This article explores the entanglements between educational and confessional history in early modern Europe, focusing on the conflict between the University of Vienna and the Jesuit College in 1553–1623. As part of a broader trend of confrontations between “old” universities and Jesuit colleges, the Viennese case stands out for two key reasons: 1) the university’s remarkable institutional resilience and 2) the overt confessional antagonism between the two institutions. The article examines both institutional and religious dimensions of the contest, highlighting the ambiguous role of the Habsburg rulers in its development. A strong commitment to the ideals of academic privileges and autonomy made the university resistant to Jesuit infiltration and led to the longest educational rivalry in Central Europe. Confronted with the Jesuit-led re-Catholicization efforts, the university remained strikingly persistent in preserving its confessionally neutral stance. This conflict offers a new perspective on complex confessional dynamics in the Habsburg monarchy.

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.

After the First World War, the Versailles Peace Treaty obliged the German Reich to far-reaching military disarmament. Pacifist journalists who reported in the 1920s and early 1930s on illegal rearmament measures by the Reichswehr were threatened with legal action by the Reichsgericht, Germany’s supreme court, on charges of journalistic treason. Contemporary opponents of the proceedings, as well as modern research, accused the Reichsgericht of siding with the Reichswehr against the republican governments in its ruling in favor of the Reichswehr’s illegal rearmament. However, the rulings of the Reichsgericht were not solely based on legal provisions; they also invoked the official guidelines of German foreign policy. The article demonstrates that the Foreign Office exerted far greater influence than the Reichswehr Ministry for most of the period. It thereby highlights the tension between law and politics in political criminal trials and nuances the so-called “crisis of confidence” in the Weimar judiciary.