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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.