When the First World War ended, Germany experienced an unprecedented period of political revolution, economic turmoil, and social upheaval. Among the myriad problems facing the nation was one concern that cut across party lines and prompted attention at both the national and local levels. Lawmakers, doctors, clergy, and ordinary Germans across the political spectrum agreed that the breakdown of the family had weakened the nation, contributed to military defeat, worsened economic misery, and exacerbated societal conflict. High divorce and illegitimacy rates together with an alarmingly low birth rate created a picture of families in crisis. The belief was widespread that only by creating policies that strengthened families would Germany stand a chance of regaining its historical strength. Because both Weimar and National Socialist policymakers saw the family as essential to rejuvenating the battered nation, the interwar era witnessed a wide variety of family-directed policies. Social welfare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and maternity benefits were just the beginning of a series of programs designed to strengthen Germany and support families. While state programs targeted many different groups within society, children stood out as especially worthy recipients. Policymakers in both the Weimar and National Socialist eras recognized that children, the most vulnerable members of society and the nation's future, required special attention.

On January 21, 1727, several communes in the Nordbrookmerland region of East Frisia, a small principality located on the North Sea coast of Germany and hard by the Dutch border, were granted what amounted to immunity from prosecution for acts of rebellion. How and why this happened is a story that has a great deal to tell about the influence ordinary people could exert, through petitioning, on the practice of state power in early modern Europe. In the months and years before 1727, the prince of East Frisia, Georg Albrecht, had become embroiled in an increasingly hostile confrontation with the Estates of his province for control over the administration of taxes in the land. In their efforts to gain the upper hand, both the prince and the Estates had tried to forge alliances among the rural population and mobilized these networks against each other. The Nordbrookmerlanders tended to ally with the prince, but felt increasingly isolated and endangered. Throughout the autumn of 1726, they had been petitioning the chancellor, Enno R. Brenneysen, for protection against attacks perpetrated by the Estates' allies on their “wives and children, houses and farms.” In light of the chancellor's inability to preserve them from further destruction, the village elders asked that they be allowed to obey the Estates' commands until order was restored. Doing this, they pointed out, would force them to commit several “rebellious” acts, such as signing manifestos, supplying recruits for the rebels' militia, and paying an extraordinary war tax that had been levied by the Estates, the so-called Wochengeld.

No one stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933 than Franz von Papen. Not only did Papen play a crucial role in overcoming Reich President Paul von Hindenburg's resistance to Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, but his presence in the newly formed Hitler cabinet provided it with an aura of conservative legitimacy that helped mollify the fears that many Germans might otherwise have felt about the so-called Hitler solution. To complicate matters further, Papen proved utterly incapable of containing the dynamism of the Nazi movement and watched ineffectually from the sidelines as the Nazis unleashed a veritable revolution in the spring of 1933 that either swept Germany's conservative institutions aside or, what proved more likely, forcibly coordinated them into the organizational structure of the Third Reich. Nowhere, however, was Papen's ineffectiveness—or, for that matter, his lack of civil courage—more apparent than in the summer of 1934, when the Nazis ruthlessly murdered two of his closest associates, along with several other prominent conservatives, in a two-pronged strike against both the more militant elements within the Nazi movement and a clique of anti-Nazi conspirators within Papen's own vicechancery.

The commemoration and remembrance of war in modern Germany has played a potent political role in both undermining and legitimizing diverse German states, and war stories have been particularly salient to the formation of German national identity in the century that experienced two world wars and the Cold War. The public commemoration of war and war heroes designed to legitimize a German state, however, dates at least to the nineteenth century, when the Wars of Liberation, fought against Napoleon between 1813 and 1815, provided the new Kaiserreich with opportunities to foster specific visions of the past that highlighted national unity and dynastic loyalty. As recent studies have demonstrated, building national unity in a new state created from former independent polities required a patient process of reconciling the region to the nation. A careful examination of nineteenth-century commemorations illustrates that they actually advanced national allegiance as well as affirmed regional solidarity. Public commemorations of the Wars of Liberation in the former republican north German city-state of Hamburg reveals both growing appeals to national unity and a celebration of traditional civic culture and authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, these public festivities enabled Hamburg's growing population to practice national and local politics simultaneously.

