On September 25, 2017, Germany awoke to the horrifying reality that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, had romped to third place in the previous day's federal election. With 12.6% of the vote, the party became not only the official face of the opposition to Angela Merkel's not-so-grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but also the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the 1950s. Election watchers soon noticed that the AfD had racked up stunning margins in the states that once made up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coming in first on the second ballot (Zweitstimme) in Saxony and second in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. That the AfD, a racist and xenophobic party that campaigns against European integration and immigration, should do so well in once-socialist states bespoke East Germany's strange resonances in German culture and memory nearly thirty years after its dissolution.

This study examines the interrelationship between national sovereignty and individual consumer sovereignty in the age of a global liberal economy and digital markets by analyzing Germany's gambling regulations. As gambling policies were codified and liberalized from 2004 to 2018, gambling addiction quickly became the key issue in legal and political quarrels over regulation. The article will shed light on the differing interests at play in the controversy and discuss how discourses on addictive gambling behavior affected political disputes over gambling liberalization. It explores contemporary German gambling regulations in the context of European integration and the digitization of the gambling market, which posed crucial challenges to national sovereignty. I argue that Germany's claim for national autonomy over gambling regulations was deeply intertwined with the question of individual consumer sovereignty because it relied on the pathologization of certain types of gambling consumption and gamblers. The emergence of the “pathological gambler” can be understood as the manifestation of a new socioeconomic and political order in which risks emanating from liberalized markets are dealt with as individual consumer addiction issues.

Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between the two. Sovereignty is less a thing to be measured than it is a dynamic to be followed, a question to be asked, even a rhetorical device. Focusing on different kinds of actors, from colonial profiteers to NGO officials, this new lens allows one to see sovereign power from above as only one locus of sovereignty. Another is the individual. For her, protracted negotiations and staking of claims often define the general contours and limits of sovereignty.

The expulsion of millions of people and the loss of Germany's eastern territories at the end of the Second World War have been a part of ongoing public discussions about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or Germany's “mastering of the past.” These events have deeply shaped personal and family memories in East and West Germany, even if political discourse about them had been marginalized in the German Democratic Republic. In the Federal Republic, the issue of expellees has been especially fraught because it represents the intersection of two discourses of German victimhood: war victims and victims of communism—here specifically the postwar East European governments that organized postwar expropriation and “resettlements.” Memorials range from the eternal flame on Theodor-Heuss-Platz in Berlin to the small plaque affixed to the wall outside of Bayreuth's train station for the almost 40,000 expellees from the Sudeten region who arrived on thirty-three freight trains in 1946. The expulsions have made their way into popular culture as well, as can be seen in the works of artists who had had little or no direct experience in the “German East.” In the 1969 song “Erstes Morgenrot,” for example, Alexandra (born as Doris Treitz in 1942 in today's Lithuania) wistfully looks forward to the dawn that brings greetings from the land where “my cradle once stood.” Heinz Rudolf Kunze, born in 1956, emphasizes his uprootedness and a sense of not belonging in his 1985 song “Vertriebener.”

What is central Europe? As I write this article in 2021, three decades after the fall of communism, this question seems as salient as ever. I am not the only Central European History reader to think about this topic in recent years. In a 2018 CEH article, provocatively titled “Habsburg History, Eastern European History … Central European History?,” Chad Bryant argued that scholarship on these three nominally distinct fields had become blurred in the wake of the post-communist opening of archives and the transnational turn. It was time, Bryant insisted, not only for CEH readers to reconsider the category of “central Europe” itself, but also to engage with a new set of questions, ones that would move beyond the predominant emphasis on “how and why regimes collapsed.” Compellingly, he advocated for studies that would help us understand the post-1989 era, such as the long-term legacies of communism, the integration of individual countries into the European Union, and present-day migration to the region.

The private eye Bernie Günther investigates the gruesome deaths of a prominent Berlin businessman's daughter and son-in-law in a house fire. The backdrop is Nazi Germany in the run up to the Berlin Olympics that took place between August 1 and 16, 1936 and that Hitler actively manipulated to present a somewhat whitewashed image of Nazi Germany to the world.