Recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine has begun to consider the diversity of sites, markets, and audiences for scientific knowledge. This article investigates a single publicly accessible location: Vienna's Prater park. At a time when the Second Vienna Medical School led the world in anatomy and pathology, two case studies demonstrate how knowledge about human anatomy entered the fin-de-siècle Viennese public sphere in a noninstitutional setting. Josef Hyrtl, an anatomist, and Hermann Präuscher, a showman, employed targeted marketing strategies for their anatomical preparations to facilitate the circulation of anatomical knowledge among the socially diverse audiences that congregated on the fairground. Examining how anatomy was visualized and discursively constructed, alongside questions of site, accessibility, and audience response, sheds light on a pivotal historical moment when the meaning of the human body was undergoing significant transformation in Austrian society.

This article looks at the transnational impact of two diaries written by the female German journalists Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and Ursula von Kardorff, whose journals shed light on German wartime experiences, resistance activities, and, to a lesser extent, the press. In the postwar years, both journalists sought to influence (West) Germany's relationship with its former enemies, in particular the United States. In their autobiographical writing, they presented both an image of Germany as a victim of Nazism, as well as an early acknowledgment of German crimes. In this way, they achieved a balanced narrative that received a positive reception from American and German audiences. Though the ways in which Friedrich and Kardorff presented aspects of journalism and everyday life in the Third Reich were not unique, their dual identity as women and journalists underlay their ability to act as “legitimate” mediators for Germany's rehabilitation. Western allied occupation authorities and overseas audiences viewed them, in contrast to men, as largely apolitical because they were women, and as objective witnesses because they were journalists. Through their autobiographical writings, both journalists situated themselves among the predominantly male US and German elites devoted to developing amicable relations between the two countries via soft-power diplomacy.

Scholars often depict the 1973 World Festival of Youth and Students—or, more colloquially, the Red Woodstock—as a momentary “departure” or “break” from everyday life, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) briefly opened its borders to the youth of the world. Similarly, they suggest that, when the festival's nine days of festivities came to an end, the “pathos of revolution” disappeared just as quickly as it had come about, resulting in a return to the restraints of everyday life behind the “Iron Curtain.” By contrast, this article reconsiders the festival's significance by adopting an analytical framework from postsocialist theorists. In doing so, it reconceptualizes the Red Woodstock as a moment of globalized influences and youth engagement that not only reflected shifting societal norms, but also the East German state's commitment to international socialist solidarity. Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the “upside-down” nature of the carnival, as well as on society’s “grotesque body,” is useful in this regard, as it sets in sharp relief the extent to which one of the East German state’s greatest challenges resulted from its own embrace of international socialism. This was the case as young people from the GDR and beyond transformed the East German capital through a subtle appropriation, transformation, and even subversion of the state-generated discourse on international solidarity, in ways that had a lasting effect during the late socialist period.

This forum explores from multiple perspectives the often stated impression that the nineteenth century is “vanishing” from German and European history. It asks how one can explain this trend, what consequences it has for the development of historiography and public historical knowledge, if and why the nineteenth century matters for the present, and what the future of nineteenth-century history might be. Fourteen experts on different regions and historiographical approaches to European history from the United States and Germany discuss these questions. We sought contributors from these two countries in order to illuminate differences in the historical profession on either side of the Atlantic, and are sure that a broader regional comparison would point to more varieties in the state of historical research on the nineteenth century.