This article examines writings on the Zigeuner (“Gypsies”) by three prominent Hungarian-German scholars—Johann Schwicker, Anton Herrmann, and Heinrich von Wlislocki—as responses to Magyarization pressures, which divided Hungarian-Germans by threatening the traditional privileges of some while offering others opportunities for social advancement. Hungarian and German elites alike cast Zigeuner as primitive Naturvölker in an effort to legitimize reform efforts. By writing about the Zigeuner, scholars asserted competing Magyar and German models for modernization and reform. Passionate German nationalist Johann Schwicker called for the Zigeuner to assimilate into Hungarian and Romanian culture, arguing that Germanization was beyond their reach, thereby asserting German culture's supposedly superior status as an elite culture. By contrast, Hungarian nationalist Anton Herrmann urged the Magyarization of the Zigeuner to strengthen the Hungarian nation-state, denigrating the role of German and Romanian culture. Finally, Heinrich Wlislocki rejected all nationalist modernizing efforts, presenting the Zigeuner as a romantic symbol of the premodern age. In all three cases, Schwicker's, Herrmann's, and Wlislocki's Zigeuner bore very limited resemblance to Romani lived experience. Collectively, the writings of these three scholars illustrate both the range of Hungarian-German responses to nationalist modernization, as well as the role of national disputes in shaping Zigeunerkunde (“Gypsy Studies”).

This article examines the role of the German language in early Jewish nationalism. It focuses on the publication, reception, and afterlife of the pamphlet Autoemancipation!, published in 1882 by Leon Pinsker, a Russian Jewish doctor. The first Jewish nationalist pamphlet to be written in German by a Russian Jew, its rhetoric and terminology tapped into various Jewish and European discourses of emancipation. Pinsker not only challenged the legal-political conception of emancipation as it had been commonly used in German-Jewish discourse, but also mobilized its social and revolutionary connotations, which had been associated with radical European political movements since 1848. Moreover, Autoemancipation! marked a shift in Jewish political culture with regard to the potential function of the German language. Since the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century, German had a controversial status in Central and Eastern European Jewish societies given its association with Jewish Enlightenment, religious reform, secularization, and assimilation. Pinsker was the first to use German as a transnational language aimed at promoting the Jewish national cause. In this respect, Autoemancipation! set in motion a process whereby German became the chief language of Jewish nationalist activism.

According to Friedrich Engels, communists would “take an axe to the root of crime.” Criminality was, in this and similar views, “alien” to the very essence of prevailing social conditions in communist societies and ought to have disappeared as a phenomenon as soon as socialism was established. Yet, despite the ruling Socialist Unity Party's (SED) claim to have created “really existing socialism” in East Germany, crime existed and persisted. Official statistics showed that over one hundred thousand incidents of “everyday” criminal offenses, such as theft, were recorded annually. The SED regarded public relations work concerning criminality as essential to its prevention. This article examines the narrative of crime that appeared in the pages of the East German magazine Neue Berliner Illustrierte, which, following SED instructions, attempted to shape public perceptions by informing readers that crime rates were decreasing and that no serious crimes were taking place. Moreover, the articles made it clear that the only way to eliminate the causes of crime were for citizens to live according to the socialist tenets set forth by the party. As this suggests, the regime used the media and its treatment of crime and criminality in an attempt to win greater legitimacy and coopt citizens for the socialist project.

Many of the most iconic moments of Germany's “1968” took place in the walled confines of West Berlin, the emblematic Cold War city often referred to as the “capital of the revolt.” Most accounts portray the events in West Berlin as having been characterized by confrontations between the leftist student movement, on the one hand, and a conservative press and generally hostile, older, urban population, on the other. This article rethinks and refines existing historiographical narratives of the 1968 student movement in West Berlin, as well as of West Berlin's place in the student movement. It examines the actions and experiences of student activists in West Berlin, who rarely feature in the familiar narrative—namely, Christian Democratic activists, particularly those from the Association of Christian Democratic Students (RCDS). Using oral history interviews, memoirs, and a wide array of archival sources from German and US archives, the article sheds light on the background of some of the most important conservative players and discusses the manifold ways in which they engaged with the goals of the revolutionary left in the city. The analysis pays special attention to the effects that German division and life in West Berlin had on Christian Democratic activists, to the sources of their anti-Communism, and to their views about the US-led war in Vietnam, a major Cold War conflict that carried special resonance in the divided city. The article concludes that there were important (yet shifting and often porous) dividing lines in West Berlin's “1968” other than those that separated politicized students from an older and more conservative city leadership and population, a conclusion that calls for a modification of the familiar storyline that simply pits Rudi Dutschke and others on the left against the city's “establishment.” The article suggests that this has repercussions for interpretations of the student movement that center on generation. It argues, in short, that Christian Democratic students—activists who were, in effect, other ’68ers—helped to shape and were, in turn, shaped by the events that took place in West Berlin in 1968.