Ivan the Terrible's 1558 invasion of Livonia plunged the eastern Baltic into military crisis. The ensuing conflict has most often been examined in terms of competition between the burgeoning powers that, by 1561, had occupied and partitioned the territories of the Livonian Confederation. The present study instead explores the fiscal and military responses of the Livonians themselves. An institutional approach to the dissolution of Old Livonia is eschewed in favor of one that foregrounds shifting networks of regional power holders endeavoring to defend their interests against a messy backdrop of mercenary warfare, military enterprise, factional rivalry, personal ambition, ad hoc negotiation, and desperate expediency. The Livonian experience reveals much about the struggles of small European polities and regional elites faced with the escalating financial demands of warfare in an age of emerging states.

After the outbreak of the First Hussite Wars (spring 1420), the Hussite capital Prague faced—at least in theory—a total embargo on all trade and commerce. However, trade evidently continued in spite of this embargo. The present article systematically assesses our knowledge on this trade and highlights articles, geographical structures and agents of long-distance trade to and from the Czech metropolis during the war, thus furthering our knowledge about the economic history of early fifteenth-century Central Europe in general. Furthermore, the author uses the example of the anti-Hussite embargo to address important and hitherto largely-neglected methodological questions concerning the analysis of medieval trade prohibitions in general.

This article presents new evidence on the authorship and readership of the earliest printed Ottoman language materials that details the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire actively engaged in learning Ottoman. Such findings open up a new field of inquiry evaluating the Ottoman impact on the German-speaking lands reaching beyond the so-called “Turkish menace.” Presenting the variety of Ottoman language students, teachers, and materials in central Europe, as well as their connections with the oral world(s) of linguistic fieldwork in the Habsburg-Ottoman contact zone, this article argues that Ottoman language learning is an important but thus far neglected element in understanding the cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern central Europe. What may appear to be experiments with linguistic riddles on first glimpse was in fact grounded in deep enthusiasm and fascination for Ottoman language learning shared among a community of Protestant semi-scholarly aficionados.

In 1966, a Radio Free Europe (RFE) report estimated that seven in ten Czechs and Slovaks listened to Radio Vienna, making it the most popular foreign station in Czechoslovakia. Yet conventional narratives of Western radio in socialist central Europe highlight the role played by runner-up RFE. By focusing on the practice of listening to German-language radio in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1969, this article shows that cross-border, German-language listening mattered not only between the Germanies, but also in central Europe, where listening habits were shaped by the region's multilingual heritage. In addition to highlighting German's significance as a language of regional communication, the article reveals the importance of cross-border contacts and the significance of light entertainment in Cold War central Europe. Rather than separating listeners out by citizenship, foreign radio listening fostered solidarities that cut across national boundaries and divided people by generation, geography, class, and technical dexterity instead.

In April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Plans for a Polish “border strip” are frequently cited to argue that the German army entered the First World War committed to pacifying conquered space through Germanization. This article contends that, in 1914, the German officer corps did not understand national homogeneity as essential for imperial security. Many influential officers insisted that Polish identity was compatible with German imperial loyalty. They supported a multinational imperial model, proposing to trade Poland its cultural and political autonomy for the acceptance of German suzerainty in foreign policy and military command. The army's preference for Germanizing space developed during the occupation of Russian Poland, as officers learned to conflate diversity with imperial fragility. Only a series of political crises after 1916 shifted military opinion against multinational imperialism. Increasingly convinced that Poland would betray the German Empire, some officers abandoned multinationalism. Others revised their plans to contain Poland and fortify Germany by annexing and Germanizing Polish space.

Cardinal Mindszenty was head of the Catholic Church of Hungary between 1945 and 1974, but had been imprisoned between 1949 and 1956 and hiding in the US embassy in Budapest from 1956 to 1971. In 1971, Mindszenty left the country and settled in Vienna after long negotiations between the Vatican and the Hungarian communist government. When he visited the Hungarian diaspora and non-Hungarian followers in the West between 1972 and his death in 1975, controversies about communism, Catholicism, and Western society and social change in general erupted. This article analyzes these controversies and the different groups that supported the cardinal and their understanding of anticommunism in the context of a changing West German society and against the background of changes within the Catholic world after Vatican II. The ideas about communism Mindszenty and his right-wing supporters formulated were outdated in the 1970s but had a long afterlife.

This article examines the interpretation of Hebrew prophecy by German Protestant scholars in the era of 1880–1920. It argues, first, that Old Testament interpreters valued the prophets since they presented God as the guiding force behind human history and, second, that these theologians cum philologians saw the prophetic conception of history as anticipating their own understanding of God in the world. The inquiry bases this argument on a reading of numerous exegetes, both leading lights and forgotten figures. Moreover, it traces this interpretative tendency across a range of sources, including specialist studies, theological monthlies, political and literary journals, popular works, public speeches, and pedagogical literature. Rather than leave the prophets in the past, these exegetes also ushered them into the present, employing their historical teachings to shore up the Christian faith. In doing so, they identified Hebrew prophecy with German Protestantism and in contrast to Judaism.

