What was the moral horizon of ordinary SA men? What did they think, what did they believe, and what were their ideals? These are hard questions to answer even when they concern people still alive and events still going on. To pose them some eighty years after the fact is to admit that no answer can be definitive. Yet a fresh look at some well-known contemporary sources can at least allow some tentative, suggestive answers. They demonstrate, above all, an emphasis on frenetic activism, combined with a sense of personal suffering and sacrifice. They stress key National Socialist values, such as antisemitism, criticism of the bourgeoisie, and a commitment to an idealized national community, or Volksgemeinschaft. And yet, they also reflect, to a certain extent, pre-Nazi middle-class values. Beyond this, they show men trying desperately to rewrite themselves as ideal SA men and Nazis.

Joseph Richter, a prolific writer of the Viennese Enlightenment, published a satirical dictionary in 1782 called the ABC Book for Big Children. Here, under the heading “men of letters” (Gelehrte), he wrote, “Emperor Augustus brought them to his table. Among the great nobility of our time, they eat out on the steps.” This criticism of insufficient patronage, marginalization, and loss of status seemed to come at an odd time. By 1781, the current Emperor and Habsburg monarch, Joseph II, freed censorship to the extent that Richter's satire could be published; writers sought to live from their works; and Vienna sustained a vibrant intellectual scene among the booksellers, coffee shops, and Freemason lodges. Yet Richter's lamentation reveals a complex reaction to the transition to a more modern, participatory, and even democratic knowledge culture.

When Hans Rosenberg wrote an assessment of the first three published volumes—by Friedrich Lütge, Heinz Haushofer, and Wilhelm Abel—of what would become the six-volume Deutsche Agrargeschichte (1962–1984), he thought he detected a new analytical direction in German agrarian history, one that pointed toward how the economic and social experiences of rural populations could be understood as mutually intertwined and active in the broader course of events. In contrast to the legal formalism of Lütge and the technicist agronomism of Haushofer, Rosenberg held up Wilhelm Abel's work as particularly noteworthy for seeing rural populations simultaneously engaged in several kinds of markets, with movements in European grain prices over three centuries playing, for Abel, the role of comparable indicators for regionally differentiated market swings with diverse effects on rural life.

On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.

Over the past few decades, a flood of historical scholarship has been spawned by the groundbreaking works of Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and others who have illustrated how a host of traditions were creations invented in the recent past to inform modern identities. The rituals of the British monarchy, the trappings of Scottish Highland culture, and many other traditions were revealed to have anything but ancient origins. Examination of such inventions, Hobsbawm argued, provided, among other things, a means to observe broader historical shifts. The intention of this article is not to illustrate another example of a tradition invented in the recent past. Rather, it seeks to examine how longer-standing traditions have been subject to related processes of reinvention. Some recent work, even if not written to theorize on reinvention, could be read through such a lens. Work in memory studies, for example, has shown how broad notions of national, regional, or local “tradition” could be reshaped based on how and which historical events were remembered. Works on “sites of memory” have similarly shown how conceptions of traditional objects and places can shift due to the fluctuation of memories attached to them. Beyond memory studies, scholars of theological traditions, often confronted with themes of universal truth and intergenerational change, have also produced works that could be viewed through the prism of reinvention. Kurt Schori demonstrates, for example, how the transmission of theological tradition through the written word could lead to submerged reformulation as different generations constructed linguistic meanings according to temporally specific circumstances. While such work could be read through the lens of reinvention, I would argue that more explicit consideration of the dynamics of reinvention is needed both to expand our knowledge of such processes and to develop theoretical models that characterize its diverse occurrences. I would also suggest, as Hobsbawm does with invented traditions, that examination of reinvention provides a means to lay bare symptoms of broader historical shifts.

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.

Hitler's storm battalions, the SA—their creation, organization, and worldview—have been the object of extensive scholarly study. A key factor in the victory of National Socialism, the SA has been understood above all as an exemplar of the political violence that helped to destabilize Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Attention to the role of the storm troopers in the Nazi seizure of power—a narrative in which the SA is centrally embedded, and in which it has been largely confined in the scholarship—has tended to foreclose other lines of analysis. Indeed, the metanymic linkage of the SA to the “failure of Weimar” has prevented scholars from considering the complex ideological and social field in which the storm troopers operated as the site of contingency that it was for contemporaries. Alongside a marching, singing, monolithic SA, policing the streets against National Socialism's enemies—an SA appropriate to the long-dominant scholarly focus on the reasons for Weimar's failure and Nazism's rise—another SA exists, one that had to be spoken for, indoctrinated, won over, infiltrated, and surveilled; an SA around which moral persuasion and ideological discussion played at least as prominent a role as the political violence that has so dominated the analytic concerns of historians and social scientists; an SA that attracted the attention of self-styled revolutionaries of every stripe in the seething chaos of Weimar politics, revolutionaries who sensed in the not-quite-closed ambit of the SA's political commitments—and in classed and gendered cultural assumptions with which these commitments were bound up—the utopian horizons of the possible, both before and after January 30, 1933.

