The representative form of government is in a somewhat difficult situation today. Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau judged in 1762 that “à l'instant qu'un Peuple se donne des Réprésentans, il n'est plus libre, il n'est plus,” representative government has been exposed to a steady stream of harsh criticism. The number of critics eventually increased to include Marxists, communitarians, and radical democrats. On the other hand, it is a matter of fact that over the last decades, representative systems were developed in, or at least formally adopted by, the vast majority of nations. For example, more than 140 out of the nearly 200 world's states formally have parliaments associated in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Institutions such as parliaments and parties, and procedures such as elections and legislation form a ubiquitous and at the same time heavily disputed part of the present political landscape.

The natives here have great awe and respect for our entire Nordic nation. If this had not been the case, they could have easily become our masters. They regard us as the strongest and heartiest people as well as the best and most fortunate warriors, although together with this fear, they also despise us and hold themselves to be better. The English know very well how to keep their respect, although there is no slavery in their settlements here, while it does exist among the Dutch, the French, and the Portuguese. In the establishments of the English, on the other hand, more money circulates, there is more polity, the troops and servants are much better paid, and in this way the English gain much more respect and sympathy.1

There has been a good deal of scholarly work on the history of the political economy of the German Empire. This is particularly true for the history of customs and trade policy, which historians identified quite early as a central arena of political conflicts and disputes and to which historians quite often assigned a key role in their competing interpretations of the history of the German Empire.

Contests over the term politics, over the boundaries that distinguished politics from non-politics, were one of the distinguishing features of the Weimar Republic. Not only did the disciplines of history, philosophy, law, sociology, and pedagogy each define this boundary in different terms, but participants in the debate also distinguished between ideal and real politics, politics at the level of state, and the dissemination of politics through society and citizenry. The fact that Weimar began with a revolution, the abdication of the Kaiser, and military defeat meant an eruption of politicization in 1918–19, whereby political organs of state and civil society sought in unprecedented fashion to draw Germans into parties and parliaments, associations, and activist societies. “The German people would still consist of ninety percent unpolitical people, if Social Democracy had not become a political school for the people,” Otto Braun claimed in Vorwärts in 1925. Politics and politicization generated not only political acts—votes, strikes, and vocal demonstrations—but also cultural milieus of Socialists and Communists, Catholics and liberal Democrats, nationalists, and eventually Nazis. In Weimar Germany there was little room for the “unpolitical” citizen of the prewar era, held up as a model in a famous tract of 1918 by Thomas Mann.

The image of the Enlightenment as an era has proved to be remarkably constant, repeatedly resisting protracted and subtle attempts to de-ideologize, pluralize, and reperiodize it. Historians have turned away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations. The concept of a homogeneous, quasi-monolithic Enlightenment has been pluralized and parceled into a large number of geographically and thematically distinct Enlightenments. At the same time, the chronological scope of research interests has been extended and refined. Whereas the decades of the high Enlightenment in Britain and France were the initial focus of interest, the phase of the radical early Enlightenment has since achieved a firm place in a total panorama that also takes account of chronologically different developments in various national contexts. Nonetheless it is true, although necessarily a generalization, to say that the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole concentrates on an “Enlightenment thinking” characterized as rational, critical of dogma, and systematic, and whose main emphases are seen as political ideas, philosophy, criticism of superstition, and the experimental sciences. The intention here is to focus on the aspect of active mass participation in the intellectual project of the Enlightenment and to supplement the image of an intellectual history centered on the triad of ideas, authors, and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective that focuses on learned practice.

The Nuremberg Trial may well be the most famous trial of the twentieth century, which is as it should be. After all, the Nuremberg Trial, while perhaps not as unprecedented as is frequently assumed, did mark a decisive turning point in the history of international law. It marked the first broadly successful attempt to impose the rule of law not just on the conduct of war but also, in a limited way, on domestic atrocities as well. The fame of this single trial has had the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing the literally thousands of other Nazi trials that took place after World War II, however. These additional trials can be divided into three categories: those that took place in the domestic courts of victim nations, those that took place in occupation courts, and, perhaps least well-known, those that took place in German courts.

