suchaya , Srisupundit Kasemsri , Tongsong Theera
Published: December 2008

Objective

To assess the outcomes of pregnancies affected by beta‐thalassemia/hemoglobin E (β‐thal/HbE) disease.

Methods

A retrospective cohort study was conducted with 54 women with singleton pregnancies complicated by β‐thal/HbE disease only. The controls‐to‐cases ratio was 2:1.

Results

Although maternal outcomes were similar in both groups, gestational age at birth and birth weight were significantly lower in the study group and the cesarean delivery rate was significantly higher in that group (relative risk [RR], 2.1). The incidences of fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, and low birth weight were also significantly higher in the study group, with RRs of 2.8, 2.7, and 5.6, respectively.

Conclusion

Pregnancies affected by β‐thal/HbE disease were significantly associated with an increased risk of fetal growth restriction, preterm birth, and low birth weight.
Association of body mass index with severity of endometriosis in Korean women
Authors: Yi Kyong Wook , Shin Jung‐Ho , Park Man Sik , Kim Tak , Kim Sun Haeng , Hur Jun‐Young
Published: December 2008

Objective

To investigate the relationship between endometriosis severity and body mass index (BMI).

Methods

Of 481 women seen for endometriosis at a university hospital in Korea, 153 had stage I, 113 had stage II, 110 had stage III, and 105 had stage IV disease. The patients' BMIs were categorized according to World Health Organization criteria for Asian‐Pacific populations.

Results

Women with early or mild endometriosis (stages I or II) had a significantly higher BMI than those with advanced disease (stages III or IV) (P < 0.001). After adjusting for age, parity, and menstrual factors, an association between BMI and disease stage remained significant (P < 0.001).

Conclusion

Women with advanced‐stage endometriosis had lower BMIs than those with minimal or mild disease, and BMI was significantly associated with disease severity.
Outcome of loop electrosurgical excision for HIV‐positive women in a low‐resource outpatient setting
Authors: Kietpeerakool Chumnan , Suprasert Prapaporn , Srisomboon Jatupol
Published: December 2008

Objective

To assess outcome in HIV‐positive women undergoing the loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP).

Method

A prospective study was conducted with 789 outpatients undergoing LEEP at Chiang Mai University Hospital between October 2004 and June 2008.

Results

The 70 HIV‐positive women (8.9%) were younger (P < 0.001) and had a lower parity (P < 0.001) than the remaining women. The proportion of women undergoing LEEP for persistent low‐grade lesions was higher (8.6% vs 1.9%) and the prevalence of margin involvement was higher (60.0% vs 49.4%) among the HIV‐positive women. After adjusting for age, parity, menopausal status, size of excised lesion, and histopathologic result, HIV infection was not significantly associated with LEEP complications (adjusted odds ratio, 0.41; 95% confidence interval, 0.15–1.15).

Conclusion

The higher risk of resection margin involvement in HIV‐infected women was not associated with LEEP complications.
Effects of dietary sodium chloride on health parameters in mature cats
Authors: Xu Hui , Laflamme Dorothy P.L. , Long Grace L.
Published: December 2008

High sodium diets have been shown to enhance water intake and urine output, a potential benefit in the management of lower urinary tract diseases. However, one study suggested that high salt (sodium chloride) diets might have adverse effects on the kidneys [Kirk CA, Jewell DE, Lowry SR. Effects of sodium chloride on selected parameters in cats. Vet Ther 2006; 7: 333–46]. Therefore, the objective of this controlled, prospective study was to evaluate the effects of diets with different salt content (1.11% sodium and 1.78% chloride versus 0.55% sodium and 1.02% chloride, dry matter (dm)) when fed to mature cats (mean age 7.0 years; 12 cats per group) over a 6-month period. Food intake, body weight, bone mineral content, total body hydration status, blood pressure, and markers of renal function were unaffected by salt intake, and no adverse effects were observed. When a subset of cats ( n=9) with an initial serum creatinine ≥1.6 mg/dl was evaluated separately, there remained no evidence of adverse effects associated with increased salt intake. These results are consistent with the majority of other studies evaluating sodium intake in cats, as well as with the National Research Council's assessment, all of which indicate that sodium at 1.5% of the diet dm is not harmful to healthy cats.
Not all cases of neural-tube defect can be prevented by increasing the intake of folic acid
Authors: Heseker Helmut B. , Mason Joel B. , Selhub Jacob , Rosenberg Irwin H. , Jacques Paul F.
Published: December 2008

