In the mid-1960s, a small delegation of graduate students went to Theodore S. Hamerow's office at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Noting that the Journal of Central European Affairs had ceased publication in 1964, James Harris, Stanley Zucker, and I asked our advisor why there was no academic journal dedicated to German history, a new field that had been developing rapidly. What could we do to create such an organ? The otherwise placid Hamerow wrinkled his brow and angrily asked who had put us up to this initiative! When we answered that this was just our idea, he relaxed and told us that he was the chair of a committee charged by the Conference Group for Central European History with doing just that, namely, founding such a new journal. Douglas A. Unfug of Emory University had already put in a bid, in fact, and Central European History started to appear in 1968. By using a variation of the previous name, the journal hoped to pick up prior subscribers and avoid being identified by its title with the erstwhile enemy—Germany.

Central European History (CEH) was the first scholarly journal I really got to know, and for more than thirty years, it has been important to me in all kinds of ways. I first encountered CEH as a Master's student at the University of Alberta, where my primary supervisor was the extraordinary Annelise Thimme, author of highly original works on Hans Delbrück, Gustav Stresemann, and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei. The discipline of history was new to me, and although I had taken some interesting undergraduate classes on early modern and modern history at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Munich, I had no idea about historiography, professional networks, or academic publishing. I probably did not even understand what the term Central Europe meant.

When I assumed the editorship of CEH in 1991 the discipline of history was changing rapidly. Political, diplomatic, and economic history seemed to be fading after a long run, and even the nation state was being challenged as a central focus of research. Given the increasing interest in gender, race, post-colonialism, and memory, I had to consider “whither goeth” CEH. In part that decision is made for the editor by the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. My own belief is that excellent history can be written based on a variety of theories, and with the employment of a diverse number of methodologies. I also concluded that weak and unconvincing history could equally be based on very different foundations as well.

When Thomas Nipperdey died on June 14, 1992, Gerald Feldman wrote the obituary that appeared in Central European History. This document was a fitting symbol of the condition of our journal—both its strengths and weaknesses—as Ken Barkin became its editor. One distinguished historian's eulogy to another found an appropriate place here, for the journal was widely recognized as a leading forum of international exchange, a link between scholarly communities in Germany and North America. The obituary appeared, however, in volume twenty-four of Central European History, which bore the date December 1991. It thus left the impression that Feldman was a man of extraordinary foresight.

I became involved with what was then called the Conference Group for Central European History in early 1997, when I accepted Roger Chickering's invitation to succeed him as Executive Secretary and Treasurer. This put me in charge of preparing and distributing the biannual (now defunct) Newsletter and of carrying out a variety of other duties, including keeping track of the money and organizing the annual executive meeting and the Bierabend—a cash bar and convivial get-together for historians of Central Europe—at the annual conference of the American Historical Association. The Newsletter kept members of the Conference Group informed about matters relevant to Central European history, such as upcoming events, panels on German and Austrian history at the American Historical Association meeting, scholarships, fellowships, as well as events at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, including the annual Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar. At one point, it was mailed separately to members and then, sometime later, published in Central European History.

Volumes 38 to 47 of Central European History, which appeared from July 2004 to June 2014, represented years of fundamental transition in the life of the journal and of its sponsoring society: then the Conference Group for Central European History, now the Central European History Society. This fundamental transition manifested itself in three forms: institutional formality, both of the journal and of the Conference Group/Society; publishing organization and technology—from the ways in which the editor produced the journal to the ways in which the audience consumed the scholarship it published; and, last but not least, the intellectual focus and content of the history of German-speaking Central Europe that Central European History presented to scholars and students alike. Although the decade presented some unexpected and surprising challenges, all these transitions were already visible in July 2002 when I presented my proposal to become editor of Central European History to the Editor Search Committee, which consisted of Konrad Jarausch, Kees Gispen, and then-editor Kenneth Barkin.

Central European History (CEH) began to appear at a crucial juncture in the historiography of the Holy Roman Empire. Of course its remit was much broader. Founded sixteen years before the British journal German History, Central European History, together with the Austrian History Yearbook (founded in 1965) and the East European Quarterly (founded in 1967), took over the role occupied between 1941 and 1964 by the Journal of Central European Affairs. Each of these US journals shared an openness to new approaches and to work on all periods since the Middle Ages, as well as a desire—in the words of CEH's inaugural editor, Douglas Unfug—to keep “readers abreast of new literature in the field …,” with “reflective, critical reviews or review articles dealing with works of central importance … [and] bibliographical articles dealing with limited periods or themes…”

That Christian religion pervaded many, if not most, aspects of life in sixteenth-century Europe, even the lives of those who were not Christian, is undisputed. “From birth to death stretched a long chain of ceremonies, traditions, customs, and observances, all of them Christian or Christianized, and they bound a man in spite of himself, held him captive even if he claimed to be free,” as Lucien Febvre remarked in 1942 in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Most everyone, including the French writer François Rabelais—the subject of Febvre's study—understood their own existence within the divine order. Accordingly, “a world without God” made little or no sense. Even if, pace Febvre, early modern people occasionally entertained the idea that there was no God, individuals rarely faced charges of atheism, as Francisca Loetz has shown. Our task in researching early modern religion is, then, to chart religious thought, practice, and experience as a complex and capacious phenomenon—its scope, shape, contours, and dynamics.

