The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History 9780199237395, 0199237395

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the oxford handbook of

MODERN GERMAN HISTORY

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the oxford handbook of

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MODERN GERMAN HISTORY ...............................................................................................................................................................................

Edited by

HELMUT WALSER SMITH

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York The Editorial Matter and Arrangement # Helmut Walser Smith 2011 The Chapters # the various contributors 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–923739–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................

The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History is four years in the making, and we have accumulated many debts along the way. We would first like to thank Christopher Wheeler, who commissioned the project and helped see it to the end, and Matthew Cotton, for his sound editorial advice. We would also like to thank Emma Barber, who carefully steered the project through production, Sue Finlay, the copyeditor, and Nicola Sangster, who proofread the final manuscript with a watchful eye. As the editor, I am especially grateful to the authors, leading experts in their fields, who have taken time away from their own work to offer an interpretive reading of their research area. The chapters, as readers will see, are neither historiographical overviews nor simple textbook glosses; instead, they represent what in Germany is sometimes called mid-level synthesis: genuine attempts to make sense of the German past, and to suggest starting points for further thinking. A Handbook, we all agreed, should open, not close, a field. I would also like to thank Christine Brocks, who translated a series of chapters (5, 11, 13, 19, and part of 26), compiled the index, and helped with proof reading. At Vanderbilt, Ann Oslin, the administrative assistant at the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, also scrutinized a number of chapters, as did my graduate students, Jeremy DeWaal, Robbie Gibson, Heather Jones, and Sonja Ostrow. Andreas W. Daum (Buffalo), Margaret Lavinia Anderson (Berkeley), James Retallack (Toronto), and Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield) read my own chapters, and offered invaluable criticism. Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to the German Studies Association for allowing us to present our ideas in a series of panels in Washington D.C., to the German Historical Institute in London for critical discussion of the Handbook’s conception, and to the “Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands,” as it is now called, for hosting a panel at its annual meeting in Berlin to consider some of the Handbook’s conclusions.

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Contents ................................................

List of Maps, Tables, and Illustrations List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

1. Introduction

xi xiii xv

1

Helmut Walser Smith

PART I: HISTORY 2. Origins of Modern Germany

29

Robert von Friedeburg

3. Senses of Place

49

Celia Applegate

4. Women and Men: 1760–1960

71

Ann Goldberg

P A R T I I : STATES, PEOPLE, AND NATION, 1760–1860 5. International Conflict, War, and the Making of Modern Germany, 1740–1815

91

Ute Planert

6. Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment

119

Franz Leander Fillafer and Ju¨rgen Osterhammel

7. The Atlantic Revolutions in the German Lands, 1776–1849

144

Jonathan Sperber

8. The End of the Economic Old Order: The Great Transition, 1750–1860 James M. Brophy

169

viii

CONTENTS

9. Escaping Malthus: Population Explosion and Human Movement, 1760–1884

195

Ernest Benz

10. Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, 1760–1871: Enlightenment, Emancipation, New Forms of Piety

211

George S. Williamson

11. The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850

234

Christian Jansen

12. German Literature and Thought from 1810 to 1890

260

Ritchie Robertson

PART III: GERMANY: THE NATION STATE 13. Nation State, Conflict Resolution, and Culture War, 1850–1878

281

Siegfried Weichlein

14. Authoritarian State, Dynamic Society, Failed Imperialist Power, 1878–1914

307

Helmut Walser Smith

15. The Great Transformation: German Economy and Society, 1850–1914

336

Cornelius Torp

16. Race and World Politics: Germany in the Age of Imperialism, 1878–1914

359

Andrew Zimmerman

17. Germany 1914–1918. Total War as a Catalyst of Change

378

Benjamin Ziemann

18. The German National Economy in an Era of Crisis and War, 1917–1945

400

Adam Tooze

19. Dictatorship and Democracy, 1918–1939

423

Thomas Mergel

20. Piety, Power, and Powerlessness: Religion and Religious Groups in Germany, 1870–1945 Rebekka Habermas

453

CONTENTS

21. The Place of German Modernism

ix

481

Stephen D. Dowden and Meike G. Werner

22. Nationalism in the Era of the Nation State, 1870–1945

499

Pieter M. Judson

23. Todesraum: War, Peace, and the Experience of Mass Death, 1914–1945

527

Thomas Ku¨hne

24. The Three Horseman of the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism, East European Empire, Aryan Folk Community

548

William W. Hagen

25. On the Move: Mobility, Migration, and Nation, 1880–1948

573

Sebastian Conrad and Philipp Ther

PART IV: GERMANY 1945–1989 26. Germany is No More: Defeat, Occupation, and the Postwar Order

593

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

27. Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: The Two Germanies, 1949–1961

615

Andrew I. Port

28. Generations: The ‘Revolutions’ of the 1960s

640

Uta G. Poiger

29. Industrialization, Mass Consumption, Post-industrial Society

663

Donna Harsch

30. Religion and the Search for Meaning, 1945–1990

689

Benjamin Ziemann

31. Culture in the Shadow of Trauma?

711

Lutz Koepnick

32. The Two German States in the International World

730

Andreas W. Daum

PART V: CONTEMPORARY GERMANY 33. Annus Mirabilis: 1989 and German Unification David F. Patton

753

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CONTENTS

34. Germany and European Integration since 1945

775

Kiran Klaus Patel

35. Toward a Multicultural Society?

795

William A. Barbieri, Jr.

Index

815

List of Maps, Tables, and Illustrations ............................................................................................................................................................