Some countries have introduced mandatory folic acid fortification, whereas others support periconceptional supplementation of women in childbearing age. Several European countries are considering whether to adopt a fortification policy. Projections of the possible beneficial effects of increased folic acid intake assume that the measure will result in a considerable reduction in neural-tube defects (NTD) in the target population. Therefore, the objective of the present study is to evaluate the beneficial effects of different levels of folic acid administration on the prevalence of NTD. Countries with mandatory fortification achieved a significant increase in folate intake and a significant decline in the prevalence of NTD. This was also true for supplementation trials. However, the prevalence of NTD at birth declined to approximately five cases at birth per 10 000 births and seven to eight cases at birth or abortion per 10 000 births. This decline was independent of the amount of folic acid administered and apparently reveals a ‘floor effect’ for folic acid-preventable NTD. This clearly shows that not all cases of NTD are preventable by increasing the folate intake. The relative decline depends on the initial NTD rate. Countries with NTD prevalence close to the observed floor may have much smaller reductions in NTD rates with folic acid fortification. Additionally, potential adverse effects of fortification on other vulnerable population groups have to be seriously considered. Policy decisions concerning national mandatory fortification programmes must take into account realistically projected benefits as well as the evidence of risks to all vulnerable groups.
Effects ofEnterococcussp. isolated from deep seawater on inhibition of allergic responses in mice
Authors: Kondoh Masatoshi , Hayashi Atsushi , Okamori Mariko , Motonaga Chie , Enomoto Tadao , Cheng Lei , Shimada Takashi
Published: December 2008

The objective of the present study was to assess the effects ofEnterococcussp. strain TN-3 isolated from deep seawater on inhibition of eosinophil accumulation, IgE production and active cutaneous anaphylaxis (ACA). We investigated the effects of viable and non-viable TN-3 on allergen-induced peritoneal eosinophil accumulation in mice. Viable (5·4 × 1010colony-forming units per 60 mg) or non-viable TN-3 (60 mg) was orally administered to BALB/c mice that had been sensitised with the cedar pollen (Cryptomeria japonica) allergen. Oral administration of non-viable TN-3 was effective in suppressing eosinophil accumulation while viable TN-3 was ineffective. We also examined the dose–response relationship for non-viable TN-3 in regard to eosinophil accumulation, IgE production and ACA in allergen-primed mice. Non-viable TN-3 was orally administered at doses of 15 mg (low dose), 30 mg (medium dose) and 60 mg (high dose) to BALB/c mice that had been sensitised with cedar pollen allergen. The anti-allergic effects expressed as inhibition of eosinophil accumulation, IgE production and ACA were found at the low and high doses, but not at the medium dose. These results suggest that non-viable TN-3 exhibited anti-allergic effects at doses of 15 and 60 mg.
The Economic Consequences of Annexation: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 1871–1918
Authors: Silverman Dan P.
Published: December 2008

Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was a relatively simple operation; it took only a few weeks for Prussian armies to rout the French forces. But integrating this prize of war into Imperial Germany proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. It is indeed a rather pathetic spectacle. While some of the highest civilian officials of the territorial administration sought to integrate the Reichsland into the Reich, the highest military officers sought to impose a military dictatorship; and on the sidelines, powerful German textile, tobacco, and iron and steel interests hoped to minimize competion from Alsace-Lorraine by sabotaging all government efforts at conciliation and integration. It is this latter aspect of the problem, what one might term the economic subversion of political integration, which we shall examine here.
Voters and Parliaments in the German Revolution of 1848: An Analysis of the Prussian Constituent Assembly
Authors: Mattheisen Donald J.
Published: December 2008

The Revolution of 1848 is a favorite subject for historians of Germany because, in so many ways, it inaugurated contemporary German history. It is a Significant “watershed” in political, social, and even intellectual history. But our understanding of this great upheaval is nonetheless still vexingly deficient. In particular, the political impact of pre-March social change, though it is the subject of much recent inquiry, is not well understood. German society was so complex, so diverse, and in such a bewildering state of tranistion that general observations are hard to make; what is true in one place is often false in another. So there is no comprehensive study. for example. of the agrarian uprisings of 1848, and opinions differ widely on their scope, intensity, and siginifcance. The role of the working class is also murky and unclear, partly because that class was beginning its long-term transformation from a traditonal guild artisante to a modern factory proletriat, a process which gratly complicates sociological definitions.
Legislative Behavior in the German Reichstag, 1898–1906
Authors: Smith Woodruff , Turner Sharon A.
Published: December 2008

