This article examines the institutional evolution and professionalization of the state police in Prague during the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy, arguing that the transformation of the Prague State Police between 1893 and 1910 represents a proactive effort in modern state-building. Drawing on reports from the Prague Police Directorate and the Bohemian Governor’s Office, it analyzes how recurring episodes of mass violence—specifically the unrest of the early 1890s, the riots of December 1897, and the nationalist disturbances of 1908—exposed the structural vulnerabilities of a security apparatus designed for routine policing rather than mass politics.

The article highlights a significant shift in administrative strategy: the movement away from a reliance on military intervention, which was increasingly viewed by civil authorities as a “double defeat” that undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional state. Instead, police directors such as Georg Dörfl and Karel Křikava successfully advocated for a robust, civilian-controlled force characterized by increased manpower, modernized equipment, and the establishment of a dedicated reserve for professional training. By 1910, the Prague Guard had largely expanded, reflecting a fundamental reconceptualization of urban order where protest was accepted as an unavoidable feature of political life to be contained by professional civilian forces rather than crushed by the army.

This article examines the many afterlives of the Tendaguru Expedition—a 1909–13 fossil excavation in the colony of German East Africa that unearthed the tallest mounted dinosaur in the world, still on display in Berlin. The long process of dinosaur assembly, which took more than three decades, meant that the Tendaguru project effectively outlived the German empire. Accounts of the expedition alongside the dinosaur exhibitions served as attempts to both theorize prehistoric life and write a history of the empire in terms compatible with the many twentieth-century German regimes that followed. These (re)negotiations of Tendaguru were reckoned with an ever-growing list of lost worlds: the prehistoric, the imperial, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar Germanies. At stake in these dinosaur stories was not merely the progress of some neutral, apolitical, or abstract paleontological science but rather national pride, international authority, civilizational superiority, and imperial legitimacy.

This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)—both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.

The contribution that coal miners made to the reconstruction of Europe is hard-wired into popular memory, with widespread tales of the selfless sacrifice that saw miners conduct extra shifts and work longer hours for the nation. This article compares three conflicts that arose when miners were ordered to go the extra mile: the campaign to have miners in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais basin (France) make up public holidays in early 1945, the extension of the Saturday shift in the coal mines of the Ostrava-Karviná basin (Czechoslovakia) in late 1946, and the calls on miners in the Ruhr basin (Germany) to conduct extra shifts to provide the population with coal for the winter of 1946/47. Where trade unionists invoked patriotic sentiments and, when that failed, ethnic resentments to motivate miners to go the extra mile, this article shows that generational conflict between old and young miners was the driving force behind these disputes.

This article examines the negotiation of ethnopolitical categories in wartime Nazi Germany by analyzing Gestapo investigations into accusations of “friendliness to Poland” against German citizens of Polish descent in the industrial Ruhr conurbation. By relying heavily on denunciations and informing, the Gestapo incentivized ordinary Germans in the Ruhr to identify perceived “dangerous outsiders” to the Volksgemeinschaft. Some therefore relied on longstanding anti-Polish tropes to frame accusations in the racial categories of the Nazi state. But while many such accusations alerted the Gestapo’s attention, they frequently masked a pursuit of personal issues and presented officers with significant investigatory difficulties. Unlike the generally brutal treatment of ethnolinguistic minorities in Nazi Germany, Gestapo officers often did not simply employ blanket repression in these cases. They frequently considered accused individuals’ socioeconomic productivity and “commitment” to Germany, characteristics that defendants stressed, thus highlighting the often contingent, unstable process of ethnic boundary formation in Nazi Germany.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.

This article examines the early Nazi movement through the contested and violent politics of Munich’s beer halls between 1919 and 1923. It argues that these spaces were not neutral stages for political speech, but rather central arenas in which the movement defined its identity, tested its tactics, and fused party and paramilitary organization. Drawing on police reports, eyewitness accounts, and Nazi publications, the article shows how the NSDAP sought to recode beer halls into sites of antisemitic and anti-republican action, aided by the toleration and complicity of Bavarian state authorities. These spaces became laboratories for masculine bonding, crowd mobilization, and practices of exclusionary violence that made the boundaries of the Volk both visible and enforceable. By foregrounding the interplay of space, sociability, and violence, the article reframes the origins of Nazi radicalism and highlights the role of everyday venues in shaping interwar populist politics.

This article examines the lives of three politicians from Austria’s crownland of Bukovina—Aurel Onciul, Nikolai Wassilko, and Benno Straucher—who pursued distinct national ambitions and built successful political careers as advocates of democratization and nationalization under imperial rule. It aims to highlight the multiple transitions these individuals experienced, including shifts from conservative to democratic mass politics, struggles for national rights, and the passage from imperial to national orders. After 1918, Onciul became a representative of a nationality with its own nation-state, while Wassilko and Straucher became spokespersons for embattled minorities. All three struggled to adapt to the new national order, and the forces of nationalization they once championed ultimately turned against them. The article argues that the nationalist politics that had brought these politicians success under imperial rule were later criticized by their co-nationals as treasonous and opportunistic, illustrating the complex and often paradoxical outcomes of nationalization processes in Central Europe.

This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

The Third Reich established a new financial order in Central Europe. This article examines one aspect of these changes, namely the evolution of banking law. After the seizure of power in 1933, Nazi officials weaponized financial and legal institutions to support the rearmament campaign. They initially worked through the Credit Supervisory Office, a regulatory agency created in 1934, to enforce a standardized model of regulation. Driven by more than a desire for self-sufficiency (autarky) and expropriative control, the authorities devised a system of economic governance that perpetuated the conflict and continually supported German financial interests. The politicization and dismantling of the regulatory office, officially dissolved in 1944, reflected the evolving priorities of the Nazi regime. By reinterpreting existing laws and working with a willing state bureaucracy, officials were able to use regulation as a tool for redesigning the banking systems of Germany and the annexed territories.

