When the First World War ended, Germany experienced an unprecedented period of political revolution, economic turmoil, and social upheaval. Among the myriad problems facing the nation was one concern that cut across party lines and prompted attention at both the national and local levels. Lawmakers, doctors, clergy, and ordinary Germans across the political spectrum agreed that the breakdown of the family had weakened the nation, contributed to military defeat, worsened economic misery, and exacerbated societal conflict. High divorce and illegitimacy rates together with an alarmingly low birth rate created a picture of families in crisis. The belief was widespread that only by creating policies that strengthened families would Germany stand a chance of regaining its historical strength. Because both Weimar and National Socialist policymakers saw the family as essential to rejuvenating the battered nation, the interwar era witnessed a wide variety of family-directed policies. Social welfare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and maternity benefits were just the beginning of a series of programs designed to strengthen Germany and support families. While state programs targeted many different groups within society, children stood out as especially worthy recipients. Policymakers in both the Weimar and National Socialist eras recognized that children, the most vulnerable members of society and the nation's future, required special attention.

Radical regimes revolutionize their holidays. Like the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, who designed festival cultures intended to create revolutionary subjects, National Socialists manipulated popular celebration to build a “racially pure” fascist society. Christmas, long considered the “most German” of German holidays, was a compelling if challenging vehicle for the constitution of National Socialist identity. The remade “people's Christmas” (Volksweihnachten) celebrated the arrival of a savior, embodied in the twinned forms of the Führer and the Son of God, who promised national resurrection rooted in the primeval Germanic forest and the “blood and soil” of the authentic Volk. Reinvented domestic rituals, brought to life by the “German mother” in the family home, embedded this revamped Christmas myth in intimate moments of domestic celebration. An examination of “people's Christmas” across this spectrum of public and private celebration offers a revealing case study of National Socialist political culture in action. It illuminates the ways Germans became Nazis through participation both in official festivities and the practices of everyday life and underscores the complexity of the relationship between popular celebration, political culture, and identity production in the “Third Reich.”

In September 1950, Julius Meyer, head of the State Association of Jewish Communities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), sent a letter to the Finance Ministry inquiring about the current state of Jewish communal property. Throughout the immediate postwar years, he and other Jewish leaders had requested, though with little success, the return of Jewish property and assistance to rebuild Jewish sites. With the occupation now over, Meyer hoped that the newly formed East German state might be sympathetic to the needs of the Gemeinde (a religious community of Jews). He noted that the Jewish community had “still not acquired its own property” since most of it remained “under the control of the state” or in the hands of those who had seized it during the Nazi program of “Aryanization.” Meyer also pointed out that the Gemeinde needed money to reconstruct the numerous synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that had been damaged during Kristallnacht and World War II. “We ask,” he explained, “that you take into consideration the fact that the Jewish community, because of the extermination policy of the fascist state, finds itself in a situation like no other religious community.”

One of our preeminent historians, Wolfgang Mommsen, died on August 11, 2004, at the age of seventy-three. Death came while he was swimming off Usedom, in the Baltic Sea. To speak of him as “ours” is to say at once that he was a treasured international presence for all of us, that he fully embodied the new transnational character of historical studies. His prodigious work and ebullient temper enriched the lives of his students, colleagues, and friends.