Abstract: One consequence 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-century Burgertum , 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 the Burgertum has flourished, as historians have attempted to identify the consequences for German national development of bourgeois successes and failures. 1 Neither an estate (as determined by legal privileges) nor an economic class (as defined by common market position), the nineteenth-century Burgertum shared 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 melange 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 the Mittelstand and claimed in the process an enhanced social and political role as advocates of a transformed society based upon individual achievement. 2

Abstract: In 1771 Johann Georg Sulzer, a well-established member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, published the first volume of his long awaited lexicon A General Theory of the Polite Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste). Although the work sold well, not many critics were convinced of its major tenet that the production and enjoyment of works of art should serve to promote the civic awareness of the citizenry of the modern state. And while Sulzer's influence on the aesthetic theories of Kant and Schiller is generally recognized and he consequently has kept a relatively high profile in histories of aesthetics, his lexicon did not survive the century in which it was written.

Abstract: purposes as well. Thus during the last years of the war a variety of complicated negotiations, focusing especially on the Jews of Slovakia and Hungary, took place in Bratislava, Istanbul, on the Swiss border, and elsewhere. The participants on both sides were often shady characters of few scruples, so that the story of their interactions sometimes reads like a spy novel. Two of the principal Jewish agents, Israel Kasztner and Joel Brand, have been vilified for putting their own interests above the task entrusted to them. Although Bauer does not attempt to whitewash these men, he does argue that they deserve greater sympathy. They did their best under the most difficult circumstances. Despite the persistent Nazi illusion that world Jewry possessed great power, it was only when neutral governments (Sweden, but even more Switzerland, both now leaning heavily toward the Allies) and international agencies finally began to intervene, that more sizable, if still very modest numbers of Jews, especially in Budapest, could be saved. Committed to a policy of rapid and total Nazi surrender, the Allies would hear neither of any concessions nor of employing military means to save Jewish lives.

Abstract: The purpose 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 of Burger, 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.

Abstract: Of the plight of Frankfurt's Jews Goethe observed in 1810 that the cramped, squalid conditions imposed upon them by their ghettoization mirrored publicly their private torment of legal, social, and economic discrimination. Commencing with the early nineteenth century, emigration increasingly came to be regarded by many German Jews as an expedient to, or \"substitute\" for, full emancipation. America, praised by Goethe as a land that lacked the internal strife of \"our old Continent,\" became the preferred destination of these refugees. Avraham Barkai's important study traces the trajectory of this mass immigration to America and assesses its impact upon the individual immigrant, the American Jewish community, and the Jewish community in Germany. Rather than recounting the experiences of a minority of Jews whose rags to riches stories already have been well documented, the author instead focuses upon those of the \"average\" Jewish newcomer during the two migrational waves, the first between 1820 and 1860, the second from roughly 1865 to 1914. Barkai suggests that the process of accommodation to American society depended upon the timing of that migration, whose two phases were distinguished by differing geographic, social, and demographic factors. Characteristic of the first phase was the migration of young, single, lower middle-class males (often former artisans, journeymen, and apprentices) from the German South and Southwest, who were \"pushed\" or driven into emigration by material necessity, legal discrimination, or marital concerns. By nature, these \"adventurers\" tended to be less religious, and once in America they eked out a living in commerce. Although German-Jewish emigration continued to be \"more than a mere trickle\" after the American Civil War, Jews from the eastern and northeastern reaches of Germany and those from the \"Pale,\" seeking refuge from the military draft or pogroms, comprised the lion's share of the second wave. These newcomers, in contrast, came from moderately well-to-do families, were often accompanied by other family members, could rely on already established kin for assistance (what the author designates as a \"pull\" factor), tended to be more traditional in their religious observance, and chose manual labor (mainly in the sweated industries). The more educated (and more fortunate) of these individuals, however, entered academe.

Abstract: Horst Fuhrmann'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.

Abstract: 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 totalitar. 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.

Abstract: Not far from the Brandenburger Tor on Unter den Linden, visitors to the Museum fur 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).

Abstract: 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.

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

Abstract: In Christoph 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.

