Table of contents for German history from the margins

Table of contents for German history from the margins / edited by Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman.

Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog.

Note: Contents data are machine generated based on pre-publication provided by the publisher. Contents may have variations from the printed book or be incomplete or contain other coding.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman
1. Germans of the Jewish Stamm: Visions of Community between Nationalism and Particularism, 1850 to 1933 Till van Rahden
2. Identity and Essentialism: Race, Racism, and the Jews at the Fin de Siècle Yfaat Weiss
3. Prussia at the Margins, or the World That Nationalism Lost Helmut Walser Smith
4. Völkisch-Nationalism and Universalism on the Margins of the Reich: A Comparison of Majority and Minority Liberalism in Germany, 1898-1933 Eric Kurlander
5. "Volksgemeinschaften unter sich": German Minorities and Regionalism in Poland, 1918-39 Winson Chu
6. A Margin at the Center: The Conservatives in Lower Saxony between Kaiserreich and Federal Republic Frank Bösch
7. "Black-Red-Gold Enemies": Catholics, Socialists, and Jews in Elementary Schoolbooks from Kaiserreich to Third Reich Katharine Kennedy
8. "Productivist" and "Consumerist" Narratives of Jews in German History Gideon Reuveni
9. How "Jewish" is German Sexuality? Sex and Antisemitism in the Third Reich Dagmar Herzog
10. Defeated Germans and Surviving Jews: Gendered Encounters in Everyday Life in U.S.-Occupied Germany, 1945-49 Atina Grossmann
11. Afro-German Children and the Social Politics of Race after 1945 Heide Fehrenbach
12. The Difficult Task of Managing Migration: The 1973 Recruitment Stop Karen Schönwälder
13. How and Where Is German History Centered? Geoff Eley
Contributors
Index
[FMO]Acknowledgments]
This volume has its origins in a conference on "German History from the Margins" held at the University of Southampton, UK, in collaboration with the German History Society. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support provided by the Thyssen-Stiftung as well as by the German History Society, the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, and the Hartley Institute and Vice Chancellor's Fund at the University of Southampton itself. Not all the original participants could be included here (and a number of new contributions have been added), but we would like to thank all paper givers for the stimulating discussions that provided the impetus for this volume. Thanks, too, to our contributors for their patience and willing cooperation in the subsequent editorial process. We would like also to acknowledge all those who make the University of Southampton such a stimulating place to pursue an interdisciplinary conversation on matters of German history and culture. Finally, we would like to thank Indiana University Press for taking on this project and for providing such excellent editorial support.
[SIG]N.G., N.R., M.R., Southampton/Bloomington, May 2005.]
German History from the Margins
[Introduction]
[AU]Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman]
[A]I]
Why a collection approaching German history "from the margins"? It would be disingenuous to claim that German historiography has remained trapped in the corridors of power, its gaze wedded to the view from the center. More than thirty years ago, in the wake of the student revolutions of the late 1960s, historians of modern Germany assumed the moral and political challenge of writing a counterhistory from below. The working-class or female subjects of these studies were not marginal in numerical terms, but, deprived of economic and cultural power, they lacked access to the dominant organs of representation.1 The new research gave voice to the silent, the dispossessed, or the persecuted. Something of that empathetic embrace of the excluded can be found in the essays presented here, even if it is not the present volume's principal concern.
Though interest in the German working class as revolutionary subject waned in the late 1970s and 1980s, the attention devoted by historians to marginal groups only grew. When the focus shifted from class conflict to the place of ethnic, religious, and other minorities, Germany's relations with its minorities seemed often peculiarly characterized by conflict, exclusion, and intolerance.2 Historians demonstrated how from Kulturkampf to Kristallnacht a variety of outsider groups came to be castigated as enemies inside the gates, with the center repeatedly defining itself in negative terms against the deviant, the dangerous, and the outlawed.3 For some historians, it was indeed Germany's inability to integrate and absorb its diverse communities that produced the extremes of nationalism and racism. The weakness of the nation and the strength of nationalism stood in close relation. Viewed from this particular perspective, Germany was in thrall to its margins, even as it tried to suppress or incorporate them.4 Nowhere else in the Western world did the coercive and exclusionary impulses of modern society find more horrific expression than the Third Reich's polices toward Jews, gypsies, the handicapped and other foreign bodies in the "People's community."5
Yet the last few years have seen a paradigm shift in German historiography. Increasingly, Germany's margins have figured in a way that cannot be encompassed by a "lachrymose history" of suppression, segregation, and murder. Until the Nazi era, as much recent scholarship has emphasized, discourses of coercion and exclusion always coexisted with more open dialogues and encounters.6 Indeed, the language and terms of national identity were subject to interpretation and debate, with minorities themselves frequently claiming to define their own place in the national community.7 As a consequence, we now recognize that the margins were less dominated by the center and more constitutive of German identity than the conventional paradigm allows. The aim of the present volume is to introduce and explore these new ways of thinking about minorities and outsiders in modern German history.
[A]II]
What does it mean to write history from the margins? The metaphor of the margin does not seek to define specific sociological categories, even those as contested as race, class, or gender. Rather, as a spatial analogy, the image of the margin alerts us to the presence in society of groups that are somehow excluded, separate or distanced from the political or cultural center. It invites and facilitates comparisons, prompting us to think across the changing experience of minority groupings in different places and at different moments in the German past. It also reminds us that minorities and majorities constrained and shaped each other's spaces within the nation. While the place of the center defined what was marginal, the margins encroached upon and redefined the territory of the center. Minority groups existed not only as outsiders, as inhabitants of a distinct space in which they lived out their own histories (though on terms frequently dictated by the dominant culture)--they also engaged the center and thereby altered its contours and character. Approached from the perspective of the margins, the center appears less homogenous and finite, more fluid and tenuous. Both sides--the dominant and the dominated, the central and the marginal--remained not only internally heterogeneous but also mutually implicated. It was Fritz Stern who long ago observed that uncertainty with regard to the question "What is Jewish?" mirrored a similar uncertainty concerning the question "What is German?"8 And as Stephen Aschheim has recently argued in respect of Jews' relationship to their German fellow citizens, they were co-constitutive.9
For understandable reasons, theorists of nationalism or nation building have emphasized the dissolution of differences rather than their reproduction or continued significance. In Benedict Anderson's classic study, the emergence of a public sphere in which the nation could first be imagined was an essential precondition for the making of a nation; with the development of national awareness and subsequent state formation, individuals and groups came to associate themselves with a larger community of people whom they had never met.10 Ernest Gellner's 1983 account argued that the formation of a nation requires central power, standardized language and education, and a common culture.11 In both Anderson's and Gellner's formulations nationalism, under the slogan of the universal, functions as a powerful agent that coerces and melts regional, social, or religious differences into the harmony of the whole.
Anderson and Gellner contributed enormously to the understanding of the making of a nation and its culture, but their interpretations tend to understate the ongoing presence both of diversity within the nation and of competing visions of what the nation might be. Moreover, in common with many theoretical treatments of nationalism, they tended to see contemporary invocations of the nation as descriptive, rather than essentially prescriptive accounts. When Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich Heine, Leopold von Ranke, or Richard Wagner engaged the question "What is German?" after all, their contributions described an ambition, rather than a state of affairs--an acceptable desire, perhaps, but hardly a historical reality. Even as a more strident national agenda washed over Germany in the era of Wilhelm II, regional cultures and identities were dampened but far from drowned.12
If theorists of nationalism have acknowledged the ongoing presence of difference only imperfectly, how far have the grand narratives penned by historians of Germany since the Second World War incorporated issues of marginality? There was until well into the postwar period a deep-rooted and surprisingly persistent tradition of history writing that took the homogeneity of the nation, and the identity of both author and reader with that nation, for granted. Gerhard Ritter's multivolume "Sword and Scepter" study of modern Prussian/German history remains the outstanding example.13 Interested in the exercise of state power, diplomacy, and warfare, Ritter acknowledged the presence of diverse forces and interests in German society only insofar as he rued the presence of "selfish private and class goals" or "partisan strife." Identity, inasmuch as it mattered, was determined simply by subject status. Ritter was typical of a generation writing in the immediate postwar era which sought to explain not ethnic conflict and genocide but expansionism and military aggression--his analysis correspondingly focused on the evolution of military-civil relations rather than on interactions between the state and minorities or on ideologies and cultures of exclusion.
Ritter's account of a healthy "Prussian" history corrupted by the short-term historical accident of Hitler gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to far more critical narratives in which Nazism figured as the culmination of, not an aberration from, long-term developments in German history. Curiously, though, Ritter's critics displayed the same tendency to ignore issues of marginality as Ritter himself. Arguing on the same terrain as those whose arguments they sought to supplant, and thus partially determined by the very narratives they sought to subvert, theories of a German "Special Path" operated with much the same understanding of a largely homogenous state and society, the latter divided only by relatively simple class interests.14 Indeed, as late as 1987, Hans-Ulrich Wehler felt able to introduce the first part of his four-volume social history of modern Germany with a methodological statement which ignored issues of gender. The presence of a multitude of foreigners, minorities, and discriminated outsiders living among and alongside the German people was acknowledged in passing but then also essentially ignored.15 Such groups intruded into Wehler's narrative only infrequently and then very briefly, their encounters with society at large going untraced. With his focus on the evolution of state and administration, economy, and culture (the latter understood in terms of institutions such as churches and universities rather than identities, rituals, or beliefs) and on the intersection between those three spheres, Wehler argued, in any case, that the hallmark of modernity was growing uniformity. If the space for difference in the eighteenth century had been characterized by the presence of segmented, regionally diverse local societies, "one of the fundamental development processes of the nineteenth and also the twentieth centuries lay precisely in the fact that from this social diversity a homogenized national society with continuous class and strata boundaries and clear borders with the outside was to emerge."16
Despite substituting the ideas of Michel Foucault for Wehler's Weberian analysis and depicting the onward march of modernity in much more critical terms, Detlev Peukert painted a similar picture of homogenization. For Peukert, one of the most systematic and theoretically sophisticated enunciators of the new, more somber sensibility of the post-[APOS]68 era, the margin marked the boundary of the "modern project," the front line of the bureaucratic and discursive construction, regulation, and destruction of "otherness." Here, the historian could observe the Gleichschaltung of particularity or non-conformity--the smoothing outs involved in the colonization of life-worlds (Kolonisierung der Lebenswelten).17 In tandem with this change in sensibility, historians often shifted the spotlight from the working class to new groups of outsiders--to youth, for example, or to those classed as mentally ill or asocial by bureaucrats, doctors, and other elites--and increasingly also to ethnic minorities. But whilst in such writing the margin attained new significance as an index of modernity, the underlying narrative, as before, was of increasing uniformity imposed by the center.
Nonetheless, in the 1980s the growing body of empirical research into the different communities resident within Germany's (changing) borders started to influence the broad picture painted by historians of modern Germany. Thomas Nipperdey's magisterial three-volume study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German history marked a major advance in incorporating the findings of such research into a more general narrative.18 In the English-speaking world, James Sheehan argued around the same time that "the essential character of the German past and the German present [is] its diversity and its discontinuity, its richness and fragmentation, fecundity and fluidity." Rather than try to shoe-horn everything into a single story, he suggested, "we must try instead to follow the many different histories that coexisted within German-speaking central Europe, histories that led Germans towards and away from one another, at once encouraging them to act together and making such common action virtually impossible."19
Germany's history, whether in the eighteenth or twentieth centuries, was never the history just of Germans. Sheehan observed that in 1762 "Germany," in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, contained a significant number of non-Germans: "Flemings and Walloons in the Austrian Netherlands, Italians in the south, Czechs in Bohemia and Slovenes along the southern frontier."20 We might add that among those who considered themselves Germans local, regional, religious, and cultural identities remained complex and fragmented.21 This was just as true for both West and East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In the post-1945 era Germany was still characterized by the presence of border regions with complex national, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identities. Moreover, a significant residual population of displaced persons and resettled former collaborators ensured the presence of many different non-German residents from Eastern Europe.22 As such groups left or were absorbed into the mainstream they were supplanted by growing numbers of Italian, Greek, and Turkish migrant workers in the West and Vietnamese workers in the East.23 Adding to the picture of postwar diversity were the large numbers of American, British, and Russian troops, providing further opportunities for Germans to define and redefine themselves through encounters with the foreign "other" on home soil.24 Perhaps even more important, but often ignored in this context, was the presence of millions of ethnic Germans who fled westward in 1945, were expelled in 1946, or slowly trickled into West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Here was a group of individuals only recently vaunted by National Socialism as the advance guard in its project to Germanize eastern territory; now they found themselves demoted to marginal outsiders in the shrunken borders of the Federal Republic, ensuring that Germans' encounters with themselves, never mind with others, remained as complex as ever.25
The presence of such groups suggests that Wehler and Peukert are wrong to see modernity as necessarily reducing diversity. The arrival of the expellees was testimony precisely to the destructive ferocity of modern warfare and its capacity to generate refugee movements of unprecedented scale. Such constituent elements of modernity as globalization, colonization, and decolonization have been at the heart of many other stories of modern migration movements and of encounters with difference. Even where modernity has had a homogenizing aspect, as for example in the trend to secularization, we need to bear in mind the striking breadth and depth of historical spaces in which diverse cultures of religiosity long continued to flourish. The presence of such cultures remained a constituent feature of German life until at least the mid-twentieth century.26 Narratives of the bureaucratization or the "colonisation of life-worlds" often underestimate the continued presence of spheres into which these processes intruded only very imperfectly. Our volume proceeds from the assumption that German history was still highly diverse in the twentieth century, and that relationships between majorities and minorities, cores and peripheries, centers and margins remained as complex as ever.
Just around the time Nipperdey and Sheehan wrote their general histories, enormous challenges to received ways of conceptualizing centeredness and diversity in German history were beginning to emerge. Most obviously, German reunification opened up new perspectives both on the history of the German nation and more broadly on continuities and discontinuities in German history.27 It reinforced the conservative calls, already evident in the Historikerstreit, for a rediscovery of the nation and for renewed emphasis on the national question in German history. But this call for a recentering of German history coexisted, sometimes paradoxically, with conservative challenges to the idea that modern German history was dominated by racism and intolerance. In the wake of the Historikerstreit, there have been many attempts to see reunification as the moment of closure in relation to working through the moral legacies of National Socialism.28
There are clearly some siren voices for whom a "recentering" of German history implies little more than an opportunity to reassert older narratives of healthy national traditions disrupted only by the contingent short-term accident of National Socialism. But attempts to rediscover the more positive traditions of tolerance and pluralism in Germany's past have not been restricted to the right. German museums of Jewish culture and some historians of German Jewry have begun to foreground a set of German-Jewish encounters which are not best understood simply as preconditions or rehearsals for the Holocaust. These developments have been hotly contested, and, as the debates surrounding the Jewish Museum in Berlin show, accompanied by protracted disputes. Some have argued that the creation of such a museum forms part of a process by which Germans are being encouraged to invent for themselves a fictitious past in which Jews and other Germans lived happily together.29
In reality, however, the rediscovery of diverse traditions involves something more complex than a simple process of "normalization" in the pursuit of conservative agendas. It demonstrates the centrality of minority experiences to the act of reimagining the nation in the changed contemporary era. Moreover, this post-reunification reappraisal has itself taken place in the context of a more diffuse set of interactions between postmodern thought and its critics. As the postmodern challenge to the idea of a master narrative filtered into the history profession, it encouraged a new set of writings about ethnic and religious groups that emphasized the diversity and multiplicity of voices. This approach has resulted in stimulating reappraisals of the interrelationships between Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, of the interaction between local, provincial, and national identities, of the degree of cosmopolitanism and the place of culture in Wilhelmine Germany, and many other themes.30 A number of the key voices in this reappraisal are represented in the present volume.
Volker Berghahn has recently pointed out the danger in allowing the nation to dissolve into a series of margins, disconnected localities, or pluralistic encounters and in forgetting the role of the "center"--in the form of states, institutions, and other hegemonic structures--in shaping encounters between majorities and minorities or between different cultural groups.31 As Berghahn argues, we need to make sure we are not constructing a partial and misleading reading of the forces which have shaped modern German history. Indeed, in other disciplines, where postmodernism as a theoretical mood advanced more quickly, there has now been a reaction against its decenteredness, resulting not least in a move to "put the state back in." Borders, for example, have long been sites for interrogating the complexity of human identities, but recent work on their anthropology has begun to reemphasize the role of the state in shaping and interacting with ethnic identities.32
In short, the question of how far, and in what direction, we can and ought to reconceptualize identities and relationships in modern German history remains open. Three key areas remain the subject of debate: the strength, authority, and appeal of German political structures; the degree of homogeneity in German society; and the level of intolerance in German nationalism. Encounters between the state and its minorities, between majority and minority cultures, and between members of different marginal groupings offer excellent prisms through which to explore such themes. To all of these things, and to their implications for one another, the present volume has a contribution to make.
[A]III]
Covering the period between the formation of the Second Empire and the consolidation of the Federal Republic, the volume seeks to illuminate relationships between different ethnic, religious, and social groups, and--sometimes--the relationship of these to the German state, from a variety of perspectives. The emphasis is particularly on ethnic and religious minorities, but also on the way those minorities negotiated or were fractured by the fault lines of region, gender, and class. All of the contributors are in some way interested in questions of continuity and discontinuity with the radical policies of exclusion pursued by the Nazis. For this reason the editors chose within the limited confines of the volume to restrict post-1945 coverage to the Federal Republic and not to introduce the rather different questions raised by the imposition of the Soviet Communist model on East Germany. Whilst all the contributions are alive to relationships between discourse and identity, within that shared broad sensitivity the editors have deliberately encouraged a diverse range of approaches. Some explore particular sets of texts or debates, others focus on behaviors and interactions between social groupings, others look at political parties as they expressed or reacted to ethnic groupings, and still others consider state policies directed at the margins.
[LINE#]
In common with a small number of other scholars in the last few years, Till van Rahden and Yfaat Weiss look at a fascinating and important characteristic of the Kaiserreich and Weimar years--the degree to which minorities were able to adopt nationalist discourses of identity to legitimate and articulate their own relationship to the Reich. In this case, the two scholars look at the way Jewish intellectual and communal elites responded to the discourse of the Stamm or tribe--this is van Rahden's topic--or in Weiss's paper, the new scientific discourse of race.
Till van Rahden surveys the way in which over a lengthy period Jews came to redefine and reevaluate the definition of identity they had originally adopted during the battle over emancipation. The emancipation view that Jews could be adequately characterized as German citizens of Jewish faith was losing its credibility. For one thing, Jews were divided between liberal and Orthodox communities and thus somewhat polarized by their faith. For another, the level of observance was declining, so that, as one ironic voice put it, Jews and Christians were now distinguished by the days on which they did not go to worship. A purely religious self-definition was thus no longer so compelling. In an age of völkisch understandings, and with the strong Jewish sense of history that had emerged in mid-century, the notion of the Stamm or tribe came to seem an attractive and plausible way of defining what it was to be Jewish. In this way, Jews could portray themselves as a component part of the German nation just like the other regional Stämme, thus laying claim to a kind of ethnic identity that did not challenge the equally strong sense of being German.
This essay thus also reminds us that the way in which Jews perceived and defined their identity evolved over time. It shows too the role of key intellectual communal elites well versed in wider national discussion and education--some of them, like the philosopher, psychologist, and university professor Moritz Lazarus, a cofounder of the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums in Berlin, with a sophisticated understanding of the voluntaristic character of national identity to rival that of Ernst Renan or, in our times, Benedict Anderson.
In "Identity and Essentialism: Race, Racism, and the Jews at the Fin de Siècle," Yfaat Weiss similarly pursues the complex and varied responses of Jewish intellectuals to the mainstream discourse around them, in this case to the concept of race that was increasingly prevalent in the social sciences in early twentieth-century Germany. Of course, as George Mosse argued long ago and Yfaat Weiss reminds us, racial "science" in the early twentieth century was often not explicitly antisemitic.33 As scientists, social scientists, or medical professionals, Jews were invited or tempted to adopt the new language of race themselves. Yet there was always a discriminatory potential in its use. With her powerful opening metaphor of "Red Peter," the humanized ape in Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," Weiss shows us that much as they were tempted to be scientific observers, Jews found themselves at the same time the object of racial categorization. It was, as she argues, therefore no accident that some of the most systematic early critics of racial theory were the Jewish scholars Franz Boas and Franz Oppenheimer.
Nevertheless, the notion that the essence of a people might lie in its blood proved extraordinarily tempting to Jewish thinkers. In part this resulted from a natural impulse of minorities to seek essentialist explanations for their cultural differences. Moreover, even thinkers of the caliber and sophistication of Martin Buber did not see the explosive negative potential of racial theories, and found themselves forced to retract or redefine their earlier statements as their dangerous implications became all too apparent. This was not a problem just for Jews, as Weiss points out, since W. E. B. DuBois too could not escape the idea that blacks might have common inherited characteristics other than simply the color of their skin.
Van Rahden's intellectuals, coining the concept of Stamm, and Weiss's Jewish scientists, helping to bring the language of race into Jewish self-understanding, have a certain tragic irony to them. But to concentrate on this irony is to argue with hindsight and to ignore one of the essays' most striking conclusions, corroborating recent work by Celia Applegate, Alan Confino, and Mark Hewitson: local, regional, religious, and ethnic groups made use of the language of nationhood and race as a way of articulating their own interests and identities.34 Nationalism, as Margaret Lavinia Anderson wrote recently, is less powerful than we once thought, but at the same time broader.35 The dream of a homogenous nation coexisted with the fact that a variety of groups utilized the nationalist vocabulary in different ways. Yet juxtaposing the two essays, with their very different vocabularies of Stamm and race, shows us also that the particular discourses were not exclusive or universal even with respect to particular minorities.
In Helmut Walser Smith's and Eric Kurlander's essays, the margin figures not only as social metaphor but also as geographical boundary, with both authors examining the relationships between majority and minority ethnic groupings in Germany's border regions. Germany, of course, had extensive borders with a variety of different countries and languages. For the most part the border regions were characterized by the linguistic, ethnic, and confessional complexities that resulted from centuries of population movement and interstate conflict. In many cases the position of the frontier posts was contested and indeed subject to revision several times during the period under review. So the boundaries were important laboratories for Germany's ethnic and confessional relationships.
Helmut Walser Smith joins that small number of younger scholars reviving research on what has, since the Second World War, been one of Germany's more underresearched territories--the former Prussian east.36 Focusing on three particular groups--the Masures, Cassubians, and Prussian Lithuanians--Smith takes as his subject the unexpectedly rich and complex relationships crossing ethnic and religious boundaries. In particular, he seeks to illuminate the way religion itself could act as a bridge between languages and ethnicities and establish, in James Clifford's words, "cosmopolitan competencies--the arts of crossing, translation and hybridity." Each of these groups saw confessional ties that crossed or counteracted linguistic and ethnic bonds. The Masures, despite a Polish language, heritage, and customs, were nevertheless tied by their Protestantism to their German counterparts and were fiercely loyal to Prussia; the same was true of the Prussian Lithuanians. The Cassubians, with a distinct Slavic dialect, formed an even more complex group, since they were internally divided by confession and also in their wider loyalties.
But beyond this comparatively straightforward story of confessional allegiances fracturing linguistic and ethnic boundaries, Smith shows the more intricate and complex allegiances that could emerge. The Masurians, though loyal Protestants, enjoyed a particular corporeal piety that established bridges to Catholic neighbors by allowing them to celebrate specifically Catholic festival days and make pilgrimages to sites of Catholic miracles. Mixed marriages were common at least until the mid-nineteenth century. Threatening to disrupt the established denominations in the second half of the century were the new ecstatic sects such as the Gemeinschaftsbewegung that swept up Protestants but also some Catholics in Prussian Lithuania and Masuria.
At the same time Smith acknowledges that these complexities and allegiances were living on borrowed time. In the 1870s such hybrids and contacts still found sympathetic intellectuals to document and support them--pastors learning dialects to cater to their flock or tolerating dual-language services, lexicographers, and ethnologists. But from the Kulturkampf onward, German Protestant church leaders began to aggressively promote the Germanization of Christian services. Under this onslaught, the old hybrids began to disappear and, by the First World War, much of this world had disappeared.
For his part, Eric Kurlander examines the relationship between ethnic minorities and German liberalism in two border regions--Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine. Kurlander reminds us that it was Germany's marginal groups--the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, the (ethnically German) Alsatians, and indeed the Jews in almost all regions--who were the most ardent defenders of liberalism's universal promise. Long after mainstream liberalism in Germany had moved to völkisch values, minority groups clung to the old-style principles, which alone could guarantee their independence. Until the First World War, they continued to find conversation partners in the mainstream liberal parties. But after the war, those liberal parties increasingly sought to combat their weakness on the left by subscribing to the values of the völkisch right.
At the same time the regions under review show marked differences. At least until the First World War, Schleswig-Holstein saw a series of seemingly paradoxical alliances. It was the völkisch liberals, with their strong sense of ethnic affinity with the Nordic peoples, who were more tolerant of the Danes' claim to cultural self-representation, while more universalist liberals worried that any separate ethnic grouping would undermine the universal character of the polity. These paradoxical stances reinforce Till van Rahden's argument that the challenge of accommodating sub-groups and identities was never an easy one for universalists. They also show the particular situation in Schleswig-Holstein, where the Danes, unlike Jews and Poles, could call on a great deal of ethnic sympathy from völkisch ideologues. And indeed right through to the Nazi seizure of power völkisch liberals would continue to see scope for expressions of Danish identity within Germany (and for German self-determination in the now Danish area of north Schleswig).
In Alsace-Lorraine, which joined the German Reich in 1871, there was no significant ethnic minority. Ninety-six percent of the inhabitants were German speakers. But the republican inheritance from their years under French revolutionary rule created a very distinct political identity among the Alsatians. The more signs emerged after 1871 of illiberal tendencies with the German Reich, the more an Alsatian particularism emerged to preserve the republican-universalist spirit. Instead of German nationalism, the "clerical-autonomist" Anselme Laugel concluded, it was "liberty, holy and fecund liberty that one must invoke and thanks to liberty Alsace [was] proud to continue producing men who know to take up in her name the word among nations and express her eternal truths in forms familiar to her genius." This explains why it was that Alsatians largely welcomed French troops with open arms in 1918, despite their cultural and linguistic affiliations with Germany. Even though resentment of the Third Republic's rule grew after 1918, a racialist majority never developed as it did in Schleswig-Holstein.
On one level, then, Smith and Kurlander remind us of the sheer ethnic, confessional, and linguistic diversity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and in particular of the ethnic complexities in the border regions. But at the same time they offer with striking clarity an inversion of the once familiar picture of cosmopolitan liberals providing a veneer of openness and perspective to the narrow provincialism of ordinary folk in the provinces. For Smith, the unexpected story in East Prussia is rather the way a "modest, limited, rooted cosmopolitanism," transacted in forms of piety and patterns of commerce, was wiped out in the intensifying conflict between Germanizing civil servants and clergymen, on the one hand, and self-consciously Polish intellectuals in the other. For Kurlander, similarly, the underlying story is the increasingly völkisch tones of Germany's liberals, dismissing the plaintive reminders from Alsatian Germans, Schleswig Danes, and (as Kurlander has added elsewhere) Silesian Jews37 that there had once been a universalist liberal conversation in the provinces.
In different ways, Winson Chu and Frank Bösch also identify fractures running against the more familiar ethnic grain, but in this case their subject is not the ties that bind different ethnicities, but rather the regional and particular sub-groupings that challenge our sense of the solidarity of German nationalism and conservatism.
Chu offers us the unfamiliar story of regionalism and division among the Germans of Poland after 1918. As he reminds us, the German minorities to be found in the newly reformed Polish state after the First World War had a threefold provenance. In the west were the formerly Prussian border regions, whose German speakers had until 1918 been part of Prussia, later the German empire, and had been accustomed to being the dominant players in the region. This grouping could not adjust to its new-found subordination and in that respect its situation was similar to that of a second grouping, the German speakers in the south in Silesia and Galicia, formerly part of the Austrian empire. Finally, the east and northeast of Poland were home to ethnic Germans formerly under Russian rule, who hoped that the new Polish state would demonstrate a greater toleration of their ethnicity than had their Russian lords.
Chu's principal concerns are the shifting dynamics that prevented these different groups from forming a united front within Poland. Despite common interests in opposing real and imagined Polish suppression of their ethnic identities, the Germans in the east were resentful of their better-supplied counterparts in western Poland, who enjoyed the lion's share of covert aid from a Weimar Republic keen to see its eastern boundaries revised. After the Nazis came to power, however, the relationship changed, with the eastern Germans enjoying increasing prominence within Poland's German minority. This was partly a question of demographics--as the German minority in the west declined, the number of ethnic Germans in Congress Poland grew rapidly. But even more significant was the Nazis' different hierarchy of value. Unlike the limited territorial revisionism of the Weimar Republic, which had given priority to the western Poles, the Nazis' support for Germandom wherever it was to be found provided greater rhetorical, administrative, and financial momentum to the formerly Russian Germans. The result was that despite a broad acceptance of Nazism, the latent regional divisions within the German minority in Poland did not disappear before 1939. Minority leaders were able to synthesize prevailing ideological considerations with these concrete interests, often in ways quite frustrating to their Reich caregivers. Indeed, Nazi support for the ethnic Germans in eastern Poland served to deepen rather than bridge regional divisions.
Frank Bösch too offers an unexpected take on "marginality" within the German ethnic mainstream, this time looking at a group that at first sight seems at the very heart of the German establishment, and certainly one located as far from the German borders as it was possible to get. The Guelphic conservatives in Hanover have been largely ignored by historians of German conservatism, in favor of Prussian elites and Catholic conservatives of the southwest. As Bösch argues, this itself reflects the Guelphs' increasing sense of marginality after the incorporation of the kingdom of Hanover into Prussia in 1866.
Bösch shows the striking persistence of Guelph identity over a full century of post-Hanoverian history. Ministers from the Guelph party (DHP, later DP) played prominent roles in Lower Saxon politics until well into the post-WWII period. This persistence belied a recurrent pattern whereby the party gained major impetus from the moments of national reorganization (1871, 1918, and 1945) but then declined during the stable years of the Kaiserreich, Weimar, and then the Federal Republic. A well-connected network of local notables, from the grand aristocrats of Hanover down to lawyers and local pastors, kept the movement's identity alive, while nevertheless making economic and social use of whatever regime was in place. Perhaps the most interesting point for our purposes is the mixture of continuity and discontinuity in the rhetoric which accompanied the Guelphs' assertions of independence. After 1866, the movement saw itself as struggling against the overweening Prussian monarchy. In 1918, its anti-Prussianism was more anti-Bolshevik than anti-monarchist. Absorbed (but not dissolved) reasonably uncomplainingly into the Nazi movement, it emerged after 1945 embodying the "safe" patriotism of regionalism and old monarchical traditions, without the rejected mantle of nationalism. In each case, the existing infrastructure of local notables was sufficiently credible to bring new generations of supporters on board.
While almost all of our contributors are interested in discourse, Gideon Reuveni and Kathy Kennedy are explicitly concerned with the politics of texts. Both look at establishment efforts in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic to control what the public read and at the images of minorities that were presented to them. Reuveni and Kennedy emerge with answers that reveal unexpected ambiguities and openness in contemporary discourse.
Kennedy's focus is the reading texts designed for grades five to eight in Germany's elementary schools. As she delved into the texts, her principal discovery was an unexpected absence: she did not find the negative stereotypes and demons she had expected. Rather, a diverse set of texts existed (for the different denominational schools), each of which in themselves had a tendency to ignore diversity. In part, this is a reminder of the institutionalized pluralism of Germany's public school system--in which, until 1933, Catholic, Protestant, and some Jewish elementary schools existed side by side--and in which the states retained local responsibility. Beyond that, there was a generic tendency to ignore, rather than demonize, difference. Thus each promoted an imaginary homogenous, harmonious Germany, but the precise content varied from book to book according to the population for whom it was primarily intended. The main religious communities were able to shape the texts for their particular schools, and tended to avoid the contentious issues of difference. The states also varied somewhat in their choice of texts. Even socialism barely figured as a bugbear, though there were several Prussian texts from the Kaiserreich extolling the kaiser's deeds for the workers.
It is only in Nazi Germany after 1935 and particularly in wartime revisions to the textbooks that we find radical discontinuity, the elimination of diversity, the stifling of positive support for Christian denominations, and the increasingly rabid denunciations of brutal Communists and devious Jews. As Kennedy notes, the writers of Nazi textbooks had been educated in the Kaiserreich and Weimar, so that the post-1933 schoolbook culture cannot simply be detached from the preceding era. Nevertheless, Kennedy urges caution in creating a teleology of German intolerance.
Like Kennedy's, Gideon Reuveni's interest lies as much in what he did not find in the texts as what he did find. His expectations had been fashioned by the well-established historical interpretation of the German Kaiserreich, of which Shulamit Volkov has been one of the most prominent advocates, that antisemitism became its generic anti-modernist "code," a pervasive and emotive shorthand for opposition to industrialization, urbanization, socialism, and democracy.38 Reuveni investigated the equally encapsulating and symbolic movement against "trash and smut" in literature and the war on alcohol. Enjoying the support of a panoply of voluntary groups and official bodies, the movement sought to combat threats as heterogeneous as pornography, homosexuality, internationalism, and capitalism. Yet Reuveni discovered the remarkable fact that from the Kaiserreich into the Weimar years, antisemitism barely figured in this campaign. In contrast, antisemitism featured prominently in the debates about animal protection in Germany--when animal welfarists attacked Jewish ritual slaughter as inhumane, cruel, and torturous--as well as in the fight against department stores.
One conclusion Reuveni draws from this is that much work on antisemitism has focused rather narrowly on the literature of the antisemites themselves, a perspective that has encouraged circular conclusions about the Kaiserreich. The silence on Jews he uncovered is remarkable, particularly given the apparent overlaps in anti-modernist sentiment between the antisemitic movement, the campaign against pulp writings, and the movement against alcoholism. Placed alongside his analysis of the antisemitism in the debates about animal protection and the battle against department stores, his finding challenges common wisdom. To account for the striking differences, Reuveni's explanation draws on what he calls "consumer" and "producer" discourses, different contexts of meaning and explanation, in only one of which the Jews figured centrally. In the consumer discourse, of which the campaign against trash or smut was an example, the vulnerable groups in society were seen as the masses, the uneducated, women, and other suggestible individuals. In this discourse, Jews were not seen as a particular threat; on the contrary, as upholders of high culture they figured, if at all, as holders of virtue. It was in the "producer discourse," which dealt more directly with division and conflicts among the bourgeois classes, that Jews became targeted.
Like Kennedy, therefore, Reuveni reminds us of the "openness" and multifaceted character of public discourse. Particular views function as "tropes" within a given context and set of connotations. This discourse can be powerful and reinforcing, but it is something contextually located and not as generic as a mindset or mentality (if such a thing as a mindset indeed really exists, independent of given contexts).
Historians have long been conscious both of the mutual constitutiveness of gender and ethnicity, and of the ways in which debates about sex regularly resonate with deeper anxieties about the nation, its purity, and its violability. It is now a commonplace that in every patriarchal society, racism involves thinking about the sexuality of the women of the racial other. In the case of Jewish men, research has shown how attribution of gender worked in highly complex and paradoxical ways. On the one hand, as Erik Erikson observed long ago, there existed the apelike and predatory sexuality stereotyped by Adolf Hitler. But there was also the widely perceived feminization of Jewish men, enunciated first so powerfully by Otto Weininger.39 And if racial stereotypes were overlaid with gender, so studies over the last two decades have shown how far National Socialist gender policy was imbued with racism.40
Most historiography has emphasized Nazism's sexually conservative side, seeing it as a reaction to the liberal, and by extension "Jewish," sexual culture of a putatively permissive and decadent Weimar era. Yet as Dagmar Herzog demonstrates in line with a growing body of stimulating and persuasive scholarship on sex in the Third Reich, the regime contained a multitude of competing voices on this issue which reflected the broader presence of diverse conservative, Christian, radical, and atheistic contingents within the regime.41 Both conservative and "liberal" voices on sexual behavior drew on antisemitic constructions of sexual theory and behavior during the Weimar era, but what was most striking about Nazi advocates of pre- and extramarital heterosexual activity was their tendency to reproduce much the same arguments as those "Jewish" sexual reformers whose activities they consistently damned. In doing so, moreover, they tapped into a deep vein in German society which sought the pleasures of a less conservative sexual culture and which found "Jewish" ideas of sexual freedom highly appealing. As Herzog has argued more extensively elsewhere, the era of sexual repression against which the radicals of 1968 reacted was not, as they thought, the era of fascism itself, but the period of the 1950s in which Christian, conservative sexual norms were reasserted against the behavioral patterns encouraged by the Third Reich.42 What Herzog also underlines in this piece, however, is that competing and contradictory constructions of Jewishness were at the core of German debates about correct or permissible sexual behavior. While Katherine Kennedy emphasizes the radical simplifications and polarizations of Nazi rhetoric, Herzog points to how fluid discursive tropes could be even within the Third Reich, and indeed how that which counted as Jewish was also of central importance to non-Jewish Germans.
Atina Grossmann's essay too explores the intersections of ethnicity and gender, focusing on what she calls the "desperately over-determined" issue of gendered encounters and sexual activity amongst Jewish DPs and Germans in the 1945-49 period. She notes the astonishing fact that far from being judenrein, Germany contained a Jewish population which was characterized at a rough estimate by "a birth rate 'higher than that of any other population' in the world." To support this reproductive behavior, Jewish women, whose privileged access to scarce resources gave them considerable purchasing power, enlisted a variety of medical, nannying, and other services from the German population. Using a rich array of sources and exploring the issues from a variety of perspectives, Grossmann's essay delineates the complex brew of collective self-assertion, revenge, opportunism, and simple human attraction that lay behind the baby boom and the set of interactions around it.
What distinguishes this essay from the others in the volume is the strange interregnum in German history it describes. Germany itself was powerless, and the DPs' situation shaped as much by international forces--Allied occupation policy, British policy toward Palestine, U.S. policy on immigration in general and American Jewish pressures in particular, Zionist demands and actions to deliver Jews to Palestine for the establishment--as by any decisions made by Germans themselves. Many of the assumptions made elsewhere about relationships between centers and peripheries do not apply here; indeed, those relationships were radically reversed. Not only the survivors in the camps were displaced, but also the power structures in which they negotiated and acted. And as Grossmann so vividly shows, these shifts in power reached into the most intimate of spheres. But though taking place in a strange interregnum, the forging of relationships between Germans and DPs had a certain character of rehearsal, and in that sense Grossmann's essay marks a bridge to the last section of this book. The interactions between DPs and Germans were of course dominated by past experiences, often impelled by nothing more than short-term opportunism, and laden with spoken and unspoken resentments. Nevertheless, for the Germans they could also represent a first rehearsal, under Allied tutelage, of a different performance of self, one that laid claim to a dignified German inheritance of toleration and openness, part of a wider Christian tradition of respecting one's neighbor.
Continuing this story, Heide Fehrenbach and Karen Schönwälder look at the Federal Republic's approach to its minorities. Like the authors of earlier essays, both identify the complexity of the relations between center and margins--but this time in the self-conscious space of the post-Holocaust era. Fehrenbach's essay concerns a group whose small size might have made it invisible to a larger public were it not for its symbolic value, namely the mostly illegitimate children of African American GIs and German women. Much scholarly research has dwelled on the coerced sex experienced by German women at the hands of Soviet soldiers in and around Berlin, but as Fehrenbach reminds us, the occupation era led to a much wider variety of sexual interactions, most of which were consensual, between Germans and others.43 In readjusting their neuroses concerning sex, race, and nationhood, many Germans focused in particular on relationships between white German women and black American soldiers.44 Here, as in relation to the DPs, West Germans had an early postwar opportunity to explore questions of race after the Holocaust. Since antisemitism was, at least in public discourse, largely taboo, postwar discussion of race was increasingly framed in terms of the distinctions between blackness and whiteness. The term Mischling, for example, survived into the postwar period--but now used exclusively to describe children of white German women and foreign men of color.
Drawing on older mentalities of anti-black racism learned in the colonial period and the Nazi era and confirmed in their apparent legitimacy by the occupiers' own attitudes to their black troops, West Germans were able to recode their attitudes to difference and rescue them into the democratic era, albeit on the basis of highly reordered taxonomies of race. A federal German census of children fathered by occupation troops sought to classify paternity in terms of nationality (American, British, French, etc.) with one exception, "colored," a non-national category that showed how the issue of race was now being reduced to the distinction between black and white. To have separately listed Jewish fathers in such a context, even assuming such information had been available, would have been unthinkable. Race--and here Germany was following the evolution of American social science in the 1930s and [APOS]40s--was now a matter of color. As Fehrenbach shows, debates during the late 1940s and 1950s on the adoption and integration of the children these relationships produced provide an excellent opportunity to map changing West German attitudes to race and difference in the 1950s and 1960s.
Karen Schönwälder's subject is the Federal Republic's approach to "guest workers" in the early 1970s, and in particular the abrupt November 1973 reversal of a previously liberal recruitment policy. Until now, historians have been agreed that successive German governments blithely pursued short-term labor-market objectives without recognizing or confronting the implications for long-term immigration. Up to 1973, it is argued, huge numbers of guest workers were imported under the naive assumption that they were there only for the short haul. Then, reeling from the 1973 oil crisis, the government introduced a unilateral stop, seemingly unaware of the obvious consequence, namely, that labor migrants already in Germany, recognizing that they would not be readmitted on a subsequent occasion, were now unlikely to leave. Using a wealth of recently released records, Schönwälder demonstrates that all these assumptions about government policy are false.
On the one hand government was indeed well aware of the potential long-term implications of labor migration, and had long been concerned enough to seek alternatives. In economic terms, there was a growing worry that future social costs might outweigh the benefits of expanding the labor force. Perhaps more influential was the explosion of anxiety that followed the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in summer 1972. The widespread concern, fanned by the Bildzeitung, that foreign workers might bring terror onto German soil drew on traditional linkages between the alien and the frightening. But in this case such fears had a postwar twist, since the public outrage was linked to calls for better protection of Germany's Jews, and fears about the impact of the Olympics on international perceptions of Germany. More than a year before the 1973 ban, consensus had thus been reached in government circles that a change in policy was required.
On the other hand, as Schönwälder also clearly demonstrates, the authorities were so trapped between competing domestic and international priorities that concerted action was not forthcoming until the oil crisis, and even afterward a coherent policy proved elusive. There was deep ambivalence among contemporaries as to what kind of society Germany should be. Many in government circles shared the view that Germany could not absorb too many migrants from other cultures. They were worried about inflaming German racism and undermining the SPD's support in future elections. Yet at the same time, in the 1972-73 period, Interior Minister Genscher made a number of gestures in the direction of acknowledging that West Germany had become a land of immigration and the SPD too presented itself as the advocate of a more social and liberal approach, in tune with the character of the Federal Republic. Legal measures to restrict the rights of migrants sat uneasily with this image. The FRG also did not want to alienate those foreign partners for whom the temporary export of labor was an important economic fact, but who--as Yugoslavia--would be offended by moves to settle their citizens permanently in Germany. Together, these contradictory concerns prevented clear steps before 1973 and afterward led to the policy of rückkehrorientierten Integration (integration oriented toward departure), a term so absurd it can hardly be translated.
In sketching out different facets of the FRG's evolving responses to minorities in its midst, both Fehrenbach and Schönwälder bring out a distinctive feature of the postwar period, namely, the enormous international symbolism that interactions between center and margin had acquired. When West Germans looked at the "other," they did so supremely conscious of the gaze of outsiders looking in at them. Of course, the Nazis, too, had been conscious of world opinion on the Jewish question, but this awareness had increasingly lost its power to restrain brutal actions, or had at most prompted irrational efforts to use Jews as hostages to prevent Germany's "Jewish" enemies from acting against it. In the postwar period, the "stain" of Nazi Germany was so profound that presenting a liberal image, or at least avoiding an illiberal one, became imperative for successive German administrations, and a major policy factor. This was one, though far from the only, factor promoting a progressive liberalization of public attitudes on race and ethnicity, in which inherited assumptions from Nazi and pre-Nazi Germany gradually faded from public discourse.
West Germany nevertheless struggled with the idea of a diverse and multiethnic society. Older racial assumptions enjoyed a continued half-life. At government level, such assumptions now appeared less as overtly defended claims of racial difference than packaged as fears about adverse popular reactions. In Fehrenbach's account we see health and welfare officials supposedly worried about the psychological impact on mixed-race children or their mothers of living in a non-pluralistic society. In Schönwälder's, we find Willy Brandt and his government anticipating popular protest against proposed government policies on permanent immigration. Only in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, did a more concerted--though thoroughly contested--discussion about a new citizenship law take place, and only in 2000 were the citizenship rights of the guest workers and their families finally acknowledged.
In his concluding paper, Geoff Eley reviews some of the key questions raised by this volume and offers an agenda for future research. Reminding us of the striking discontinuities in form, self-definition, and territorial extent of the German nation over the last 150 years, Eley begins with a lengthy account of the stages and processes by which the nation--in Germany and elsewhere--nevertheless came in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to acquire a "self-evidentness" that went beyond formal citizenship and entered the interstices of private identities and public life. This provides the context for his underlying question, namely the degree to which we can and should recognize a "centeredness" in modern German history.
In examining the relationship of margin and center, Eley illustrates again how versatile and complex the metaphor of the margin can be. In his discussion of the margin as spatial metaphor, Eley reminds us, for example, of the ways in which local and provincial identities become "sutured" to an idea of the nation. Turning to the idea of the margin as a metaphor of "cultural condition," Eley looks at the relationship between National Socialism and the many groups it sought to enlist in, or eradicate from, the racial community. He underscores the value of recent work on the power of the Nazi notion of racial community but argues that it has overstated the degree to which different communities and groupings were subject to the Nazis' totalizing impulses. Ultimately, Eley's purpose is to balance historical interest in the margins with a continued sense of the sources of cohesion, unity, or hegemony in modern German history. The point is that the "centeredness" of the national can be understood only through examining the co-constitutiveness of the margins. Finally, Eley uses the notion of centeredness (though here the apposition is perhaps less with marginality than with fragmentation) in a third way, namely as a yardstick by which to measure the historiography of modern German history. For Eley, National Socialism remains the central organizing question of modern German history.
It may seem odd, then, that only one contributor to the present volume, Dagmar Herzog, deals exclusively with the Nazi era. Of course, all the other essays have a great deal to say that is relevant to understanding the origins and impact of the Nazis' monstrous project, not least with reference to the rhetorics of inclusion and exclusion, to processes of identity formation and articulation, and to the homogenizing ambitions and practices of state institutions. But the decision to pursue these issues outside the period of the Third Reich itself is a sign of the somewhat paradoxical way in which Nazism and the Holocaust have shaped current historiographical debates and the questions posed by this volume. On the one hand, the moral framework underlying almost all of the contributions does indeed derive ultimately from the challenge that Nazism and the Holocaust have bequeathed to contemporary scholars. In that sense, all avenues of enquiry lead directly or indirectly from Auschwitz. On the other hand, if this volume is shaped by one overarching hypothesis, it is that while National Socialism continues to set the ultimate reference point for interest in the margins, the questions to which our post-Holocaust sensibility gives rise are beginning to take us down roads which do not, necessarily, lead us back to Auschwitz. In short, attuned to the importance of the ways in which modern nations incorporate and respond to their minorities, we are rediscovering the complexity, diversity, and openness of German history's traditions.
[ECN]Notes]
1. On the enormous literature on workers and class, see Wolfgang Schmierer, Von der Arbeiterbildung zur Arbeiterpolitik: Die Anfänge der Arbeiterbewegung in Württemberg, 1862-1878 (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1969); Hugo Eckert, Liberal- oder Sozialdemokratie? Frühgeschichte der Nürnberger Arbeiterbewegung (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968); Klaus Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Neue Gesellschaft, 1977); Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 1914-1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1973); Hans Mommsen and Ulrich Borsdorf, eds., Glück auf, Kameraden! Die Bergarbeiter und ihre Organisation in Deutschland (Cologne: Bundverlag, 1979); Mary Nolan, Social Democracy and Society: Working-Class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and W. L. Guttsman, Workers' Culture in Weimar Germany: Between Tradition and Commitment (New York: Berg, 1990). For introductions to the literature on women, see Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: Sage, 1976); Ute Gerhard, Verhältnisse und Verhinderungen: Frauenarbeit, Familie und Rechte der Frauen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978); Karin Hausen, ed., Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983); John C. Fout, ed., German Women in the Nineteenth Century: A Social History (London: Holmes and Meier, 1984), with a comprehensive English-language bibliography; Ute Frevert, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Bürgerlicher Verbesserung und neuer Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986); and Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey, eds., Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency, and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
2. Influential texts in an extraordinarily diverse field include, on Germany and its Jews, Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: Wiley, 1964); Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Anti-modernism in Germany: The Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); William Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann, eds., Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien des Antisemitismus (Freiburg: Herder, 1997); on eugenics and race, Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasia: Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung "lebensunwerten Lebens," 1890-1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987); and Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); on other ethnic and social minorities, Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Polenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich," in Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, 1871-1918: Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1979); and Detlev J. K. Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung: Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Jugendfürsorge von 1878 bis 1932 (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1986). On Protestant nationalism and the marginalization of Catholics, see Horst Zillessen, ed., Volk, Nation, Vaterland: Der deutsche Protestantismus und der Nationalismus (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1970); and Arlie J. Hoover, The Gospel of Nationalism: German Patriotic Preaching from Napoleon to Versailles (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1986).