Radical regimes revolutionize their holidays. Like the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, who designed festival cultures intended to create revolutionary subjects, National Socialists manipulated popular celebration to build a “racially pure” fascist society. Christmas, long considered the “most German” of German holidays, was a compelling if challenging vehicle for the constitution of National Socialist identity. The remade “people's Christmas” (Volksweihnachten) celebrated the arrival of a savior, embodied in the twinned forms of the Führer and the Son of God, who promised national resurrection rooted in the primeval Germanic forest and the “blood and soil” of the authentic Volk. Reinvented domestic rituals, brought to life by the “German mother” in the family home, embedded this revamped Christmas myth in intimate moments of domestic celebration. An examination of “people's Christmas” across this spectrum of public and private celebration offers a revealing case study of National Socialist political culture in action. It illuminates the ways Germans became Nazis through participation both in official festivities and the practices of everyday life and underscores the complexity of the relationship between popular celebration, political culture, and identity production in the “Third Reich.”

By 1850, a major shift in how Europeans participated in the Christian religion was well underway. On Sundays, most members of a church's or chapel's congregation were women. Women received communion more assiduously than their male counterparts. Catholic religious congregations for women were founded and joined at rates well above those for men. In Protestant lands, women became deaconesses. From Italy to Scotland, women contributed greatly to churches' social and charitable missions through their active involvement in voluntary associations and parish committees. Moreover, mothers now had the primary obligation to nourish religious sentiments in the home. Even the representation of angels had changed, the powerful, free masculine figure replaced by one who was restrained, domesticated, and feminine.

In September 1950, Julius Meyer, head of the State Association of Jewish Communities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), sent a letter to the Finance Ministry inquiring about the current state of Jewish communal property. Throughout the immediate postwar years, he and other Jewish leaders had requested, though with little success, the return of Jewish property and assistance to rebuild Jewish sites. With the occupation now over, Meyer hoped that the newly formed East German state might be sympathetic to the needs of the Gemeinde (a religious community of Jews). He noted that the Jewish community had “still not acquired its own property” since most of it remained “under the control of the state” or in the hands of those who had seized it during the Nazi program of “Aryanization.” Meyer also pointed out that the Gemeinde needed money to reconstruct the numerous synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that had been damaged during Kristallnacht and World War II. “We ask,” he explained, “that you take into consideration the fact that the Jewish community, because of the extermination policy of the fascist state, finds itself in a situation like no other religious community.”

March 18, 1948 dawned cold and rainy in Berlin. Although the city government had proclaimed the hundredth anniversary of the 1848 revolution an official holiday, Berliners awoke to a day that seemed ill-made for personal or political celebrations. One century earlier, some nine hundred persons had died on Berlin's barricades, dramatically challenging the Prussian ancien regime but falling short of their aspirations for a free and unified Germany. After one hundred years that had seen only a brief interlude of tumultuous democracy between the world wars, competing forces in postwar Berlin both claimed the democratic legacy of those barricade battles in a new contest for the city. But that legacy proved difficult to control. For the Soviet-supported Socialist Unity Party (SED), Berlin represented at once the core of the party's expanding power and the greatest threat to its realization. Like the 1848 revolutionaries, the SED leadership in Berlin found the lines between victory and defeat decidedly blurred.

Many elements were woven into this rather sneering assertion by Ferdinand Avenarius, founder and editor of the leading cultural journal of Wilhelmine Germany, Der Kunstwart. Toys, by then thoroughly commercialized consumer goods, had “true value.” By extension, consumer goods could have value. Unfortunately for Avenarius, that value stands in “inverse ratio to its dazzle.” Dazzle did not simply obscure or even eliminate value, but rather maintained a complicated link. “Value” was the mirror image of “dazzle,” varying in equal and opposite proportion. That “inverse ratio” was also connected to the power that dazzle had over “weak minds.” The values and assumptions that informed and united Avenarius' broadside represent the subject of this essay. For Avenarius was not piecing together ideas at random, nor were they applicable to toys alone. Rather, this outburst was but one example of a persistent effort by German cultural elites to assess the problems as well as the possibilities of an increasingly commercial, even consumerist society. In that effort, Avenarius and others would mobilize the Romantic suspicion of vision and reemphasize the central importance of creativity and autonomous self-expression in the construction of genuine subjectivity. In this way, important elements of the Romantic tradition worked to authorize, even promote, certain types of consumer items while stigmatizing others, suggesting a nuanced and historically specific response to the challenges of modern consumerism.

