On 9 October 2001 Vernon Lidtke delivered his valedictory lecture at The Johns Hopkins University on the topic of “Die Abstrakten,” a left-wing group of artists in Germany during the Weimar Republic. With this address before an appreciative audience comprising students, colleagues, and friends, Vernon concluded almost forty years of a distinguished scholarly career in the field of modern European and German history. In his scholarship Vernon is most widely identified with the study of the German labor movement in general and especially the Social Democratic Party, on which subjects he has thus far published two major books along with numerous journal articles and chapters. His formal retirement from academic life was also marked a few months earlier by a testimonial dinner held in Baltimore and attended by a large proportion of the twenty-five doctoral graduates whose dissertations he had supervised over more than three decades at Johns Hopkins. On both occasions he was fondly remembered as an accomplished historian, an inspiring teacher, and a generous mentor. In this and the four essays that follow, some of his former students wish also to commemorate Vernon's scholarly and teaching career.

In the epilogue to his authoritative 1957 intellectual history, The German Idea of Freedom, Leonard Krieger concluded his exploration of German political thought from the Reformation to the Second Empire by excoriating the German liberal middle class, and especially the National Liberal Party, for its compromise with the authoritarian state and the landed aristocracy. He singled out for particular scorn the Rechtsstaat theory of Rudolf Gneist: Rudolf Gneist's doctrine of the Rechtsstaat, from which all oppositional elements had now been removed, set the tone for the adaptation of the old liberal political ideal to cover the legal reality of the new national state … The concept of Rechtsstaat, that barometer of 19th-century liberalism, was no longer defined in terms of a state which permitted to the individual rights apart from the state. It became now simply the kind of state whose power was articulated in legal modes of action — that is, in measures which conformed to general rules.

There is perhaps no more fitting way to honor Vernon Lidtke than to demonstrate, in the form of this essay, that the questions he posed to his students years ago continue to provide a grid for contemplating and analyzing historical subjects, both familiar and new. One such question involved the impact of one concept's transformation upon another: would class persist as a crucial historical category once it had confronted the differences of gender? This question preoccupied me in previous work and I return to it here, taking stock of that which has changed since I first contemplated this question, in the fields of both German and European gender history. Another question that remains an object of debate is the longer-term trajectory of the history of women and gender: how might we define the point at which its work of subversion or revision is complete? What directions might this field take once “mainstream” histories have successfully incorporated its findings? This essay aims to compare the ways in which the keywords class, citizenship, and welfare state have been redefined, expanded, or circumscribed through the turn to culture, language, and gender. This comparative exercise allows me to expand Vernon's original questions to include citizenship, the critical concept in my more recent scholarship, and to review the potentials and promises of main-streaming across the so-called Atlantic divide.

In the early 1930s German democracy was dying, mired in political gridlock, burdened by four million unemployed, and under assault by Nazis and Communists alike. In the midst of this crisis the Reich Association of Catholic Workers' Clubs and Working Youth (Reichsverband der katholischen Arbeitervereine und der Werkjugend) published a modest anthology entitled Die Arbeit (Work), “dedicated to the poetic glorification of labor.” Editorially justifying the decision to provide Catholic workers with verses at such a time, Ferdinand Göbel, one of the rising young leaders of the Catholic labor movement, argued that the poems, far from serving as a distraction or a momentary boost to morale, would enable workers to find the only true and lasting solution to their predicament. Poetry would lead to an inner, spiritual renewal, a rediscovery by workers that their labor was “not simply to earn bread, but… joyful participation in the act of creation, sacrificial service to humanity and a means of atonement that makes us strong and free within.” Because of this, said Göbel, The modern worker, this man of iron, has discovered his soul. He believes in loyalty and comradeship, in brotherhood and the courage to sacrifice. He hopes in a new humanity. Yes, out of his heavy everyday existence he hammers bridges to the eternal and the divine. He turns hard slave labor into an act of worship.