Demographic research is rapidly rewriting the history of the preindustrial European population. Numerous recent local studies contradict the common stereotype of geographical stability; European communities before 1800 housed highly mobile populations. Much of this new research concerns England and France, but significant migratory movement has also been found in early modern Sweden, Scotland, and Japan. This paper surveys the evidence on mobility in Germany since the later Middle Ages, and places it within a broad socioeconomic context.

The purpose of this article is to analyze, using the example of Franz Mehring, the growing cleavage between German left-liberalism and social democracy in the 1880s. Due in part to the radicalization produced by Bismarck's anti-socialist law of 1878 to 1890, Marxism was firmly established within the German socialist movement in the 1880s. The reverse of that process, the growing ideological and political rigidity of left-liberalism, is less well treated. In this article, I will outline the program of social reform proposed by the then left-liberal journalist, Franz Mehring, to German liberalism in an effort to build a coalition of middle-class and working-class democratic forces in Imperial Germany. Mehring's failure was instructive both for his own intellectual and political development and for what it tells us about the relationship between social democracy and liberalism in Germany.

Historians have generally limited their interest in the Fashoda Crisis to the Anglo-French diplomatic confrontation, which they believe ultimately led to a general understanding on African matters and to the Entente Cordiale. The crisis itself, however, had ramifications which went far beyond the complexities of British-French relations and which historians have yet to appreciate fully. The incident on the Nile precipitated a complete, if temporary, turnabout in France's revanchist policy toward Germany, and equally important, it offered Germany two possible options to defuse the antagonism France had held toward her since the treaty of Frankfurt twenty-seven years before: Germany could encourage war between the two nations or she could join France in an understanding, if not an alliance, against Great Britain in order to counter British dominance in Africa.

The role of law in the totalitarian state is problematic. In principle, law and unfettered political authority are antithetical but, in practice, the two have coexisted in uneasy and unequal partnership. As the Third Reich neared its apex in terms of internal and external power, a German expatriate described it as a “dual state” in which law existed side-by-side with the dynamic, ideologically charged will of the Führer. Duality did not imply balance, however, for law survived largely as a discretionary tool of total power. Nevertheless, pretotalitarian legality was never entirely deprived of a residual potency, a fact illustrated by an unlikely agent—SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, judge in the judicial branch of the SS. But the organizational context of Morgen's career is sufficiently unfamiliar as to require elucidation.