List of Maps Map 1 Central Europe on the Eve of the French Revolution

90

Map 2 Creation of the German Empire

280

Map 3 Germany after World War II

592

Map 4 Contemporary Germany

752

List of Tables Table 8.1 Non-guild masters in Berlin, 1826–1845 (%)

179

Table 8.2 City growth in Germany and Europe, 1800–1870 (in 000s)

181

Table 8.3 Railroad development in Germany, 1839–1865 (km)

185

Table 8.4 Output of coal (000s metric tons)

186

Table 9.1 Population within Germany’s 1871 borders

199

Table 9.2 Emigrants from Germany, 1816–1914

205

Table 14.1 A sample of the leading associations (with at least 20,000 individual members), with dates of foundation, and peak memberships

318

Table 15.1 German net domestic product in billion marks (prices of 1913), 1850–1913

338

Table 15.2 Effective investment rates in Germany, 1850–1913 (five-year averages, current prices)

340

Table 15.3 Distribution of the workforce among the three major sectors of the German economy, 1825–1907 (in percent)

340

Table 15.4 Shares of world export, 1874–1913 (in percent)

341

Table 15.5 German export ratio and import ratio, 1874–1913 (in percent)

342

Table 18.1 Weimar’s volatile balance of payments

407

xii

LIST OF MAPS, TABLES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Table 18.2 Outproduced: Axis and Allies armaments production 1942–1944

417

Table 29.1 Households equipped with consumer goods, 1962–2000 (in percent)

680

List of Figures Figure 18.1 European economic convergence, 1870–2005

401

Figure 29.1 Employment by production sector (1950–2000)

669

Figure 30.1 Church leavers in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1995 (in percent)

691

Figure 30.2 Catholic Sunday service attendance in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1995 (in percent)

694

List of Contributors ................................................................................................

Celia Applegate is Professor of History at the University of Rochester. William A. Barbieri, Jr. is Associate Professor of Ethics and Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the Catholic University of America. Ernest Benz is Associate Professor of History at Smith College. James M. Brophy is Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Sebastian Conrad is Professor of History at the Free University of Berlin. Andreas W. Daum is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Stephen D. Dowden is Professor of Literature at Brandeis University. Franz Leander Fillafer is Research Associate at the University of Konstanz, Centre of Excellence focused on ‘Cultural Foundations of Integration’. Robert von Friedeburg is Chair of Early Modern History and Director of the Erasmus Center, University of Rotterdam. Ann Goldberg is Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside. Rebekka Habermas is Professor of Modern History at the University of Göttingen. William W. Hagen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Donna Harsch is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, Freiburg, and Research Director at the Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam. Christian Jansen is Professor of History at the Technical University of Berlin. Pieter M. Judson is Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St Louis. Thomas Kühne is Strassler Family Professor in the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University. Thomas Mergel is Professor of Modern History at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

xiv

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jürgen Osterhammel is Professor of Modern History at the University of Konstanz. David F. Patton is Professor of Government at Connecticut College. Andrew I. Port is Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University. Uta G. Poiger is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. Kiran Klaus Patel is Joint Chair in History of the European Union and Transatlantic Studies at the European University Institute, Florence. Ute Planert is Professor of History at the University of Wuppertal. Ritchie Robertson is Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Queen’s College. Helmut Walser Smith is Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History and Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. Jonathan Sperber is Curator’s Professor of History at the University of Missouri. Philipp Ther is Professor of History, University of Vienna. Adam Tooze is Professor of History at Yale University. Cornelius Torp is Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence and Lecturer at the University of Halle. Siegfried Weichlein is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. Meike G. Werner is Associate Professor of German Literature at Vanderbilt University. George S. Williamson is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield. Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at the George Washington University.

List of Abbreviations ............................................................

AEG

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft

AG

Aktiengesellschaft (public corporation)

APO

Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition)

BDF

Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Associations)

BDKJ

Bund der Deutschen katholischen Jugend (League of German Catholic Youth)

BHE

Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (Federation of Expellees)

CCC

Civilian Conservation Corps

CDU

Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union)

COMECON

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

CSCE

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe

CSU

Christlich Soziale Union (Christian Social Union)

DAF

Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front)

DBD

Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands (Democratic Farmers Party of Germany)

DDP

Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party)

DKP

Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (German Communist Party)

DNVP

Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party)

DVP

Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party)

ECSC

European Coal and Steel Community

EDC

European Defence Community

EEC

European Economic Community

EFTA

European Free Trade Association

EKD

Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland

EMS

European Monetary System

FDJ

Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth)

xvi

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

FDP

Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party)

FRG

Federal Republic of Germany

GATT

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

GDP

Gross Domestic Product

GDR

German Democratic Republic

GM

General Motors

GNP

Gross National Product

KdF

Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy)

KPD

Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany)

LDPD

Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany)

LDP

Liberal-Demokratische Partei (Liberal Democratic Party)

MBFR

Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions

MfS

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security)

MLF

Multilateral Force

MSPD

Mehrheitssozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany)

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty organization

NCO

Non-commissioned officer

NDP

Net Domestic Product

NDPD

National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany)

NKWD

People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Soviet)

NS

National socialismus (National Socialism)

NSDAP

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party)

OEEC

Organization for European Economic Co-operation

RAD

Reichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labor Service)

RAF

Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction)

RNST

Reichsnährstand (Agricultural Agency)

SA

Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers)

SAG

Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaften (Soviet Corporation)

SALT

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty

SDS

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union)

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party)

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

xvii

SoPaDe

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Exile designation of the SPD)

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany)

SRA

Statistisches Reichsamt (Statistical Office)

USPD

Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany)

VDA

Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (Association for Germandom Abroad)

WWI

World War I

WWII

World War II

ZAG

Zentrale Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Association of Employers and Unions)

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CHAPTER

1

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INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... HELMUT WALSER SMITH

