In 1913 the bourgeois youth movement in Germany fell under the influence of a radical minority who called for complete emancipation from adult control. The two most influential youth movement publications of that year joined the language of countercultural rebellion with unconventional discussions of adolescent sexuality. Hans Blüher's book The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon argued that the adolescent boys and young adult male leaders of Wandervogel groups were bound together by homoerotic attraction and that these male leagues were of great benefit to the German nation. Der Anfang, a monthly journal written by adolescents and university students only tangentially related to the Wandervögel, proclaimed that Germany's young people were perfectly capable of self-education in all matters, including sexuality. The countercultural trend of 1913 culminated in the Hoher Meissner festival in mid-October.

Historians who look at the stark contrast between the spectacular successes of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany and their horrific end in the Holocaust only a few decades later continue to argue about the relative success or failure of Jewish integration into German society. Were Germany's 600, 000 Jews — only 1 percent of the population — fully integrated or not? Did they have non-Jewish friends or not? Were they accepted or were they strangers in their own land?

World War I intensified antisemitism everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe, both at the level of public opinion, among right-leaning political parties and, often, in government circles. The war elevated the significance of the Jewish question in other ways as well, and not only because the Balfour Declaration of 1917 conjured up a Zionist triumph. The prospect of a German victory over Russia promised a reordering under German hegemony of the civil condition and citizenly status of the east European Jews, such as the Central Powers' creation in November 1916 of the Kingdom of Poland in the heartland of Russia's former Polish lands had already begun to bring about. Later, in the shadow of the German defeat, there arose the quite different question of the Jews' integration into the newly founded, nationally legitimized, nationalistically agitated successor states to the now vanished multiethnic monarchies.

In Leibniz, in Whitehead, there are only events. What Leibniz calls predicate is nothing to do with an attribute, but an event, “crossing the Rubicon.” So they have to completely recast the notion of a subject: what becomes of the subject, if predicates are events? It's like a baroque emblem. (Gilles Deleuze)

The [Swiss] Confederacy presented a deep political ambiguity, a union of urban oligarchs and peasant producers, all of whom collectively ruled over yet other subjects, which mirrored the tension between the [South German] cities' own oligarchical present and communal past. If there is indeed “an unbroken progressive line” between the communal burghers of this age and the bourgeoisies of a later one, it runs through deep shadows of ambiguity and tension, which flowed from securing the liberties of some through the subjection of others…More and more, the bigger folk in the cities made their livings from the vast web of market relations…and made their peace with the early modern state. (Thomas Brady)

The League for the Protection of Motherhood (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, or BfM) was the largest and most active sex-reform organization in Germany before the First World War. The league was at the center of a broad debate about sexuality, gender roles, the family, and population policy, in which representatives not only of the women's movements but also of the Christian churches, the medical and psychiatric establishments, and the sexology, eugenics, and life-reform (particularly nudist) movements participated. Both this broader debate and the BfM itself have been the subject of intensive study over the past fifteen years. One major interpretive focus of the literature to date has been on the issue of the extent to which the biologistic, social Darwinist, and eugenic ideas prominent in the thinking of many of the leading figures in the BfM were or were not evidence of a turning away from liberal, individualist feminism and toward the political and social Right, or of deeper intellectual affinities between National Socialism and sex reform — a point regarding which there is still considerable disagreement.

In March 1907, as newly-appointed Colonial Minister Bernhard Dernburg prepared to visit German East Africa to assess the colony's potential for economic development following the recent Maji Maji rebellion, requests poured in from businessmen seeking to accompany the minister. Prominent among the select few allowed on the trip were representatives of the German textile industry interested in founding cotton plantations in the colony. Among those participants was Gustav Hertle, director of the Leipzig Cotton Spinnery, the largest cotton spinner in Germany, who had long expressed interest in colonial cotton production. Following the trip the Leipzig Spinnery went on to acquire land in German East Africa, where it founded one of the biggest cotton plantations in the colony. Other textile industrialists who accompanied Dernburg also established cotton plantations in East Africa.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, a popular nationalist movement developed in the German states that had gained considerable strength by 1871, the year of unification. The German gymnastics association movement was one of the main forms in which popular nationalism was organized. It was started by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn early in the nineteenth century as a means to train young Germans to fight the French occupation. Gradually, it developed into a movement that sought to unify Germany, a project that was not, at first, supported by the German states. The movement was also guided by liberal and, especially before the revolution of 1848, democratic principles, and in this sense, too, was at odds with the reigning political system in Central Europe.

The main fault that Hermann Rebel finds with the practitioners of “symbolic actionism” is a tendency to naturalize systems of power and cultural domination and to treat subaltern groups as if they were unable to examine their position in them critically. This tendency in turn causes symbolic actionists to misrecognize self-interested maneuvers within existing systems of domination as counterhegemonic symbolic manipulations. The overall effect of symbolic-actionist analysis, therefore, is to “downplay the degradation and terror experienced by victims of exploitation and persecution.” Rebel's view of such relationships could hardly differ more. As he sees it, hegemonic forces were so disruptive that to speak of peasant societies as culturally autonomous and of peasants as historical “agents” is at best self-deceiving.

In the Third Reich a high percentage of the civil servants in the cadres of functionaries of the National Socialist Party on the local and district levels were teachers. It is thus not surprising that some historians who studied the elementary school teaching profession in the Weimar Republic began their research with assumptions about the “ideological affinities” of teachers to fascism and discussed “the specific predispositions that made it easy for them to identify with National Socialism.” The German Teachers' Association, one scholar wrote, “proved to be more a precursor than an opponent of fascism.” At its national congress in May 1932, another historian related, the representatives of the chapters voted for a policy which, in effect, abandoned the democratic republic and “indirectly helped those political forces that would create a dictatorship in Germany within a year.” In 1932 and 1933, on the other hand, recruiters for the National Socialist Teachers’ League often complained about “hard and difficult soil” and “unpenetrable” regions.

My study of the Swiss Peasants' War of 1653 has received four reviews in the United States. I am grateful to Hermann Rebel for supplying another, most unusual review to Central European History. It is unusual not only in length but also in judgment. Where the other reviews wrote positively about the book, Rebel rejects it completely.

If I read Rebel correctly, his criticism covers four main points. First, he criticizes the book's theoretical point of view, alleging that the call for a “return to historical events in social history” means a return to “histoire événementielle” and would lead to “high antiquarianism.” Second, Rebel criticizes my methodological inferences from this theoretical point: systematic attention to the cultural dimension of human action; the expansion of social history's traditional methods of analysis and perspectives on time (longue durée, temps sociale) to include cultural and anthropological insights (from, i.e., Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz); and the introduction of a “slow-motion” perspective.