April 21, 1771, brought unusual weather conditions, namely a springtime blizzard, to the Swabian town of Göppingen. We know this because the worsted-wool weaver Ernst Jacob Vayhinger wrote about it in a chronicle that he kept from 1756 to 1784. His exact words were, “The weather is also quite something. I have a barometer, which indicates the clearest weather today, and yet it is snowing so badly. The same thing happened a year ago. As the upper wind brought rain, it [the barometer] was instead showing nice conditions, and the rain was freezing cold.” While the vivid description of inclement weather certainly catches the eye, the presence of a barometer in this weaver's household in 1771 stands out even more. In fact, this weather-based technology was barely a century old in the latter half of the eighteenth century, having been invented by Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian mathematician, in 1643. To be sure, Vayhinger's malfunctioning barometer was almost certainly a water-filled glass instrument rather than the more precise mercury-based instruments of early-modern natural philosophers, but what matters here is that Vayhinger had a relatively new, ornamental wall hanging that indicated an awareness of new scientific principles. And, as this article will show, he was not at all the only one to acquire such novelties in this hometown full of Handwerker (artisans).

Writing in 1957, Leonard Krieger famously argued that Lutheranism was “not itself central” to what he called the “problem of political liberty” in the German lands during the nineteenth century. By downplaying the influence of Luther's teachings on German political thought, Krieger tacitly aimed to refute the controversial “from Luther to Hitler thesis” proposed by some historians in an effort to identify the ideological roots of National Socialism. Contrary to these scholars, Krieger blamed the emergence of Germany's “peculiar 19th century version of political freedom” not on religious doctrine, but on a complex of political and socioeconomic circumstances that, he argued, were unique to central Europe. Scholars have almost universally followed Krieger's line of interpretation. Recent debate focuses not on whether he was correct to argue that political and socioeconomic factors were primarily responsible for engendering a distinctively German species of liberalism, but rather on the question of which of these factors was paramount. As a consequence, religion's role in the making of early German liberalism seldom receives serious consideration today.

Established in spring 1928, the Sturmabteilung's (SA's) Sturm 33 was known in the Berlin area for its bloody street fighting. Four years after its founding, the well-known journalist Gabriele Tergit observed in the Weltbühne that “People know it—when Sturm 33 is involved, . . . there is terror. But no newspaper says as much any longer, no police pass it on as news—it is civil war as habit.” The Berlin-Charlottenburg district's SA-Sturm represented the Nazi movement's systematic application of violence in an especially acute manner, as both social experiences and the way of living within the unit were closely tied to violent action. In that respect, I will here argue that in Sturm 33, only an internal sociohistorical dynamic of violently plotting camaraderie made it possible to fulfill Nazism's ideological promise of integration, rendering it plausible within the organizational unit's particular cosmos.

Recent scholarship has cautioned us that censorship does not require a censor, nor can it be described merely as the repression of information by power. Censorship can be discursively productive, and historically it has worn many guises. This article treats a case in which state censorship practices were unstable, their execution uncertain, and their target cunning, if ultimately open to compromise. Sparked by an antiaristocratic short story in Ernst Keil's Gartenlaube (arbor, bower), the most widely read German periodical of the era, the Amazon affair involved not only its namesake ship—the Prussian S.M.S. Amazon (Amazone), a wooden corvette that sank in a storm off the coast of Holland in 1861—but an extraordinary confrontation between the conservative Prussian state and the liberal popular press. From the misstep of a weekly family magazine arose a multiyear press ban and a struggle over liberal-democratic public opinion in Germany. If no clear winner emerged from the Amazon affair, the episode nonetheless speaks to the malleability of German political culture at a moment of profound transition, as well as to the ability of the state to shape it.

In his memoirs, published in 1919, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the former Secretary of the Navy and architect of the Wilhelmine battle fleet, claimed that it had been his great “fortune” in 1896 to receive a naval command abroad. Deployed to East Asia, he had been able to “take yet another look at the overseas interests of Germandom” right before the “takeover of the Imperial Naval Office and the inception of the naval buildup.” Appointed in late March 1896, Tirpitz commanded the East Asian Cruiser Division until he was summoned back to Berlin twelve months later, on March 31, 1897. He had returned home “with the impression that England sought to block as much as possible our future development,” as he characterized the main lesson he claimed to have learned during the months he spent away from Germany.