3. On exclusion and citizenship, see Andreas K. Fahrmeier, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789-1870 (New York: Berghahn, 2000); and Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgen und Ausschliessen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2001). On violence toward the other, see Richard J. Evans, Tales from the German Underworld (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); and Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).
4. See Harold James, A German Identity, 1770 to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Stefan Berger, Germany: Inventing the Nation (London: Arnold, 2004).
5. For recent syntheses of Nazi policy toward Jews, see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (London: Phoenix Giant, 1997); and Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1998). On gypsies, see Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische "Lösung der Zigeunerfrage" (Hamburg: Christians, 1996); and Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On euthanasia, see Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). On the Nazis' black victims, see Reiner Pommerin, Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde: Das Schicksal einer farbigen deutschen Minderheit, 1918-1937 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1979); and Clarence Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2002). The breadth of the Nazi assault on difference emerges anew from Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
6. On Jewish-Christian relations, an early example of a more differentiated approach is Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975). More recently, see Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer: Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Gro[ESS]stadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2000); the essays in Helmut Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914 (Oxford: Berg, 2001); and Thomas Weber¿ "Anti-semitism and Philo-semitism among the British and German Elites: Oxford and Heidelberg before the First World War," English Historical Review 118 (2003): 86-119. On Catholics' place in Germany, see (as well as essays in Smith, above) Thomas Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession: Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994); Raymond Chien Sun, Before the Enemy Is within Our Walls: Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885-1912 (Boston: Humanities, 1999); and Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser's Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Emphasizing cosmopolitanism and tolerance in the Kaiserreich more generally is Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7. Again Jewish history has been in the vanguard here. For an early example, see Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). A key recent essay is Steven E. Aschheim, "German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Junctions, and Interdependence," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 315-22. For other religious minorities, see Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche, eds., Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2001); and Hartmut Lehmann and Michael Geyer, eds., Religion und Nation / Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004). The reappraisal of the relationship of religious and ethnic minorities with nation overlaps with sophisticated recent attempts to rethink that between locality, region, and nation; see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Celia Applegate, "A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-national Places in Modern Times," American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1157-82; Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Nancy R. Reagin, "Recent Work on German National Identity: Regional? Imperial? Gendered? Imaginary?" Central European History 37, no. 2 (2004): 273-89; and Charlotte Tacke, Denkmal im sozialen Raum: Nationale Symbole in Deutschland und Frankreich im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1995).
8. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977), 471.
9. Aschheim, "German History and German Jewry."
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
11. Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
12. Maiken Umbach, ed., German Federalism: Past, Present, Future (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002); Confino, Nation as a Local Metaphor; and Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: Das Problem des Militarismus in Deutschland, vol. 1, Die altpreussische Tradition (1740-1890) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1954), and subsequent vols.
14. The classic statement of this position remains Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1985), first published in German as Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918 in 1973.
15. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Vom Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur Defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära, 1700-1815 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987).
16. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1 (3rd ed., 1996), 124.
17. Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987); and Peukert, Grenzen der Sozialdisziplinierung; see also Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, and Uwe Lohalm, eds., Zivilisation und Barbarei: Die widersprüchlichen Potentiale der Moderne: Detlev Peukert zum Gedenken (Hamburg: Christians, 1991).
18. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800-1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984); Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866-1918, vol. 1, Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990); and Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866-1918, vol. 2, Machtstaat vor der Demokratie (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992).
19. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1.
20. Sheehan, German History, 15.
21. Confino, Nation as a Local Metaphor; Applegate, Nation of Provincials.
22. David Rock and Stefan Wolff, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic since 1945, Culture and Society in Germany 4 (New York: Berghahn, 2002). On Jewish DPs, see Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). On Jewish life in postwar Germany, see Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Micha Brumlick, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum, 1986); and Y. Michal Bodemann, ed., Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
23. Karen Schönwälder, Einwanderung und ethnische Pluralität: Politische Entscheidungen und öffentliche Debatten in Gro[ESS]britannien und der Bundesrepublik von den 1950er bis zu den 1970er Jahren (Essen: Klartext, 2001); Karen Schönwälder, Rainer Ohliger, and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, eds., European Encounters: Migrants, Migration, and European Societies since 1945 (London: Ashgate, 2003); and Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn, "Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic: From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until Its Halt in 1973," in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187-218.
24. Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 1-30.
25. On the expellees see, for example, Albrecht Lehmann, Im Fremden ungewollt zuhaus: Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in Westdeutschland, 1945-1990 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993); and Dierk Hoffmann, Marita Kraus, and Michael Schwartz, eds., Vertriebene in Deutschland: Interdisziplinäre Ergebnisse und Forschungsperspektiven (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000).
26. Olaf Blaschke, ed., Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970; Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002).
27. See, for example, Reinhard Alter and Peter Monteath, eds., Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1997).
28. On the Historikerstreit, see Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). On post-1989 debates, see Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), part 2; and Berger, Germany.
29. See Jack Zipes, "The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Minor Jewish Culture," in Re-emerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 15-45; Sabine Offe, Ausstellungen, Einstellungen, Entstellungen: Jüdische Museen in Deutschland und [O,DIE]sterreich (Berlin: Philo, 2000); and Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
30. See the references above in notes 6 and 7 as well as the survey of recent work in Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003).
31. Volker R. Berghahn, "The German Empire, 1871-1914: Reflections on the Direction of Recent Research," Central European History 35, no. 1 (2002): 76-77.
32. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, "Nation, State, and Identity at International Borders," in Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, ed. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1-30; and John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
33. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
34. Applegate, Nation of Provincials; Confino, Nation as a Local Metaphor; and Mark Hewitson, National Identity and Political Thought in Germany: Wilhelmine Depictions of the French Third Republic, 1890-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).
35. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, "Reply to Volker Berghahn," Central European History 35, no. 1 (2002): 85.
36. See Mathias Niendorf, Minderheiten an der Grenze: Deutsche und Polen in den Kreisen Flatow (Zlotów) und Zempelburg (Süepólno Krajenskie), 1900-1939 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997); Robert Traba, ed., Selbstbewu[ESS]tsein und Modernisierung: Sozialkultureller Wandel in Preu[ESS]isch-Litauen vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2000); Andreas Kossert, Masuren: Ostpreu[ESS]ens vergessener Süden (Berlin: Siedler, 2001); Andreas Kossert, Preu[ESS]en, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen Nationalismus, 1870-1956 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001); and Richard Blanke, Polish-Speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians since 1871 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001).
37. Eric Kurlander, "Nationalism, Ethnic Preoccupation, and the Decline of German Liberalism: A Silesian Case Study, 1898-1933," The Historian 65, no. 1 (2002): 95-121.
38. Volkov, The Rise of Popular Anti-modernism; and Shulamit Volkov, "Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code: Reflection on the History and Historiography of Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany," in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 25-46.
39. For recent work on Jewish sexuality, see Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Sander L. Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör, eds., Antisemitismus: Vorurteile und Mythen (Munich: Piper, 1995).
40. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986); and G. Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Ehepaar: Ehe und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1981).
41. On the range of Christian voices, see Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
42. Dagmar Herzog, "Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of War," in Life after Death: Approaches to the Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161-92.
43. See also the essay by Atina Grossman in this volume.
44. See also Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins; Maria Höhn, "Heimat in Turmoil: African-American GIs in 1950s West Germany," in Schissler, Miracle Years, 145-63.

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

Germany -- Ethnic relations.
Minorities -- Germany -- History -- 19th century.
Minorities -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.