This article examines the German Communist Party’s (KPD’s) propaganda campaign during the Reichstag election in the summer of 1932. It asks why a movement which openly rejected parliamentary democracy fervently contested elections and it analyzes the KPD’s strategy, campaign organization, and publicity. The article argues that the party’s culture created a distinctive electoral appeal. As a Stalinized, heavily bureaucratized party, the KPD ran a centralized campaign with tightly controlled ideological messaging. Yet its leadership was also able to compete with better-funded rivals by tapping the party’s ethos of revolutionary activism and showing hitherto unrecognized pragmatism in encouraging independence and initiative. Supercharged by an extra-parliamentary campaign that summer, the KPD waged an edgy, violent “battle of symbols” in the streets which united the party’s revolutionary aims with its supporters’ neighborhood activism. Revolutionary mass propaganda projected a uniquely Communist visual and audio appeal, embodying protest, poverty, and radicalism.

Over the twentieth century, the Vienna Philharmonic—Austria’s flagship musical institution—became a leading player in global musical life through intercontinental touring, the distribution of recordings, and the establishment of “Austrianness” as a global brand. By framing the mobility of musicians as “world practices,” this article investigates the driving forces behind an Austrian ensemble going global. It understands the Philharmonic’s relation to the music world as an entangled history of globalizing tour destinations, cultural diplomacy, non-European audiences, the agents and interests in the music market, and musical branding. The attitudes that become visible in relation to the musicians’ global mobility and their reluctance to admit non-European players bear witness to the disruptive dimensions of world practices. In conclusion, this article proposes the Philharmonic’s entanglements with Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and the Middle East as an entry point for writing a global history of twentieth-century Austrian culture.

The conventional historiography of eighteenth-century Prussia portrays peasants as completely dominated by their imperious Junker superiors. Since the 1980s, a revisionist tendency has challenged this asymmetrical picture of lord-peasant relations, downplaying the oppressiveness of the manorial system and arguing that peasants were equally capable competitors in the “tug-of-war” with their lords. This article evaluates the revisionists’ claims using the historical findings they, and others, have produced about the relationship of lords and peasants in rural Prussia. The evidence supports the contention that peasants were, to a significant extent, the victims of the Prussian manorial system.

The Publicity Department of the Austrian Fatherland Front served the Ständestaat regime (1933–38). An elaborate organization on paper, the Fatherland Front's actual work was bound up in the performance of para-fascism and the surveillance of opposing parties. Each of these modes of being mutually reinforced the need for the other and created a unique self-awareness of failure within the movement. As such, the Publicity Department offers a microcosm of the larger challenges of the Ständestaat, which faltered in the face of economic collapse, political violence, and a population largely indifferent to its attempt to secure Austrian sovereignty in the 1930s.

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.