When asked to provide his own “solution to the Jewish Question” for a 1907 survey, the journalist and philosopher Fritz Mauthner responded, “I do not know how to give an answer to your question, because I do not know which Jewish question you mean. The Jewish question is posed differently by every questioner, differently at every time, differently at every location.” While untypical for its time, Mauthner's viewpoint is shared by many scholars who write today—not one but a myriad of “Jewish Questions” proliferated in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, across the globe. The dramas they framed could be transposed onto many stages, because talk about the purported virtues and vices of Jews had the remarkable ability to latch onto and thereby produce meaning for a wide range of public debates. By plumbing this excess of meaning, scholars have teased out some of the key dynamics and antinomies of modern political thought. No longer focusing solely on conservative antisemitism, they have examined the role of the “Jewish Question” in other political movements, such as liberalism and socialism, and in the conceptual elaboration of the state, civil society, and the nation. Cast in ambivalent roles at once powerful and vulnerable, familiar and foreign, the figure of the Jew acted as a lightning rod for imagining such collectivities. Opposing parties shared common assumptions, such as the tacit understanding that integration into the nation, state, or civil society required a self-transformation of Jews, something historians have referred to as the “emancipation contract.” Generally speaking, it was the terms of this contract rather than its form that divided liberals from conservatives, philo- from antisemites, and Jews from non-Jews in the nineteenth-century. Accordingly, scholars now increasingly approach the “Jewish Question” not merely as an example of prejudice, but rather as a framework through which multiple parties elaborated their positions.

During summer 1917, civilians using the city baths in Olmütz, Moravia, demanded that soldiers stationed at the local Emperor Francis Joseph infantry barracks cease swimming nude in the March River opposite the city baths, especially during the women's swimming hour. In addition to those of soldiers, the bathing habits of other culprits offended the good citizens of the city. One resident complained that children, adolescent boys and girls, and even some grown-ups, among them “buxom” prostitutes, were swimming nude in the March and thus offending the morals of others. “Flashers” also caught the attention of the public and the police, including the unknown man who made “immoral,” but unrecorded, remarks and exposed himself to the women who frequented the promenade under the Freundschaftshöhe in the western Bohemian spa town, Karlsbad, during the summer. The offended women provided the police with a good description of this man, said to be between forty-five and fifty years old, of average size, with gray, grizzled hair, a graying mustache, and a goatee. They described his clothing, a dark suit with knee-length pants, knee-high stockings, hiking boots, and a panama hat. (Records do not indicate whether police apprehended the suspect.) In the Bukovinian provincial capital Czernowitz, an eighteen-year-old electrical technician accused a forty-seven-year-old man from Saxony who allegedly propositioned him on the city's Ringplatz one late summer's evening in 1918 of “crimes against nature.” The most common “morals” problem to preoccupy the police and the military during the Great War, however, was neither flashers nor nude bathers; it was prostitution.

In July 1933, an official at Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry gave an influential speech concerning the “cultural-political tasks of the German press.” The speaker, Wilfrid Bade, was himself an author and journalist who had previously attracted little notice outside Nazi circles. He declared that “a new Germany needs new authors”—an unsurprising sentiment, and one pronounced by the cultural representatives of many new regimes. Bade went on, however, to name a surprising group of candidates for this authorial duty: the storm troopers, members of the Nazi's paramilitary group, the Sturmabteilung (SA), whose violent thuggery had raged through German streets and helped to push the decaying Weimar Republic over the edge.

The study of German Christian responses to the Nazis is undoubtedly a growing field of historical inquiry. Within this topic much of the focus has been on larger church organizations, such as the Catholic Church or on those who were engaged in the “Church Struggle” (Kirchenkampf)––the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, BK) or the German Christian Faith Movement (Glaubensbewegung Deutsche Christen, GDC). There are numerous such works that form excellent studies of church organizations, as well as individual theologians.

Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not the strongest) field in modern European history. Whether measured anecdotally by the number of job openings, the number of historians hired, the stream of published books, or the share of German history articles in academic journals, it always seems that German historians and German history are at the forefront. In fact, though, historians of Germany have always made up the smallest cohort of historians of the major European history fields (that also include British, Russian, and French history). According to the latest figures available from the American Historical Association (AHA), in 2010 there were 990 historians of Britain, 668 historians of Russia, 605 historians of France, and 592 historians of Germany in the United States.

Some two decades ago, Peter Fritzsche wrote the first of two influential essays that questioned the then common conviction that Weimar Germany was all about doom and gloom. “What is distinctive about twentieth-century German culture,” he argued, “is not simply ‘crisis’—economic, political, cultural—but the widespread consciousness of crisis and the allied conviction that these emergency conditions could be managed to Germany's advantage.” Recently, Fritzsche's view has been taken up and expanded by a younger generation of German scholars, who have detailed how “crisis” meant different things to different people, often denoting the possibility of favorable change. This insistence on “crisis” as the beginning of something (positively) new is in many ways the most far-reaching application of the anti-teleological turn in Weimar historiography.

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 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing: