In April 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky left Russia for central Europe, in part to celebrate his marriage to Anna Gregorovich Snitkina, the young stenographer who had helped him compose The Gambler the previous fall. While that book freed him from the clutches of the publisher Stellovsky, who had advanced him money in exchange for a lien on his future works, it did not remove the larger financial destitution that threatened the new family, and fear of the debtor's prison clouded Dostoevsky's subsequent four-year sojourn in Europe. Residing first in Berlin and Dresden, he began to entertain thoughts of escaping his financial difficulties through gambling. In May, he traveled briefly to Bad Homburg; later, both he and Anna proceeded to Baden-Baden. Contrary to his hopes, life imitated art, and Dostoevsky was soon as hopelessly beset by the gambling demons as his fictional anti-hero, Alexei, and with as little success. By the end of the summer, he had pawned many of his and Anna's belongings and systematically lost the gifts sent from Russia by friends to bail them out. Finally on August 23, he managed to tear himself away from the tables. Over the next four years, he would gamble sporadically, but never with the same fervor he brought to Baden-Baden that summer. After returning to Russia in 1871, he gave up gambling entirely.

One of the first things that Hans Castorp, the protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, learned upon his arrival at Berghof Sanitarium in Davos, was that there was a “good” Russian table and a “bad” Russian table. The bad Russians were characterized as barbarians, more or less uncivilized. Even the good Russians, while more polite, were considered to be an exotic and alien presence, quite different from anything that Castorp, the model of the German bourgeois class, had ever experienced. As Larry Wolff has noted, Russia was a place connected to the rest of Europe by postal routes, but which few Germans ever visited.

On May 26, 1906, as German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow rested on the North Sea coast recuperating from a recent physical collapse, his administration suffered a resounding triple defeat in the Reichstag at the hands of his hitherto indispensable Catholic political partners in the Center party. In the course of a single day, the Centrists rejected the military justification for a railroad in wartorn Southwest Africa, ruled out further government compensation for settler losses in the Herero and Nama Uprisings, and then blocked the elevation of the Colonial Department of the Foreign Office to the status of an independent imperial office. Moreover, the intense interest of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the passage of each of these colonial measures rendered the Center's decisive contribution to the rout acutely embarrassing for the chancellor. Faced seven months later with a similar Centrist refusal to authorize more than twenty of the latest twenty-nine million marks toward suppression of the Nama, Bülow would then dissolve the Reichstag, putting a definitive end to nearly a decade of government-Center parliamentary cooperation.

In the introduction to his 1915 book Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk, Otto Hintze ruefully quoted an Englishman's observation that, “Prussian history is endlessly boring because it speaks so much of war and so little of revolution.” As the “Great War” entered its second year, and with Germany's hopes for a quick and decisive victory fading, Hintze saw history repeating itself. Like Frederick the Great's Prussia, he wrote, “The German Reich, under a Hohenzollern Kaiser, [now] battles for its existence against a world of enemies.” Since the beginning of the war, Entente propaganda had mobilized the home front by depicting the war as an epochal struggle against the enemy of all civilized men: the savage “Hun,” the jack-booted, spike-helmeted despoiler of innocent Belgium. The crudity of this propaganda caricature aside, its power to persuade nevertheless drew on a widespread conviction that the story of war constituted the core of German history and that the disease of “militarism” was a peculiarly German deformation of the national psyche. In response to the censure of their nation's enemies, the German intellectuals rejected that diagnosis while defending the role war had played in their nation's history. Published in the Kölnische Zeitung on October 4, 1914, the hastily drafted manifesto “To the Civilized World!” was endorsed (if not read) by ninety-three of the Second Reich's most prominent scholars, scientists, philosophers, and theologians, including Peter Behrens, Lujo Brentano, Adolph von Harnack, Max Lenz, and Gustav von Schmoller. They vehemently repudiated the distortion of Germany's history: “Were it not for German militarism, German civilization would long since have been extirpated.” “The word militarism,” the liberal jurist Gerhard Anschütz defiantly declared in 1915, “which is being used throughout the world as a swear word against us, let it be for us a badge of honor.” As Hintze, Anschütz, and their contemporaries understood the course of German unification (and Germany's rise as a great power under Prussian leadership), the modern German nation-state owed its very existence to what Hintze called “the monarchical-military factor.” If we are to advance our understanding of how a nationalist discourse obsessed with foreign and domestic threats supported a foreign policy that ignited two world wars in the space of twenty-five years, we must be prepared, I believe, to re-think the “Sonderweg thesis,” not in its relation to the putative immaturity of German liberalism or an atavistic predilection for autocratic rule, but as it was rooted in German military culture. The books under discussion in this essay reframe the militarism/“Sonderweg” debate by examining the unique connection between modern German visions of the nation and the waging of war as revealed in the experience of the First World War. Representing the maturation of the new intellectual and cultural history of war, they pose two fundamental questions: What kind of war did the Second Reich's military, political, and intellectual leadership envision that would “complete” the German nation? And how did they define Germany's enemies?