The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History departs in significant ways from previous histories of modern Germany. It is, for one, a national history put together by an international team of scholars, with historians from Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and other nations suggesting the diversity of scholarship and the global context of the modern discipline of history. We offer neither a German history in a national key nor the view of outsiders looking in. Rather, we take into account that German history is a substantial field of study in a range of countries that have been affected by Germany’s past. The Oxford Handbook also represents a novel attempt to place German history in a deeper international and transnational setting than has hitherto been the case. This is the second important departure, and is, in this sense, indebted to the proposition, as C. A. Bayly has recently emphasized, ‘that national histories and “area studies” need to take fuller account of changes occurring in the wider world.’1 Accordingly, the Oxford Handbook is not fixed on the Sonderweg debate—the question of whether Germany took a special and mistaken path to modernity, resulting in World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust. Rather, the contributors emphasize the embeddedness and the impact of German history in and on wider developments, and render these qualities as central organizing principles of modern German history. This approach does not preclude showing how German history differed from other national histories, but it allows us to see these differences in a more complex and international field. It also encourages students of German history to develop a catholic sense of ‘family resemblances’ to other histories, seeing, as Wittgenstein would have insisted, a wider range of likeness even while retaining a concept of difference. The third departure follows from these propositions and concerns the chronological markers of German history. As few countries have experienced political ruptures with such dramatic impact on everyday life, it has become accepted practice to demarcate historical change with the dates of regime changes. These typically include the end of the Holy Roman Empire of 1806, the Revolutions of 1848/9, the foundation of the

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Second German Empire in 1871, the foundation of the Weimar Republic in 1918, the Nazi take-over of power in 1933, the collapse of the Nazi Empire in 1945, the founding of East and West Germany in 1949, and the Revolution of 1989 and the Unification of Germany in 1990. There have also been a number of attempts to emphasize the history of the everyday, or to underscore the impact of war on German society. Historians have, for example, interpreted World War I as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ (George F. Kennan) of the twentieth century, and characterized the years between 1914 and 1945 as a modern Thirty Years War. This periodization separates the first half of the bellicose twentieth century from the comparatively peaceful ‘belle époque,’ and emphasizes the magnitude of the human tragedy—so many ‘quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,’ as Ezra Pound put it. Yet as the historian Charles S. Maier has argued, this periodization also renders twentieth-century barbarity as a moral narrative without a convincing analytical frame.2 The Handbook makes nation-state sovereignty into a decisive marker as well as a problem of modern German history. A concept of the German nation reaches at least to the early sixteenth century, when the Holy Roman Empire officially added the appellation ‘of the German Nation,’ and the first two-dimensional images of Germany as a cultural nation were reproduced on maps.3 If the German nation was an old category, German nationalism—the political doctrine positing the necessity of congruence between a German nation and a German state—was at best a late eighteenth century invention, which in the German lands had few adherents until the nineteenth century. In 1871, the German nation state was formed in a world of multinational and overseas empires, and the pull of empire, including dominion over peoples considered inferior, shaped the context in which Germany’s subsequent political history unfolded. The nation state—the ideology behind it, the forces creating it, holding it together, and tearing it apart—thus plays a prominent role in this Handbook. Yet the sovereign nation state was not a given frame, and most of German history happened outside of it: at the communal level, in the individual states, in regions, and in transnational networks. It is also true that in the 250-year history that this Handbook covers, the sovereign nation state as the principal form of government constituted an interlude, just as on a wider stage nation states were always only one possible way of organizing the political world. In Germany, that interlude covered nearly three-quarters of a century, from 1871 to 1945. After 1990, full national sovereignty returned, if embedded in European structures. The Oxford Handbook is divided into an introductory section and four chronological parts. The introductory section roots the Handbook in a chronologically deeper conception of German history. It also offers the reader overarching chapters on place and on people, with the former showing the changing representation of German homelands, and the latter focusing on gender as constitutive, but historically changing. The Handbook is thereafter divided by four chronological markers, which separate two long periods of time (1760–1860 and 1860–1945), and two shorter periods (1945–1989, and 1989 to the present). These markers point to central events in the economic and political history of modern Germany, and therefore remain familiar reference points:

INTRODUCTION

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the 1760s signaling the Seven Years War and a decisive turn in the history of AustroPrussian dualism; the 1860s marking the industrial revolution and the events leading towards national unification; 1945, the collapse of the Nazi Empire; and 1989, the East German Revolution. To see these markers only in this way is however to stay within a primarily internal history of modern Germany. Our intention is also to signal fundamental changes in the history of nation-state sovereignty, and to evoke a wider history of war and peace, economic change, and the making of modern polities. What follows in this introduction is not a synopsis of the Handbook’s contents, but an attempt to show why these transition periods suggest a possible frame for understanding modern German history.

1.1 C I R C A 1760

.................................................................................................................. The first section, 1760–1860, chronicles a period in German history when the history of the German nation and the history of the state in Germany represent separate histories— not histories without relation to one another, but histories that cannot be narrated as if they were one. Circa 1760, it was not evident that a German nation state would emerge or that Prussia would be the state that placed its indelible stamp upon it; in fact, in 1762 it was entirely plausible that Prussia would cease to exist. Prussia, as is well known, was saved not by its inner strength, but by the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Seven Years War. This fact reminds us that although German historians have tended to downplay the significance of international relations, these relations played a decisive role in the unfolding of German history. If Prussia was spared oblivion in 1762, it narrowly escaped this fate again in 1806. The next half-century witnessed the increasing centrality of a political and territorial dualism between the Hohenzollern and Habsburg dynasties. The rise of the idea of nation and the ideology of nationalism did not emanate from this dualism, but rather flourished in its shadow. For most of this period, nationalism, as John Breuilly has convincingly argued, was not an engine of national unification, but at best an ideology that made other solutions increasingly improbable.4 At the same time, the Seven Years War, which opens our Handbook, while not the first German civil war, was the first trans-continental war, fought on three continents, and involving the great issues of the day—colonial rule, slavery, the dissolution of religiously unified states, and the balance of power. It allows us to set German history, from the very start, in a wider global history, and to emphasize the transformative impact of inter-state violence on this history. It has been conventional to begin consideration of the second half of the eighteenth century by noting that there was no single Germany, but only ‘the electoral princes, 94 spiritual and lay princes, 103 counts, 40 prelates, 51 free towns, in all some 300 separate “territories.”’5 Fewer historians pause to mention that, in the second part of the eighteenth century, and especially in the eastern parts of the Empire, the majority of people nevertheless lived in the great territorial states.6 Take a contemporary