One of the many issues currently under dispute by historians of Wilhelmine Germany is the question of “parliamentarization”: was the German political system, or was it not, evolving into a parliamentary democracy in the years before 1914? The answers to this and related questions have important implications for explaining modern German history.
Calvinism, the Thirty Years' War, and the Beginning of Absolutism in Brandenburg: The Political Thought of John Bergius
Authors: Nischan Bodo
Published: December 2008

When Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg converted to Calvinism in 1613 he became the second major German prince, with the elector of the Palatinate, to renounce Lutheranism in favor of Calvinism. Unlike Frederick of the Palatinate and the dozen or so other minor German princes in the empire who had opted for Calvinism, the Hohenzollern decided not to impose his new faith on his subjects, who had been Lutheran since the days of Joachim II in the early sixteenth century. John Sigismund decreed instead that the two Protestant churches were to exist together in peace and harmony in his domains.
Nazism: Highway or Byway?
Authors: Krieger Leonard
Published: December 2008

For those of us who were raised politically on the vicarious experience of National Socialism, its graduation into an apparently successful and overpowering regime was a cataclysm of unparalleled proportions. The movement seemed an enormous, overbearing force whose source was beyond time and the changes associated with time. It appeared not so much to grow and develop as to manifest in apparently different, but internally affinitive, ways the relentlessly consistent potentialities which had ever been in it. Nazi opportunism was well known to us, of course, but it did not so much define the movement as express it, generalizing National Socialism and equipping it to act characteristically on all kinds of objects in all kinds of situations. Nazism, in short, was a massive central reality, sui generis. We were uneasy about Italian fascism, saddened by the Spanish version, regretful at the east European varieties, and divided both within and among ourselves vis-à-vis the instrumental similarities of the Soviet dictatorship. But Nazism was in a class by itself, at once invincibly individual and supremely representative, an inimitable compound of Germanism, fascism, and regressive autocracy that was reducible to none of these ingredients and yet intensified each of them to its ultimate power. Thus Nazism was connected to the past and contemporary worlds sufficiently to make its impact universal, but in these connections it was ever Nazism that was the senior partner: it was not German history or fascism or absolutist tradition that made Nazism relevant to us but the other way around. Nazism abolished the limitations of time and space for us: the clutches of atavism and the tentacles of technology alike could now reach to any individual anytime anywhere. It was at once fact and symbol. It marked both the climax of German history and the point at which, as the ultimate authoritarianism, this German finality met the destiny of humanity.
Imperial Berlin and Washington: New Light on Germany's Foreign Policy and America's Entry into World War I
Authors: Doerries Reinhard R.
Published: December 2008

Since the early 1960s we have witnessed in West German historical writing noteworthy changes in the interpretation of the causes of the First World War and, therefore, of the meaning of that war for Germany. One is particularly struck by the refreshing debate which ensued among German scholars on Germany's war aims specifically and on Imperial Germany's foreign policy prior to the World War in general. The so-called captured German documents of the Foreign Office and other branches of the government were returned to Germany, and a younger generation of historians eagerly examined the newly available material. Remarkable, if at times controversial, studies were the result of the scholarly reexamination of the German imperial era. Yet, in all the commotion and controversy, there was one area of German foreign policy which conspicuously remained ignored or treated with astonishing marginality
German Social Democratic Agrarian Policy, 1890–1895 Reconsidered
Authors: Maehl William Harvey
Published: December 2008

If in the 1890s any one aspect of economic development under capitalism confounded the prognostications of German Marxists it was the agricultural. The peasants had not obliged the pundits of German Social Democracy by permitting themselves to be ruined and liquidated as a class. The realization, based on a plethora of statistical evidence, that the peasant would be for years to come a hardy perennial disposed many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) to coquette with reformist approaches to the agrarian problem. This provoked the great debate of 1893–95 in the course of which traditional lines between orthodoxy and reformism became blurred. Some of the party's best men were compromised, and the “whole conception of the movement as that of a class which harbors goals of the broadest revolutionary compass” was put into question. The erosion of principle was such that not only men of the standing of Georg von Vollmar and Bruno Schoenlank in South Germany but also August Bebel, who was the generalissimo of the SPD, Ignaz Auer, and Wolfgang Heine in North Germany were to be labelled by Otto Wels, the later Social Democratic Reichstag leader, shining examples of opportunism. The problem of the small farmer was to be a major factor in the subsequent rise of revisionism, for Eduard Bernstein, that brilliant wandering star in many constellations, was to stress the indispensable auxiliary role of the peasantry in engineering the gradualist transformation of society along Social Democratic lines.
The Rural Community and the Urbanization of German Jewry
Authors: Lowenstein Steven M.
Published: December 2008

The process of urbanization is treated by most historians as intimately related to other changes in the economic, cultural, and social life of societies and individuals. In some societies the growth of cities is one of the first steps in the processes of industrialization, secularization, cultural change, economic growth, and other changes often labelled “modernization.” A study of urbanization and other societal changes in German Jewry, however, suggests a different sequence.
“Rosa Luxemburg Belongs to Us!” German Communism and the Luxemburg Legacy
Authors: Weitz Eric D.
Published: December 2008

RosaLuxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.
The World of a Beggar Around 1775: Johann Gottfried Kästner
Authors: Ulbricht Otto
Published: December 2008

During the past twenty years a number of social historians have stopped looking at history as if observing the environment from the highest floor of a skyscraper and instead have made the microscope their most important tool. Rather than concentrating on objective, large structures and processes that are discernible from such great heights they have turned to the study of smaller entities all the way down to the single individual, taking ethnographical research methods as their guide. Rather than the study of hierarchies and class, and conflict and coalition among these large groups, popular culture, the relationship of the sexes, and the subjective side of history have moved into the foreground. How the large structures relate to individual experience, how they are perceived, interpreted, and acted upon became the central question. As a result, sweeping explanations, all too often the product of abstract logic coupled with limited awareness of the sources, are now tested by the informal, frequently quite different, and much more complex logic of everyday existence.
Anti-Judaism in Intra-Christian Conflict: Catholics and Liberals in Baden in the 1840s
Authors: Herzog Dagmar
Published: December 2008

This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between Jewish emancipation and the revival of Catholic neoorthodoxy in the years preceding the revolutions of 1848/49. My focus is on the Grand Duchy of Baden, renowned as the most liberal of all the nineteenth-century German states. The rise of neoorthodoxy in Baden provoked political liberals to rethink the relationship between church and state and, consequently, through a conjunction of circumstance, to make Jewish emancipation a central plank in their political platfrom. The Jewish emancipation implemented by the liberals in the revolutionary years, however, would be heavily burdened from its inception by the manner in which the new Catholic “religious right” deployed anti-Jewish rhetoric in its struggle for religious and political influence.
Religion and Conflict: Protestants, Catholics, and Anti-Semitism in the State of Baden in the Era of Wilhelm II
Authors: Smith Helmut Walser
Published: December 2008

RahelStraus, a Jewish woman from Karlsruhe, begins her memoir of childhood in the 1890s with a story of her experience in aSimultanschulefor Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish girls. She does not, as one might expect, complain about “Christian” anti-Semitism. Rather, she notes that when conflicts arose, they were typically between Protestants and Catholics.
The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich
Authors: Smith Helmut Walser
Published: December 2008

Historiansof the Second GermanKaiserreichhave increasingly identified the Catholic milieu as a tightly woven subculture easily as dense and symbolically rich as the social-democratic milieu. But while we have detailed and excellent studies on the alternative culture of the workers, we still know comparatively less about the Catholic milieu: its literature, its patterns of reading and ideological dissemination, its complex world of popular beliefs, attitudes, and symbols.
Ernst Däumig and the German Revolution of 1918
Authors: Morgan David W.
Published: December 2008

One of the oldest commonplaces about the German Revolution of 1918 is that the leadership of the revolutionary left was ineffectual—that the revolution never found its Lenin. Yet anyone who seeks insight into particular leaders of this revolution will find little to go on. Apart from the peripheral but ever-popular Spartacist leaders and Kurt Eisner, only a handful of leading radicals and revolutionaries have been studied in any depth. Others, however important they were then, are shadowy figures to history. Among these is Ernst Däumig, intellectual leader of the Berlin Executive Council, foremost spokesman of the German workers' council movement, and sometime chairman of two important political parties during the revolutionary years: the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the United Communist Party (VKPD).
Autarky, Ideology, and Technological Lag: The Case of the East German Chemical Industry, 1945–1964
Authors: Stokes Raymond G.
Published: December 2008

