The Councils of many Imperial Free Cities struggled throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to establish their position as “Obrigkeit,” enjoying the same kind of recognized authority as that exercised by the other petty political rulers within the Empire. The struggle resulted in increasingly authoritarian trends in city government, as some Councils sought to extend their control over more and more aspects of citizens' lives in an effort to win the respect of other ruling groups. Although sporadic violence marked the growing polarization between governed and governing which developed from such efforts, city Councils still justified their actions on the basis of benefit to the community—a community which included both Council and citizenry. This unitary concept of the urban community was subjected to further severe strains by the introduction of the ideas of Luther and Zwingli into the cities.

Punctually at 8:00 A.M. on 26 November 1895, teams of police officers in Berlin began to search the homes of nearly eighty members of the Social Democratic Party, and the city offices of their organizations. These surprise raids, over by 10:00 a.m., were ordered by the Prussian Minister of Interior, Ernst Köller, to obtain evidence that the Socialist organizations had been working with one another to promote their political goals. In 1895 it was illegal in Prussia, and in most of the other states of the German Empire, for political associations of any kind to work together. Yet the evidence so efficiently confiscated on that gray November morning ultimately put not only the Socialists on trial, but government policy and the fundamental political rights of German citizens as well. Neither the national constitution nor the federal law codes provided protection for the rights of association or assembly at that time. In the absence of such guarantees, the political organizations had to cope with the particularities of the various state laws.

A history, both comprehensive and detailed, of the foreign contacts of the German Resistance does not yet exist. The subject is vast, and many sources are not yet accessible, notably those in the custody of intelligence agencies, and also those relating to contacts between the German Communist underground and foreign authorities or individuals. This paper will, firstly, consider some conditions and circumstances of foreign contacts sought and established by the German Resistance; secondly, survey some of those contacts; and, thirdly, attempt to draw some conclusions.

Nazi ghettoization policy in Poland from 1939 to 1941, like so many other aspects of Nazi Jewish policy, has been the subject of conflicting interpretations that can be characterized as “intentionalist” on the one hand and “functionalist” on the other. The “intentionalist” approach views ghettoization as a conscious preparatory step for total annihilation. For instance, Andreas Hillgruber has described the ghettoization of the Polish Jews as a step parallel to Hitler's conquest of France; in both cases Hitler was securing himself for the simultaneous war for Lebensraum in the east and Final Solution to the Jewish question through mass murder. Together these steps constituted the nucleus of his long-held “program.”

Fully five decades before Olympe de Gouges, Mary Woll–stonecraft, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel spoke out for the equality of men and women, Dorothea Christiane Leporin, Germany's first female medical doctor, challenged the readers of her Thorough Investigation of the Causes which Prevent the Female Sex from Studying to free themselves from the idea that all women are destined to serve husband, house, and children. As she put it: “If one admits that the female sex is capable of learning, then one must also admit that it has received a calling to go with it.” She reached this conclusion by accepting the assumption that men and women are equally suited for intellectual endeavors and then questioning all real and fictitious obstacles that were placed in the way of female study. Like all her known contemporaries, Leporin did not want to press all women into advanced study, which according to her would cause disorder, but she pleaded eloquently for the removal of prejudices and obstacles to talent.

An older colleague recently observed to me that today we stand further removed in time from the end of World War II than Americans at the beginning of that conflict were from the Spanish American War. To those Americans of 1939, he said, the war with Spain seemed almost antediluvian, while to us World War II lives vividly in memory, and its consequences still shape our lives. As a student of modern American foreign policy, I found my colleague's observation particularly appropriate. American and Soviet soldiers still face each other in the middle of Germany, and Europe remains divided along the lines roughly set by the liberating armies. Yet could we now be facing major changes? Will an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons in Europe, and glasnost in the Soviet Union transform this environment? Will the postwar division of Europe come to an end? What will be the consequences for the United States?

In late nineteenth-century Prussia, as in other industrializing societies, urban policing took on unprecedented significance with uniformed patrolmen becoming, before the century ended, the most visible and ubiquitous representatives of governmental authority. For both the leading officials of the Prussian state and the elites of that state's burgeoning industrial cities, the creation of large urban police forces in the decades between the revolution of 1848 and the First World War raised a number of vital questions. Of particular concern were the problems of defining and legitimizing the role of the new police and of determining the limits of police powers. Related debates centered on the questions of who should control and who should pay for the maintenance of greatly expanded urban police departments.

Something important happened in the imperial city of Frankfurt am Main between 1612 and 1616. Nobody doubts that. The Fettmilch Uprising, as it is generally known, involved a complex and turbulent series of events which culminated in the dramatic execution of the ringleader, Vincenz Fettmilch, and six of his comrades. But why exactly were they executed—and what was the uprising all about? This depends on what you read. It is a commonplace, of course, that historical events are subject to different interpretations, but here a much deeper problem of historical perception seems to be at stake. For we come across descriptions of the uprising so different in substance as to make one question whether they even refer to the same event. And the differences between these accounts are generally related to one of the most sensitive and troubling aspects of German history: the status and treatment of the Jews. In fact the Fettmilch Uprising illustrates with disturbing clarity the difficulties that both Germans and Jews have long experienced—and continue to experience—in attempting to understand and give meaning to some important aspects of their common past.