On Easter Monday, 1615—the seventh day of Passover in 5375 by the Jewish calender — the entire Jewish community of the German city of Worms was sent into exile. But the banishment of the Jews, which followed almost two years of anti-Jewish agitation by the citizens of Worms, was far from permanent.Eight months later, by order of commissioners appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Jews of Worms were permitted to return. They remained in the city for another three centuries, until the final eradication of the Jewish community of Worms in 1942.

We could be more liberal if we had no social democrats.” This was one axiom of German electoral politics with which the overwhelming mass of non-socialist (bürgerlich) German voters agreed unrservedly, wrote Lothar Schücking, a liberal critic of Prussian officialdom, in 1908. Nevertheless, continued Schücking, the aims and ideals of the social democratic movement were completely unfamiliar to most educated Germans. “One knows a few slogans,” wrote Schucking: “‘free love,’ ‘religion a private matter,’ ‘impoverishment of the masses,’… ‘republic.’” Everything else was subsumed under the specter of the “red international.” Disapprovingly, Schucking concluded that “the burgerlich parties have gradually come to recognize only ‘national questions.’”

An important element of urban planning as it has developed in Europe and North America is the provision of housing for classes of people who are poorly served by private housing markets. In the case of Germany one can trace this activity back to the 1920s, during the middle years of the Weimar Republic, when public authorities began to plan and build housing on a large scale. However, one can also see in the activity of German employers, dating back another half century or more, earlier efforts at urban residential planning for people with modest incomes.

The Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund- und Schmutzschriften (Law to Protect Youth from Trashy and Dirty Writings) was proposed at the cabinet meeting of 19 December 1923, passed by the Reichstag on 3 December 1926, and went into effect on 18 December 1926. Within ten years it was a dead letter, replaced by the 1935 guidelines of the Reichsschrifttumskammer. The law and the agitation surrounding it had many dimensions; the phenomenon was at once political, legal, sociological, psychological, and cultural. A classic example of moral censorship, it has many parallels with other censorship activity, such as the British campaign to protect youth from horror comics in the 1950s. Yet while it is a case study of censorship, this law is more than illustrative. The debate over its passage further politicized the already controversial issue of culture in Germany, and it can be credited with a small but definite contribution to the political alignments that eventually made possible the Nazi takeover of January 1933.

As Albert Hirschman has recently observed, critics and advocates of a capitalist, market economy are forever reinventing the wheel, repeating arguments made by their forebears decades and sometimes centuries ago. Take the following observations of a social critic—let his name, for the moment, remain a mystery—as he casts his gaze upon the cultural influence of the market. New forms of capitalist economic organization, he observes, have led to the disappearance of the link between ownership of property and civic responsibility. Men are so involved in acquisition, he laments, that they no longer have time for political concerns and public life. He sees an eclipse of civic virtue, a diminishing willingness to sacrifice private concerns for the public good. Changes in social structure brought about by capitalist development are no less worrisome. The process of the market is leading to the replacement of once-independent producers by men who are mere specialized cogs in a productive machine. The cultural consequences of capitalism are cause for despair. The ever-shifting, international fashions on which the market thrives are destroying authentic, indigenous culture. New forms of capitalist merchandising prosper by arousing novel desires, creating tastes for consumer goods which people do not really need, and leading to excessive expenditure which is bankrupting the economy. Most pernicious are unprecedented marketing techniques which undermine the steadying influence of the family by invading the household itself.

Given the Weimar Republic's collapse into dictatorship, its political historiography has stressed its many failures. To that pattern the Catholic Center Party, or Zentrum, which participated in all of the Republic's cabinets but one, has been no exception. Programmatically vague, the party was subject to bitter divisions between an authoritarian monarchist right and a vocal republican left. This trend was already obvious after the June 1920 Reichstag elections in which the party lost four million votes, mostly from the Catholic working class. Thereafter the Center remained unable to extend its appeal beyond a fixed, socially conservative base. Accordingly, the Center's record, culminating in the controversial chancellorship of Heinrich Brüning, has been presented as one replete with failure, if not desperation.

The recent revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe represent a mixed blessing for the United States and the western alliance as a whole. On the one hand, the West has had good reason to rejoice, witnessing the triumph of democracy and economic liberalism after more than forty years of Cold War tensions. On the other hand, the fall of the Eastern European communist governments in 1989, including that of the German Democratic Republic, once again brought the German question to the forefront. The Bush administration approached the issue of German reunification in a very cautious manner, insisting that a unified Germany guarantee the finality of its eastern borders and remain committed to the West. This caution clearly demonstrated the apprehension on the part of U.S. policy-makers that nationalism and the push for national unity might prove stronger than the German commitment to NATO and the western alliance.

It is often assumed, especially in the Anglo-American literature, that Frederick William I (1713–40), by establishing the “canton System” in 1733, lessened his need to rely on foreign mercenaries for military manpower and moved in the direction of a national, conscript army. As put by Robert Ergang: “The establishment of this so-called ‘canton system’ not only assured… a large permanent supply of recruits; it was also a long step toward making the Prussian army a national one. Recruiting abroad was still continued, but it was only supplementary. Native recruits now formed the backbone of the Prussian army.” This persistent assumption, stated in different ways by different authors, has even penetrated the textbook literature. A closely related assumption holds that Frederick the Great after 1740, by increasing the proportion of foreign manpower to as much as two-thirds of the total, “reversed” the trend toward making the army more national in character. The purpose of this essay will be to demonstrate that both of the above-mentioned assumptions are false; they depend on a misunderstanding of the real trends in Prussian recruiting bolstered, in the latter case, by faulty statistics.

In the past several decades, the scope of European social history has been widened considerably attention given to the historical experience of inarticulate, common folk. By imaginatievly exploring neglected sources and through the use of quantitative techniques, social science historians on both sides of the Atlantic have attempted to systematically weigh hypothesis and evidence in order to recover the texture of past lives. In recent years, however, social science historians who specialize in German history have been confronted by the challenges of Alltagsgeschichte—the history of ordinary events. Using a methodology influenced by anthropology, practitioners of “every-day history” have utilized memoirs, letters, old photos, and interviews with participant observers in order to evoke the past social life of select groups. These scholars have often reported their findings in vivid, detailed narratives in order to avoid forcing the multifaceted experience of ordinary folk into what they consider arid statistical tables and reified constructs, dangers that particularly beset the consumers of computer-generated cross-tabulations and regression equations. In addition, advocates of “peoples' history” have attempted to make historical scholarship unambiguously relevant to contemporary issues by setting their research against a backdrop of current social and political controversy and by espousing “populist” social views.