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mid-century map of the German Empire, say from the workshop of Jean Baptiste Homann in Nuremberg. If one folded it in half, creasing it at a line passing roughly through Augsburg, Erfurt, and Lübeck, then practically the whole of the east would be taken up by Prussia, Saxony, the Hereditary Crown lands of Austria, and Bavaria. To the left of the fold there would be Hanover and Württemberg. In the northern part, Western Pomerania north of the river Peene belonged to Sweden, while Holstein, including the city of Altona, belonged to the Kingdom of Denmark. In the southwest, an estimated 400,000 subjects lived in Anterior Austria, and thus under Habsburg control. Much of the map, in other words, would be covered by medium and even large-scale territorial states. In recent years, historians have rightly emphasized the importance and vitality of the Holy Roman Empire.7 The Empire, however, was not a state; contemporaries called it a ‘political system.’ In the second half of the eighteenth century, it was dominated by near-sovereign, largely, but not completely autonomous territories—countries almost—with a smaller part, containing fewer people, consisting of less powerful, and therefore less sovereign, territories and cities. The German nation, in other words, constituted a framework of language and culture within a fragile political system. It did not govern politics in the elementary sense, as Carl Schmitt put it, of defining friend-foe relationships, or of regulating the state of exception.8 In the late eighteenth century, the salient and defining friend-foe conflicts were internal: Prussia versus Austria, Austria versus Bavaria, and Prussia versus Saxony—to list a few prominent examples. These conflicts were also played out among shifting European and even global alliances. Circa 1760, these alliances had come to center on the clash of major seagoing Empires pursuing a vast human trade transported in ‘practically floating concentration camps.’9 This was, of course, the slave trade, now nearly at its apex. Between 1760 and 1860, six times as many Africans as Europeans traversed the Atlantic, creating, as the historian David Eltis has written, ‘a hemispheric “community” . . . for the first time in human history.’10 Germans were largely excluded from this hemispheric community, except as migrants themselves or as mercenary soldiers. Germany did not possess an Empire that ruled over distant lands, and Germans did not own slaves, or participate, except as critical observers, in the drawn-out, often violent, abolition of the trade and the institution of slavery. It is difficult to discern the precise meaning of these facts, but in the period 1760–1860 they arguably separated Germany from the ‘west’ in ways far deeper than the alleged lateness of Germany as a nation state.11 It is commonly accepted that the period subsequent to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 represented an epoch of territorial states. Yet it was not until the eighteenth century that these states came to be thought of as precisely delimited territorial spaces measured by area and not just as a vertical extension of a ruler’s patrimony. The position of the individual within territorial states changed as well. Not the chain of feudal obligations, but the laws, customs, and bureaucracy of the state increasingly circumscribed the everyday life of subjects. Based on binding rules, transparency, and a supposedly neutral bureaucracy, the modern state engendered an increasing depersonalization of rule. Frederick the Great’s charisma notwithstanding, this depersonalization

INTRODUCTION

5

encouraged identification with the state first, and the regent as an expression of state and territory. By the end of the eighteenth century, the ‘machine’ had become the principal metaphor for the state, and the relationship of state to individual had changed considerably.12 One should not over-estimate this development, still in its incipient stages. The estate (Stand) to which one belonged—whether noble, townsman, craftsman, or peasant—marked individual identity more decisively than public allegiance to a territorial state. Military organization reflected this fact. Circa 1760, the vast majority of soldiers remained either mercenaries or forced conscripts. Yet it is indicative that in the midst of the Seven Years War, the first political tract in the German lands encouraging citizensubjects to die for the fatherland appeared; its author, Thomas Abbt, admonished his countrymen to sacrifice themselves for their state, Prussia, and the admonishment followed English, French, and still more decisively classical models.13 The wider Germany, Abbt made clear, was not something to die for—but territorial states, fatherlands, were. Moreover, only men were slated for active sacrifice, a line of thinking that foreshadowed the gendered division of public and private, making, as Fichte would later write, the weapon into ‘the main symbol of citizens.’14 There are other reasons to start the Oxford Handbook of Modern German History around 1760, even if they tend to confirm the Heraclitian insight that ‘war is the father and king of all.’ The first is demographic. Although demographers disagree on precise numbers, it took Germany roughly a century after the Peace of Westphalia to claw its way back to the population levels it had achieved in 1600. By the mid-eighteenth century, the German population was, however, finally in the midst of a demographic up-swing that would see the population of the German lands double in the next hundred years.15 An agricultural, not an industrial, revolution drove this slow, fitful departure from a subsistence economy. Between 1760 and 1860, the agricultural constitution—the balance between large and small farms, free and unfree labor, and different methods of crop rotation—determined human possibilities as surely as industrial take-off shaped what was possible in the century thereafter. In 1860, the majority of the German population still worked in the agricultural sector, which had significantly diversified in the intervening period. Among the dynamic factors was rural industry—concentrated on the spinning and weaving of linen, cotton, and wool— and which historians have credited, perhaps too much, with causing the population explosion and bringing forth the transition from a rural to an industrial economy. The basic fact of life in 1760, and for most of the next hundred years, was nevertheless that the majority of Germans lived on the land, and accorded themselves to its rhythm, just as had been the case for hundreds of years previously, and would not change on a global scale until the second half of the twentieth century.16 Finally, Germany was, in fact, beginning to become more urban, with the number of cities with at least 10,000 inhabitants increasing from 39 in 1750 to 62 in 1800.17 In terms of the percentage of people living in such cities, Germany remained behind—certainly behind Great Britain, the Italian lands, and the Low Countries, but also still behind Spain and Portugal.18 Another reason to start circa 1760 is cultural. The Thirty Years War had devastated not only a population, but also a world of religious and humanistic learning, and one of

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the surest indexes of this devastation was the production of books. Remarkably, it would not be until 1765 that book production in the German lands reached the levels it had attained in 1600.19 The language in which books were written also changed. Just after the Thirty Years War, Latin-language books outstripped German by 2:1, but by 1740, according to the catalogs of the Leipzig book fair, Latin books made up just over a quarter of the total, and by 1800 they constituted a mere four percent of the book trade.20 The world of German learning had become a German-language world, and this allowed for the creation of a public sphere with a deeper reach. A rise in literacy corresponded to this crucial transformation from Latin to German. Historians used to place literacy in Germany far behind northern France, Holland, England, Sweden, and Scotland, seeing German literacy as crawling from roughly 10% in 1700 to 15% by 1770, and 25% by 1800.21 Recent research places literacy rates—based on the low threshold revealed by the ability of marriage partners to sign their names—well above 50% in 1780. This literacy was higher in cities and market towns than in the countryside; higher for men than for women, with the gap closing fast by the end of the century; and marginally higher in Protestant than in Catholic territories.22 Of the sociological indicators, class, more than gender or religion, influenced reading ability. In Koblenz, for example, the urban upper class registered literacy rates higher than 95% at a time when fewer than half of day laborers could sign their names.23 Still, even the numbers for the lower classes remained impressive, and suggest that the take off in literacy had already begun in the second half of the eighteenth century.24 Accompanying the shift from Latin to the vernacular and the rise in literacy was the standardization of German and the creation of a modern German literature embedded in the wider currents of European Enlightenment. The standardization of German involved a longer history, from the first attempt to ‘stabilize’ the language in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (when throughout Europe we find the first grammatical works, rhetorical manuals, orthographies, lexica, and dictionaries in vernacular languages) to successful ‘standardization’—which in Germany, unlike England or France, did not finally occur until the eighteenth century.25 ‘It was in the period between 1700 and 1775,’ the literary historian Eric A. Blackall has written, ‘that the German language developed into a literary language of infinite richness and subtlety.’26 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was at once actor and emblem of this transition, and his turn away from the French of the courts—famously in Letter Number Seventeen (1759) of Letters Concerning the Newest Literature—signaled the emergence of an independent literature whose bearings, like those of Lessing himself, were European and cosmopolitan, but whose authors aspired to create a genuine German and national literature. Not coincidentally, Lessing’s letter has the war as its context. Finally, it was in German, rather than Latin, that an intense, learned, and engaged debate about religion and its place in society took place. Beginning circa 1780, this debate continued for more than a century until Nietzsche mistakenly pronounced ‘God is dead . . . and we have killed him.’27 In fact, the century witnessed a resurgence, especially after 1815, of church-oriented and popular religious practice.28 In Germany, this resurgence was especially evident among Catholics, who in the decades after the

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mid-century constituted themselves into modern religious milieus. The century also saw an intensification and clarification of religious identity, the twining of that identity with politics, and the exacerbation of conflicts between religious groups. By 1860, religion was not dead, but rather at the center of social and political life.

1.2 C I R C A 1860

.................................................................................................................. The second caesura, 1860, marks the time when the history of the nation and the history of the state begin to come together, chronicling what might be called, starting in 1870/71, the 75-year experiment of the German nation state. In this period, stretching to 1945, German history was at the center of international events—World War I, World War II, and the Holocaust—that brought about mass death and population movements nearly unparalleled in human history.29 Bringing the experience of the nation and state together, in one chronological arc, places less stress on the undeniable importance of specific governments, regimes, and revolutions. Instead, it emphasizes continuity, and sets this continuity not in the context of social structure or the history of everyday life, but in terms of the history of the nationalizing state, inter-state violence, and global war. On the other hand, it makes little sense to write German history as if only the gun of the soldier-as-executioner mattered, for this was also a period, at least until 1933, of German ascendancy in education, arts, and science, and in modernist experimentation. These developments also had a wider impact, not the least through the emigration of German intellectuals, many of them Jewish. The German experience of the nation state was eminently international in its timing and its consequences. In the 1850s and 1860s, nation and state first came together, not just in Germany, but also in the two halves of the Habsburg Empire, as well as in Italy, Meiji Japan, and, in significant ways, the United States of America. This coincidence reveals that until the mid-century, confederations of loosely organized polities, with relatively weak central governments, remained nearly ubiquitous, and the national state, with a centralizing government, hardly foreordained.30 Italy, for example, tried a series of confederate solutions before its partial unification in 1861 as a nation state. Even thereafter, ‘legal Italy’ masked a society whose attachment to the unified nation was tenuous, whose command of Italian, a written language in a significantly illiterate society, was hardly impressive; and where the new federal government, as Gramsci famously put it, lacked hegemony.31 It was also remarkable for Japan, where the decentralized rule of the Shogunate had seemed viable for hundreds of years, and to which the shock of exogenous pressure helped put an end. In the United States, it was not until the post civil-war federal government occupied the Confederacy and subdued the western territories that the powers of the central government, and with it a standardization of national institutions, dramatically increased. By contrast, nation state consolidation occurred far earlier in the two great warring states of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: England and France.