One of Rosamond McKitterick's laudable contributions to medieval studies has been the attention she has focused on the importance of manuscript evidence as a fundamental and fruitful source for doing history. Another has been the imagination, creativity, and enthusiasm she has brought to that evidence, most famously in her provocative work on literacy. In this manifesto, McKitterick turns her interest to another topic that has received much attention in the last decade and a half, memory, and joined it to the larger issue of the writing and reading of history in Carolingian times. Here again we see McKitterick daring to get behind the critical editions by going to the manuscripts themselves and thus introducing us to the vibrancy of Carolingian historical culture too often cloaked by the published sources. It is her underlying contention that the particular Carolingian emphasis on chronology, as the means by which Christian, Frankish, Roman, and local histories were united and brought into a synthesis, contributed fundamentally to the development of a European identity.

Bruce Moran's new book forms part of Harvard University Press's series “New Histories of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” The series is aimed at a general readership rather than a specialized academic market, although its volumes can also serve as basic introductions to scholars in other specialties who need a quick entrée into their fields. In the present instance, however, the location of the precise problematic that the book addresses is historiographically rather complex for such a task.

“Christianity has emptied Walhalla, felled the sacred groves, extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition, as a devilish poison, and given us instead the imagery of a nation whose climate, laws, culture, and interests are strange to us and whose history has no connection whatever with our own” (p. 72). The young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel voiced this lament in 1796, while working as a private tutor in Berne.

In 1953, Karl W. Deutsch published one of the most powerful works in the history of the study of nations and nationalism. The book was entitled Nationalism and Social Communication, and it hypothesized that a nation was not the expression of the essence of a people, as nationalists had argued, but of networks of communication. These networks ran along the rails and with the postal service, and were the “steel sinews,” as Bismarck once maintained, of a community that shared and exchanged a common culture. The cultural turn in the study of nationalism, most prominently represented by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, did not so much refute Deutsch as shift the analytical terrain from an analysis of the infrastructure of commonality to an interpretation of the style in which nations were imagined. Many of Deutsch's insights remained the unspoken assumptions of the historiography of nations.

In recent years, a growing literature on nationalism has highlighted cultural and gender topics. At the same time, religion, most prominently Catholicism, has attracted the intellectual energy of more and more scholars. To date, however, the relationship between nationalism and religion has been undervalued. Helmut Walser Smith's study German Nationalism and Religious Conflict was one of the first to relate religious conflict to the character of German nationalism. Michael B. Gross now analyzes the relationship between German liberalism and religion.

The growth of research on religious topics from different conceptual perspectives in the past several years represents what one scholar has now called the “religious turn” in modern German historical study. With Catholicism, Popular Culture, and the Arts in Germany, Margaret Steig Dalton has made another important contribution to this historiography with a study of Catholic cultural criticism from the Wilhelmine period through the Weimar Republic. Her focus is on what she calls the “Catholic cultural movement,” and by cultural movement she means production in the arts broadly understood from literature to film and radio.

Ladislas Löb's superb translation of Otto Weininger's highly controversial but enormously influential book is a most welcome contribution to understanding Vienna circa 1900 for readers who, for whatever reason, must approach Weininger via an English edition. It replaces what Wittgenstein termed a “beastly” anonymous translation published by Heinemann in England and G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1906 in the United States; the latter was reissued in 1975 by AMS Press and again as recently as 2003 by Howard Fertig. Approaching Weininger from that translation, one has the sense of being confronted with the work of a madman, who spins thoughts off the top of his head in a way that can only be described as absurd, so absurd that their very implausibility and contrariness have a way of making it into a fascinosum. To be sure, there is enough in Weininger's original to encourage that impression. It also helps to explain his appeal to half-educated fanatics like Dietrich Eckhart. Such a seriously defective edition, expurgated, bereft of one hundred thirty-five pages of notes and references and notoriously inaccurate, made it even more difficult than it otherwise might have been to understand how Weininger attracted the attention of brilliant thinkers and writers like Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and even James Joyce (whose Ulysses, improbable as it seems, is deeply indebted to Weininger). In his Translator's Note, Löb provides numerous examples of absolutely grotesque mistranslations—in one place “es ist klar” is rendered as “it does not follow”—which more than corroborate the judgment Wittgenstein passed on the 1906 English edition. Löb neglects to mention, however, that English prudery seems to have dictated that all explicit references to orgasm be deleted. The expurgated version gives the impression of being a kind of misogynistic, anti-Semitic version of Peter Pan. Only a naïve, sensitive “boy genius” could have written such nonsense. In the end, camps formed on both sides about whether the author was a genius or a madman. Nobody, however, paid much attention to the argument—or the state of the text itself. This state of affairs has persisted until recently. Only in 1982 did it become known that there were two slightly different German editions of the work, and this only became widely known in the mid-1990s thanks to the assiduous research of Waltraud Hirsch (who is currently preparing an electronic critical edition of Weininger's complete works that should finally clear up the matter of the authoritative German text). Little wonder that there has been so much confusion surrounding Weininger.

The law of diminishing returns can arguably be applied to historical research as well as larger economic enterprises. What had previously been described in a few paragraphs and notes of such standard works as those by Paul O. Rave and Hildegard Brenner has now been brought to the light of day in a full monographic treatment of Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder and the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German Art Society). For those attracted by the majestic sweep of Joan Clinefelter's book title, however, a more accurate (if still overstated) description is found in the title of her 1995 Indiana University doctoral dissertation, “The German Art Society and the Battle for ‘Pure German’ Art, 1920–1945.”

Seeking a general theory of fascism is a bit like the attempt to gather all of modern physics into a single unified field theory. It is a necessary exercise that can stimulate reflection, even in failure. Michael Mann, a historical sociologist at UCLA, provides an intriguing survey and theory of European fascism. While he does not really break significant new ground, he does raise questions that will eventually advance the state of our knowledge.

Between the two world wars, Germany was on the move. The slowdown of the Great Depression notwithstanding, more and more Germans took vacations and enjoyed weekend adventures, and when they traveled, they did so to destinations farther and farther away from home. Along the way, they filled up trains, hotels, and youth hostels. And it was very much Germany that Germans wanted to explore, following as they did quite explicit itineraries of the idealized nation. “Seeing Germany,” as Kristin Semmens puts it, was a way of possessing and occupying Germany. This was quite deliberately the case for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who took special trains to Stahlhelm marches, Reichsbanner demonstrations, and, later in the 1930s, the Nuremberg party rallies, for which more than 700 special trains were pressed into service in 1938. “Seeing Germany” was also at the heart of the new tourist practices the Nazis created: the camp experiences of the Hitler Youth and the rural outposts of the Reich Labor Service. Patriotism required an overnight stay.

Dagmar Herzog opens her introduction to Sexuality and German Fascism with a simple question: “What is the relationship between sexual and other kinds of politics?” The essays printed here offer a thought-provoking and sometimes surprising set of approaches to that question. Like most recent research in the history of sexuality, they focus on “deviant” sexualities—homosexual, commercial, interracial, public—and its policing. They are, however, informed also by an awareness of the productive and positive, as well as the prohibitive and repressive functions of the societal regulation of sex.

During the Second World War, Germans fought a “two-front war.” A “community of fate” bound together Germans at home and Germans in uniform who carried the war beyond Germany's borders. “Between 1939 and 1945, there was no doubt that civilians were no longer excluded from the fighting; they found themselves right in the middle of it—as actors, as observers, and as those who bore the suffering” (part 1, p. 2) of the war. The Nazi leadership knew this from the start, and only days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, Hermann Göring was exhorting a factory workforce to remember: “We are now all fighters at the front!”(part 1, p. 8). Jörg Echternkamp reminds us of this in his introduction to this massive two-part volume, the latest installment in the history of Germany in the Second World War that has occupied historians of the Military History Research Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, or MGFA) for the last twenty-five years. Echternkamp is the editor, and he deserves enormous credit for pulling together a collection of twenty essays—some of which could easily stand on their own as monographs, all of which are grounded in staggering amounts of original research—that not only summarize what we know about the impact of the war on the homefront in Germany, but also add considerably to that knowledge. Previous volumes in the MGFA series (seven of which are available from Oxford University Press in English translation) have focused primarily on the military planning, the war at the front, and the organization of the war economy at home. In the more than 2,000 pages of this two-part volume, contributors turn their attention to the impact of the war on German society. The results are extremely impressive, and what Echternkamp has brought together will be the starting point for anyone who wants to understand the war at home in Germany.

To date, debates about the identity and motives of perpetrators of German extermination policies have focused on the Einsatzgruppen (mobile squads of the Security Police and the Security Service), concentration camp personnel, and the Order Police. Martin Cüppers now presents the first systematic study of one of the best documented, yet least publicized set of units that participated in the murder of European Jews. He explores three Waffen-SS brigades and some smaller units under the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS. In some respects, the book's title is misleading. It does not cover the military wing of the SS as a whole and, if anything, it demonstrates that the Kommandostab was of minor importance since it was never really in command of anything. Serving as a transmitter of information and as an organizational tool, it further declined in importance after early 1942. In addition, just as with other perpetrator units, the Waffen-SS brigades did not murder only Jews; the book does deal with the brigades' other victims though the book title does not suggest it.

This concise study of the German army's anti-partisan campaigns on the Eastern Front in World War II provides added detail and nuance to historical understanding of the “war of devastation” launched by the Nazi leadership. While titanic armies clashed on the battlefields, German campaigns in the occupied territories behind the front also took a devastating toll, with “the destruction of more than 5,000 villages and the killing of up to 300,000 mainly civilian Soviet citizens” (p. 27). This brutal treatment was meted out not only by the indoctrinated killers of the SS units, but also by units of the German army (contrary to the idealized depictions of a “fundamentally decent” regular army circulated after 1945). Shepherd aims to reveal the mix of “personal influences and particular conditions” (p. 33) and their interplay in causing the brutalization of the German army, the Wehrmacht. Shepherd states, “the Wehrmacht was the single institution that, more than any other, shaped the lives and actions of ordinary Germans between 1933 and 1945” (p. 28), with eleven million men serving in its ranks in this period.

Weinberg pursues a simple question: What “visions” of the postwar world did the principal leaders of the major belligerent powers develop during the war? Weinberg's unsurpassed mastery of World War II as a global war allows him to pen eight compelling portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Chiang, Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Roosevelt and their ideas for the future positions of their country. Each essay constitutes a minor masterpiece of concision and erudition in and of itself. My only quibble is that Weinberg exclusively concentrates on the top leadership and ignores the lower working levels of postwar planning—there may have been less “vision” there but most of the “grunt” work was done by those planners. Much information in these portraits is known to specialists, but there are some surprising insights, too.

In his examination of the Nuremberg Medical Trial conducted by the American Military Tribunal in 1946, Horst H. Freyhofer has not, in fact, written a book about an important war crimes trial; this is rather a book that ponders whether we can “comprehend” the crimes of Nazi doctors engaged in some of the most heinous medical experiments in history. This is a short volume that tries to cover too much: the Hippocratic oath; the history of human experimentation by doctors; the ethical implications of medical crimes from the beginning of “Western Civilization” to the present; and a theoretical analysis of medical ethics from Goldhagen, to Socrates, to Darwin, to Nietzsche, to Hegel. Freyhofer fails to provide a contextual examination of the medical trial or of Nazi trials in general. The book would have benefited greatly from an examination of the important literature on war crimes trials (Gary Bass, Belinda Cooper, Ian Buruma, Lawrence Douglas, Jörg Friedrich, Michael Marrus, and Mark Osiel, to name but a few). These scholars address key questions about the trope of the trial as a forum for the teaching of history lessons, as a political event, and for its success and failure in seeking justice in cases of mass atrocity. Freyhofer does not explore any of these avenues. Instead, the author's main thesis is that the trial “symbolizes a break, not so much with the image physicians have of themselves, but with the image patients have of themselves” (p. 11). Freyhofer argues that the trial made patients conscious—for the first time—that doctors did not always have their best interests at heart. While this is an interesting observation, it does not suffice to keep the reader engaged in the history of the trial.