During the 1660s and 1670s, the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its expansion with military invasions of Ukraine and Habsburg Hungary, parts of central Europe that had traditionally been regarded as beyond the Porte's horizons. Many Ukrainians and Hungarians welcomed the Ottomans as liberators; they saw the sultan as a more benevolent ruler than the Russian tsar, the Polish king, and the Habsburg emperor. This article reconstructs the political, social, and religious dimensions of pro-Ottoman hopes as well as the popular revolts that resulted from these hopes. Comparing Ukrainian and Hungarian engagements with the Ottomans reveals the divergent and overlapping aspects of a largely forgotten historical reality, that is, the quest of many Orthodox and Protestant Europeans to consider a Muslim alternative to the Christian empires that oppressed them. The article draws on a treasure trove of little studied sources, both archival and published, in multiple languages.

This article uses the example of Manoli Cigarettes and its product line, The Kaiser Cigarettes, to examine the concept of co-branding as applied to royal brand names in the German Empire. It reviews the broader networks of circulation that determined the production of royal brand names: commercial laws, business ties, advances in technology, advertising structures, tourism, and other sectors of the consumer economy. The article delves into how trademark law, the Imperial Patent Office's role in approving brand names, and case law contributed to the choice of royal brand names. The article also illuminates how manufacturers used royal brands to implement business strategies along a horizontal plane of market competition. The production of the monarchy as a cultural object was thus activated through a process of triangulation: not only through the bilateral relationship between monarch and subjects, but also lateral relations between producers who were concerned about their professional networks.

This article explores the rise of international cooperation and policing in solving the so-called “Gypsy question” between 1870 and 1945. Situating this issue within a broader phenomenon of illiberal internationalism, it demonstrates how the central European powers often pursued international action to serve their own national agendas. In doing so, this study shows how the shared concern of cross-border Gypsy itinerancy and migration in central Europe prompted several international policing initiatives that eventually crystallized under the International Criminal Police Commission (or ICPC) in 1931 into a transnational framework for controlling Gypsies. Against this background, the article also investigates whether the role of Switzerland and Austria as major frontrunners for anti-Gypsy international measures changed once the ICPC was under Nazi control. By closely examining critical activities and antiziganist ICPC discourse between 1933 and 1945, it reveals how the ICPC created a matrix of surveillance that eased the way toward the Gypsy genocide.

This article explores the sudden rise in popularity and limited long-term impact of Rudolf Goldscheid's work around the time of the Great War. Goldscheid is remembered as a founder of central European sociology, a creator of fiscal sociology, and a fin-de-siècle feminist and pacifist. His reputation ranks behind many of his peers in the social sciences, however. A reevaluation of Goldscheid's position within the fin-de-siècle intellectual landscape of Vienna and central Europe reveals why his sudden success—which was really decades in the making—did not endure in the same way as that of Joseph Schumpeter or Otto Neurath, among others. Goldscheid's ideas seemed innovative in the revolutionary years 1918–1920, yet they were frequently misunderstood. His eccentric position in the socio-liberal sphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna seemed to mute his political impact after the war. A better appreciation of Goldscheid's work not only enriches our understanding of his innovative proposals but also illuminates a frenetic, experimental era in central European history.

Like other historiographical fields, that of German history has been defined through most of its existence by the things historians argued about. We could go back well over a hundred years to the Methodenstreit over Karl Lamprecht's efforts to write multidisciplinary history, follow the line through the work of Eckart Kehr, Fritz Fischer, Hans Ulrich Wehler, and the Sonderweg debate, and continue on through the Historikerstreit and the Historikerinnenstreit of the 1980s, and the Goldhagen and Wehrmacht exhibit fights in the mid-1990s, to recent debates over the relative weight of colonial and Holocaust memory.

By far the greatest number of photographs of Nazi sites of violence were taken by the perpetrators. Some Jews did work as official photographers in the ghettoes, but during deportations, in the camps and extermination centers, and at the sites of mass shootings, only Gestapo officers, SS men and women, or other authorized personnel were officially permitted to use cameras. In the Mauthausen concentration camp, for example, as Lukas Meissel explains in his contribution to the excellent collection of essays, Fotografien aus den Lagern des NS-Regimes. Beweissicherung und ästhethische Praxis, “only members of the so-called Erkennungsdienst (identification department) were allowed to take photographs.”1 These photographs “do not reflect the reality of the camp” (45). They seldom confront us directly with Nazi violence. Instead, these pictures offer (false) images of frictionless operations, visual testimony to the efficiency of the perpetrators, usually meant to impress their superiors.