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There was then nothing natural about national unification. The state, as John Breuilly has argued, gave form to the nation, not the reverse.32 In fact, Germany, unlike the United States, which fought a civil war for the sake of union, achieved unity only by massively slicing through, and in fact dividing, what many contemporaries thought belonged together. A glance at August Petermann’s Handatlas of Central Europe, which unlike Homann’s atlas of a century earlier could reproduce color mechanically, underscores the dimensions of the rupture, as roughly one-quarter of the area of the German Confederation of 1815 was now excised out of Germany, along with Vienna, which in 1870 was still the largest German-speaking city.33 The composition of religious affiliation also changed as a result of the unification and division of Germany: from a marginal majority of Catholics in the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation to the two-thirds majority that Protestants held in Imperial Germany. The shift had crucial consequences for the identity of the new German nation state. It fueled Prussian—and largely Protestant—foundation myths that saw the German Empire of 1871 as the apotheosis of a German history centered on Martin Luther, Gustav Adolph, Frederick the Great, and the Prussian ‘Wars of Liberation.’ In this context, middle class Protestants articulated a theologically-framed, religiously-inspired nationalism, which exacerbated religious conflict with Catholics and in some cases denied Jews, granted full citizenship in the imperial constitution, the status of fully-authentic Germans.34 Finally, the ethnic composition of the German Empire of 1871 differed from the German Confederation of 1815. Here, historians have become more cautious, understanding the degree to which hardened ethnic categories are themselves the products of the late nineteenth-century politicization of ethnicity. It was, nevertheless, of considerable importance that many more Polish speakers, who had belonged to Prussia, but were outside the Confederation, were now citizens of the German Empire by virtue of being subjects of Prussia. The German Empire also included Danish and French speakers, making the population of its linguistic minorities close to 7% of the total population. This made Imperial Germany far less multi-ethnic than the AustroHungarian Monarchy or the Russian Empire, but more ethnically diverse, at least according to official categories, than France or Italy. In fact, it made it in some ways structurally similar to Spain, and to the Federal Republic of Germany of the 1990s. At the time of German unification, nation states existed in an international arena still dominated by empires as the main form of political organization. In mid-century, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and Imperial China defined themselves principally as Empires.35 Not until the ‘imperial implosion’ following World War I would the era of nation states predominate, and not until after World War II would national states become the principal political form organizing humanity on a global scale.36 Precisely for this reason, Germany, a new national state in a world of empires—an experiment, in fact—tells us something about the beginning of a process that left an indelible mark on the twentieth century. Germany was not a late nation, but a ‘nationalizing state,’ to use Roger Brubaker’s term, whose novel homogenizing policies ‘from above’ provoked resistance ‘from below,’ and this resistance constituted one of the formative moments of post-unification

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German politics.37 In Germany, these policies remind us again that, although integrative in intent, nationalism was also a divisive force. Once political nationhood had been achieved, the divisiveness of nationalism came more strongly to the fore: dividing Protestants from Catholics (and both from Jews), liberals amongst themselves, and the majority of Germans from the Socialists, stigmatized as essentially anti-national. In all of this Germany was hardly alone. The Kulturkampf, for example, represented one aspect of a wider, pan-European clash between secularizing liberals who hoped to harness the transformative potential of the modern state, and Catholics, who, resisting the intrusion of modern states into networks at once more local and universal, had since the 1840s experienced a remarkable religious revival. Similar conflicts, each with lasting effects on national political cultures, played out in Italy, Spain (where it was considerably more violent), Belgium, the Netherlands (where it divided society into strict socialcultural milieus), and France.38 Likewise, the problem of regional autonomy, and minority ethnic status within nation states, was hardly confined to Germany. In the United States, the problem was posed more sharply still, especially in the post-bellum South and in the new states and territories of the West, but also with respect to the recently emancipated black population. The problem of the nationalizing state was also posed sharply in the United Kingdom, where starting in the 1870s Irish home rule became a continual source of political turbulence; and in Italy, where unification exacerbated and politicized considerable disparities between north and south, city and country, and within regions. In Germany the ‘nationalizing state’ was not a single, coherent entity, but rather represented the convergence of nation and state into an interdependent conception of sovereignty. In the Constitution of 1871, it was defined as an ‘everlasting alliance’ of states, ‘which carries the name German Reich.’39 In the German Confederation of 1815, sovereignty lay, with few if important limitations, with the states. In 1871, the individual states still carried out an enormous portion of the national work—such as raising taxes, creating infrastructure, and schooling. It was, however, the actual constitution of the Reich, not of the individual states, that delineated competencies and set the terms for the separation of power. In this sense, as the contemporary jurist Georg Jellinek argued, ultimate sovereignty lay, in fact, with the Empire.40 Within this constellation, enormous power devolved, however, to Prussia, the largest of the states, with its king, William I, now also German Emperor, and its Minister-President, Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of the Empire and responsible only to the monarch. In practice, Bismarck retained significant power, with members of the imperial cabinet, the state secretaries (lower in social rank than the corresponding Prussian ministers) answering directly to him, and William I allegedly complaining that ‘it was not easy to be Emperor under such a Chancellor.’41 Bismarck also controlled foreign policy, perhaps more than any one man in Europe, and therefore exercized an important influence over the definition of the external enemy. His authority faltered, however, before the Prussian Army. In the crucial matter of who has the monopoly of violence, the King of Prussia, and his military cabinet, retained Kommandogewalt, and the Prussian Minister of War answered to the king, not to Bismarck. This was decisive

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not only for the deployment of force in inter-state conflict, but also because changes in military organization, tactics, and weaponry made the army more efficacious when it came to suppressing armed rebellion than ever before. In two crucial areas—fighting external foes and retaining the monopoly of violence during a state of exception—the German Army, dominated by the Prussian Army but also including the armies of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony, remained effectively insulated from democratic pressure and constitutional control. The Reichstag could ask for an accounting of military policy; it could also limit the size and budget of the army when that budget was set for renewal. There its influence over the army ended, however. Yet the Empire, based on the model of the North German Confederation that preceded it, also created a democratic institution, the Reichstag, whose deputies were elected by universal suffrage for men above 25 years of age. If the gender of suffrage seemed self-evident to contemporaries, habituated to structures of male superiority, it also reflected a deepening of the middle class separation of spheres, public and private, and stark divisions of labor in the new industrial factories.42 In this way, the mid-century timing of the suffrage replicated and hardened the gendered coding of citizenship, whose discursive co-ordinates had been set a century earlier in discussions of patriotism, war, and male sacrifice. The suffrage transformed imperial Germany, as Margaret Lavinia Anderson has put it, ‘into a nationalized, participatory, public culture, one in which partisan loyalties organized expectations and structured much of public life.’43 Not democracy, but democratic practices followed. If conventional histories have emphasized Germany’s democratic deficiencies, a comparison with contemporary states reveals significant shortcomings elsewhere as well. Such a comparison would show a United States, which in 1870 had just ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting individual states from denying citizens the right to vote based on ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude,’ but which left open the possibility of denying these rights through poll taxes and literacy tests; US elections were also marred by fraud and by staggering outbreaks of voterintimidating violence. The comparison would further reveal a Great Britain that, even after the Reform Act of 1867, enfranchised only male householders, and thus registered as voters less than half the adult male population. It would also show a France of the Second Republic that oscillated under Napoleon III between Caesarist autocracy and the begrudged rudiments of parliamentary control, and a Third Republic, proclaimed in 1870, that featured a representative assembly based on universal manhood suffrage, but that was marred at its inception by the brutal repression of the Paris Commune. The list of democratic shortcomings does not end there. A contemporary comparison would also show a Belgium that did not embrace democratic male suffrage until 1893 and a Netherlands that did not until 1896 (and then only for about half the adult men); an Austro-Hungarian Empire that did not take this step until 1907 (and then only on the Austrian side); an Italy that desisted until 1912; and a Russian Empire that took the step in 1905, but with an elected Duma of drastically limited power.44 Against these comparative facts of politics and suffrage, it must be noted that Germans fought for

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near universal manhood suffrage in the Revolution of 1848–1849, but not thereafter. Instead, Bismarck unceremoniously presented it to the North German Confederation in 1867, as an unasked for gift. Moreover, Germany remained remarkable for the many limits the Constitution placed on the power that representative institutions exercised over the monarchy. Germans practiced democracy, but with limited democratic power, and the gap, while narrowing in the years before World War I, remained wide. Within this system, historians have rightly emphasized the transformation of political culture in Imperial Germany, especially after Bismarck’s departure. But precisely because this political culture flourished without ministerial responsibility, it turned political parties into lobbying groups for sectional interests and encouraged rhetorical excess or, as David Blackbourn has put it, ‘an irresponsible politics of posture.’45 In Germany the formation of the nation state came together with industrial take-off. This confluence, which historians have called the ‘double revolution’, had profound consequences for subsequent developments, even if the zones of take-off remained regionally specific and often crossed political boundaries, as was true of the industrial region stretching between the Ruhr and Pas-de-Calais.46 In Germany, the foundation of the nation state coincided with the breakthrough of a form of capitalism that was both industrial and global. Economic growth, represented by net domestic product, increased nearly four times as fast in the second half of the century as in the first. In roughly the same period, German exports, measured as the share of world exports, grew more impressively than in any other country, including the United States and Great Britain. This meant, first, that the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 coincided with the beginning of an economic take-off that in the long term brought about a modern mass consumer society in which the department store, more than the army barrack, left its imprint on everyday life.47 Yet despite a long-term trajectory of increasing per capita wealth, the German experience was equally marked by calamitous economic ruptures, periodically trapping Germans in hunger and want. In material terms, these ruptures temporarily set Germans back decades, and even, as occurred at the end of World War II, a half century.48 In the long era of the German nation state, the impact of politics and war on material life can hardly be underestimated. Between 1871 and 1945, the history of the nation state in Germany oscillated between economic progress, especially in the first half of this chronological arc, and dramatic regress. This was not the fate of Germany alone. Yet in economic terms, the deleterious impact of war proved more profound in Germany in this period than in either Great Britain or the United States, which in the same time period experienced fewer, although still significant economic ruptures. The impact of war on social and economic life conformed more closely to the experiences of France and Italy. It was not, however, as severe as in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In the 54 years after 1860, the remarkable growth of the German economy had a number of political repercussions. One involved the take-off in urbanization—so that in the half-century after the foundation of the German Empire, Germany went from being a country where nearly two-thirds of the population lived in the countryside to one in which almost two-thirds lived in urban communities of 2000 people or more,