The ignominious and total collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989/90 revealed all too clearly the disastrous state of the country's economy, especially in comparison to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This fact must not, however, be seen in isolation from another, apparently contradictory one: From the beginning to the end of its existence, the GDR was the shining economic and technological star in the communist firmament in Eastern Europe. GDR electronics and optics were crucial to the Soviet space program and to East-bloc military production, which counted among communism's few technological successes. Its chemical and automobile industries were also well regarded in the Eastern bloc and in many developing countries. The GDR's technological prowess—especially when combined with its favored and very lucrative relationship with the FRG—made for a reasonably high standard of living, not just in relation to other countries in the Soviet bloc, but in relation to other industrialized countries as well.
The Meanings of Labor: East German Women's Work in the Transition from Nazism to Communism
Authors: Tobin Elizabeth H. , Gibson Jennifer
Published: December 2008

InChristoph Wetzel's 1988 painting,An Everyday Story, the divided canvas proudly depicts women's accomplishments in the German Democratic Republic (Figure 1). On one side, a woman operates a large piece of heavy machinery in a rolling mill, cool and competent behind the enormous mass of metal and gears. On the other side, the same woman helps her two children prepare for school in the morning. In the act of combing her daughter's hair, she looks out directly at the viewer, her expression asking: “And what are you surprised at?” This painting, displayed as part of a 1995 exposition on art commissioned by government agencies in the GDR, graphically displays that government's ideological commitment to women's paid labor, especially in jobs that, in capitalist societies, are often thought to be inappropriate for women.
The Politics of Rural Industrialization: Class, Gender, and Collective Protest in the Saxon Oberlausitz of the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Quataert Jean H.
Published: December 2008

History preserves numerous images of workers' protests. Both contemporaries and later historians, inspired by fear or enthusiasm, have scoured the records of the past for examples of popular rebellion, workplace militancy, or class mobilization. Indeed, a large literature exists that seeks to explain collective behavior by puzzling out the links between class formation and collective protest as well as the relationships between the individual's “objective” class situation and thought and action. But this literature—like the subjects of its inquiry itself—is in transition. It was once assumed that protest had its own iron logic and that “radical” consciousness was the necessary end product of the changing labor process under industrial capitalism; all other behavior was easily dismissed as “false” consciousness.
German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919–1921
Authors: Tooley T. Hunt
Published: December 2008

The fixing of the disputed Polish-German border in Upper Silesia by referendum in 1921 has generally stood in a second rank behind other dramatic and difficult episodes of peacemaking and stabilization. Set in calmer times, the phenomenon of 1.2 million voters deciding whether their region would belong to one state or the other might reasonably rate as a remarkable event. Indeed, the German plebiscite victory in the face of an actual majority of “ethnic” Poles, the ensuing paramilitary war (May to July 1921), and the eventual partition of the province provide ample historical drama.
Economics, Politics and Labor Protest in the German Inflation: the Tax Strikes of 1920 in the Chemical Industry
Authors: Patton Craig D.
Published: December 2008

InMarch 1920 the German Reichstag passed legislation which fundamentally altered the country's tax system. The tax package, known as the Erzberger taxreform after its chief architect, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Center Party, soughtto stabilize the chaotic financial affairs of the young Weimar Republic. Not unexpectedly, the effort provoked intense opposition from many segments of the population. Resistance to the tax plan was particularly strong among the working class, and when it was implemented in July and August, large-scale protests and strikes occurred in various parts of the country. Although an enormous literature exists on labor problems in the Weimar Republic, the tax protests of 1920 have been largely ignored.
Gender, Citizenship, and the Welfare State: Social Work and the Politics of Femininity in the Weimar Republic
Authors: Hong Young-Sun
Published: December 2008

In a talk delivered on 20 September 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the president of the League of German Women's Associations (BDF) likened the political status of German women to mothers who were forced to nurse their children with their hands tied behind their backs. They were thoroughly frustrated by the destructiveness of the war and were only able to fulfill their duties toward family and nation because they believed that the experience of the war would make the nation stronger.
Mothers and Citizens: Gender and Social Policy in Germany after the First World War
Authors: Rouette Susanne
Published: December 2008

Historians have generally interpreted the early years of the Weimar Republic as an important stage in the development of the German welfare state. For the first time in the history of Germany, the state established in the constitution not only its own wideranging responsibilities and opportunities for intervention, but also the political and social rights of its citizens. Apart from “fundamentally” equal citizenship rights for womenand men (Art. 108) these also included entitlement to state support for the family and maternity as well as special state protection for marriage which, the constitution proclaimed, was to rest on an “equality of the two sexes” (Art. 119).
God, the Devil, Medicine, and the Word: A Controversy Over Ecstatic Women in Protestant Middle Germany, 1691–1693
Authors: Stitziel Judd
Published: December 2008

