The new millennium appears to be ushering in a new view of the Enlightenment. The synthesis of the 1930s to the 1970s had posited a unitary Enlightenment that was the matrix of a modern secular or secularizing culture. The authority of reason and science either fully displaced, or fundamentally challenged and thus forced the reconstruction of, the claims of belief and tradition. From the 1970s a social history of ideas and institutions explored the Enlightenment's seemingly infinite regional and national variations, subverting the unitary notion and yielding a mass of new information. The works of J.G.A. Pocock and Jonathan Israel, James E. Bradley and Dale K. Van Kley, have begun to build on this accumulated scholarship, offering a new synthesis that rests on two related notions.

In a contribution to this journal, Volker Berghahn regretted the fragmentation and lack of focus in the recent research on the German Empire. While he may have overstated his case, his criticism certainly applies to the historiography of Germany's parliamentarization. The dearth of research, especially of recent vintage, has left the debate about the exceptionalism of Germany's governing institutions indeed “fragmented and decentered.” Since Manfred Rauh's two volumes in the 1970s, little has been published. His thesis about Germany's silent parliamentarization has been attacked, it seems, more for the haughtiness of its footnotes than the substance of its argument. As a result, Rauh's provocative interpretation coexists far too quietly with other accounts, and thereby preempts the sort of dialogue and scholarly integration Berghahn so misses. In her response to Berghahn, Margaret Anderson points out that such a dialogue can be found in, without being confined to, the new work of Germany's electoral politics, that looked anew and more skeptically at the exceptional political development of Imperial Germany. Its findings indirectly raise questions about why the development of Germany's governing institutions — the Reichstag, the Bundersat, and the chancellor — continue to be interpreted in much more exceptionalist terms than the evolution of electoral politics.

On 27 February 1943 in Nazi Germany the Gestapo brutally arrested more than ten thousand Jewish men and women. Martin Riesenburger, later the Chief Rabbi of the German Democratic Republic, recalled that day as “the great inferno.” This large-scale raid marked the beginning of the final phase of the mass deportations, which had been under way since October 1941. Also interned in Berlin were people who, according to NS terminology, lived in so-called mixed marriages. But new documents show that no deportation of this special group was planned by the Gestapo. In the past decade, in both the German as well as the American public, quite a bit of attention has been paid to the fact that non-Jewish relatives publicly demonstrated against the feared deportation of their Jewish partners. The scholarly literature as well has pictured this protest as a unique act of resistance that prevented the deportation of these Jews living in mixed marriages. The fact that during this raid an untold number of Jews, both women and men, fled and went underground has so far been ignored. Since we still know much too little, the following article will discuss all the events of the spring of 1943 and their background.

Most Germans still know the story. One day in October 1906, the 57-year-old ex-convict Wilhelm Voigt dressed himself in the uniform of a Prussian captain, assembled from several second-hand stores. So equipped, Voigt intercepted two squads of soldiers who were going off duty, and ordered the soldiers to accompany him to the town hall of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick. There, claiming to act on “All-Highest command,” Voigt arrested the mayor and other town officials, and had the town's cash handed over to him in two large sacks. He departed with the money and sent the officials in a car to the police station at Berlin's Neue Wache, guarded by several of the soldiers. Only at the Neue Wache did the officials learn that the “All-Highest” had not in fact ordered their arrest.

In the year 1724, fifteen-year-old Hark Olufs sailed on the ship the Hoffnung (Hope), half of which was owned by his father and the other half by Ricklef Flor, the captain. The ship was sailing under the flag of Hamburg although the entire crew consisted of Danish subjects: three came from Amrum, as did Hark, one from the neighboring island of Föhr, three from the Elbe. The ship was sailing from Nantes to Hamburg to unload its cargo. Although these waters were considered to be safe, the Hoffnung was seized by a “Turkish” privateer near the Scilly Isles and towed to Algiers.

Johannes Kepler's most important publication on questions of religion and confession, his Profession of Faith appeared in 1623 when the universal scholar Matthias Bernegger had an edition of one hundred copies printed in Strasbourg — at Kepler's expense — under the title: Glaubensbekandtnus vnd Ableinung allerhand desthalben entstandener vngütlichen Nachreden. With this booklet, Kepler intended to demonstrate that his religious convictions did indeed stand in harmony with the Bible; in addition, he strove to refute the accusations of heterodoxy brought against him, the “gossip” or “Nachreden” as he called it. His argument peaks in the next passage: “It is indeed quite an irksome matter, and one very much a matter of great agitation for the average, uninformed man, that someone could be so foolhardy, proud, and swollen-headed as to join no [religious] party. But I swear by God that I have not found joy in the situation nor found any peace therein. It causes me great grief that the three large factiones have torn the truth so terribly among themselves that I am forced to search and piece the truth together where I find it.”

Marcus Kreuzer's vigorously-argued essay on the progress of parliamentarization in Imperial Germany is an innovative intervention into a long-running scholarly debate about a central assertion of the Sonderweg thesis, namely the power or powerlessness of the democratically elected Reichstag of Imperial Germany. Plausibly dividing historians who have studied the topic into three groups: “optimists,” who perceive a steady increase in parliamentary power and a move toward democratic and parliamentary government, particularly in the Wilhelmian Era; “pessimists,” who deny the power of the Reichstag vis-à-vis the executive increased at any point in the history of the empire; and “skeptics” who point toward an increase in the power of the Reichstag, once again primarily in the Wilhelmian era, but deny that such an increase in power was leading toward democratic or parliamentary government. Kreuzer points out that underlying all three arguments is an implicit assumption of what a powerful parliament should be. Blinded by the “Westminster model” of British parliamentary government, he suggests, pessimists and skeptics have condemned the imperial Reichstag for not resembling the House of Commons. Yet the British governmental system represented just one possible form of parliamentarization. By systematically comparing the powers of the Reichstag with those of today's West European and North American legislatures, Kreuzer ascertains that the Reichstag was a politically influential parliament, thus demonstrating that the optimists have had the better of the argument about parliamentarization.

