This article analyzes the affective economy of West Germany's postwar society. After delineating the intellectual history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research's “Gruppenexperiment,” which consisted of 137 group interviews with different segments of West German society, my article focuses on one transcript of a 1950 group discussion of young fashion-designer apprentices. Based on a close reading, I study how the younger generation in West Germany constructed a passive and privatist self-image in which they could both articulate their emotional dissociation from National Socialism while clinging to antidemocratic, racist, and antisemitic feelings in metamorphosed form. The micrological focus of the analysis of the group's emotions is balanced by a rereading of both Helmut Schelsky's study about the “skeptical generation” and texts by researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research who came to markedly different conclusions about the West German youth.

How does one prepare for flight? Is it possible to plan for such a disruptive event? This article explores a unique publication project established precisely for that purpose: migration manuals published by a German-Jewish organization to support the masses of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s. These manuals consolidated elaborate information from all over the world to prepare Jews for impending displacement. They encompassed not only essential details but also impressions, recommendations, and complaints. The manuals’ editors assembled reports from individuals already settled in refuge, generating a collaborative self-help effort on a global scale. Analyzing their content, this article shows that the process of guiding readers into forced migration extended in this case beyond technical migration procedures to include knowledge transfer about the politics of race, class, and gender, reflecting how German-Jewish refugees studied and situated themselves within these categories.

By 1849 the kindergarten spread across the German Confederation as an alternative space of revolutionary politics and protest. I argue that the kindergarten worked alongside the barricade as a key location to protest traditional forms of state and religious authority and cultivate a new humanity that centered on women's gendered labor and children's education. For the founder of the kindergarten Friedrich Fröbel and his supporters, the classroom was a garden for the future in which educators and children alike could “perform utopia.” For female revolutionaries, the kindergarten provided a forum to make political claims in ways not open elsewhere. This article provides insight not only into the history of Central Europe in the Age of Revolutions, but also into the histories of emotions, gender, and education. I argue that historians should examine how ideas of “utopian hope” have been utilized in moments of upheaval to create new spaces of opposition.

The Habsburg Empire has typically been understood as a continental power with few overseas aspirations, or as Robert Musil waxed nostalgically in his fictional Kakania: “A Ship would now and then be sent off to South America or East Asia, but not too often.” It is mostly true, of course, that Austria did not have “ambition for world markets or world power,”1 but recently historians have begun to explore the role colonial fantasy played in an empire with no actual overseas colonies to speak of.2 The Empire did support a series of oceanic voyages in the 19th century. None resulted in permanent settlement of course, but the voracious enthusiasm with which a Habsburg public responded to them is a testament to the weight colonial discourse had even in continental empires like Austria's.3 A small, but exciting literature has sprung up around these expeditions, situating them in their broader political contexts.4 The exercise has been fruitful at situating Habsburg history in a broader global context and has done much to de-provincialize what was once a relatively insular field.

Returning from a four-month tour in America, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) stopped for a few days in Switzerland, on his way home. On May 7, 1930, he gave a lecture in Bern on medieval peasants and their struggle for freedom in the 14th century. Peasants against feudal armies inspired memories from America. However, Iorga, who was at the time preoccupied with questions of world history and comparative research, did not simply associate the War of Independence with the victory of the Swiss “peasants” at Sempach against Duke Leopold III of Tyrol. He drew a parallel between the military success of the Eidgenossen of 1386 and the defeat inflicted 56 years earlier upon the king of Hungary, Charles I, by Romanian peasants. The battle, on the 600th anniversary of which Iorga delivered his lecture, was illustrated in the Hungarian Illuminated Chronicle. The Romanian historian was convinced that the illustrator had been an eyewitness or, at least, somebody informed by a participant. There is no mention of peasants in the text of the Chronicle, but on the basis of the last illuminations in the manuscript, Iorga thought he could recognize the dress of the Romanian peasants of his own time: the woolen hat (căciulă, a sort of Phrygian cap); the long, braided hair; the leather jacket doubled with wool; the leggings; and the leather sandals (opinci). The Romanians fought like peasants as well: they cut trees in the forest, which they then pushed over King Charles and his heavy cavalry. Iorga did not find this detail either in the text or in the illuminations of the Hungarian Chronicle. He got it from the Chronicle of the Prussian Land by Peter of Dusburg, although that source is not mentioned in the lecture.

Between 1817 and 1831, four German scientists – Karl von Martius, Georg Langsdorff, Ludwig Riedel, and Friedrich Sello – undertook expeditions in Brazil with the goal of collecting natural specimens, particularly focusing on Brazilian cinchona plants. Renowned for their medicinal properties, especially in the treatment of fever diseases, cinchona specimens were extensively utilized by local Brazilian communities. The widespread use of cinchona raises important questions regarding how German scientists acquired knowledge of the therapeutic properties of plants, previously unknown within German pharmacology. This paper argues that the German understanding of Brazil's cinchona trees was situated within an imperialist endeavor that not only appropriated indigenous knowledge but also involved conducting experiments on these plants and their effects on local populations. This hybridization of knowledge about cinchona was characterized by an asymmetrical dominance of German pharmacological experimentation, which sought to enhance organic life and establish utopian, “healthy” German societies, in both German territories and Brazil. Consequently, German chemical experiments with Brazilian cinchona specimens intersected with biopolitical practices, aimed at manipulating both plant and human life through therapeutic interventions.

In 1525, Prussia became the first territory to enact the Reformation when its leaders issued a new church order based on the teachings of Martin Luther. As this article makes clear, these were not native Prussians instituting reforms but rather German clergymen, many of whom had travelled to Prussia because their marriages had provoked persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. To illuminate the intertwined phenomena of marriage, migration, and church reform in Prussia, this article compares the journeys of two German clergymen who travelled to Prussia and led the Reformation there: Paul Speratus, a Swabian preacher, and Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order. Although they came from different social strata and their journeys to Prussia were distinct, the leitmotif of marriage animates their embrace of the Reformation and their paths to Prussia.

This article examines the neglected war crimes trials of Holocaust perpetrators that took place at the People's Tribunal in early postwar Romania, focusing especially on the first trial (the “Macici group”). The article shows that in spite of the political interferences by the new pro-communist regime and the USSR, the Macici group trial in particular, and the first war crimes trials in general, were not Stalinist show trials or fake trials and they sentenced real war criminals and accurately captured Romania's participation in the Holocaust. Unlike the Antonescu group trial – that indicted the former pro-Nazi dictator and his closest collaborators – the first war crimes trial was not a typical political trial. In general, it respected the rule of law of the era. Resembling the cases of other trials of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators in postwar Europe, the Romanian perpetrators invoked superior orders as their main line of defense. In spite of the public perception and the communist regime's propaganda, the primary sources show that the People's Tribunal proved rather lenient and inefficient. Additionally, these trials had an important political-social role in postwar Romania and helped the communist regime discredit political adversaries, purge the judiciary, gain legitimacy, and increase its control of local society.