This article aims at analyzing, within the scope of industrial and state paternalism, the interdependent dynamics between employer (Witkowitzer Bergbau- und Eisenhüttengewerkschaft), employee, and the Austro-Hungarian state, taking as an example the development of the education system of the Vítkovice (Witkowitz) company town, located in Moravia, one of the crown lands of the Habsburg Monarchy. The opening point of our research is the year 1869, when the so-called Hasner school law was adopted. The closing point is February 1914, with its new intervention into educational policy in the crown land of Moravia.

In the early 1990s, reunified Germany faced surging numbers of asylum seekers and a wave of far-right violence against foreigners. In letters that German citizens wrote to President Richard von Weizsäcker, it is clear that some Germans feared that the arrival of large numbers of non-Germans would bring about the collapse of the state or the destruction of the German people. This article engages with the history of fear in postwar Germany by examining Germans’ post-reunification fears of migration and foreigners. I argue, first, that a biological understanding of race was still surprisingly widespread as late as the early 1990s. Second, I call for a substantially more nuanced understanding of German reunification, one that emphasizes uncertainty and the terrifying openness of the future. Finally, I highlight the intersection of race thinking and memory by showing that racial fears were frequently shaped by memories of Germany's dark past.

In recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.

Working hours were largely unregulated in nineteenth-century Germany, but a powerful alliance emerged in the 1890s between the Christian churches and the socialist labor movement to prohibit most industrial labor on Sunday, including most production of steel. In the 1950s steel management persuaded organized labor that it would be advantageous to produce steel continuously throughout the week, the prevalent system in other countries. The Evangelical Church retreated in this debate, but the Catholic Church waged a fierce and partly successful campaign from 1952 to 1961 to defend the old prohibition. Until the 1980s organized labor continued to cooperate with both major churches to keep Sunday industrial labor quite rare. Their influence declined suddenly after national reunification in 1990, however, and many Germans have come to prize individual freedom above the old principle, honored by Christians and the unchurched alike, that most people should have the same day of rest.

Conductor Erich Kleiber was born in Vienna, made his reputation in Berlin, fled Nazism for Latin America, and tried briefly to return to postwar East Berlin before dying in 1956. His life illustrates the wide diversity in mid-century migratory stories. For so many of Kleiber's fellow migrants, flight disrupted established structures, contexts and networks. More recently, scholars have emphasized refugees' creative self-reinvention. Kleiber's story illustrates both these outcomes while embodying neither; his narrative is one of musical and political continuity, involving a particular kind of Habsburg cultural nostalgia, insulated by his wealth and fame.

The decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.

As COVID-19 began to spread across the globe in early 2020, few could have envisaged that it would so profoundly affect our personal and professional lives. In-class teaching soon had to be either replaced with online teaching or could only be carried out with great risk to staff and students. Working from home and a constant stream of video conferences became the norm instead of informal chats on departmental corridors. As if all of this were not bad enough, positions for junior academics, already scarce in the wake of the general financial crisis and the rise of the neoliberal university, were cut. Travel funding was slashed by many universities, and most countries closed their borders. Libraries were closed or could only be accessed with considerable difficulty. Archives were shut or, if they reopened, operated long waiting lists. In situ research, essential for historians of central Europe, became difficult, if not impossible.

How do you explain the Cold War to a generation who did not live through it? For Jörg and Anna Winger, co-creators and showrunners of the Deutschland series, you bring it to life on television. Part pop culture reference, part spy thriller, and part existential crisis, the Wingers’ Cold War is a fun, fast-paced story, “sunny and slick and full of twenty-something eye candy.” A coproduction of Germany's UFA Fiction and Sundance TV in the United States, the show premiered at the 2015 Berlinale before appearing on American and German television screens later that year. Especially popular in the United Kingdom, it sold widely on the transnational market. It has been touted as a game-changer for the German television industry for breaking new ground for the German television industry abroad and expanding the possibilities of dramatic storytelling in Germany, and is credited with unleashing a new wave of German (historical) dramas including Babylon Berlin, Dark, and a new production of Das Boot.

Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, and seventeen contributors have produced a powerful and incisive book that deserves the attention of everyone interested in central European history. Bashir and Goldberg's volume engages readers methodologically as well as intellectually, politically, ethically, and personally. It challenges us to think, write, and do things differently, to take risks, and to welcome the invigorating and disruptive presence of people in every aspect of our work.