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with the largest growth in the great cities, like Berlin, which more than doubled in population, Hamburg and Munich, which trebled, and Leipzig and Düsseldorf, which increased roughly four-fold in size.49 If Germany did not yet match the urban density of England, where urban dwellers approached eighty percent of the population, it nevertheless now, unlike a hundred years earlier, was counted among the genuine urban civilizations of Europe, with a higher urban density (of cities with 20,000 inhabitants) than Italy, France, and Belgium.50 Berlin was, in one estimate, the third largest city in the world, and Hamburg the fourteenth, with European cities still comprising half of the world’s twenty largest cities—a fact that in the late twentieth century no longer pertained. A second repercussion involves the fundamental fact that in Germany, as well as the rest of industrializing Europe, the second half of the long nineteenth century up until World War I was an era wholly without political revolution—excepting the Paris Commune of 1870 and the devastating events in Russia in 1905, both products of defeat in war. Although historians usually start from a different assumption, the growth of one of Germany’s most potent forces for democratic change, the Social Democratic Party, and in fact, the existence of the Second International, cannot easily be understood without this nearly Europe-wide non-revolutionary, non-bellicose, context. The third repercussion is that, in the long term, most Germans, including those organized in the Social Democratic Party, experienced the new national state as a framework for continual improvement in the material quality of life. The social insurance bills of the 1880s, early, primitive welfare measures, cemented this image, and suggested the novel role of the new state as a provider of public goods. The deep connection between the first German sovereign nation state and the experience of material improvement and peace shaped the affective ties of Germans to the Kaiserreich, cementing their loyalties and constraining radicalism. The contrast with Weimar, teaming on either side of the political spectrum with demands to overturn the fundamental political order, is instructive. It is true that, in Imperial Germany, the Social Democrats—albeit an increasingly small number of them—hoped for fundamental revision of the political and economic system. In practice, the SPD, in its Erfurt Program of 1891, pursued increasingly reformist politics. Reinforced by one of the most densely unionized workforces in the world, the SPD pushed for small changes to a system that its members increasingly accepted as legitimate.51 No other groups, excepting a small number of separatist representatives of ethnic minorities, placed the fundamental political order in question so that, however divided German society was in cultural and political terms, there remained a significant consensus about sovereignty, political comportment, and ultimate loyalties: which in matters of international politics and war were unequivocally to the German Empire. In its 1871 borders, the German Empire continued to exercise a profound emotional pull. During the Weimar Republic, so-called revisionists hoped to restore Germany to its pre-war Imperial borders (minus Alsace-Lorraine). These revisionist claims, it may be recalled, enjoyed wide consensus, reaching into the Catholic Center and the Social Democratic Party. The National Socialists, who combined ethnic and imperial ambitions, represented an exception. They wanted much more than a return to the nation state of 1871.

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1.3 1945

.................................................................................................................. The era of national states came to a preliminary end in 1945. It did not come to a complete end because, even after ‘hour zero’, Germans continued to think primarily in terms of the nation state. They also proved slow to shed the nationalist categories they had acquired in the previous century, maintaining many of the affinities, antipathies, and ideologies, including anti-Semitism, that had led to Nazism and World War II. Even after 1945, most Germans remained loath to confront the full measure of the catastrophe that they and their country had brought upon Europe and the world. Especially destructive in the last years of the war, this catastrophe culminated in an apocalyptic crescendo of violence and murder. Not resistance, but the military victory of the allies— and in particular the Soviet Union—brought it to an end. It is for this reason that 1945 must be seen as a break with the past. Moreover, the collapse in 1945 set the stage for the revolution in mentalities that occurred, however incompletely, in the 1960s. First, the demographic trauma, now accumulated over two wars. The First World War ended with 2.5 million lives lost in Germany, and a further depletion of an estimated 4.5 million through a decline in the birth rate coupled with high rates of mortality. More devastating still, the Second World War cost (in a conservative estimation) roughly seven million German lives, or about 10% of the German population, with the German dead spread out among the soldiers (3.7 million), civilians (2 million), and expellees from the former eastern territories (1.2 million). Demographers estimate that a further population deficit, resulting from a decline in births and a general increase in mortality, accounted for another seven million.52 These figures, especially when both wars are taken together, constitute a historical calamity by any measure. In the Second World War, the great death toll was in Eastern Europe, where the invasion of German armies and killing squads resulted in a theater of terror that ended with well over fifty million lives lost, with Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia losing between ten and twenty percent of their populations. The comparison with pre-war populations gives a sense of the dimension of the catastrophe, and its concentration in the east: in one estimate, Poland lost one in five, Yugoslavia one in eight, the Soviet Union one in eleven, Greece one in fourteen, Germany one in fifteen, France one in seventy-seven, and Britain one in 125.53 The National Socialists pursued policies of annihilation that were without precedent on the continent, even if there were harbingers, as Hannah Arendt understood, in the colonial wars.54 The German Army killed an estimated 3.3 of 5.7 million Soviet POWs in its custody, most in the first year of the war against the Soviet Union. The Nazis also targeted Roma and Sinti for extermination, and killed nearly a quarter of the population. They murdered a further 190,000 handicapped people in the course of their Euthanasia campaigns. Yet their greatest effort was focused on the eradication of the Jews, killing nearly six million, roughly half with industrial efficiency in extermination camps, the rest by brutal shootings, or by allowing them to starve or die of disease in

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the ghettos and concentration camps. The genocide—one should perhaps write in the plural—remains at the center of any attempt to understand modern German history, and the history of Europe in the twentieth century.55 It may also lie at the center of one of the abiding questions of contemporary history: why, when all was lost, did German troops resist so tenaciously? Although it remains a matter of debate, good evidence suggests that knowledge of the crimes contributed to the cohesion of the Army in the last months of the war, when the death toll on the German side was simply immense.56 In January alone, more than 450,000 soldiers fell—more soldiers than either Great Britain or the United States lost in the whole war, and nearly a million more German soldiers died in the next few months of war, until the European war finally ended on 8 May 1945.57 The racial war also had radical consequences for the complexion of nations and cities. The brutality of the Nazi-prose