I became involved with what was then called the Conference Group for Central European History in early 1997, when I accepted Roger Chickering's invitation to succeed him as Executive Secretary and Treasurer. This put me in charge of preparing and distributing the biannual (now defunct) Newsletter and of carrying out a variety of other duties, including keeping track of the money and organizing the annual executive meeting and the Bierabend—a cash bar and convivial get-together for historians of Central Europe—at the annual conference of the American Historical Association. The Newsletter kept members of the Conference Group informed about matters relevant to Central European history, such as upcoming events, panels on German and Austrian history at the American Historical Association meeting, scholarships, fellowships, as well as events at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, including the annual Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar. At one point, it was mailed separately to members and then, sometime later, published in Central European History.

Even for readers of Central European History, it is easy to forget that there is more than one country in the middle of Europe and that there is more than one solution to the geopolitical problem associated with the perception of being in the “middle.” That problem is so overwhelmingly claimed by Germany and its interpreters, and it is so weighed down by reflections on the (ab)uses of state power, articulated in the long-running debate on the “primacy of foreign policy,” that it is somewhat jarring to encounter a book with the title In the Middle of Europe—André Holenstein's Mitten in Europa: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung in der Schweizer Geschichte—that is not at all concerned with Germany. It has Switzerland as its subject and Verschweizerung as its substance and subtext. I leave the term untranslated because it means nothing to most of the world and an English translation would surely not capture the partly facetious, partly scandalized, partly admiring undertones that the German conveys: “Die Welt wird entweder untergehen oder verschweizern,” in the words of Friedrich Dürenmatt. Even if not taken in jest, it still sounds better than: “Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen.” But if horror in the latter case makes sense when looking back at the twentieth century, why is there so much mockery in response to the former?

By now there is not much resistance to the notion that historians of modern Germany should pay heed to events outside the borders of the Reich or nation-state (though, even now, Austria and Switzerland often remain an afterthought). At the 2006 annual conference of the German Studies Association in Pittsburgh, Michael Geyer spoke of transnational history as “the new consensus.” His keynote address bore the title “Where Germans Dwell”—a clear indication that the subject matter of German history must include transplants such as Jürgen Klinsmann and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as the German diaspora of prior centuries. In keeping with this agenda, H. Glenn Penny has played a significant role in organizing scholarship on Germans abroad, whereas Kira Thurman is exploring how African Americans experienced German musical culture. The scope of transnational German history remains vast.

In the mid-1960s, a small delegation of graduate students went to Theodore S. Hamerow's office at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Noting that the Journal of Central European Affairs had ceased publication in 1964, James Harris, Stanley Zucker, and I asked our advisor why there was no academic journal dedicated to German history, a new field that had been developing rapidly. What could we do to create such an organ? The otherwise placid Hamerow wrinkled his brow and angrily asked who had put us up to this initiative! When we answered that this was just our idea, he relaxed and told us that he was the chair of a committee charged by the Conference Group for Central European History with doing just that, namely, founding such a new journal. Douglas A. Unfug of Emory University had already put in a bid, in fact, and Central European History started to appear in 1968. By using a variation of the previous name, the journal hoped to pick up prior subscribers and avoid being identified by its title with the erstwhile enemy—Germany.

Habsburg studies stand at a crossroads. We have come a long way since C. A. Macartney published his magisterial history, The Habsburg Empire, in 1968. He began his story with the death of Joseph II in 1790—and thus, for him and his narrative, with the beginning of the end of the monarchy. Macartney's narrative represented the best and most complete traditional story of decline and fall, according to which the ever-present push of modernity put the Habsburg Monarchy in the larger story of modern Europe as an entity doomed to dissolution. Moreover, its leaders, embodied in the clever Prince Clemens von Metternich, foresaw the decline of the empire and did their best to resist change and forestall the future.

In the past two decades, colonial studies, the postcolonial turn, the new imperial history, as well as world and global history have made serious strides toward revising key elements of German history. Instead of insisting that German modernity was a fundamentally unique, insular affair that incubated authoritarian social tendencies, scholars working in these fields have done much to reinsert Germany into the broader logic of nineteenth-century global history, in which the thalassocratic empires of Europe pursued the project of globalizing their economies, populations, and politics. During this period, settler colonies, including German South West Africa, were established and consolidated by European states at the expense of displaced, helotized, or murdered indigenous populations. Complementing these settler colonies were mercantile entrepôts and plantation colonies, which sprouted up as part of a systematic, global attempt to reorient non-European economies, work patterns, and epistemological frameworks along European lines. Although more modestly than some of its European collaborators and competitors, Germany joined Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States in a largely liberal project of global maritime imperialism.

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”

As a genre, book reviews date back to at least the eighteenth century. Although there were earlier precursors, reviews emerged during the Enlightenment and then flourished with the expansion of print culture in the nineteenth century. They often provided readers who could not aspire to owning or even gaining access to valuable books an introduction to their content. Today, reviews remain a “meta-genre” that reflects the changing place of books not only in specific scholarly fields but also in written culture more generally. As Central European History (CEH) celebrates its fiftieth year of publication, it therefore makes sense to spend some time contemplating CEH’s book reviews—past, present, and future.