Habsburg studies stand at a crossroads. We have come a long way since C. A. Macartney published his magisterial history, The Habsburg Empire, in 1968. He began his story with the death of Joseph II in 1790—and thus, for him and his narrative, with the beginning of the end of the monarchy. Macartney's narrative represented the best and most complete traditional story of decline and fall, according to which the ever-present push of modernity put the Habsburg Monarchy in the larger story of modern Europe as an entity doomed to dissolution. Moreover, its leaders, embodied in the clever Prince Clemens von Metternich, foresaw the decline of the empire and did their best to resist change and forestall the future.

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern of Central European History (CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968, CEH emerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of the Journal of Central European Affairs in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsored CEH, as well as the recently minted Austrian History Yearbook (AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor of AHY, sat on the editorial board of CEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May's The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year, East European Quarterly published its first issue.

The era of the French Revolution and the Napoleon Wars left a deep mark not only on political, social, and cultural life in German-speaking Europe, but also on German academic historiography as it emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Both before and after the formation of the Kaiserreich, professional historians like Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke sought in their scholarship to justify Prussia's leadership role in Germany, and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic years figured centrally in this effort. For Friedrich Meinecke, writing in the Wilhelmine years, a remembrance of this era was crucial if Germany was to retain its intellectual and moral bearings: “One thing is clear: the survival and continuity of German intellectual life is somehow related to the events between 1807 and 1815—the liberation of Germany from foreign rule, and the transformation of Prussia, her most powerful state, into a freer, more national political entity.” In Das Zeitalter der deutschen Erhebung (1906), Meinecke related the process by which the formerly apolitical, individualistic musings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were given practical, political implementation in the reforms of Karl vom Stein, Karl von Hardenberg, and Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and then in the Wars of Liberation: “By descending to the state, the spirit not only preserved its own endangered existence as well as that of the state, it secured a reservoir of moral and psychological wealth, a wellspring of creative power for later generations.”

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy found the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the word culture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even the raison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.

Why study the history of modern German-speaking Central Europe? If pressed to answer this question fifty years ago, a Germanist would likely have said something to the effect that one studies modern German history to trace the “German” origins of Nazism, with the broader aim of understanding authoritarianism. While the problem of authoritarianism clearly remains relevant to this day, the nation-state-centered approach to understanding it has waned, especially in light of the recent shift toward transnational and global history. The following essay focuses on the issue of authoritarianism, asking whether the study of German history is still relevant to authoritarianism. It begins with a review of two conventional approaches to understanding authoritarianism in modern German history, and then thinks about it in a different way through G. W. F. Hegel in an effort to demonstrate the vibrancy of German intellectual history for exploring significant and global issues such as authoritarianism.

From Central European History’s founding in 1968, Nazism commanded a great deal of attention in the journal, but it was only after many years that this was also true of the Holocaust. A quick search on JSTOR shows that, of the articles and reviews mentioning the Holocaust, less than 10 percent were published in the journal's first twenty years, and over two-thirds were written between 2000 and 2014 (the last year of the JSTOR search). Of course, there is some semantics involved, as other terms such as Final Solution were sometimes used in earlier decades. But there is no doubt about the underlying trend, both in terms of the growing number of books that have come up for review, and the increasing number of important articles. In the 1970s, only one essay, by Lawrence Stokes, was devoted to the Holocaust. The 1980s saw a review article by Richard Breitman and a seminal piece on the ghettos by Christopher Browning. By contrast, since 2000, CEH has published around ten major contributions to Holocaust scholarship.

By now there is not much resistance to the notion that historians of modern Germany should pay heed to events outside the borders of the Reich or nation-state (though, even now, Austria and Switzerland often remain an afterthought). At the 2006 annual conference of the German Studies Association in Pittsburgh, Michael Geyer spoke of transnational history as “the new consensus.” His keynote address bore the title “Where Germans Dwell”—a clear indication that the subject matter of German history must include transplants such as Jürgen Klinsmann and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as the German diaspora of prior centuries. In keeping with this agenda, H. Glenn Penny has played a significant role in organizing scholarship on Germans abroad, whereas Kira Thurman is exploring how African Americans experienced German musical culture. The scope of transnational German history remains vast.

Every good humanities journal emerges from and is produced by a specific scientific community that shapes its content and its style. Central European History (CEH) is no exception. For me, i.e., a French historian of Germany teaching at a Swiss university in Geneva, CEH is the journal to read in order to follow the more recent and innovative English-language scholarship on the history of Germany and German-speaking countries. Most of the articles published in the journal are written by historians based in the United States or in the United Kingdom (and its dominions), and most of the books that are reviewed originate from the same community, with the notable exception of ones by German authors.

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”