In the early morning of May 26, 1935, some residents of the eastern German city of Brandenburg an der Havel awoke to shouts of “We Want Our Kaiser Back” and “We Want Back the Black-White-Red” emanating from the dormitory of the storied and elite Prussian secondary school, the Ritterakademie am Dom zu Brandenburg. A small number of students had thrown an illegal party during which, emboldened by alcohol, at least one student had called for the restoration of the monarchical order, to the audible delight of others present. Informed of the night's events on the following Monday, school authorities quickly investigated the matter and decided that the episode represented neither a genuine act of political subversion nor a reflection of possible “reactionary” attitudes held by the students. The utterances were instead an act of foolishness (Dummheit) committed by immature pupils, the consequence of the more serious and perennial problem of students' drinking parties, concluded the Ritterakademie administration. In response, school principal Georg Neuendorf punished several older pupils by removing them from their position atop the student hierarchy and revoking several privileges. He also wrote to all parents of students boarding at the Ritterakademie, asking them no longer to send their sons money, food, and alcohol. Satisfied with his response, the principal ended his report on the incident to his superiors in Berlin, the Oberpräsidium of Brandenburg Province, by noting optimistically that the episode would be of pedagogical use in the continued “Nazification” of the school. In what must have seemed to those involved to signal the end of the affair, regional authorities approved of Neuendorf's actions three days later, concluding that the drunken utterances were a “foolish youth's prank” (dumm[es] junge Streich).

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

Albert Ballin was one of Imperial Germany's most successful business leaders. He early recognized the impact and possibilities of the expansion and integration of global markets. Within little more than a decade after he had joined the management of the Hamburg-Amerikanische-Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) in 1886, he turned an already significant enterprise into the world's largest steamship line. As a leading manager and later as HAPAG director general, Ballin was a major force behind Hamburg's rise to Imperial Germany's second largest city. Due in no small part to HAPAG's spectacular growth, Hamburg emerged as a key global port for passengers and freight by the turn of the century. But Ballin was not just a gifted business leader in a highly innovative economic sector; he also had access to some of the highest figures in Berlin. Ballin repeatedly met with the Kaiser and government members, and he used his long-standing contacts in England on several diplomatic missions to ease rising tensions between the two powers, albeit without lasting success.

The notion of “crisis” plays an important role in both the history of the Weimar Republic and the historiography on this period of German history. Modifying Max Horkheimer's famous dictum on the intrinsic connection between capitalism and fascism, one might even say that anyone who does not want to talk about “crisis” should remain silent about Weimar Germany. In the brief period between 1918 and 1933 Germany not only had to cope with the consequences of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, but also it was struck by two severe economic crises. Moreover, strong political forces relentlessly tried to overcome the unpopular democratic political system. After the National Socialists finally succeeded in overthrowing the republic, Weimar came to be conceptualized as the ill-born precursor of National Socialism, as the critical stage of German history before the establishment of a rule of terror that intentionally led into the most devastating war in human history. This perspective on the failure of Germany's first democracy stems largely from the dominance of National Socialism as a negative point of reference in historical as well as public debates in the Federal Republic.

Recent historical studies on the organizations of German expellees and their influence on West German political culture highlight the insincere attitude and deception by the whole West German political establishment toward the expellee politicians and activists and their cause. One study in this field is Matthias Stickler's important book “Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch,” and a more recent one by Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen?, takes Stickler's thesis even further. It creates the impression that the expellee organizations, highly dependent on the government for financial and political support, had no option in this matter and were even helpless in that they had to accept the noncommittal rhetoric and the West German government's unwillingness to obligate West Germany for their cause. In this article, I probe this portrayal of the expellee politicians and activists as objects rather than subjects of German politics by inquiring into the political and public relations activities of the German Sudeten Council (Sudetendeutscher Rat) in the field of foreign policy during and around the tenure of Hans-Christoph Seebohm as the leader (Sprecher) of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society (Landsmannschaft) (1959–1967). The Sudeten Council is a non-party association; one half of its members are elected by the federal assembly of the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and the other half by the political parties of the Bundestag. As well as being a politician of the expellee organization, Hans-Christoph Seebohm pursued the longest political career in the German federal cabinet—seventeen years. He served as Minister of Transportation and Mail of the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1966 under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. To date, no monographic work has been written about Seebohm.

In the aftermath of World War II, Christian leaders in Germany embraced the political ideology of Christian Democracy. Viewing Nazism as a form of materialism and atheism, which they blamed on the ongoing secularization and moral decay of German society, both Protestant and Catholic leaders argued that only the society-wide renewal of Christian faith and Christian values could provide a solid foundation for the future. Enjoying a privileged position in the eyes of the western Allies (particularly the Americans), the churches took on a leading role in the reconstruction of German society. And, working to overcome the postwar disillusionment of many of their members, church leaders urged their followers to take active, personal responsibility for political life in the new German states.

Thousands of demonstrators crowded Trafalgar Square on a chilly April afternoon in 1978 to protest the planned expansion of nuclear fuel reprocessing operations at the Windscale Reactor in rural Cumbria. Toward the end of the rally, a young woman faced the mass of protestors from behind the podium. “I am here to bring you greetings of solidarity from the various European, Australian, and Japanese anti-nuclear movements,” she announced. She explained that the movements whose greetings she brought to London represented “a great wave of transnational determination to put a stop to Windscale, to put a stop to a nuclearized, militarized Europe.” Within the next few moments, she described the contours of this “transnational wave.” She took her audience from Aboriginal territory in Australia, where Green Ban strikes interfered with uranium mining, to the nonviolent demonstrations against reactor construction in German villages, and back to Windscale, where protesters demanded a stop to nuclear fuel reprocessing. In the few minutes she stood at the podium, Petra Kelly narrated an around-the-world journey that had taken her most of the previous two decades to complete.

