Central European History 

About: Central European History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): German & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0008-9389. Over the lifetime, 1732 publications have been published receiving 9381 citations. The journal is also known as: CEH.

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Abstract: and shows none of the projected Dorflandschaften. Wolschke-Bulmahn is undoubtedly right to argue “Urban architecture and landscape design were inextricably linked to the terror regime of the Nazis. Planning professionals for the most part enthusiastically welcomed these new realities and legitimized them. Their ideal conceptions for designing villages, towns, and landscapes were based on disenfranchising, dispossessing, and exterminating human beings” (p. 253). But, for evidence readers will have to turn to the larger studies from which this essay is excerpted, or to the well-illustrated account by Michael Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften. Nationalsozialistische Siedlungsplanung in den “eingegliederten Ostgebieten” 1939 bis 1944 (Berlin: Köster, 1998), or to the case study in David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006). That ethnic Germans as well as Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews were harmed by the recasting and “cleansing” of eastern lands seems to have escaped all these authors. To return to the second suggestion in the introduction, namely regarding environmentalism in the twentieth century, an appropriate approach for a future volume would be comparative. Given the emphasis in these essays on annexed-area colonialism, the supposed “white man’s burden” of “caring” for those “incapable” of caring for themselves and their own lands could be posed as a question: how have the various empires (whether British, French, Soviet, or American) of the twentieth century handled environmental issues abroad and how violently have they exploited (or planned to exploit) colonies and conquered areas in disregard of people and landscapes? That might help to answer the related question: “how different were the Nazis” in their light greenness and heavy brownness?

Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity”

Abstract: In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderweg thesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History

Abstract: ICOME before you like the chastened miller in Rumpelstiltskin. In the spring of the year I thought I could demonstrate the connec? tions between "the Kulturkampf and the Course of German His? tory" ?and in twenty minutes. And so I promised. In sober December that promise seems no less rash than one to spin flax into gold. All I can do to redeem some ofthe grandiosity of my title is to offer today one thesis and two hypotheses.

Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe

Abstract: The discussion above can be summarized in three points that refer back to the introductory remarks1 On the basis of their social origin and social integration, both Protestant pastors and Catholic pastoral clergy were a part of that bourgeois group who acted in the service of the secular authority; this applies to all of early modern Europe What the pastors' family achieved on the social level through familial contacts in Protestant areas was established through the mediated connections of extended family, clientage, and friendship in Catholic areas The similarities are strengthened by the comparable form and contents of education and of educational institutions Insofar as the state of research allows generalization, it seems that the pastoral clergy of both confessions had attained a comparable level of education by the seventeenth century In Catholic areas university study was the exception but priests were required to complete their education at a seminary, whose standards surely met the qualifications for a specialized professional education A complete course of study in theology was not the rule within Protestantism, either; having graduated from a philosophical faculty was a sufficient qualification In comparison with the standards of pre-Reformation education, there was a clear improvement in education that can be called the early modern “path toward a profession” This, together with the development of a social and familial network, allows us to characterize the pastoral clergy of Europe during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a part of that “power elite”144 who were essential for the early modern period2 The formal conditions for the suitability of clerical officeholders reached cum grano salis a comparable level in all confessions throughout Europe during the seventeenth century The disagreements concerning the evaluation of these conditions stem from the measures by which historical change is characterized For the group of pastoral clergy examined here, the category of modernization proves to be insufficient, since there was a tendency transcending the confessions to appeal to prereformatory traditions in establishing an understanding of office Historians must be able to describe how tradition was able both to accommodate and to be transformed3 From this point of view the question of the clergy’s suitability for the goal of the developing modern state encompasses only half of the historical reality The clergy and their contemporaries who comprised their congregations were also concerned with their role as mediators of the holy, of “the religious” in the world Clerical perception of self and of office was decisively stamped by the conviction that despite all contradictions these formed an insoluble unity For this reason we must also consider for both confessions the broad impact of the doctrine of the Christian state, whose core was the doctrine of the three estates In the political and social controversies of the late sixteenth century the political impulse of this doctrine grew in strength in a way more clearly seen in Protestantism than in the territories that remained Catholic Nevertheless the concept of the monarchia temperata in the Catholic understanding of authority also gave the clergy a right to criticize the ruler The long tradition of the correctio principis was put into practice through the clerical understanding of office in both confessions and became a very concrete reality for people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries This is a typically early modern way of developing tradition further through the consensus of generations, whose relevance the historian of the early modern period must take just as seriously as the attempts of the secular authority to use the power elites in their own interests