The process of European integration is posing a challenge to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to rethink their frames of analysis. The once dominant nation-state has lost relevance while transnational processes and exchanges are receiving greater attention. This is not only true for the social sciences and economics, but also for history. The closer the European states are integrated, the more questions about Europe's past are asked. But what is European history, and upon which methods and units of analysis can it be built? Is it the sum of national histories, just as the EU is a union of nation-states, or is it something more? Since no one subject of European history can possibly encompass all countries on the continent, it is clear that independent of the general topic there needs to be a certain selection of studies about more than one local or national case. If those studies, no matter whether they cover political, social, or cultural history, are to be synthesized on a European level, comparisons need to be made at a certain stage of any given work. The same holds true for the history of Central Europe, an area with a particularly high degree of internal differentiation.

Now Žižka had appointed a time to assemble for the purpose of attacking Sigismund when, near the castle of Přibyslav, by divine inspiration, if you will, that detestable, cruel, horrible and savage monster was stricken with an infectious disease and died. The one whom no mortal hand could destroy was extinguished by the finger of God. As he lay ill he was asked where he wished to be buried after his death. He ordered that his body be flayed, the flesh discarded for the birds and animals, and a drum be fashioned from his skin. With this drum in the lead they should go to war. The enemies would turn to flight as soon as they heard its voice.

In June 1937, a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Fritz Brüggemann wrote Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, asking for some theological advice. Himmler, a leading “neopagan” in the Nazi movement, had formally left the Catholic Church in 1936, but had been lost to Christianity years before. Fritz Brüggemann had also left his church, which meant that he, like Himmler, formally went by the designation gottgläubig (literally “believing in God”). Those designated as “believing in God” did not just avoid church taxes; they were also making a statement about their rejection of Germany's two confessions and their interest in a new völkisch alternative. Still, for this young Hitler Youth squad leader from Schönebeck, a speech on religion delivered to his troop was causing him concern. He was not sure if he had heard correctly, but he thought he understood the speaker to say that Jesus had been a Jew. He wrote to see if the Reichsführer-SS could perhaps enlighten him on this question. He received a reply from Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's personal assistant and a leading figure in his entourage. “The Reichsführer is of the opinion,” wrote Brandt, “that Christ was not a Jew. You must certainly have misunderstood the speaker.”

In his collection of essays, The Path to Genocide (1992), Christopher Browning contends that when Hitler ordered his subordinates to pursue the wholesale destruction of European Jews in the mid-summer of 1941, what they were being asked to accomplish was at the time totally unprecedented. At this stage every step was uncharted, every policy an experiment, every action a trial run … Murder was in the air; many avenues were being explored, but little was settled other than at least Himmler and Heydrich now knew what they were looking for — a way to kill all the Jews of Europe.

Inspired in part by a recent exchange in Central European History in which Volker Berghahn and Margaret Lavinia Anderson debated trends in the historiography of the Wilhelmian era of the Kaiserreich, Marcus Kreuzer offers to historians the perspective of a political scientist on what he calls the neglected issue of the “parliamentarization” of the imperial regime over its last two decades. From the starting point of an interpretive dispute about German exceptionalism among historians, a dispute that to him seems easily solvable, Kreuzer compares the various arguments that historians have made about whether by 1914 the Imperial Reichstag was already, or was developing toward becoming, a truly parliamentary regime; he next categorizes historians into schools of interpretation; and he finally resolves the issue for historians by comparing the imperial Reichstag with an array of other parliaments, showing that, based upon evidence contained in the cumulative scholarship produced by historians, it in most cases ranks toward the more powerful end of the spectrum. In the end, he remains puzzled as to why this easily available method has remained too difficult for historians to grasp, concluding that it has been rather easy to drive a stake through the heart of the German Sonderweg, as it is with any exceptionalism.

Over the last decade, historians have made steady inroads into the frequently static social sciences as they are trying to understand the changing post-Cold War order and the even more rapidly changing global and domestic political economies. Such softening of disciplinary boundaries is also observable in the other direction. Jonathan Sperber's work on nineteenth-century electoral politics and Kenneth Ledford's study on German lawyers offer two examples among many of historians borrowing concepts and methods from the social sciences. Yet, these encouraging signs of disciplinary trespassing cannot mask the fact that these two disciplines continue only infrequently to publish in each others' journals, intelligently review each others' works, or jointly reflect on the payoffs of interdisciplinary scholarship. Given this limited dialogue, it is a particular pleasure to reply to two such thoughtful and constructive respondents. In subtly tackling the problems inherent in comparing, Kenneth Ledford ventures into the disciplinary borderlands of history and the social sciences while Jonathan Sperber stays more closely in the historical corner and — to use Ledford's apt characterization of his colleagues — “picks cautionary holes in the applicability” of comparisons.

Among the more durable tenets of postwar West German historiography was the widespread conviction that Catholicism and Nazism were, at some most basic level, mutually exclusive entities. While a flood of critical studies in the 1960s began to erode this conviction at least around the edges — as scholars subjected to greater scrutiny the actual responses of Catholic opinion leaders, the German episcopate, and the Vatican to the Nazi regime — the image of a fundamental, albeit not quite perfect, incompatibility between Catholicism and Nazism has remained essentially intact to the present day. The durability of this image has been due to some degree to the steady stream of primarily apologetic monographs produced by a large and energetic Catholic scholarly community in Germany, whose works have stressed the heroic oppositional stance and victimhood of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich.