The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the possibility of a suicide is disturbingly present. In Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, one character asks himself, “My God, does everyone now have his tea cup of veronal ready?” Tales of suicide also surfaced in the tabloid press which presented them as human interest stories. Partisan papers supported their respective stances by tying individual actions to political narratives, a strategy pursued by both Nazis and Communists as well as liberal reformers. Even schools' reports on pupils who had taken their own lives and farewell notes themselves echoed a general feeling that suicide was a sign of the times.

In January 1915, Sir William Grenfell Max-Müller, an intelligence officer in the British Foreign Office, recorded the following remark from a German trade journal.

The early career of Herbert Blankenhorn (1904–1991) illustrates important trends in the transition from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic. During the 1930s and 1940s he served as a diplomat in the German Foreign Office and also joined the Nazi Party in 1938. After 1945 he would play a very public role in the creation of a new political culture in West Germany. Konrad Adenauer thought that the exceptional political sense of his young personal assistant, who also served as Secretary General of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the British Zone, helped him become chancellor of the Federal Republic in 1949. Through the mid-1950s Blankenhorn remained one of Adenauer's most intimate advisors, especially on matters concerning foreign policy. From late 1949 to mid-1950, he also oversaw the creation of what became the West German Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), and thereafter he was the head of its Political Division and deputy to State Secretary Walter Hallstein until 1955. He went on to serve as West German ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (1955–1958), France (1958–1963), Italy (1963–1965), and the United Kingdom (1965–1970). After retiring from the diplomatic service in 1970, Blankenhorn functioned as the West German representative in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Executive Council until 1976.

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Enno Edward Kraehe, William M. Corcoran Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, died at the University of Virginia Medical Center on Thursday, December 4, 2008, five days before his eighty-seventh birthday. He was the leading American scholar on the Congress of Vienna and of its most important and colorful participant, Prince Clemens von Metternich.

Those discovering the growing number of writings on the religious history of the Federal Republic of Germany might be forgiven for thinking that they had entered a parallel universe. To use the terminology popularized by M. Rainer Lepsius, Christian milieus have largely disintegrated and their members been integrated into the mainstream of political and economic life. Yet until recently, research on German Catholicism and Protestantism has remained confined to confessional ghettos that many members of these religious subcultures once sought to escape. The dozens of monographs that have appeared in the last five years have yet to be incorporated into the central narratives that dominate the secular histories of the postwar era. Many have still to be reviewed in non-religious journals. Edited volumes that purport to analyze the many facets of the Federal Republic include few if any chapters on religion.