This article examines the early Nazi movement through the contested and violent politics of Munich’s beer halls between 1919 and 1923. It argues that these spaces were not neutral stages for political speech, but rather central arenas in which the movement defined its identity, tested its tactics, and fused party and paramilitary organization. Drawing on police reports, eyewitness accounts, and Nazi publications, the article shows how the NSDAP sought to recode beer halls into sites of antisemitic and anti-republican action, aided by the toleration and complicity of Bavarian state authorities. These spaces became laboratories for masculine bonding, crowd mobilization, and practices of exclusionary violence that made the boundaries of the Volk both visible and enforceable. By foregrounding the interplay of space, sociability, and violence, the article reframes the origins of Nazi radicalism and highlights the role of everyday venues in shaping interwar populist politics.

This article examines the lives of three politicians from Austria’s crownland of Bukovina—Aurel Onciul, Nikolai Wassilko, and Benno Straucher—who pursued distinct national ambitions and built successful political careers as advocates of democratization and nationalization under imperial rule. It aims to highlight the multiple transitions these individuals experienced, including shifts from conservative to democratic mass politics, struggles for national rights, and the passage from imperial to national orders. After 1918, Onciul became a representative of a nationality with its own nation-state, while Wassilko and Straucher became spokespersons for embattled minorities. All three struggled to adapt to the new national order, and the forces of nationalization they once championed ultimately turned against them. The article argues that the nationalist politics that had brought these politicians success under imperial rule were later criticized by their co-nationals as treasonous and opportunistic, illustrating the complex and often paradoxical outcomes of nationalization processes in Central Europe.

This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

The Third Reich established a new financial order in Central Europe. This article examines one aspect of these changes, namely the evolution of banking law. After the seizure of power in 1933, Nazi officials weaponized financial and legal institutions to support the rearmament campaign. They initially worked through the Credit Supervisory Office, a regulatory agency created in 1934, to enforce a standardized model of regulation. Driven by more than a desire for self-sufficiency (autarky) and expropriative control, the authorities devised a system of economic governance that perpetuated the conflict and continually supported German financial interests. The politicization and dismantling of the regulatory office, officially dissolved in 1944, reflected the evolving priorities of the Nazi regime. By reinterpreting existing laws and working with a willing state bureaucracy, officials were able to use regulation as a tool for redesigning the banking systems of Germany and the annexed territories.

The article analyses the Jewish militias that were established in Galicia during the fall of the Habsburg empire in 1918 and the creation of new nation-states. As public order collapsed and the region descended into violence, Jews throughout Galicia took up arms to protect and organize their communities and to take an active part in the transformation of the region. They mirrored the efforts of their non-Jewish neighbors, creating paramilitary forces that aimed to fill the vacuum left behind by the disintegrating imperial state. The militias were more than a means of self-defense. They actively participated in the establishment of the new states’ monopoly on violence but did so on their own terms—integration was only possible through separation. At the same time, the militias served a decidedly internal, Jewish purpose by replacing traditional leaderships and imposing discipline in the community, at times through universal conscription.

Although the social democrats fundamentally opposed the political order of the German Empire, they participated in parliament from the beginning. The party not only sat on the parliamentary benches, but its representatives also proved to be committed parliamentarians. Using a combination of parliamentary, party, and movement sources, this article shows that social democrats’ parliamentary participation followed two lines of reasoning. First, the party admitted that parliamentary participation served publicity purposes. In fact, social democrats took the Reichstag stage to present their political project to the masses. Second, the party was less willing to admit that parliament fitted perfectly into the associational tradition of working-class culture. Orderly and fair debate had been the norm of social democratic activism long before the party was founded. It is precisely this last aspect that provides an important and previously overlooked explanation for the social democrats’ surprising devotion to a political system they so deeply detested.

The 1960s in Czechoslovakia witnessed a remarkable political movement to foster what was then called “socialism with a human face” by merging the egalitarian-distributive vision of socialism with quasi-Western democratic values. This article investigates the social and emotional origins of Czechoslovak reformism and argues that the movement was rooted in the intersection between social class discontent and the collective emotional pain of a revolutionary intelligentsia that I call the “red-collars.” In doing this, the article explores how the post-revolutionary class structure and shared “melancholic” feelings of the red-collars (a mix of discontent with their material/social circumstances and regret for their part in Stalinist revolutionary excesses) shaped their ideological transformation from Stalinism to democratic socialism between 1948 and 1968. Throughout the 1960s, by declaring emotional pain over their past Stalinism, the red-collars voiced their desire to reform the system and reclaim what they considered the “humanistic core of socialism.”

This article examines the German Communist Party’s (KPD’s) propaganda campaign during the Reichstag election in the summer of 1932. It asks why a movement which openly rejected parliamentary democracy fervently contested elections and it analyzes the KPD’s strategy, campaign organization, and publicity. The article argues that the party’s culture created a distinctive electoral appeal. As a Stalinized, heavily bureaucratized party, the KPD ran a centralized campaign with tightly controlled ideological messaging. Yet its leadership was also able to compete with better-funded rivals by tapping the party’s ethos of revolutionary activism and showing hitherto unrecognized pragmatism in encouraging independence and initiative. Supercharged by an extra-parliamentary campaign that summer, the KPD waged an edgy, violent “battle of symbols” in the streets which united the party’s revolutionary aims with its supporters’ neighborhood activism. Revolutionary mass propaganda projected a uniquely Communist visual and audio appeal, embodying protest, poverty, and radicalism.