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After Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, West Germans began to accept the more permanent division of the country and rediscovered the regional fundaments of their federal political system. A catalyst for this process was provided by a massive regionalization of the daily press in the aftermath of the recession in 1973. That regionalization entailed the delineation of new regional distribution and advertising areas, the launch of new editions, the growth of regularly and irregularly published alternative papers and a stronger emphasis on regional news. In the 1970s regionalization cut across all segments of the market and across party affiliations and affected established papers, the irregular alternative press and even television and broadcasting. It propelled the West German daily press to its height point in German history, with more than 25 million copies per day in 1982. The new regional focus of the daily press increased public awareness of regional protests, regional identity politics and regional scandals during the chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt (1974-82) to such an extent that the article concludes that the 1970s were not only a 'global' decade, but also a regional decade. The history of the regional press that is presented in the article for the first time facilitates a new view of regional changes in economic prosperity, criticism of the federal state and the emergence of regional consumer markets between 1974 and 1982. The analysis provides a cornerstone for a more detailed media history of the Bonn Republic and a new understanding of the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the roots of mania and melancholia can be traced to the 18th century and earlier, we have no such long historical narrative for dementia praecox (DP). I, here, provide part of that history, beginning with Kraepelin's chapter on Verrücktheit for his 1883 first edition textbook, which, over the ensuing 5 editions, evolved into Kraepelin's mature concepts of paranoia and paranoid DP. That chapter had 5 references published from 1865 to 1879 when delusional-hallucinatory syndromes in Germany were largely understood as secondary syndromes arising from prior episodes of melancholia and mania in the course of a unitary psychosis. Each paper challenged that view supporting a primary Verrücktheit as a disorder that should exist alongside mania and melancholia. The later authors utilized faculty psychology, noting that primary Verrücktheit resulted from a fundamental disorder of thought or cognition. In particular, they argued that, while delusions in mania and melancholia were secondary, arising from primary mood changes, in Verrücktheit, delusions were primary with observed changes in mood resulting from, and not causing, the delusions. In addition to faculty psychology, these nosologic changes were based on the common-sense concept of understandability that permitted clinicians to distinguish individuals in which delusions emerged from mood changes and mood changes from delusions. The rise of primary Verrücktheit in German psychiatry in the 1860–1870s created a nosologic space for primary psychotic illness. From 1883 to 1899, Kraepelin moved into this space filling it with his mature diagnoses of paranoia and paranoid DP, our modern-day paranoid schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Bombing Restriction Committee's efforts in preventing the British Royal Air Force's (RAF's) aerial bombing of civilians in Germany during World War II, from 1941 through 1945, including the committee's pacifist protests. An overview of committee chairperson H. Stanley Jevons' advocating that British aerial bombing be restricted to military targets in Germany is provided. British politician George Bell's perspective on aerial bombing is discussed.

Extramarital sexuality has always been regarded as a transgression of the accepted norms. The increasing criminalization of extramarital sexuality after the Reformation led to an intensification of the prosecution of illegitimacy by secular authorities. But in the pluriform early modern legal landscape, a whole range of judicial, semi-judicial and extrajudicial institutions and mechanisms existed to exercise control over deviant behavior.  This paper focuses on the institutional setting in which social control over illegitimacy was exercised in the early modern period in Holland and Germany, working with Martin Dinges' concept of the "uses of justice." Both regions experienced several waves of criminalization of sexuality during and after the Reformation, and women were disproportionately affected by this. However, research for both regions has shown that women were not only "passive victims" in this process but also shaped the institutions by actively making use of them. It has been suggested in the literature that, in the early modern period, Dutch women enjoyed a rather favorable position compared to women in neighboring countries and that they were granted considerable leeway in social and legal respects. Considering the differences in the legal system in both countries, the question arises whether there were fundamental differences in the way that social control was exercised over illegitimacy in Germany and the Netherlands and whether Dutch women were truly granted more leeway in a social and legal respect with regard to illegitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in how early modern German burghers conceptualized the role of anger and provocation in cases of insult and defamation. Reflecting the wider culture's conflicted assessment of anger, considerable debate existed among urban magistrates as to whether anger could excuse or mitigate a defendant's culpability for defamatory outbursts; some jurists concluded that anger negated the punishable animus of the offense, while others rejected the defense as a threat to public order. Because of the high social value of public reputation in this period, however, early modern German law assumed, and to some extent, justified, the forceful defense of honor. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the law increasingly came to legitimize the expression of anger in insult cases, recognizing it as a potentially mitigating or exculpatory factor. Many territorial and civic codes also defined a legal "right of retort" that allowed a certain measure of verbal "self-help" when individuals judged that their honor had been offended. These developments complicate Norbert Elias' suggestion that standards of civility emerging in this period increasingly proscribed the passionate defense of honor and the pursuit of private justice. Far from demanding the suppression of anger, the law increasingly came to protect it, while at the same time seeking to tame its more destructive manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘New Woman’ was an important part of the culture and society of Weimar Germany, both as a discursive figure and as social reality. However, the interdependencies between these two aspects—the ‘New Woman’ as a media phenomenon and as a lived reality—have not yet been investigated in depth. Using the example of the tabloid newspaper Tempo (1928–1933) and its interaction with its readership, this article sheds light on the ways in which Germans reconciled the ‘New Woman’ ideal with their own experiences at the end of the Weimar Republic. Most importantly, it shows the struggle of many readers to accommodate new ideas about ‘modern’ relationships between men and women at a time when traditional morals persisted in a rapidly deteriorating economic climate.A number of scholars have pointed to a change in the media-driven construction of images of femininity in the late 1920s, with the modern, independent ‘New Woman’ making way for a more conservative ideal of motherhood and devotion. This article argues that this shift in the discourse on femininity did not reflect a change in the self-definition of German women. Rather, the interaction of Tempo’s female and male readers with the paper suggests that they tried to accommodate new concepts of modern femininity with persisting traditional ideas about women’s role in society, arriving at a hybrid type of ‘moderately modern’ womanhood. Thus, only the image of the ‘New Woman’ constructed in the media changed at the end of the 1920s, while the self-definition of German women remained relatively stable—even beyond 1933. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Gregorian reform movement in general, and events at Canossa in 1077 in particular, have been credited with tarnishing the lustre of sacral kingship within the Empire. In this paper narrative, liturgical and material sources are drawn upon, to demonstrate the extent to which the image of kingship within the Hohenstaufen Empire continued to be rooted in biblical and liturgical soil. The paper focuses on the ritual of inauguration and draws a distinction between royal and imperial ceremonies. This makes it apparent that, while scholars have been right to stress the extent to which papal alterations to the imperial rite undermined the liturgical associations of the imperial office, the imperial liturgy developed by the papal curia in Rome had negligible impact on the royal inauguration liturgy used in Aachen. On the contrary, German monarchs continued to make lively use of inauguration liturgy to emphasize, in the face of papal opprobrium, the divinely ordained nature of their rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two hundred years or so have seen the transformation of medical practice from a clinical art to the application of science to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There has been a historical debate about how the use of technology and discoveries of the laboratory have become integrated within medical practice. In trying to understand the evolution of “scientific medicine,” this has generally focused on the tensions between the differing cultures, persons, and professions of the “laboratory” and “clinic” and sought to explain how they were resolved within specific institutions. This paper looks again at the “Glasgow School” (the subject of a number of seminal papers on this subject) and the forces that shaped it, by exploring the career of Leonard Findlay, whose training in Glasgow, and in Berlin (where he worked in a department in which science and medicine were integrated), defined a style of clinical medicine that formed the model for a new sort of university department of medicine in which clinicians and scientists worked side by side, albeit under the leadership of the former. As a clinician exposed in Berlin to the emerging new sciences of nutrition, microbiology, and immunology, which were particularly relevant to the care of sick children, Findlay created in Glasgow a department of medical pediatrics, which owed less to local factors, figures, and forces and more to his experience in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the central role of the West German state in the transition from the golden to the global age of capitalism in the crisis decade of the 1970s. I argue that in order to keep the world economy open for its exports and shore up its competitive position, German crisis managers pursued a grand economic strategy that sought to defeat the interventionist and expansionary responses of the European left and to commit the United States to monetary discipline. The success of this strategy had contradictory consequences: It stabilized the social consensus inside Germany but undermined it in states whose economies did not stand to benefit from austerity measures. Germany's particularistic way of coping with the crisis thus contributed decisively, though not deliberately, to the 'disembedding' of the liberal international economic order. This argument challenges existing explanations of neoliberalism as an Anglo-American imposition on a passive Western Europe and Japan or as an ideological conversion of policymakers. I conclude with an alternative interpretation that highlights the interplay of divergent and opposing strategies of crisis management as the principal driver of social and world order change in the 1970s and potentially today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pharmaceutical industry adopted technology in markedly different ways in Germany, the United States, and Britain. During the early 20th century, useful knowledge became a commercial asset, but British intellectual property and drug regulation laws created neither pressures nor rewards for growth. Key differences emerged in the ways in which intellectual property was used, in the development of testing and standardization, and in the links between researchers and industry. We show how firms sought to control the new knowledge assets that built the business of health. This also helps to explain the choices made in the three countries as to what forms of investments best further industry goals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the anti-Jewish riots in Germany and Russia from 1881 to 1882. The author analyzes how these incidents of anti-Jewish violence were assessed in the German Catholic press. The article focuses on the German newspaper "Germania." Background information on the newspaper is provided. The author reviews the response of "Germania" to the Anti-Jewish riots of 1881 in Germany and its response to similar events that took place in Russia. The article also discusses the casual factors of the anti-Jewish violence.

The article explores the local history of the Silesian city of Oels as presented in selected early modern books and pamphlets published primarily in the local print shop, but also in other cities. A prominent example of such a historical event is the 1535 tempest, descriptions of which were published in its immediate aftermath. The much-later Beschreibung of 1657 is presented as an example of creating local identity through emphasizing two cultural aspects linked to the event: the alleged nefarious role of the Jewish community and the special relationship of the local citizens with the dukes of, at first, the Podebrad, and later the Württemberg families. Although natural disasters are repetitive occurrences, the 1535 tempest was understood by the people of Oels in a singular manner, which was characteristic for the local context. The thesis about the singularity of the local history is further corroborated through a number of examples from Oels. Different aspects of singularity dominate in different publications depicting local events: the singularity of situations, people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bonn's ascension to the rank of capital city in 1948/1949 represented the first major success of a new political culture and the original aesthetic imperatives it was designing. In 1948 five cities, Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt, Kassel and Stuttgart, vied to be chosen capital city of the soon to be formed Federal Republic of Germany. When the dust settled, the unexpected had occurred; the sleepy university town in the Western reaches of the country, Bonn, had triumphed over a cultural centre, financial centre, commercial centre, and the former capital city. The new political aesthetics were firstly based on the repudiation of any aesthetic program associated with either National Socialism or Monarchism, Third Reich or Wilhelmine Germany. Carlo Schmid warned that nomina sunt omina--names are omens! 'Names express what is really there, or ought to be there', that is, the essence of things. Although Schmid was warning about the name of the future constitution, his attitude reflected a broadly held belief that names and symbols are important, even crucial signifiers. This paper explores the ways the choice of Bonn was perceived by West Germans in their visual media through a look at several political cartoons and how the cartoons and official state press photographs from the Bundesarchiv collection contributed to the formation of Bonn's symbolic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the excise taxes (Ungeld) paid by town residents on the consumption of beer, wine, mead and brandy represented the single most important source of civic revenue for many German cities. In a crisis, these taxes could spike to 70–80% of civic income. This paper examines civic budgets and ‘behind-the-scenes’ deliberations in a sample of towns in southern Germany in order to illuminate how decisions affecting consumer taxes were made. Even during the sobriety movements of the Reformation and post-Reformation period, tax income from drinkers remained attractive to city leaders because the bulk of the excise tax burden could easily be shifted away from privileged members of society and placed on the population at large. At the same time, governments had to maintain a careful balance between what they needed in order to govern and what the consumer market could bear, for high taxes on drinks were also targeted in many popular revolts. This led to nimble politicking by those responsible for tax decisions. Drink taxes were introduced, raised, lowered and otherwise manipulated based not only on shifting fashions and tastes but also on the degree of economic stress faced by the community. Where civic rulers were successful in striking the right balance, the rewards were considerable. The income from drink sales was a major factor in how the cities of the Empire survived the wars and other crises of the early modern period without going into so much debt that they lost their independence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Nazi leisure organization Kraft durch Freude organized roughly 4,000 exhibitions of artworks, crafts, and consumer objects in factories across Germany. This paper explores the ideological function of mass-produced housewares and decorative objects within these shows—in particular, how these objects reinforced the notion that National Socialism would bring individual Germans together as members of a Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’. By analysing how individual objects entered into dialogue with the exhibition site, with each other, and with spectators, I argue that factory exhibitions gave traction to the concept of ‘people’s community’ in three ways. First, the exhibitions used the interplay between displayed objects and their immediate environment to metaphorically re-shift the factory from a paradigmatic site of Gesellschaft (‘society’) to one of Gemeinschaft (‘community’). Second, although exhibited objects were frequently governed by different formal vocabularies, these differences created slippages between objects with explicitly political or racial references and those whose ideological charge was less overt. Third, regardless of the seeming innocuousness of the exhibited mass-produced housewares and decorative objects, the inclusion of these goods directed workers’ demand, as consumers, toward products made by ideologically compliant, ‘racially pure’ manufacturers—a process that companies hosting the exhibitions facilitated largely out of self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The spread of computer technology in West German industry during the 1980s and 1990s dramatically changed the demand for skilled and unskilled work in manufacturing. As a result the knowledge used in production was redefined and reformers pushed for radical reform in vocational and general education. In these decades a corporate agreement across trade unions, associations of employers and state bureaucracy brought about a series of adaptive reforms of existing apprenticeships and the creation of new apprenticeships in new branches. This survival of the dual system is analysed as part of the strategies of modernizing West German manufacturing industries. Both employers and trade unions defended the central role of skilled workers in the new system of flexible quality production that developed during this period of rapid technological change. Data from the Socio-Economic Panel and from other sources enable analysis of the social effects of this economically successful strategy. They show the large-scale use of skilled workers in industrial production and their opportunities for upward mobility and additional qualifications. At the same time unskilled workers, and unskilled migrant workers in particular, experienced greater risks of unemployment and increased job uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History museums in old industrial regions are important agents in the current debate on how we perceive work in our society. One of their key issues is how work built the region and how it changed in the context of deindustrialization. The article explores the depictions of work in the Ruhr Museum, which is the central regional history museum of the foremost region of heavy industry in Germany. It shows that with few exceptions the representations of the past in this museum include only images of standardized male industrial work, mainly in the coal and steel industries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that in the sections of the museum dedicated to the present, work has disappeared almost entirely from the representations, to be replaced with representations of culture, including industrial heritage, and lifestyles. In light of these findings the article argues that this way of presenting (and not presenting) work emphasizes the break between the past and the present. It homogenizes the historical narrative of work while making current work forms invisible and downplaying the continuing importance of the world of work. Instead, the museum tells a story of loss that requires compensation by culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do Muslim institutions in Europe relate to national and European values? How do they visibly challenge boundaries that other/exclude Islam? This analysis identifies two factors that result in the acceptance or rejection of mosques, showing the boundary work at play in this process: (1) the ability of Muslim leadership to achieve a positive visibility of the mosque through the performance and staging of key German civic ideals; and (2) the role of local contexts of reception. Through ethnography, interview data, and analysis of newspaper coverage of the Penzberg Mosque and the Cologne Mosque, I argue that the strategic presentation of both form and function by Muslim communities interacts with constraining environmental factors in delineating possibilities of belonging. This leads to the labeling of mosques as "good" or "bad," evoking the "good Muslim"/"bad Muslim" binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the memorialization and supposed cult of veneration of religious leader Martin Luther following his death in relation to the confessional era following the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Topics include the notion of Luther as a pseudo-saint, the purported use of relics and remains of Luther, and the development of collective memory regarding Luther.

Through an examination of American policy toward Germany during late 1918 to 1919, this article challenges widely held ideas about the attitudes of American President Woodrow Wilson toward democracy promotion. Scholars typically have seen in Wilson’s foreign policy the antecedents of several subsequent U.S. presidents’ policies of democracy promotion and democratic interventionism. This study contends that at least during the second half of Wilson’s presidency, however, Wilson did not regard it as appropriate for the United States to intervene in the internal political affairs of other nations to promote democracy. While he hoped that postwar Germany would come to embrace democracy, he believed that the Germans would have to find democracy on their own. Despite the fact that those American diplomatic officials who were most familiar with the situation in Germany continually urged a more active U.S. policy to promote democracy there, Wilson remained deeply skeptical of the new German government and adhered firmly to the view that the United States should refrain from attempting to influence Germany’s internal political affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A bibliography on the topic of world history is presented which includes the books "The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History," edited by Xun Zhou, "Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages," by Nicholas Orme, and "The Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1939: A Documentary History," edited by Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann.

Cities and war have a long shared history, but the historical constructs to explain the place of the city in modern warfare during the Revolutionary era and nineteenth century are underdeveloped. I define this experience as 'modern military urbanism' and explore the examples of Hamburg and Leipzig during the Napoleonic Wars and in their immediate aftermath to highlight the responses of urban society to wartime mobilization, destruction and civilian displacement. To reveal these practices, I analyse how volunteer militias and civic associations operated and intersected with central urban institutions, churches, public spaces and the press and print media in times of war and civilian distress. Associational life, churches and the press formed a trinity that embodies key elements of modern urban militarism in co-operating to support local and state armies, patriotic wartime mobilization, humanitarian relief and postwar commemorative practices and rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of his continuing political and cultural currency in Germany and beyond, this article endeavours to understand the widespread and singular interest in sexologist and sex reformer Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) as a historical figure. To this end, it analyses four book-length biographies, two in English and two in German, written between the mid-1980s and the early 2010s. By highlighting repeated themes, claims and assertions, the article demonstrates how the dominant representation of Magnus Hirschfeld that emerges across all of his biographies is that of a tireless humanitarian doctor who dedicated his life to fulfilling the spirit of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee's motto: Per scientiam ad justitiam, 'Through Science to Justice'. Based on this framing, his biographers mobilize Hirschfeld's legacy to defend the Enlightenment tradition and champion a liberal approach to sexual politics. This article considers the consequences of these representational choices by examining how biographers suppress or mitigate the more troubling aspects of Hirschfeld's life in order to sustain a narrative that can bear the weight of these political investments. By way of conclusion, it explores the narrative and analytical possibilities afforded by a more ambivalent reading of Hirschfeld's life and legacy, and maintains that a less certain and less heroic view of Hirschfeld may ultimately provide more insight into both the past and the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role that father confessors and confession played in the 1692 witch trial in the Lutheran city of Rothenburg ob der Taube, Germany of the accused attempted murderer Barbara Ehness. An overview of Ehness's attempt to murder her lodger Hans Georg Rupp and his family through poisoning is provided. The Rothenburg cleric and Church Superintendent Sebastian Kirchmeier's efforts in witch hunting is discussed.

For much of his career, New Testament scholar and systematic theologian Heinrich Weinel promoted theological pluralism, progressive politics, and humanitarian ideals. However, near the end of his life he gave qualified support to the Deutsche Christen, a movement that sought to establish a “German Christianity” informed by Nazi ideology. Examination of Weinel’s published works, unpublished manuscripts, and private correspondence reveals that his support for the Deutsche Christen was a strategic compromise, driven by situational factors and limited ideological affinity rather than a thoroughgoing embrace of völkisch (populist/racist) Christianity. Weinel’s story represents one of many paths to complicity within the German churches during the Third Reich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first decade of the twentieth century scholarly reformers around the world became newly aware that universities were assets that could be harnessed to achieve national economic and cultural goals. Yet universities remained local institutions, nested in the cities that benefited from—and contributed to—their success. Focusing on scholarly reformers in Germany and America, including Daniel Coit Gilman, Nicholas Murray Butler, Felix Klein, and Karl Lamprecht, this article shows how competition and cooperation developed among universities, in which scholarly managers negotiated often conflicting local, national, and international goals. In contrast to the classic story of the history of the research university, I reveal that educational models were transported not only from Germany to America, but also, nearly a decade before World War I, in the reverse direction. And in contrast to the recent “international” turn in the field, I argue that placing the university in a transatlantic framework reminds us that the local remains a critical ingredient in histories of knowledge exchange and globalization. The transnational story of these scholarly reformers and their institutions suggests that the “knowledge economy” has earlier roots than assumed, and those roots are the basis of contemporary questions concerning the university’s role in the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The largest cache of medieval liturgical furnishings that survives is in Protestant Germany. This survival has sometimes been attributed to Martin Luther's doctrine of the 'indifference' of objects. Using several examples, one from south Germany (the altar at Rothenburg ob der Tauber) and two from women's convents in the north (especially some devotional statues and their dresses from Kloster Wienhausen), this article argues not only that religious objects are far from indifferent but also that they alter our standard opinions about the Observant Reform of fifteenth-century Germany and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and suggest new understandings of continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses German physician Georg Palma of Nuremberg, and explores how a biography can be built from city records, his library, and his personal notebooks. It reports that municipal record detail his education, including his university studies in Germany and Italy, marriage, visits to the local bishop, and death. His library of roughly 800 books was donated to the Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg and their topics and marginalia highlight his travels and interests. Also donated to the library were notebooks detailing his medical career spanning twenty-five years and were highlighted by the move from Medieval medicine focused on the beliefs of Galenic theory to a more modern understanding of human anatomy.

Germany's relationship with Russia has historically been one of the most crucial in shaping Europe's fate. Despite radical transformation in the nature of European Great Power politics, it continues to be pertinent from the perspective of today's world. Germany's willingness to establish good relations with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s-its emphasis on economic relations and cooperation instead of political disagreements-prepared the ground for the end of the Cold War and German unification twenty years later. Germany's basic policy towards Russia remained broadly unchanged despite German unification and changes in the domestic political coalitions and leadership, sometimes against political expectations. In the European context, Germany's attitude towards Russia created the backbone of EU-Russia relations. During 2012-13, however, the continuity in Germany's policy towards Russia was seen as having come to an end. Political twists came to the fore and the atmosphere was loaded with tensions, made worse by the Ukrainian crisis. This article reviews the recent, alleged changes in Germany's policy towards Russia during the Merkel era. It asks two basic questions: first, whether Germany's policy really has changed and if it has, what are the theoretical tools that give us the best potential understanding of these changes? The article argues that the policy has changed, but not as dramatically as made out by some headlines. Moreover, the article suggests that a key element in analysing the degree of change in Germany's policy towards Russia is neither the external power relations nor domestic politics and related changes in the prevailing interpretation of national interest, though these are important too, but the interaction between the leaders and foreign policy elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses anti-secular Christian conservatives in Germany during the late Weimar Republic years of 1928 through 1933, including in regard to their efforts against godlessness, or atheism. The relationship between the anti-secular movement among Christians in Germany and the rise of the national socialism in the country, is discussed.

In the context of German federalism and its current reform debate, this article explores the federal reform preferences of members from all sixteen German Länder parliaments. We examine the role of Länder self-interest, party ideology, and individual characteristics to understand the preferences for tax autonomy and fiscal equalization. One clear result is the joint importance of ideology and jurisdictional interests. We use the empirical results to simulate which type of reform would garner the necessary support in Germany's upper house, the Bundesrat. Finally, we draw conclusions for federal reform strategies which could enjoy the support of veto players who feel disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, focusing on the role of Germany in responding to the crisis in relation to the country's politics, government, and history. The author presents a case for the view that the crisis is not likely to lead to the collapse of the euro monetary union and that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's policies in handling the crisis reflect continuity with Germany's ordoliberal economic policy tradition. Topics include Germany's economic power within Europe, financial bailouts and the eventual requirement for private creditors to pay part of the cost of bailout, austerity economic policies, how ordoliberalism differs from neoliberalism, monetary policy and inflation, and German public opinion.

In the aftermath of the Kulturkampf, involvement in the German colonial project provided an opportunity for German Catholics to demonstrate their patriotism. In particular, German Catholic missions sought to carve out a role for themselves in the education of African youngsters not just in the new overseas territories in Africa, but also in Germany itself. Prior to the First World War, a handful of youngsters, primarily from Cameroon, were thus educated by the Pallottine Mission at Limburg an der Lahn and by the Benedictine Mission at St Ottilien, near Munich. This article looks at the ways in which these African students were soon used both publicly and privately to promote Catholic missionary work at home in order to secure support from amongst the Catholic elite of Europe, both financial and political, for ventures abroad. This allows for an analysis of domestic missionary promotional practices as well as of evolving representations of colonial Africans during the Imperial period. The article considers public religious ceremonies (primarily baptisms), mission newspaper reports and fundraising tours in order to demonstrate that these African youngsters came to personify an image of the civilized African, who was devout, intellectually capable and hard-working; an image which offered a counterpoint to the more prevalent negative representations of blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the impact exerted by the evacuation of civilians on the pastoral structures of Catholic dioceses in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the later years of the Second World War. It examines the religious lives of Catholic evacuees from these regions in other parts of Germany, such as Saxony and Thuringia, and also assesses how effectively their clergy were able to minister to them in these new surroundings. In so doing, this article contributes to historiographical debates concerning the role of religion in German society during the Second World War. Many excellent works claim that the later phases of the conflict witnessed a widespread return to religious faith on the home front. This article aims to challenge this historiographical assumption, by revealing the manifold ways in which Catholic life was profoundly disrupted by the evacuation of civilians during the last years of the war. Large numbers of evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia went for extensive periods without supervision by their clergy, and frequently displayed indifference towards religious matters. Rather than viewing the Catholic Church’s prominence in western Germany after 1945 as grounded in social developments under way during the war years, this article contends that it must be seen as the product of changed political circumstances in the later 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the relationship between the Anabaptist religious movement and the economics and culture of the printing industry in 16th-century Germany. Particular focus is given to the book "A Christian Instruction, How the Godly Scriptures are to be Compared and Interpreted" by Hans Hut, edited by pamphleteer Johannes Landsperger and published by printer Philip Ulhart. According to the author, Anabaptists made wider use of print media than scholars have previously believed.

From August 2013, a new, controversial ancillary copyright law (Leistungsschutzrecht) permitted German publishers to charge online news aggregator, such as Google for displaying article snippets. Implementation remains contested, but this is not the first time that new technology has prompted Germans to seek intellectual property rights in news. In August 1927, a German delegation successfully pushed through its compromise resolution on the legal protection of news during a Conference of Press Experts at the League of Nations. The resolution foresaw protection for news before publication, but allowed national governments to regulate news after publication. This left space for Germany to promulgate a national law on news that Germans hoped would become a model for others. This article uses the Conference of Press Experts to argue that German approaches to media, technology and law developed from the intersection between national and international concerns. In contrast to other scholars’ focus on the press as a national phenomenon, the article shows that the international spotlight enabled a temporary cooperation between two groups often at odds during the Weimar Republic: the press and government officials. Officials saw law as a form of soft power to raise Germany’s international profile, while the semi-official news agency, Wolff, aimed to counter domestic competition and stop radio listeners eavesdropping on its news. Yet, bureaucrats and the media only cooperated effectively on the international stage. In domestic discussions after the conference, consensus swiftly disintegrated. This interplay between national and international imperatives remains key for media policy today as well as in interwar German history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

War was over, the nations that had participated in it were burdened by enormous war debts. They had financed their war expenditure to a large extent on credit. War bonds had been taken up by the people and, in addition, foreign loans, mostly from the United States, had also been raised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s Commercial Revolution using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the papal schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are robust to estimating a variety of specifications that address concerns about the endogeneity of university location. Universities provided training in newly rediscovered Roman and canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in the Middle Ages. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity in medieval Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

World War I witnessed the admission of large numbers of German soldiers with neurological symptoms for which there was no obvious organic cause. This posed a considerable challenge for the military and medical authorities and resulted in an active discussion on the etiology and treatment of these disorders. Current historiography is reliant on published physician accounts, and this represents the first study of treatment approaches based on original case notes. We analyzed patient records from two leading departments of academic psychiatry in Germany, those at Berlin and Jena, in conjunction with the contemporaneous medical literature. Treatment, which can be broadly classified into reward and punishment, suggestion, affective shock, cognitive learning, and physiological methods, was developed in the context of the emerging fields of animal learning and neurophysiology. A further innovative feature was the use of quantitative methods to assess outcomes. These measures showed good response rates, though most cured patients were not sent back to battle because of their presumed psychopathic constitution. While some treatments appear unnecessarily harsh from today's perspective and were also criticized by leading psychiatrists of the time, the concentration of effort and involvement of so many senior doctors led to the development of psychotherapeutic methods that were to influence the field of psychiatric therapy for decades to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Karl Marx has been increasingly understood as a globalized figure, distant from his central European origins, intellectual orientation and political career. Reversing the usual approach, this article places Marx in the context of the intellectual and political world of nineteenth-century Germany. Arguing that the development of Marx’s social and philosophical theories rather paralleled that of the other Young Hegelians, the essay suggests that his endorsement of classical English political economy set him apart from most of his central European contemporaries. Characteristic of Marx’s political activity was his advocacy of a double recurrence of the French Revolution: a literal rerun in central Europe of the events of 1789–1794, but also a recurrence by analogy, a Communist workers’ uprising against capitalism, following the lines of the bourgeois capitalist revolt against the old regime society of orders. The essay follows Marx’s efforts to combine, both theoretically and practically, these two versions of a recurring French Revolution, from the 1840s through to the 1870s, and demonstrates the place these efforts had in the broader context of German politics during the Vormärz, the 1848 revolution and the Reichsgründungszeit. The article considers Marx’s attitudes towards German nationality and German nationalism, arguing that while Marx condemned nationalism and presented himself as an internationalist, certain aspects of both his private life and his political stances suggest the influence of nationality and nationalism. The piece concludes with a brief consideration of its implications for a globalized approach to the study of nineteenth-century German history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the development of city policy towards guest workers in the city of Stuttgart between 1955 and 1973. It argues that local-level institutional leaders almost immediately recognized the social impact of labour migration into the city. Initially Stuttgart officials emphasized the construction of guest-worker cultural centres that would take the guest workers out of public spaces and minimize their potential to create social disruption. However, by the mid-1960s, officials from the city administration and relief organizations realized that the foreign workers were not temporary and therefore began to pursue polices to integrate them into West German society—particularly in terms of providing proper family housing and schooling for guest-worker children. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the city administration began instituting various programmes to encourage more active civic engagement by the guest workers, now termed ‘foreign co-citizens’, through the creation of a Foreigner Advisory Committee and a model integration programme in a city quarter with a high density of foreigners. However, their efforts were significantly hampered because of the larger framework of federal and state policies that continued to treat the guest-worker presence as temporary, left guest workers uncertain about the duration of their residency in West Germany, and offered no long-term path to citizenship for guest workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the relationship between patriotism and nationalism in Germany between 1792 and 1815. The author discusses the how war and the state impacted the German public sphere, explores the differences of patriotism in wartime and peacetime, and examines how belligerence and public opinion were representative of the political order at the time. He also analyzes the work of scholars Otto Dann and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