Abstract: Barbara Duden is one of the foremost modern historians of the body. She interprets her task as the history of bodily perception, not of medi? cine. Her works argue brilliantly that bodily perceptions cannot be reduced to the effects of a static, discoverable biological fundament. They are instead strongly the historical effects of culture, but because bodily experience is centrally located in the midst of the indissoluble tangle of sensation, perception, and cognition, it has simply been more convenient to imagine bodily experience as universal. In these two very different books, one a deep reading of eighteenthcentury documents, the other a slender polemical essay on the follies of late twentieth-century bio-political discourse, Duden develops an argu? ment about the transformation of bodily self-knowledge from sensationbased to visually directed apprehension. Duden finds the former characteristic of premodern Western society; for women, understanding their bodies via the sensations only they could feel meant they were the authorities who determined how to interpret bodily states: for example, whether they were in fact pregnant, or when they were ill or well. Gradually, in the course of the shift from traditional to modern society, sensation-based bodily knowledge gave way to the primacy of the visual. This removed the locus of interpretive authority from the person feeling the sensations

Abstract: Germany's interwar Social Democratic movement was anything but the monolithic structure often presented in the literature. Indeed, the standard teleology—which portrays the movement as conservative and petit bourgeois, doing its best to fend off Nazism, but ultimately not up to the task—obscures more than it illuminates. It imposes a top-down frame on the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that characterizes it and its affiliates as an undifferentiated mass, making a nuanced analysis difficult. As is true of most political movements, interwar German Social Democracy presented multiple faces to the world. While its core was a political party that worked to win elections, the SPD also formed the heart of an alternative culture, one that allowed its largely working-class membership to take part in cultural and social functions, as well as in political meetings to express class solidarity.

Abstract: On 26 October 1858 I attended the swearing in of the country's leader, just as I did on 6 February 1850. In 1850, I attended as a deputy of the lower house and rebellious councillor third class; now I took part as a loyal councillor first class and even a possible ministerial candidate. This time the act had something uncommonly captivating. The prince spoke plainly but with a dignified voice and conveyed to the world the feeling that such an oath was truly not meaningless, that the Constitution had finally attained its true confirmation, and that we further stand on firm ground—as if the confusions of 1848 had never disturbed the path of legal development started in 1847.

Abstract: just as Kasten no more than hints at the susceptibility of some Germans to the lure of France's \"douceur de vie.\" This is not because Cobb is less interested in police history but because he sees police history quite differently. Was Kasten discouraged from exploring the subject element that activated so much of his story because one prefect of the Vichy regime whom he wanted to interview told him lies? A criminal investigator would not have dropped that witness, but would have interrogated him again and again. Another reason why Kasten's book will not close the historical debate on the performance of French police and German occupants is because he so strictly limits his evidence to what happened in France from 1940— 44. How would his assessment of the French police have differed had he included records from the wars of 1870-71 and 1914-18? What would a study of regional traditions have added to his explanation of wartime conditions in the Bretagne and in Roussillon? Above all, Kasten's several references to the contrast between German occupation methods in France and in Eastern Europe are far too interesting to be left without elaboration. And finally, speaking of tantalizing questions left unanswered, there is Kasten's brief reference to police reform in France during the early 1940s in which he is undecided whether to call them long overdue steps to modernize French police methods and therefore continued in the Fourth Republic, or attempts to convert a democratic police into the executive arm of the Vichy dictatorship. To the historian of modern police, that is a very fundamental difference left unexplored.

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

Abstract: Volker Berghahn's is the first of several surveys of the German Empire that have been signaled for publication in English. In its length and format, it resembles the essay that Hans-Ulrich Wehler published two decades ago. It is schematically organized and proceeds from an overview of economic and social trends, through a survey of developments in the realms of high and popular culture, to an account of politics, both domestic and international. Berghahn's essay is broader, however, and more balanced than Wehler's, which emphasized the political instrumentalization of economic, social, and cultural institutions. Berghahn's allots more autonomy to these realms; and its coverage is remarkably comprehensive for such a compact survey. The account touches, for example, on demographics, marriage patterns, nutrition, housing, generational issues, confession, minorities, and cultural modernism. The treatments are introductory sketches, but they are supported by long series of statistical tables at the end of the account; and they cohere within an analytical framework defined by the issue of class society. Berghahn concludes that despite growing social and cultural diversity in many arenas, class remained the fundamental divide in Imperial Germany.

Abstract: bourgeois discipline on the other that he sees as the enduring characteristic of Basel's history—features that made the city anathema to the Nazis even as they made its culture the object of profound criticism by a more recent native son, Karl Barth. All three essays in this book struggle with the challenge of representing a city's history and culture without stereotyping it, and of capturing a vision without perpetuating myths. In the process, the authors provide English-speaking readers important historical perspectives on the contemporary malaise in the Swiss Confederation.

Abstract: Robin Lenman's essays on art and society are well-known to historians of Wilhelmian Germany, especially for their treatment of such professional concerns of the artist as censorship and the economics of the art market. Three of his essays, revised to varying degree, have now appeared in a German translation. The first examines the output of both conventional and avant-garde artists from the perspective of censorship and of the anxieties and political views that motivated efforts to control the public display of images and their sale. The second outlines the economic condition and opportunities of the artist, and the third describes and analyzes the Munich art world. A seven-page epilogue, \"The World War and its Impact,\" written for this edition, contains some interesting observations on economics after 1918 and on the decline of Munich as a center of painting, but is too brief to do justice to its complex subjects or even to provide a satisfactory conclusion to the preceding discussions. It was a promising idea to bring these pieces together, but the result is a somewhat uneven book.

