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.

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.

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.

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.

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.