On the morning of October 21, 1941, the custodian of Odessa's Museum of Western Civilization summoned twenty-three-year-old Eugenie Anissimoff and her middle-aged mother to lead an unusual and most demanding tour group. Having fled the besieged metropolis weeks earlier to their former residence in suburban Odessa, the two women had returned to their bombed-out apartment in the recently occupied city. Homeless, the pair had sought refuge with the museum's caretaker, an old family friend. Unable to communicate with the delegation of SS and Wehrmacht officers who queued for admission, the Russian-speaking janitor hoped that the two Volksdeutsche women would help to disarm the menacing visitors by granting them a German-language tour. Although ostensibly to inspect the building for booby traps, the visit's true purpose became clear as the Germans began loading paintings, rugs, and even a golden saddle into their vehicles. At the conclusion of the tour-cum-robbery, the group's leader, SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Klaus Siebert, thanked the two women and complimented their excellent German. Hearing of their dire situation, Siebert advised Anissimoff and her mother to register for support at the local SS-run Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic German Liaison Office (hereafter VoMi), bureau in a former music conservatory on Novovlaskaia Street.

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came as a surprise to most western observers. For historians of modern Europe, its disappearance remains remarkable for at least two reasons. First, East Germany has ceased to exist in an era when new states are constantly being born. Since the French Revolution unleashed the power of national self-determination as an ordering principle more than 200 years ago, new sovereign states have continued to emerge across the globe, whether through the breakup of multiethnic and colonial empires or the dissolution of pan-Slavic states in eastern Europe. Illiberal governments have been swept aside, often with the result that new states have been cast out of imperial entities by the centrifugal force of cultural attachment. In the history of European political sovereignty during the twentieth century, the particular has triumphed over the universal. Except in the case of the GDR. Against the tide of European history, the GDR has gone from sovereign state (East Germany) to regional designation (eastern Germany). In this sense, the story of the GDR's absorption by a larger polity is a tale of modern state-building told in reverse.

National Socialist propaganda has created an aesthetic legacy that is difficult to shake off. Filmic images of well-trained athletes preparing for the Berlin Olympics or mass scenes from Nazi Party rallies have become familiar features in history documentaries. While many of us lack personal memories of the Third Reich, we think we know what Nazism looked like. In addition, Walter Benjamin's concept stressing the use of aesthetics in politics has become commonplace in interpretations of Nazi representation. “Gesamtkunstwerk of political aesthetics” or “formative aesthetics” are terms used to analyze festivities and spectacles in the Third Reich, suggesting that the Nazis developed a specific style with a focus on aesthetics, symbols, and festive set-up. This allegedly distinctive Nazi style is emphasized even more by contrasting it favorably with celebrations of the Weimar Republic. Once again, the German republican experience is placed in “the antechamber of the Third Reich.”

Over the course of the 1970s, West Germans fought one another in an attempt to defend democracy. Frustrated with the seemingly ineffectual speeches and demonstrations of the 1960s protest movements, militant groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF), June 2nd Movement, and the Red Cells took up arms. They declared war on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) for its failure to rid itself of the vestiges of fascism, for its hierarchical-authoritarian structure, and for the abuses of western consumer society. Inspired by national liberation movements in the formerly colonized world, the groups aimed both to raise revolutionary consciousness among the West German population and to demonstrate the state's vulnerability through illegal action. The RAF, in particular, stressed the importance of violence as a simultaneous act of emancipation and defense—the latter understood as counterviolence necessitated by state-initiated violence. The repeated violation of norms would, its members argued, undermine Germans' traditional “habit of obedience” and, at the same time, force the state to reveal openly its fascism. These tough-love tactics, in short, aimed to save West Germans from themselves and thereby save German democracy.

It is common knowledge among historians of Germany that the nationalist right frequently and loudly argued that the Weimar Republic, throughout its fourteen-year existence, was fundamentally “un-German,” foreign in inspiration, and resting on a foundation of internationalist political thought. Indeed, in the opinion of many on the more traditionally minded right, such as the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP) and the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), monarchy corresponded most closely to Germany's historical development and German national character as a form of state. In large part due to Weimar's ultimate demise at the hands of the conservative and radical right, these sentiments have received the lion's share of scholarly attention. Curiously, however, the republican response to these charges remains less well explored.