Abstract: worthy of study only to the extent that it confirms the current discourse that considers foundationalism hopelessly wrongheaded? What, then, will the \"history\" of philosophy amount to? But the quest for a nascent spirit does have the advantage of countering the tendency to exaggerate a text's degree of coherence. Behind Fichte's rhetorical insistence on his own consistency, we become alerted to unresolved tensions, perhaps even contradictions, in his thought. Intellectual historians are likely to feel more comfortable with Daniel Breazeale's reexamination of Fichte's \"science of knowledge,\" though he too claims to identify an \"overall Tendenz\" rather than the author's \"actual, subjective intentions.\" With close attention to texts, Breazeale argues that Fichte was well aware of tensions and potential contradictions in his concept of system. He sees Fichte's \"commitment to a profoundly foundationalist philosophical project\" as entirely compatible with an awareness of \"inescapable circularity.\" This is an especially valuable corrective to historical stereotypes of Fichte's Idealism as \"naively foundationalist.\" All in all, this collection is to be recommended to historians engaged in the contextual study of philosophy—and not simply because is reminds us that there are good reasons to continue doing what we are doing. The disciplinary division of labor still makes sense, but only if it avoids becoming mutually dismissive.

Abstract: The debate about the alleged \"feudalization\"—defined by Dolores Augustine as a \"general social and political capitulation to the nobility\" (?) by the wealthy German business class has by this time run its course. Augustine revives it in a different form, replacing \"feudalization\" with the somewhat more apposite if equally inelegant \"aristocratization\" defined as \"imitating aristocratic models of behavior and forming ties of marriage and friendship with the nobility\" (p. 7). She now poses the question as to the degree of \"aristocratization\" of the \"wealthy business class\" of Wilhelmian Germany. To find an answer, she turns in the first place to a sample of the 502 wealthiest businessmen, credited by Rudolf Martin in his Yearbook of Millionaires with fortunes of 6 million marks or over. This sample forms the basis of some introductory quantification. For the bulk of the study Augustine draws on an impressive array of autobiographies and biographies, supplemented by public and private papers and by secondary sources. Inevitably, her evidence comes mainly from those who wrote autobiographies or who had biographies written about them, not necessarily a representative sample.

Abstract: In a pamphlet published in 1932 entitled “Women's Status and Women's Vocation,” the chairwoman of the German Women Teachers' Association, Emmy Beckmann, looked back at how the position of women in German society had developed since the founding of the Weimar Republic She painted a pessimistic picture:It is well known how things have developed since the Weimar Constitution came into force How little it has been possible for women to make their views and their goals count in the machinery of party politics, which quickly srestabilized itself and slipped back into old patterns; how soon the rise of unemployment made women's paid employment come to be viewed merely in terms of competition At the same time, a new generation of women has grown up, equipped with the education which a previous generation had fought for so hard, and with new rights and freedoms These young women now see the tasks and lifestyle which await them as an unwanted burden and responsibility, a cold and empty substitute for the fulfillment to be gained from a peaceful home and the close family ties of husband, wife, and child And, just as among the German people generally over the last ten years the concepts of liberty and the individual personality have faded like waning stars in the firmament of our values while other stars have begun to outshine them, so for these young women the ideal of liberation into a condition of enlightened humanity, which the previous generation followed with such conviction, has faded away

Abstract: United Germany has become more ethnically divers and, to a certain extent, more “multicultural” with a growing minority of immigrants and temporary migrants living within its borders. There are labor migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with restricted work permits, immigrants coming out of the former “guest worker” population, and ethnic Germants from Eastern Europe as well as various groups of asylum seekers and other refugees.

Abstract: Current sources on Wagner and Bayreuth being what they are, much of the fault for these misinterpretations lies with Spotts's somewhat uncritical reliance on books like the dated Bayreuth history by the bloated Erich Ebermayer, a postwar confidante of Winifred Wagner who during the war conferred with Goebbels over the making of films, and Friedelind Wagner's dangerously subjective memoirs. And it is a shame that more recent accounts, such as Wolfgang Wagner's own memoirs (1994), have provided so little information to help in writing a more reliable history. While Spotts's book is certainly useful, especially as regards the aesthetic and technical aspects of the recurring shows on the Green Hill, it also makes clear that the definitive history of the Bayreuth phenomenon, especially in view of its umbilical connection with Nazism, is yet to be written.