“Youanti-Christian animal, what have you stung? I crush you, I the Lord crush you as you sit on My chair which you exalt up to the stars. I want to kick you into the deepest hell; now you are there and do not know what happened to you. On you, on you shall my soul take revenge; you God of the heathen who pray to you, who pray to you.” Thus began the letter dictated by Anna Margaretha Jahn and addressed to her confessor, Johann Christoph Wurtzler, pastor of the Moritz Church in Halberstadt, who had died three days earlier on 19 December 1692. The letter, transcribed by two men as Jahn spoke, closed with the commandment from God that the writing be delivered to Wurtzler's house and read aloud to his corpse, at which point he would become alive again, if that had not occurred already.
Germany and the Fashoda Crisis, 1898–99
Authors: Cockfield Jamie
Published: December 2008

Historians have generally limited their interest in the Fashoda Crisis to the Anglo-French diplomatic confrontation, which they believe ultimately led to a general understanding on African matters and to the Entente Cordiale. The crisis itself, however, had ramifications which went far beyond the complexities of British-French relations and which historians have yet to appreciate fully. The incident on the Nile precipitated a complete, if temporary, turnabout in France's revanchist policy toward Germany, and equally important, it offered Germany two possible options to defuse the antagonism France had held toward her since the treaty of Frankfurt twenty-seven years before: Germany could encourage war between the two nations or she could join France in an understanding, if not an alliance, against Great Britain in order to counter British dominance in Africa.
But Are We Any Closer to Home?: Early Modern German Urban History SinceGerman Home Towns
Authors: Friedrichs Christopher R.
Published: December 2008

For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book,German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only wasGerman Home Townsoriginal and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.
Of “Manly Valor” and “German Honor”: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising Against Napoleon
Authors: Hagemann Karen
Published: December 2008

These words introduced a collection entitledDeutsche Wehrlieder für das Königlich-Preussische Frei-Corps(German Military Songs for the Royal Prussian Volunteer Corps), that appeared in March 1813 immediately after Prussia declared war on France. It was not only in this songbook that the patriotic national mobilization for the struggle against Napoleonic rule was closely linked to the propagation of “valorous manliness” (wehrhafte Mannlichkeit). In the period of the Wars of Liberation between 1813 and 1815, the press and topical literature teemed with similar phrases and cultivated a veritable cult of manliness. A new breed of “patriotically”-minded, “combat-ready” men was needed if, as intended, a “people's army” of conscripts was to fight a successful “national war” against France. This phenomenon has generated scant interest in the extensive historical literature about the time between 1806 and 1815, which is considered as the birth period of the German national movement.
Monuments and the Politics of Memory: Commemorating Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 in Postwar Munich
Authors: Rosenfeld Gavriel D.
Published: December 2008

Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue ofVergangenheitsbewältigung—the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German struggles with memory. In recent years, however, this state of affairs has begun to change. As the epochal events of 1989–90 have forced Germans to confront still another burdensome historical legacy—that of communism—the increasing calls for a “second”Vergangenheitsbewältigunghave, for better or worse, broken the monopolistic hold of the Third Reich on the nation's historical consciousness. course of this newVergangenheitsbewältigungby comparing it to the experience of coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism.
Holocaust Views: The Goldhagen Controversy in Retrospect
Authors: Deák István
Published: December 2008

Holocaust literature is one of the richest devoted to a single event; it is also one of the newest. In the 1950s and '60s one could count on one's fingers the monographs that dealt with the destruction of the Jews. Then came a surge of interest in the 1970s, perhaps due to the arrival on the scene of a European generation innocent of this heinous crime. Since then, the production of books, articles, and films on the subject has continued unabated; in fact, it is growing. Yet the thousands of books and the tens of thousands of articles, many of them not only accurate and scholarly but also beautifully written, have not achieved their purpose. They may have persuaded other scholars but not the public. For when Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust was published, in 1996, with new claims, it was as if the previous literature had never existed.
The Prevalence of Irrational Thinking in the Third Reich: Notes Toward the Reconstruction of Modern Value Rationality
Authors: Lindenfeld David F.
Published: December 2008

Within the voluminous literature on the Holocaust, a trend has emerged in recent years: a shift of focus from remembrance and commemoration of this horrible event to serious reflection about its significance in a variety of theological, philosophical, historical, and even aesthetic contexts. This shift has not been an easy one, for its practicioners have had to face the widely held view that the Holocaust is unintelligible or incomprehensible, and that the tools of scholarship are simply inadequate to grasp it in any meaningful way. This view is certainly understandable when uttered by those who have personally survived the Holocaust—voices which played a leading role in the literature of previous decades. But even as these voices recede in time, the obstacles which this event poses to intelligibility remain formidable to many scholars.
Pegasus and Insurrection.Die Linkskurveand Its Heritage
Authors: Angress Werner T.
Published: December 2008

