In a luncheon address at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association in 2013, David Blackbourn delivered an impassioned plaidoyer to “grow” German history, i.e., to rescue it from the temporal “provincialism” that has, he believes, increasingly characterized the study of Germany over the past two decades. Blackbourn was critical of the growing emphasis on the twentieth century and especially the post-1945 period—not because of the quality of the work per se, but rather because of the resultant neglect of earlier periods and the potential loss of valuable historical insights that this development has brought in its wake. There have been other seemingly seismic shifts in the profession as a whole that have not left the history of Germany and German-speaking Central Europe untouched: greater emphasis on discourse analysis and gender, memory and identity, experience and cultural practices (i.e., the “linguistic turn” and the “new” cultural history). Accompanied by a decline in interest about Germany exclusively as a “nation-state,” the last decade in particular has seen a spike in “global” or “transnational” approaches. And, like other fields, the study of Germany has also witnessed greater interest in the study of race, minorities, immigration, and colonization—what Catherine Epstein referred to as the “imperial turn” in a piece that appeared in the journal Central European History (CEH) in 2013.

This article situates the establishment of the Bundeswehr and the implementation of compulsory military service in the 1950s and early 1960s within contemporary efforts to define a “sexual-moral order” for the Federal Republic of Germany. It argues that West Germany's rearmament offered contemporaries an opportunity to stipulate not only acceptable soldierly behavior, but also adequate male behavior in general. In the context of heightened concerns about juvenile delinquents (so-called Halbstarken), female prostitution, homosexuality, and the distribution of pornographic materials, West German citizens became interested in the social and sexual conduct of Bundeswehr soldiers and officers. Whereas some still considered the military to be a “school of the nation” and of proper masculinity, others worried about the armed forces as a possible breeding ground for immorality. Partly sharing these concerns, government representatives, members of the Bundestag, church officials, and military commanders sought to guide soldiers’ behavior, emphasizing the ideal of the “complete” (vollkommene) Christian male-breadwinner family.

As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

The Jews who lived in the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) ghetto endeavored in a variety of written ways to document their experiences for later generations. Photographers who lived in the ghetto also helped capture on film the daily reality of those who lived there. In this way, the foundation was laid for a later investigation of the ghetto—one from the perspective of the victims, who wanted to ensure that the perpetrators would not be able to monopolize future interpretations of what had transpired there. After providing a brief overview of the history of the ghetto and of the archive set up by the Jewish ghetto administration specifically for this task, the article focuses on the activities of two photographers in particular: Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who secretly, and at great risk to their own lives, attempted to capture as many aspects of ghetto life as possible. The article discusses a number of their photographs, the way in which they came into being, and the likely motivation of those who made them.

Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.

This article describes how a particular kind of queer figure moved from private photography into the mainstream of East German visual culture. It begins with a set of private photographs from the late 1960s from the collection of Heino Hilger, a regular, with his friends, at the East Berlin bar Burgfrieden. The photographs show how dressing in drag and the act of photography were important ways of constituting a gay male subculture. After the decriminalization of sex between men in 1968, the gay scene became bolder and more political in East Germany. The subversion of gender norms was central to the activism of groups such as the Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB) and Gays in the Church. The visibility of the queer figure culminated in the late 1980s, when parts of the film Coming Out were filmed in Burgfrieden and when the popular monthly Das Magazin published a three-part feature on male homosexuality. What all these cultural artifacts and events had in common was not just a critique of the heterosexual norm, but also a queering of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity.