This article revisits the interplay between enterprise, technology, science, and the state in the latter stages of Prussia's “early industrialization.” Tracing the footsteps of Werner Siemens as he sought to establish a business in Berlin during the 1840s, it highlights the social networks that enabled individuals and ideas to circulate between the military establishment, administrative departments, scientific circles, and entrepreneurial communities. At heart, these abstract entities constituted dense clusters of individuals who shared strong connections to one another, but whose contacts with other groups also enabled them to mobilize resources. During the 1840s, fostered by the dynamism of Berlin's expansion, social networks stepped into the breach caused by the Reform Era's upheaval of traditional employment structures and the emergence of a market economy. They provided a means of negotiating the uncertain socioeconomic circumstances that characterized Vormärz Prussia.

This article considers the fate of Prussian buildings and memorials in East Germany between 1945 and 1961. Analyzing a number of case studies from Berlin and Potsdam, it places the treatment of these structures within the broader contours of history management practices. Although this era was characterized by a strong anti-Prussian sentiment in the GDR's historical discourse, it also witnessed a complex interaction between the SED and its historical inheritance. This interaction often influenced decisions about the fate of Prussian structures in the GDR as much as any animosity toward Prussia as a historical entity did.

This article focuses on compulsory psychiatric admissions in the early German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until 1968 there were no East German laws regulating such hospitalizations, a regulatory vaccuum filled by neither the police nor the judicial system. Instead, families made decisions in conjunction with medical personnel about sometimes unlimited stays in psychiatric institutions and clinics—a practice that calls into question popular scholarly characterizations of the relationship between state and society in the GDR. Previous research has explicitly argued that GDR citizens had agency and acted in a so-called eigensinnige manner in many areas, but has not examined this issue with regard to the sensitive practice of forced psychiatric admissions: where there was no state interest, no Eigensinn vis-à-vis authorities was necessary. This was an especially curious constellation given that psychiatric institutions were run by the East German state and that state interventions in this area had been well established under the Third Reich, as well as in the Soviet Union, which served in many areas as a model for the GDR. One might well have expected that continuing state intervention would have thus been path-dependent. This article suggests resurrecting the term Vergesellschaftung (socialization), only shortly discussed in the 1990s, as a way in which to understand the way in which agency on the part of patient families compensated for the absence of formal state regulations regarding such admissions. The term nicely captures such routine forms of compensation by East German society in areas where the state abdicated its responsibility—as was the case in the early GDR when it came to forced psychiatric hospitalizations.

Rare is the book that helps to shift the paradigm upon which an entire field rests. Such a book is Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Building on insights and critical approaches that have been emerging and developing for the last twenty to thirty years, Judson offers a fresh framework—a new scaffolding for interpreting the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, especially since the early eighteenth century.