Beginning with Ferdinand I's Polizeyordnung of 1552, the Habsburgs’ state inserted itself into the regulation of welfare for the poor. To manage the homeless, there emerged after the 1720s a state-driven but locally administered system (Schubsystem) of police surveillance to discover, arrest, and physically remove those without a provable birth place (or a ten-year residence in one place) to a to-be-determined Heimat, a “home” community declared responsible for their welfare. In practice, the system's specific self-contradictions and conflicted agendas, its brutalization of those who served it, its several social-relational and language figures that emerged as the actualizations of the state's vision, together placed a significant number of the homeless on forced marches toward indeterminate destinations until they collapsed and could be removed from the road to die “in the straw.” The essay suggests that the interplay between Heimat and Schubsystem serves as a foreshadowing dimension in modern Austro-German history.

A dramatic paradigm shift has occurred in European and German hate-speech laws, from their nineteenth-century origins in repressive campaigns against the Left to their present association with pluralism, tolerance, and minority rights. This article rethinks the timing and causes of that shift, arguing that, contrary to the prevailing scholarship, the decade of the 1890s—not 1945—constituted the first key turning point toward a human-rights model of hate-speech law. Departing from a more traditional legal historiography focused on formal legal institutions and laws, the article examines law “from below” as social and political practice. The results show how, in the 1890s, a new vision of hate speech began to take shape when a grassroots Jewish defense movement began to appropriate and reshape the law in order to oppose antisemites. In theoretical terms, the article's method of examining the interaction of law and politics shows that from the 1840s onward, the politics surrounding hate-speech law refutes simple binary constructions that cast German legal culture as “dignitarian” and distinct from U.S. “libertarianism.”

Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have called into question the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult. This article paints a different picture. First, virtually all Nazi leaders appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and “border-scientific” thinking across the German population and within the Nazi Party itself. Second, although Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and even Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo consistently advocated anti-occult policies or pro-enlightenment campaigns during the first six years of the Third Reich, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. Third, the regime's reticence to eradicate even popular or commercial occultism—indicated by the fact that the environment for professional debunkers became more hostile with the outbreak of World War II––reflected the popularity of supernatural and border-scientific thinking within the German population. Indeed, whereas some Nazis intervened on the side of occultism for reasons of public opinion, many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value.

This article situates the establishment of the Bundeswehr and the implementation of compulsory military service in the 1950s and early 1960s within contemporary efforts to define a “sexual-moral order” for the Federal Republic of Germany. It argues that West Germany's rearmament offered contemporaries an opportunity to stipulate not only acceptable soldierly behavior, but also adequate male behavior in general. In the context of heightened concerns about juvenile delinquents (so-called Halbstarken), female prostitution, homosexuality, and the distribution of pornographic materials, West German citizens became interested in the social and sexual conduct of Bundeswehr soldiers and officers. Whereas some still considered the military to be a “school of the nation” and of proper masculinity, others worried about the armed forces as a possible breeding ground for immorality. Partly sharing these concerns, government representatives, members of the Bundestag, church officials, and military commanders sought to guide soldiers’ behavior, emphasizing the ideal of the “complete” (vollkommene) Christian male-breadwinner family.

Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.