Following the passing of the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Genetic Diseases” in July 1933, sterilization became a means to tighten the borders of the German ethnic community against outsiders, including Sinti and Roma. For a while, Sinti soldiers were spared sterilization. After Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 1942, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They escaped the extermination of other Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerlager on the night of August 2, 1944, only because they represented a human shield deployable against advancing Russian troops. Still, the Reich insisted on sterilizing them and their families before placing them in front of enemy guns because they were still considered “internal enemies.” As a result, some forty Sinti men and boys were sterilized by Dr. Franz Lucas in the men's camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945. Focusing on their story challenges Lucas's portrayal as the victim of SS practices, a narrative that long benefitted from the testimony of non-Sinti prisoners. In addition, compensation agencies in Germany underestimated the ongoing effects of psychological trauma resulting from sterilization. Sinti victims who were subjected to an “expert assessment” of their blood purity before war's end underwent a renewed assessment of their productivity for German society after the war.

Aligned with renewed commitments to class critique in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, I examine premium as a floating signifier. My initial semiotic landscape analysis demonstrates how this word is attached to any number of goods/services, coaxing people into a sense of distinction and superior status. These language games occur most vividly in my second analytic site—Premium Economy—where status is fabricated as tangibly but not too obviously distinct from Economy while preserving the prestige of Business. From a corpus of over forty international airlines’ promotional materials, I pinpoint three key rhetorics underpinning Premium Economy: extraction, excess, and comparison. My analysis locates premium as a quintessential form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1997/2000) deployed for controlling people by seducing, flattering, and enchanting them. The anxious bourgeoisie are thereby ‘joyfully enlisted’ (Lordon 2014) into the aspirational logics of elitism, all animated by the tenacious neoliberal ideologies of a supposedly post-class world. (Elite discourse, post-class ideology, floating signifiers, Frédéric Lordon ‘premium’, Premium Economy)*

Historians have examined the Herero genocide in German South West Africa extensively. The role of the Prusso-German general staff has received only rudimentary treatment, however. The following study focuses on the actions of this institution and its chief. Evidence indicates that initially and with varying degrees of success the general staff was heavily involved in German military actions. After the Battle of Waterberg, however, the local military commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, fought his own war. Meanwhile, the general staff gravitated toward a different role: shielding Trotha from criticism emanating from German civilian leaders and the public. The impulse to protect sprang not only from a harmony of views about the annihilation of the Herero, but also from an urge to preserve the prestige of the German military after unexpected losses at the hands of “African savages.” In fact, the Prusso-German general staff was complicit in, if not partly responsible for, the conduct of genocidal warfare in GSWA.

Numerous past review articles by scholars of German history share ideas produced by the religious turn in historiography since the 1970s and 1980s. Although highlighting a still growing groundswell of work focused on the German Catholic minority, these essays typically express discomfort with the relation of their subspecialty to the rest of the discipline. Bemoaning the marginalization of Catholic history and the self-inflicted ghettoization of research narrowly focused on regional traditions, past reviewers have worried about the integration of Catholicism within a larger framework. These past articles summarize phases of research on German Catholicism that produced much scholarship and multiple conceptual frameworks through which to understand the enduring impact of the church. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s pushed against the grain of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Bielefeld School to prove that Catholicism contributed more to the liberal democratic development of Germany than had been previously assumed, and by the 1990s German Catholic research focused primarily on the social history of Catholicism. The field of German Catholic history underwent a period of uncertain change during the early 2000s. Many of the German-language monographs on the topic remained wedded to the milieu model, but some younger scholars responded to critiques of German Catholic history by studying women's history or deploying poststructuralist analysis.

This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe.