In the history of the Burschenschaft published in 1939, Georg Heer wrote that with the coming of the National Socialists to power “the goals of the German Burschenschaft had been achieved; the National Socialist German Student Union had now taken over its tasks.” Of course Heer was not free to write what he wished about the 1935 dissolution of the Burschenschaft, but his interpretation is consistent with the ideas of many historians about this important organization within the history of German nationalism. Something had gone terribly wrong with this organization, despite its clear liberal and middle-class origins.

During the nineteenth century, Jews in the German lands received, in exchange for their religious, cultural, and political transformation, civic liberties. Viewing the national as the realm of cultural interaction, production, and contestation has underlined the tortuous and conflicted process of German Jews' integration. Yet, at the dawn of modernity, Jewish communities in Germany grew out of temporal and spatial networks that the emerging nation-state absorbed only in a very limited fashion. As Stuart Hall has observed, for diasporic communities, memories about the past homeland and the interaction between overlapping communities continued to have a decisive impact upon their formation and maintenance. Indeed, the still largely unexplored German Jewish traveling culture acquired a new importance during the first decades of the twentieth century and formed a cultural practice that involved transcending cultural, political, and national boundaries.

Romania entered World War I at a difficult moment for the Central Powers. The offensive against Verdun had been an extraordinarily bloody stalemate, one that sapped the officer corps' confidence in the leadership of General Erich von Falkenhayn. In June, Russia launched its great Brusilov offensive, pushing Austria-Hungary to the verge of capitulation. Soon thereafter, the British offensive against the Somme, itself a blood-soaked disaster, nonetheless revealed an astounding Entente advantage in war material. The first part of 1916 had not been kind to the armies of the Dual Alliance.

In the months and years following ratification of the Versailles Treaty, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland became a focal point of German nationalist propaganda. The campaign against the so-called “black shame on the Rhine” (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), a racist slogan referring to the stationing of soldiers from northern Africa, Senegal, and Madagascar in the French zone of occupation, was one of the ugliest outgrowths of German opposition to the peace treaty. Support for the movement against France's African troops was disquietingly broad. An interpellation to the Reich government of May 1920 launched by the Majority Social Democrats (SPD) and endorsed by all parties in the national assembly except the Independent Socialists (USPD) is illustrative of the racist fears motivating “black horror” protests: “Even after the armistice, the French and Belgians continue to use colored troops in the occupied territories. … For German women and children, men and boys, these savages pose a horrifying danger. Their honor, health and life, purity and innocence are being destroyed. … This situation is disgraceful, humiliating, and insufferable!”

In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.