The shock administered to the power structure of southern and central German lands by the Peasants' War of 1524–25 had many ramifications. Among the most interesting was the further deterioration in the always tense relationship between the imperial cities of the area and the princes and nobility. This deterioration stemmed directly from a feeling on the part of the latter two groups that the imperial cities had not supported the suppression of the rebellion as fully as they might have. Indeed, despite the fact that only a few imperial cities actually cooperated in any way with the peasants, some princes charged the leadership of all imperial cities with secret support for the rebels.

While censorship touched upon the careers of every German writer in the nineteenth century, a few cases stood out to contemporaries, defining their era. If the Demagogenverfolgung stamped the early 1820s and the prohibition of Young Germany the 1830s, the assault on left-wing or “Young” Hegelianism in 1842–43 was the major censorship case of the decade. Banning the Deutsche Jahrbücher, Rheinische Zeitung, and Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung was part of a significant, coordinated effort to undermine a small but influential faction of radical social critics. This wave of intellectual persecution radicalized the left, sowing the seeds for Marx's thoroughgoing assault on the foundations of European state and society. Understanding these cases in the context of a broader process of the transformation of censorship practices in modern Germany, however, remains an incomplete project for historians.

“More than any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.

In 1780 Christian Dohm, a ranking Prussian civil servant, collaborated with the Berlin Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn on a memorandum submitted on behalf of the Jews of Alsace to the French Council of State. A year later Dohm issued his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, a treatise on the civil improvement of the Jews, which contained a comprehensive program for increasing the general utility of the Jewish population. By that time, the European debate over the Jews was already long in progress. The seventeenth century had dealt with the question of readmission and the first half of the eighteenth century less successfully with naturalization. Both debates had centered in England, although the issues involved were pertinent to Holland, France, and to some extent Italy as well. Both debates had also produced a considerable number of polemics. Most recently, a 1753 bill sponsored by the Pelham government sought to facilitate the process of naturalization for Jewish immigrants. The so-called Jew Bill precipitated a wide-ranging public debate on the status of the Jews in England.

In the numerous analyses of the economic failings of the German Democratic Republic, considerable attention and blame have attached to the extensive social policy program of Erich Honecker, leader of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) after 1971. The “unity of economic and social policy” encompassed the GDR's entire political economy under Honecker. It was an attempt—a last-ditch attempt, as it transpired—to incentivize higher production, but also to fulfill the party's promise of higher living standards. In sum, the intention was to secure both the GDR's long-term economic viability and popular support via (modest) consumerism and an extensive program of social welfare measures. In so doing, the SED would prove the economic, social, and political theories that underpinned the whole ideology of “real existing socialism.”

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.

The emergence of commercial investment banks after the revolution of 1848 was an institutional breakthrough for modern capitalism and one of the central factors in the accelerated development of the Industrial Revolution in Germany between 1848 and 1871. The accumulation and mobilization of capital in concentrated and accessible forms was indispensable for underking such large-scale projects as railroads, coal mines, and iron works. Long-term promotional loans that enabled entrepreneurs to start up new business became a self-evident necessity in the growth of modern business. As one bank director noted, “capital, more than water, steam, or electricity, put the machines into motion.”

“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.

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.”

In October 1936, Herbert Levy, a thirty-year-old German Jew living in Breslau, the capital of Silesia, moved to the eastern stretches of the region in order to become a doctor. Against all odds and repressive trends in Nazi Germany at the time, Levy applied for a spot to study medicine in Hindenburg, a mining town near the Polish-German border. While his application was predictably rejected based on his Jewish identity, Levy's response was less predictable, at least to an outsider. He appealed his case, arguing that he had the law on his side. Levy was right. Although more than three years of Nazi decrees and persecution had driven many Jewish doctors out of the practice and made the study of medicine all but impossible, Levy enjoyed the protections of international law.

In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

The three papers collected here present important arguments concerning the gendered context and content of the Weimar welfare state. They unsettle our abilityto judge the origins, the efficacy, and the abstract political value of the welfare state and its democratic claims; they have much to say about twentieth-century women's history and the coordinates of feminist politics in the period between the early 1900s and the 1960s; they have vital lessons for a politics of democratic citizenship; and they all demonstrate the payoff of taking gender seriously as a useful category of historical analysis. In fact, gender seems to have acquired particular salience, in especially public and visible ways, in the period dealt with by these papers.

The years 1906–1910 were a period of crisis and unstable consensus in German colonial history. In contrast to the debates of the previous two decades following Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's 1884 decision to establish overseas protectorates, colonial discourse in Germany after 1905 shifted decisively away from abstract considerations of the desirability of colonies for economic and imperialist expansion to focus on the more practical matters of colonial policy and long-term developmental reform. Indeed, given the fact that by 1905 the German colonial empire covered a sprawling expanse of land six times the size of the German state, including territories in Africa, the South Pacific, and a naval base (Tsingtao) on the coast of China, the enormous challenges of managing its far-flung and costly possessions were becoming increasingly difficult to meet. For better or for worse, the Kaiserreich had become a de facto colonial power, and German society was increasingly and uncomfortably being forced to recognize the hazards and burdens of its fledgling global empire.

It may seem strange today to study aspects of the political sphere—from foreign policy to diplomacy and the military—in the context of sexuality. But the Belle Epoque (1871–1914) was an era of prestige politics, also with respect to the politics of sexuality. This article reveals how the Eulenburg Scandal of 1906 to 1909 used sexual morality as a way to explain and interpret the tensions that pervaded Germany's domestic affairs and international relations. The reliance on sexual mores as an explanation for large-scale political events was the result of an ever-intensifying chain of national and international complications—complications that later undermined Germany's sense of national honor. The Eulenburg Scandal is remembered today mainly as the first major homosexual scandal of the twentieth century, but contemporaries experienced it in a wider sense: it became Germany's counterpart to the Dreyfus Affair in France—two examples of political, social, and cultural conflict that threatened the foundations of their respective countries.

Diaries justly rank among the most valuable sources for historians. Committed to paper soon after the events and thoughts they record, diaries are free of the knowledge about what occurs afterward or only later takes on significance that adulterate memoirs and render them far more problematic for historians. It is therefore worthy of a cautionary note when historians confuse examples of the two genres. That has frequently occurred in the case of Bella Fromm's Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary. Published nearly sixty years ago in the form of a diary; it has been used as such in numerous historical studies of the Third Reich. A more recent book that poses problems similar to Fromm's and that has also been used by historians as a source for the Nazi period, is The Berlin Diaries, 1940–1945, attributed posthumously to Marie “Missie” Vassiltchikov.

To discuss the connections between place, nature, and identity, and the dilemmas of modern German history that derive from them, James Retallack (University of Toronto) and David Blackbourn (Harvard University) brought together sixteen historians from Canada and the United States for a three-day conference at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto from May 12 to 14, 2005. The meeting was generously sponsored by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD)/University of Toronto Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies Program.

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.