A Literature designed to express discontent with political or social conditions, rally public support, and sometimes threaten revolution has as much of a tradition in Germany as in other countries, and it was not the German authors' fault that their efforts remained on the whole without decisive achievements. Until 1918, this genre of literature had been nearly exclusively the preserve of what may loosely be called the political Left. But with the establishment of the republic the forces of the Right appropriated to themselves this time-honored intellectual weapon in their efforts to destroy the hated "Weimar System." Under these circumstances, no responsible independent left-wing journal could afford to do more than criticize the new German state for its shortcomings, and while in this respect some of them were less restrained than others, all of them wanted to reform and strengthen, not overthrow, the republic.
German Intellectuals and Politics, 1789–1815: The Case of Heinrich von Kleist
Authors: Craig Gordon A.
Published: December 2008

In January 1949, Thomas Mann wrote to a correspondent: “I must acknowledge the arrival of your book on Kleist and assure you of my earnest attention to it. Of loving attention I cannot speak, since much about this writer, even in your incisive study, strikes me as really dreadful; and, after reading it, I find I can warm to his genius less than ever… In the Hermannsschlacht…one can see what a hysterical—Goethe said hypochondriacal—spirit he was on the whole, and one recoils in horror.”
Lower—Class Immigrants in Wilhelmine Berlin
Authors: Liang Hsi-Huey
Published: December 2008

During the Second Empire, tens of thousands of poor people from East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Posen moved to Berlin every year. They came primarily to improve their economic position. A large number of them were transient agricultural laborers who had been accosted by private employment agents in Berlin railway stations. Others were provincial craftsmen in declining trades who sought to start a new life in the city: for example the cigar maker hoping to make enough money to buy a tobacco shop. Coming on the mere chance of a job, such men were likely to end up as anything from a coal carrier or hackdriver to kitchen help in the Charité hospital. Most of them became factory hands. Journeymen on the tramp who arrived on foot from as far as the Bohemian border were better off as far as job opportunities went. They had not as yet burnt their bridges and could still move on with a small travel allowance from their guilds if nothing lucrative turned up in Berlin. But Berlin needed young looksmiths, turners, carpenters, molders, tinsmiths, and harnessmakers. (In 1905,72 per cent of the workers in Ludwig Loewe's machine-tool factory were immigrants from outside Berlin.) There were also those who became Berliners in the course of their military service: after two or three years of garrison duty in or near Berlin, a country boy often had no wish to renounce the “big-city life” and would go to great lengths to find a living there.
A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany
Authors: Silverman Dan P.
Published: December 2008

If every German had had his own home,” wrote the National Socialist Karl Fiehler in 1932, “the revolution of 1918 would not have been possible.” Typical of the Nazi tendency toward exaggeration, Fiehler's assertion nevertheless recognized the role of housing in a stable society. Article 155 of the Weimar constitution of August 11, 1919, promised suitable housing for every German, but that promise remained unfulfilled. The Weimar regime, in fact, left many promises unfulfilled, and the collapse of the republic might be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in solving basic social and economic problems. Existing studies of the Weimar republic provide inadequate treatment of the problem-solving process employed to attack specific problems such as the housing shortage. Students of Weimar Germany have been fascinated with the beginning and the end of the republic, paying little attention to the relatively stable years from 1924 to 1929. Examination of the German housing problem will not explain why the republic fell. Historians have already supplied a rich variety of “explanations” for the fall of the republic: the burden of Versailles, reparations, inflation, depression, constitutional deficiencies, political fragmentation, and unhealthy compromises between the republic and the military, labor and management, and federal and state governments. Not everyone has been convinced. The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf criticizes “explanations that do not explain, statements that do not state anything.” Perhaps, as Michael Stürmer suggests, it is time to go beyond the origins and collapse of the Weimar republic. The historical significance of the Weimar republic lies in how it functioned as well as how it fell.
Fascism versus Totalitarianism: Ernst Nolte's Views Reexamined
Authors: Friedrich Carl J.
Published: December 2008