The article analyses the Jewish militias that were established in Galicia during the fall of the Habsburg empire in 1918 and the creation of new nation-states. As public order collapsed and the region descended into violence, Jews throughout Galicia took up arms to protect and organize their communities and to take an active part in the transformation of the region. They mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors, creating paramilitary forces that aimed to fill the vacuum left behind by the disintegrating imperial state. The militias were more than a means of self-defense. They actively participated in the establishment of the new states’ monopoly on violence but did so on their own terms—integration was only possible through separation. At the same time, the militias served a decidedly internal, Jewish purpose by replacing traditional leaderships and imposing discipline in the community, at times through universal conscription.

Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

Over the twentieth century, the Vienna Philharmonic—Austria’s flagship musical institution—became a leading player in global musical life through intercontinental touring, the distribution of recordings, and the establishment of “Austrianness” as a global brand. By framing the mobility of musicians as “world practices,” this article investigates the driving forces behind an Austrian ensemble going global. It understands the Philharmonic’s relation to the music world as an entangled history of globalizing tour destinations, cultural diplomacy, non-European audiences, the agents and interests in the music market, and musical branding. The attitudes that become visible in relation to the musicians’ global mobility and their reluctance to admit non-European players bear witness to the disruptive dimensions of world practices. In conclusion, this article proposes the Philharmonic’s entanglements with Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and the Middle East as an entry point for writing a global history of twentieth-century Austrian culture.

In 1525, Prussia became the first territory to enact the Reformation when its leaders issued a new church order based on the teachings of Martin Luther. As this article makes clear, these were not native Prussians instituting reforms but rather German clergymen, many of whom had travelled to Prussia because their marriages had provoked persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. To illuminate the intertwined phenomena of marriage, migration, and church reform in Prussia, this article compares the journeys of two German clergymen who travelled to Prussia and led the Reformation there: Paul Speratus, a Swabian preacher, and Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order. Although they came from different social strata and their journeys to Prussia were distinct, the leitmotif of marriage animates their embrace of the Reformation and their paths to Prussia.

By 1849 the kindergarten spread across the German Confederation as an alternative space of revolutionary politics and protest. I argue that the kindergarten worked alongside the barricade as a key location to protest traditional forms of state and religious authority and cultivate a new humanity that centered on women's gendered labor and children's education. For the founder of the kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel and his supporters, the classroom was a garden for the future in which educators and children alike could “perform utopia.” For female revolutionaries, the kindergarten provided a forum to make political claims in ways not open elsewhere. This article provides insight not only into the history of Central Europe in the Age of Revolutions, but also into the histories of emotions, gender, and education. I argue that historians should examine how ideas of “utopian hope” have been utilized in moments of upheaval to create new spaces of opposition.

This article argues that sexualized travel was a crucial site in which the ambivalences of the so-called sexual revolution were negotiated. Focusing on the experiences of white, West German men between the late 1960s and early 1990s, this article draws on a wide range of travel literature—as well as criticism of sex and travel—to document the ways in which tourists made sense of sexual ambivalences at home through discussions about sex abroad. Regardless of sexual orientation, white, West German men drew on overlapping languages of racialized desire to describe perceived pleasures abroad, revealing that race and racism are inextricable from the history of the sexual revolution in the Federal Republic of Germany.

After the two world wars, numerous Germans were forcibly removed or fled their homelands in eastern Europe, resettling in Germany. In both postwar periods, the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany established compensation systems to indemnify the material losses and damages suffered by these refugees: the Gewaltschädengesetze (Violent Damages Laws) of 1921 and the Lastenausgleichsgesetz (Equalization of Burdens Law) of 1952. The article offers a unique comparative insight into the functioning of the two compensation mechanisms, examining six cases of applicants (or their heirs) who lost their homes twice in their lives and applied for compensation twice: first after the end of the First World War and then following the Second World War. The diachronic comparison reveals the complex nature of German national belonging, the persistence of the term Volksgemeinschaft in modern German history, and the role of class status in the context of compensation after both wars.

How does one prepare for flight? Is it possible to plan for such a disruptive event? This article explores a unique publication project established precisely for that purpose: migration manuals published by a German-Jewish organization to support the masses of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s. These manuals consolidated elaborate information from all over the world to prepare Jews for impending displacement. They encompassed not only essential details but also impressions, recommendations, and complaints. The manuals’ editors assembled reports from individuals already settled in refuge, generating a collaborative self-help effort on a global scale. Analyzing their content, this article shows that the process of guiding readers into forced migration extended in this case beyond technical migration procedures to include knowledge transfer about the politics of race, class, and gender, reflecting how German-Jewish refugees studied and situated themselves within these categories.

This article examines the neglected war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators that took place at the People's Tribunal in early postwar Romania, focusing especially on the first trial (the “Macici group”). The article shows that in spite of the political interferences by the new pro-communist regime and the USSR, the Macici group trial in particular, and the first war crimes trials in general, were not Stalinist show trials or fake trials and they sentenced real war criminals and accurately captured Romania's participation in the Holocaust. Unlike the Antonescu group trial – that indicted the former pro-Nazi dictator and his closest collaborators – the first war crimes trial was not a typical political trial. In general, it respected the rule of law of the era. Resembling the cases of other trials of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators in postwar Europe, the Romanian perpetrators invoked superior orders as their main line of defense. In spite of the public perception and the communist regime's propaganda, the primary sources show that the People's Tribunal proved rather lenient and inefficient. Additionally, these trials had an important political-social role in postwar Romania and helped the communist regime discredit political adversaries, purge the judiciary, gain legitimacy, and increase its control of local society.