The discussion of the hand-made and hand-written cookbook of Ruth Bratu, who was evacuated from Prague in a Kindertransport in 1939, leads to a wide-ranging exploration of what we expect and what we can know about the cookbook. It discusses its recipes as well as Ruth Bratu's use of the cookbook's pages for handwritten notes about the 1941/42 political gatherings of exiles of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party in the Czechoslovak Republic in London. Above all, it is a reflection on Alltagsgeschichte, the use of a single document as a vehicle of historical interpretation, and not least the sensory recognition that this cookbook evoked for the author.

The despoliation of the Strasbourg Cathedral during the Jacobin Terror of 1793–94 has long been considered a high point of revolutionary iconoclasm, which manifested for some the anti-enlightened nature of the Terror regime and the violence inherent in the French Revolution itself. The hybrid space—linguistic, cultural, and political—in which these vandalizing acts took place, however, brings to the fore the problem of Franco-German cultural transfer and its politics of emotion as a significant, yet previously untapped, interpretative layer. This article explores the emotional vocabularies used by both French and German commentators, which substantiated their divergent stances regarding historical consciousness, aesthetic sensibility, and national identity in the debate on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence. It argues that while it contributed to the denouement of intercultural transfer in the German-speaking sphere, the vandalism debate also had long-term consequences for German communal identity formation in a sentimental key.

Many Germans defended local time well beyond 1893, when Germany adopted a time standard bearing on the life of the entire nation. Yet the defining feature of Germany's temporal landscape was its multilayered nature, with North and South adopting different temporal regimes and undergoing different experiences. Focusing on the spread of (railway-induced) standard time and the responses it provoked, this article offers an investigation of German time culture in the nineteenth century. Out of curiosity and because their lives depended on it, Germans took an interest in obtaining the right time from the frequently contradictory horological landscapes they inhabited. Yet their shared curiosity did not breed conformity. The inspectors of the station clocks concerned with accuracy and synchronicity; the townsfolk in southern Germany who fast-forwarded their favorite public clock in order to get to the station in time; the Prussian scientists and villagers who opposed railway time becoming public time—they all, in their own way, contributed to putting time back in its place.

This article examines the experiences of Polish-speaking subjects of the German Empire during World War I. Fighting for wartime empires tended to be retrospectively defined as involuntary service to a “foreign” cause. But the author of this article argues that it was very difficult to distinguish ostensibly passive “compliance” from ostensibly active “patriotism.” The apparent tensions between a German imperial agenda and Polish nationalism also proved to be highly navigable in practice, with German war aims often seen as not only reconcilable with but even conducive to the Polish national cause. Drawing on a recent wave of relevant historiography in English, German, and Polish, and incorporating further analysis of individual testimonies, the article explores the various ways in which “non-German” contributors to the German war effort tried to make sense of their awkward wartime biographies.

By retracing the history of the Protestant journal Eckart, this article examines a theological forum in which supporters and opponents of the Nazi movement came into direct contact. Specifically, the article evaluates political ambiguities among religious authors, who had openly rejected Nazism from the 1920s onward but would feel compelled by theological considerations to remain loyal to the regime after 1933. Analyzing contemporary discussions of the Protestant Two Kingdoms Doctrine, for example, puts historiographical distinctions between “resistance” and “collaboration” into question. This study shows that Protestant intellectuals were able to voice a limited degree of public criticism until World War II. Their criticism, however, was often so imbued with nationalism and ideals of loyalty that it effectively helped stabilize the Nazi regime. In Eckart, even critics engaged deeply with völkisch and anti-Semitic ideology. Finally, this article also shows how these authors perpetuated nationalist ideas in West Germany after 1945.

This article explores Allied intelligence officers’ encounters with and interrogations of German civilians from autumn 1944 onwards, psychological warfare operations directed at civilians, and their wider ramifications. Focusing especially on the officers serving with the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), I will demonstrate that field intelligence officers’ stance towards German civilians was fluid and often ambiguous, with the encounter causing considerable distress to some of them. Their reports and correspondence further suggest that in this period, Germans readily professed knowledge of atrocities. But contrary to intelligence officers’ expectations, they failed to accept any guilt or responsibility. Finally, I will argue that the very foundations and techniques of Western Allied psychological warfare may have reinforced and legitimised justification strategies that separated between “real” Nazis and everyone else. This was at odds with one of the central aims of Military Government, i.e. to inculcate a sense of culpability in Germans.

Historians of East Germany often see the state as future-looking, but questions remain about the kinds of futures that East Germans expected. Youth space education provides one example of how East Germans thought about the future. Across the country, spaceflight formed an important part of youth education through books, the Jugendweihe, and places like cosmonaut clubs. Although these activities show how East German adults taught children about space travel, they also illuminate expectations for the future of spaceflight and the future of East Germany's children. In a state that continually proclaimed the imminent future of everyday spaceflight, East German adults, even party members, adopted a particular vision of the future. They taught children that the ideas of space travel would be important for their lives on Earth, while simultaneously questioning the state's optimistic vision for everyday spaceflight.

This contribution explains how a specific constellation of Swiss consulting experts, financial advisors, and diplomats became involved in the economic restructuring of eastern Germany after November 1989. Swiss engagements reveal that capital did not merely “flow” across unifying Germany's borders, as economists’ definitions of foreign direct investment suggest. Rather, facilitators within and especially beyond Germany actively promoted investments. Business involving foreigners was often grounded in socialist-era trade activities that united profit seekers from East and West Germany, Switzerland, and other nations. As foreign engagements in unifying Germany's economy illustrate, mediators mattered. Pasts persisted. Debt and investment were intertwined. The course of public divesture and state-sponsored private investment in post-Wall Germany suggests future scholars pay closer attention to individuals and entities engaged in exchanging market information, not so much within individual nations as between them.

Yair Mintzker's book on Jew Süss raises a series of provocative questions about German history and history itself, which this forum aims to address. Specifically, it presents four reflections on Mintzker's book that cover the following range of topics: Jay Howard Geller situates Mintzker's work within the historiography on Jewish biographies and antisemitic trials; Sarah Maza explores whether Mintzker pursues the venerable task of getting to the “truth” of who Joseph Oppeinhemer was, despite his claims to the contrary; Jesse Spohnholz considers Mintzker's book as a model of microhistory; and my essay takes a broader approach by confronting the central issue of self-interest in history.