From Central European History’s founding in 1968, Nazism commanded a great deal of attention in the journal, but it was only after many years that this was also true of the Holocaust. A quick search on JSTOR shows that, of the articles and reviews mentioning the Holocaust, less than 10 percent were published in the journal's first twenty years, and over two-thirds were written between 2000 and 2014 (the last year of the JSTOR search). Of course, there is some semantics involved, as other terms such as Final Solution were sometimes used in earlier decades. But there is no doubt about the underlying trend, both in terms of the growing number of books that have come up for review, and the increasing number of important articles. In the 1970s, only one essay, by Lawrence Stokes, was devoted to the Holocaust. The 1980s saw a review article by Richard Breitman and a seminal piece on the ghettos by Christopher Browning. By contrast, since 2000, CEH has published around ten major contributions to Holocaust scholarship.

When I assumed the editorship of CEH in 1991 the discipline of history was changing rapidly. Political, diplomatic, and economic history seemed to be fading after a long run, and even the nation state was being challenged as a central focus of research. Given the increasing interest in gender, race, post-colonialism, and memory, I had to consider “whither goeth” CEH. In part that decision is made for the editor by the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. My own belief is that excellent history can be written based on a variety of theories, and with the employment of a diverse number of methodologies. I also concluded that weak and unconvincing history could equally be based on very different foundations as well.

That Christian religion pervaded many, if not most, aspects of life in sixteenth-century Europe, even the lives of those who were not Christian, is undisputed. “From birth to death stretched a long chain of ceremonies, traditions, customs, and observances, all of them Christian or Christianized, and they bound a man in spite of himself, held him captive even if he claimed to be free,” as Lucien Febvre remarked in 1942 in The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Most everyone, including the French writer François Rabelais—the subject of Febvre's study—understood their own existence within the divine order. Accordingly, “a world without God” made little or no sense. Even if, pace Febvre, early modern people occasionally entertained the idea that there was no God, individuals rarely faced charges of atheism, as Francisca Loetz has shown. Our task in researching early modern religion is, then, to chart religious thought, practice, and experience as a complex and capacious phenomenon—its scope, shape, contours, and dynamics.

Volumes 38 to 47 of Central European History, which appeared from July 2004 to June 2014, represented years of fundamental transition in the life of the journal and of its sponsoring society: then the Conference Group for Central European History, now the Central European History Society. This fundamental transition manifested itself in three forms: institutional formality, both of the journal and of the Conference Group/Society; publishing organization and technology—from the ways in which the editor produced the journal to the ways in which the audience consumed the scholarship it published; and, last but not least, the intellectual focus and content of the history of German-speaking Central Europe that Central European History presented to scholars and students alike. Although the decade presented some unexpected and surprising challenges, all these transitions were already visible in July 2002 when I presented my proposal to become editor of Central European History to the Editor Search Committee, which consisted of Konrad Jarausch, Kees Gispen, and then-editor Kenneth Barkin.

When Thomas Nipperdey died on June 14, 1992, Gerald Feldman wrote the obituary that appeared in Central European History. This document was a fitting symbol of the condition of our journal—both its strengths and weaknesses—as Ken Barkin became its editor. One distinguished historian's eulogy to another found an appropriate place here, for the journal was widely recognized as a leading forum of international exchange, a link between scholarly communities in Germany and North America. The obituary appeared, however, in volume twenty-four of Central European History, which bore the date December 1991. It thus left the impression that Feldman was a man of extraordinary foresight.

Germany and all things German have long been the primary concern of Central European History (CEH), yet the journal has also been intimately tied to the lands of the former Habsburg monarchy. As the editor stated in the first issue, published in March 1968, CEH emerged “in response to a widespread demand for an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe,” following the demise of the Journal of Central European Affairs in 1964. The Conference Group for Central European History sponsored CEH, as well as the recently minted Austrian History Yearbook (AHY). Robert A. Kann, the editor of AHY, sat on the editorial board of CEH, whose second issue featured a trenchant review by István Deák of Arthur J. May's The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914–1918. The third issue contained the articles “The Defeat of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the Balance of Power” by Kann, and Gerhard Weinberg's “The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the Balance of Power.” That same year, East European Quarterly published its first issue.

This article takes as its starting point the so-called ‘sex scandals’ surrounding Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during the last years of his premiership (2009–2011), which have filled Italian newspaper columns and legal case files. Political discourses and media interpretations of women’s freedom at the time represented genders through the eroticisation of power. The deployment of postfeminist and stereotyped representations of gender relations produced a complex and ambivalent frame for female sexuality and agency which reproduced the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric that locates freedom and emancipation in the market. This narrative was further inflected by class and race, as it was deployed through the opposed images of white, Italian, respectable, caring women, and cynical young women and migrants using their bodies as a resource in a sexual-economic exchange with men occupying positions of power. Through feminist reflections on work I frame and discuss the use of the notions of choice and freedom in these discourses. Shifting the focus from women’s behaviour to the analysis of a peculiar image of masculinity displayed by the then premier, the article highlights how racism, colonial legacies and homophobia are enmeshed in this historically and culturally based gender imagery.

Why study the history of modern German-speaking Central Europe? If pressed to answer this question fifty years ago, a Germanist would likely have said something to the effect that one studies modern German history to trace the “German” origins of Nazism, with the broader aim of understanding authoritarianism. While the problem of authoritarianism clearly remains relevant to this day, the nation-state-centered approach to understanding it has waned, especially in light of the recent shift toward transnational and global history. The following essay focuses on the issue of authoritarianism, asking whether the study of German history is still relevant to authoritarianism. It begins with a review of two conventional approaches to understanding authoritarianism in modern German history, and then thinks about it in a different way through G. W. F. Hegel in an effort to demonstrate the vibrancy of German intellectual history for exploring significant and global issues such as authoritarianism.