Ernst Nolte, Professor of History at Marburg University, challenged the attention of all students of recent European history as well as specialists on totalitarian dictatorship some years ago by a new and intersting interpretation in his Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963). In it he undertook to see the Action Française group of Charles Maurras and his friends, Fascism, and National Socialism as cut from the same cloth.It was a view based upon a strong emphasis on the ideological features of these movements, rather than their conduct of politics. Like all syntheses, it encountered sharp criticism by specialists in the three national histories and cultures, with their vested interests in their particular specialties. I myself considered it a very valuable contribution, having always stressed the kinship of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, in conduct as well as ideology—in opposition to Hannah Arendt, who inclined to an ideal-typical restriction of the notion of totalitarianism to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia on the ground that “the essence of totalitarianism is total terror”; this has always seemed to me like restricting the concept of absolute monarchy to Louis XIV and Peter the Great.
Diplomacy and the Military in France and Prussia, 1870
Authors: Showalter Dennis E.
Published: December 2008

It is a textbook cliché that the diplomatic history of Europe between 1815 and 1914 was characterized by the increasing prominence of military men and military considerations in policy-making. It is almost as generally accepted that the Franco-Prussian War was a milestone in the development of this process, particularly in the new German Empire. What must not be overlooked in the search for future portents, however, is the consistently minor role soldiers on both sides actually played in the diplomacy of 1870. This essay offers some generalizations on the background and structure of the relationships between soldiers and statesmen during the Franco-Prussian War.
The Waning of a Traditional Alliance: Russia and Germany after the Portsmouth Peace Conference
Authors: Oppel Bernard F.
Published: December 2008

At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the traditionally close relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia appeared as cordial as ever. Russia had an alliance with France but, except for its lucrative financial advantages for the Russians, this Dual Alliance remained largely an untested one vis-à-vis Germany. Less than a year after the conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan meaningful friendship between Russia and Germany ceased to exist. Within another year, Russia settled her major Asiatic differences with Great Britain, thus completing the process of isolating Germany diplomatically. The culminating period in this deterioration of Russo-German friendship occurred during the seven-month interval between the end of the Portsmouth Peace Conference in September 1905 and Germany's refusal to participate in the international loan to Russia in April 1906. This paper seeks to examine the causes of Russo-German estrangement within the framework of interrelated and often conflicting considerations of German Weltpolitik, Russian military defeats, the Revolution of 1905, and the international aspects of the Moroccan question.
Catholic Political Movements in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands: Notes for a Comparative Approach
Authors: Evans Ellen L.
Published: December 2008

Inthe second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic political parties and affiliated organizations were formed in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. These movements, variously referred to as “subcultures,” “ghettos,” the Dutch Catholic “pillar,” and the German “tower,” have only begun to break down and become integrated into national society within the last thirty or forty years. The best known of these parties, the German Center, has been called “a strange product of German history and … of conditions in Europe around 1870,” an ill-assorted alliance of interest groups who, if not actually the “mobilization against the state” of Bismarck's rhetoric, were opposed to the way in which the Bismarckian Reich was created: an alliance which was given an extension of life by Bismarck's decision to wage war against the party and the Catholic Church in theKulturkampf.Several recent interpretations have seen the Center as a byproduct of Germany's transition from a precapitalist agrarian society to a modern capitalistic society, representing those peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and traditional preindustrial bourgeoisie whose interests were being injured by liberal economic and social policies introduced after 1867. According to these interpretations, the party is defined primarily by its anticapitalism and antiliberalism, rather than by ethnic allegiance. Any satisfactory analysis of the Center's place in the German political spectrum, however, must account for the striking parallel provided by the history of similar Catholic parties in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
A Response to David Abraham's “Reply”
Authors: Feldman Gerald D.
Published: December 2008

Iregret that David Abraham's lengthy, bizarre, obfuscating, and often mendacious reply to my charges requires me to impose on the generosity of CEH once again, but readers will understand why I insisted that Abraham not be allowed to have the kind of “last word” granted him in the AHR. In my article, I deliberately refrained from a discussion of the various circular letters sent around by Abraham, myself, and others for the simple reason that most readers would have no direct means of checking the evidence for themselves, that the whole affair had been utterly confusing, and that it was most appropriate in this journal to concentrate on what had appeared in print. This is not a tabloid, but a scholarly journal, and I find the airing of Abraham's personal grievances against me inappropriate in this forum. The way in which I treated Abraham can have no bearing whatever on the reliability of his book or other writings. Although I initially contemplated writing a detailed reply to Abraham's plaints, I have concluded that this would be an abuse of CEH's hospitality. Since this is a historical journal, however, falsifications of the historical record and certain charges should not go totally without comment, and I will now make a number of brief responses to certain of Abraham's charges for that purpose.