The German preoccupation with the Nazi past, with issues of guilt, responsibility, and victimization “… doesn't end. Never will it end,” to quote the resigned note on which Günter Grass concluded his latest novel, Crabwalk. It manifests itself in ever new forms, as different parts of the past, which may or may not have been repressed, come to the fore and are painfully reconstructed, tentatively probed, and reluctantly and often only partially accepted. Each new perspective on the past reorders, sometimes even shatters, the previous mosaic. Recall the impact of the film Holocaust or of the Wehrmacht exhibition. A similar phenomenon is now occurring—or so some hope and others fear. Since 2002 German suffering, rather than German guilt, has become the principal theme in discourses about the past. The firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, “moral bombing,” mass rape, and ethnic cleansing dominate historical and literary production and public debate as the Eastern Front, war crimes, and the pervasive knowledge of the Holocaust did in the mid- and late-1990s, and the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its central place within the Third Reich did a decade before that.

One of our preeminent historians, Wolfgang Mommsen, died on August 11, 2004, at the age of seventy-three. Death came while he was swimming off Usedom, in the Baltic Sea. To speak of him as “ours” is to say at once that he was a treasured international presence for all of us, that he fully embodied the new transnational character of historical studies. His prodigious work and ebullient temper enriched the lives of his students, colleagues, and friends.

Most historians who address it agree that the street protest by non-Jews for their Jewish family members constitutes the most plausible explanation for the Gestapo's release of intermarried Jews incarcerated at Berlin's Rosenstrasse. Had the women not protested, the Jews (or the overwhelming majority) most likely would have been deported to either death or labor camps. This view holds that regime leaders released the Jews for tactical reasons, not because it was cowed or had moral scruples. Although Wolf Gruner has characterized this long-established interpretation as “legend,’ his evidence on balance supports rather than challenges it.

In the years leading to the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, popular books and films have sparked lively discussions about the ways Germans use gender and sexuality to interpret the Nazi past. July 2003 saw the re-release of Eine Frau in Berlin, the anonymous diary of a woman who experienced the mass rapes surrounding the Battle for Berlin. In October of that year, the film Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) told a sentimental tale of a late-returning POW's relationship with his son. Coming on the heels of renewed discussions of German suffering, the popular film and best-selling diary formed something of a “his-and-hers” opportunity to revisit debates about guilt and trauma, Nazi-era dominance and postwar degradation, now with gender front and center. If these debates raised concerns that Germans might believe their sufferings have redeemed their guilt, Thor Kunkel's novel Endstufe raised a different specter: a Nazi guilt that is not redeemed, that is paired not with suffering but rather with pleasure. Endstufe, released in March 2004, describes scientists at the SS Hygiene Institute who, in their cocaine-filled leisure hours, produce and enjoy pornographic films.

During the brutal factory raid at the end of February 1943, the Gestapo rounded up thousands of Berlin Jews at their forced labor sites and brought them to various collection points. The Gestapo immediately singled out two thousand Jews in “mixed marriages” and transferred them to a separate building in the Rosenstrasse. The traditional view of the events, which Stoltzfus promotes, is that after a week-long demonstration by their relatives, Goebbels ordered the release of the inmates on March 6, 1943. Based on a variety of hitherto overlooked documents, I provided the reader with a different interpretation in my Central European History article: that special Gestapo orders at this point still exempted the Jews in mixed marriages from deportation. I argue that the real purpose of the arrest was to facilitate the deportation of hundreds of employees of Berlin's Jewish institutions who would be replaced by the Jews in mixed marriages. This interpretation forces us to reconsider key elements of the traditional account.

Contemplating with dread the slide toward war between Japan and the United States in the autumn of 1941, Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Tokyo, noted gloomily in his diary: “Facilis descensus averni est”—the descent into Hell is easy. Events in Europe and China had already given eloquent testimony to that grim axiom, confirming all too clearly that among the first casualties of war are peacetime notions of morality. Grew's foreboding was more than justified. Before the Second World War would come to a close in the summer of 1945, it had become the most destructive conflict in human history, with fifty-five million dead, millions more broken, either physically or psychologically, thirty million refugees, and still millions more who had simply vanished. Continents had been ravaged, great cities laid waste, and a tidal wave of destruction left behind a landscape of unparalleled human suffering. A war that began with the major powers pledging to refrain from “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or unfortified cities”—Hitler piously committed Germany to conduct the war “in a chivalrous and humane manner”—ended with a mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.