In the article by Hermann Rebel, “What Do the Peasants Want Now?”, vol. 34, no. 3 (2001), the below listed footnotes should read as follows:

77. James C. Scott, Domination, 187–92 passim …

78. James C. Scott, Domination, 191–92.

79. Ibid., 103.

82. James C. Scott, Domination, 198.

The East German consumer supply lobby? Admittedly, the very idea strains our credulity. That it has yet to receive its scholarly due is hardly surprising in view of our assumptions about everyday consumer reality in socialist societies: empty shelves, long lines, poor quality merchandise, frustrated customers, surly salespeople, monochromatic drabness. What evidence, if any, is there to suggest the existence of a consumer supply lobby in the German Democratic Republic in the 1950s?

Since the nineteenth century, cleanliness and hygiene have played an integral role in the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and notions of self-governance in Europe. Drawing on this reservoir of potential signification, the spread of a mass consumer society in the twentieth century has capitalized on commodified images of health, hygiene, and cleanliness, while the maintenance and representation of clean bodies for modern men and women became virtually inseparable from consumption. The Nazis both accelerated and gave a racial spin to the idea of a clean, healthy body as the symbol of racially superior, socially productive, and sexually virile Aryans. Whether commodified and sexualized under consumerism or channeled into a murderous project under the Nazis, hygienic and healthy bodies became the object of pleasure and a signifier of superior social and racial identity. When these considerations are taken into account, it is important to inquire into the problems faced by the founding fathers of the GDR with regard to questions of health and consumption. The vision of the socialist “New Man” and the ideal of pure and healthy living that were so frequently invoked in the early years of the GDR must be seen as attempts to forge a positive identity for the new socialist state while avoiding the twin ideological dangers posed by the memory of Nazi racial policies and the implicit connections made between health, consumption, and freedom in the pluralistic consumer society to the west.

In 1886, the National Association of Animal Protection Societies petitioned the German Reichstag to protest “the deplorable state of affairs surrounding the method of slaughtering, the role of the butcher, and finally the demoralizing effect that the sight of this albeit necessary killing of livestock must have, particularly on the youth.” Calling for a nationwide law to prohibit the killing of livestock without prior stunning, animal protectionists insisted that only nationwide state intervention could alleviate the widespread problems with slaughter, which, by extension, would guarantee the advancement of humanity. Yet, butchers and Jewish communities vehemently disagreed and in more than two thousand counterpetitions, they appealed to the Reichstag to refrain from proposing such a law. Why did a relatively minor issue like the slaughter of livestock spark so much controversy, and, more importantly, why did it become such a politicized agenda when it was deliberated in the Reichstag in 1887 and again in 1899?

In late July 1914, upon partial mobilization of the Austro-Hungarian army, an urgent appeal to “Austria's women” circulated widely in the Viennese press. It urged women to “perform service in the time of war” and reminded them that in this moment of state peril, women had to suppress their “differences” and display the “strongest solidarity” among themselves. “Women's unity, women's energy, and women's work” would be crucial for the survival of Austria. The notice was published by one of the women's groups in what would become the Frauenhilfsaktion Wien, an umbrella organization founded in early August, comprising the major women's groups in the city. Together with similar subsequent appeals to duty, service, sacrifice, and an inner bond uniting all women, the notice marked the beginning of World War I as a potential turning point in women's relationships with each other and with the state. Across the political spectrum, noble, bourgeois, and working-class women, Christian and Jewish, German-speaking, and others, were asked to put aside their differences and perform war service as “Austria's women.”

The investigations into the crimes of the Auschwitz perpetrators by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office began in 1958. The trial opened in 1963. Why did it take five years? In the 1960s, scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, and Hannah Arendt emphasized West German reticence, indifference, or even unwillingness to confront the Nazi past as explanations for the late start of investigations of Nazi criminals. They argued that the 1950s were dominated by a collective silence about Nazism and crimes against the Jews in Germany. According to them, politically, culturally, and also legally, the new West German state refused to acknowledge the Nazi past of anyone but the highest ranking Nazis, whose trial at Nuremberg marked the Schlussstrich (drawing the line) under the topic of National Socialism and its crimes against humanity. Recent historiography of postwar German trials has also pointed to lingering Nazi beliefs not only on the part of judges and lawyers but in the minds of the public as well.

After reading the “Jewish News Bulletin” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt) in early 1939, the Romance language scholar Victor Klemperer wrote: “Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else … They were and remain (even if now they no longer wish to remain so) Germans …” Klemperer, a convert to Protestantism, but a “full Jew” by Nazi decree, continued, “It is part of the Lingua tertii imperii [LTI, language of the Third Reich] that the expression ‘Jewish people’ [Volk] appears repeatedly in the ‘Jewish News'…”

“Our dead are above the petty quarreling and the wretched, empty phrases that we cherish. A deep remembrance of our fallen brethren can only strengthen the will to reconcile differences and awaken the spirit that one of their number once expressed in this fashion: ‘Germany must live, even if we must die.”’ Thus a conservative nationalist representative to the Reichstag in Berlin addressed his colleagues in March 1927. His words reflect several notions current in Weimar Germany. They voice a call, still impassioned eight years after the armistice, for commemoration of the war dead, and they register a frustration with the contentious fragmentation of contemporary political culture, so dissonant with the image of soldiers unified in selfless sacrifice for the German fatherland. Finally, these words articulate the widespread sense that it was in the memory of the fallen of the Great War and in the emulation of their heroic sacrifice that Germans could find the bond to unify them as a people during the postwar period.

There are a variety of possible approaches to Weber's political thought. One can emphasize his class-conscious attack upon the new East Elbian agrarian capitalists, or his commitment to a politics of responsibility, in which the probable consequences of political proposals are explicitly assessed and announced. Wolfgang Mommsen has focused upon Weber's nationalism, almost to the exclusion of other aspects of his work. Jürgen Habermas has suggested that Weber tended to reduce ultimate value choices to essentially gratuitous, purely personal decisions. The emphasis in the present essay, however, is upon Weber's liberal pluralism, which anticipated a principled value pluralism, and which was a profound and persistent theme in his political commentaries.

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

This rather brief essay represents an attempt to raise a problem relating to the direction that much of recent research on Imperial Germany has taken. The deliberations that follow emerge from a renewed and quite extensive reading of the secondary literature on the history of the German Empire that I undertook in connection with my contribution to the 1806–1918 volume of the 10th edition of Gebhardt's Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Although my research interests had moved into other fields of German and European history following my work on the sociopolitical history of the Wilhelmian period, I confess that, like so many fellow historians, I continue to be fascinated by those decades before 1914. So, even if I have not been back to the archives, I have been trying to follow the no doubt rich “post-Bielefeld” output of what are by now at least two consecutive generations of younger scholars in this field.

I am grateful to Volker Berghahn for the chance to clarify our differences as well as for the characteristic civility of his critique. In what follows, I will 1) take issue with his view of German historiography; 2) rebut his charge that the recent scholarship has left us with a “fragmented,” ultimately undecipherable picture of the Kaiserreich; and 3) explain why I think my own argument in Practicing Democracy, which he agrees takes seriously the oppressive features of German society, is more persuasive than his picture of “deterioration to the point of impasse and ungovernability.”