This article examines the debate around transatlantic slavery in the German Enlightenment. The debate is considered in light of previous early modern notions of servitude, the interest in sympathy characteristic of the Enlightenment, and the emergent abolitionist movement. The article argues that emotion was central to German commentaries on transatlantic slavery so that, by around 1780, Enlightened Germans were expected to sympathize with the enslaved. This normative emphasis on sympathy preceded widespread support for abolitionism, which emerged only from the middle of the 1780s. The article further argues that the emotional import of slavery played a key role in both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist arguments. Abolitionists understood the feelings associated with the slave trade (and in some cases slavery itself) as reflections of its retrograde character. By contrast, anti-abolitionists praised sympathy with the enslaved as a reflection of European Enlightenment, but maintained that such feelings should be subdued to perpetuate Enlightened progress.

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 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.

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.