In 1934, the physician Johanna Haarer published a babycare manual entitled Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind (The German Mother and her First Child). Published by Julius Friedrich Lehmanns, a prolific publisher of Nazi literature, the book went through numerous editions and by 1945 had sold nearly 600,000 copies. In 1936, Lehmanns published a follow-up, Unsere kleinen Kinder (Our Little Children), which gave advice on raising children between the ages of two and six. Haarer’s advice manuals have recently elicited interest from a range of scholars from different disciplines, raising questions about the relationship between Haarer’s childcare guidance and Nazism. This article explores what was specifically National Socialist about Haarer’s manuals by comparing her writings to childrearing advice popular in Britain at the time: advice based on Frederic Truby King’s ‘mothercraft’ movement, first advocated in the 1920s, but common into the early 1950s. Paying attention to the cultural contexts in which the advice manuals were written and disseminated, the article provides comparison of the most important instructions they contained concerning the mother–child relationship, feeding, sleep, crying, and the overall ‘training’ of the infant, to provide a historically nuanced assessment of Johanna Haarer’s manuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dachau concentration camp served throughout the pre-war period of the Third Reich as the national 'school of violence' for S. S. concentration camp personnel. Yet, typically of the pre-war Nazi camps, its history has been written by former prisoners rather than historians and offers little analysis of the S. S. personnel. This article focuses on these personnel by considering the contribution of the entangled concepts of militarism and masculinity to the ' Dachau School' and to the particularly violent culture of Dachau. It concludes that any attempt to account for the conduct of the guards must incorporate these cultural ideals and their influence on social relationships in the camp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, venereal diseases were seen not only as a problem in Germany, but also in its colonial empire. In Germany, doctors believed that through their scientific training and education they could be successful in fighting VD through the use of a biopolitics aimed to educate and regulate the bodies of targeted groups. They approached the problem in the colonies from a similar perspective. However, the colonial setting was different from the homeland, which meant that policies pursued in Germany had to be modified overseas. In the end, they achieved a greater degree of supervision over targeted bodies than their peers at home. Accordingly, the goal of subjectifcation, though not entirely abandoned, assumed secondary importance behind the perceived need for more coercive methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent research on displaced persons camps in occupied Germany, Jewish self-governance, embedded in the trope of a general Jewish rebirth, has emerged as the central narrative theme. This article makes the case that Jewish governance in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was characterized by deep divisions between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox, particularly from the liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945 through early 1947. The author considers the implications of this conflict for collective memory of the Holocaust and research on the displaced persons camps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Introduction provides an overview of how historians, in conversation with musicologists, seek to explain music and account for its prominence in the societies, movements and lives of the people they study. It introduces this special issue of German History on music and history by considering the current state of the interdisciplinary field known as the ‘new cultural history of music’. The article suggests that historians have tended to study the social, intellectual and political contexts of music rather than the music itself and as a result have relegated music to a relatively passive role in society. New research on musical performances and other cultural practices makes it possible to assign a more active role to music in history. The article draws attention to the role of scholarship on music in political cultures, both affirming and resisting established power. It also considers how historians study music in order to shed new light on the construction, maintenance and interrogation of social hierarchies, gender distinctions and religious communities. New areas of research into the history of emotions, media, sound and the brain (neural history) suggest further perspectives on the powerful force that music exerts in society—as a means to express oneself, to form, reform and transcend communal boundaries. The introduction places the subsequent articles in the context of this growing body of research and suggests how all such work helps to understand Germany’s identity as a musical nation within a richer, more international context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An article is presented that examines national socialism and the establishment of German-Hungarian borderland space, known as Burgenland, prior to World War II. The article examines the collapse of Austria in 1938. It examines the role of nationalism and the German Nazi Party in German and Hungarian territories during the time period. The article also discusses the oscillation between offensive and defensive nationalization tactics employed by Germany, the reaction to such actions by Hungary, and the roles played by Germany and Hungary in establishing borderland space following 1938.

In 1728 the Saxon elector Frederic Augustus the Strong acquired a private collection of more than 10,000 drawings which became the foundation of the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett. The print room itself developed out of the Kunstkammer which had been founded in 1560 and was dissolved at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The present article focuses on the systematization of this private collection, assembled by Gottfried Wagner in Leipzig, and the alterations it underwent on the occasion of its transfer to the Dresden print room. New archive material sheds light on the activities of collecting and arranging drawings during a period of increasing scientific erudition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the Transylvania Saxon dilemma concerning a desire to remain linguistically and ethnically German while remaining citizens of Magyar-dominated Hungary and the case of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (ADS) in 1881 and 1882. According to the article, the ADS made money available to German communities in Hungary for German-language educational and cultural purposes. The article examines the Transylvania Saxon press and several pamphlets being circulated in Imperial Germany.