Studies in Central European Histories – serie

Recomposing German Music illuminates the tangled relationship between music and politics in 20th-century Germany. Focusing on the reconstruction and division of Berlin’s musical community after 1945, author Elizabeth Janik demonstrates how military occupation and Cold War rivalry transformed the city’s elite musical institutions. Berlin became a crucible for competing interpretations of German musical tradition. Cultural authorities in East and West Berlin disputed the social authority responsible for defining and upholding musical standards, the appropriate relationship between art and the state, the definition of musical progress, and finally, the nature and purpose of music itself. This study is an important contribution to the social history of 20th-century music and the comparative cultural history of the two Cold War Germanys.

Banishment was crucial to law enforcement in early modern Europe, as magistrates used expulsion to punish and control thousands of offenders convicted of crimes ranging from adultery to theft. While early modern social control has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent decades, banishment has been largely neglected. This book examines the role of banishment in sixteenth-century Ulm, an important south German city-state, using the town’s experience to uncover how early modern magistrates used expulsion to regulate and reorder society. This investigation sheds new light on the application of authority, the intersection between official disciplinary efforts and customary behavioral norms, and the function of public expulsion in displaying and defending social hierarchies, issues central to our historical understanding of the period.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays about early modern Germany addresses the tensions, both fruitful and destructive, between normative systems of order on the one hand, and a growing diversity of practices on the other. Individual essays address crucial struggles over religious orthodoxy after the Reformation, the transformation of political loyalties through propaganda and literature, and efforts to redefine both canonical forms and new challenges to them in literature, music, and the arts. Bringing together the most exciting papers from the 2005 conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär, an international research and conference group, the collection offers fresh comparative insights into the terrifying as well as exhilarating predicaments that the people of the Holy Roman Empire faced between the Reformation and the Enlightenment.Contributors include: Claudia Benthien, Robert von Friedeburg, Markus Friedrich, Claire Gantet, Susan Lewis Hammond, Thomas Kaufmann, Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, Benjamin Marschke, Nathan Baruch Rein, and Ashley West.

Recent scholarship has criticized the assumption that European modernity was inherently secular. Yet, we remain poorly informed about religion's fate in the nineteenth-century big city, the very crucible of the modern condition. Drawing on extensive archival research and investigations into Protestant ecclesiastical organization, church-state relations, liturgy, pastoral care, associational life, and interconfessional relations, this study of Strasbourg following Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 shows how urbanization not only challenged the churches, but spurred them to develop new, forward-looking, indeed, urban understandings of religious community and piety. The work provides new insights into what it meant for Imperial Germany to identify itself as "Protestant" and it provocatively identifies the European big city as an agent for sacralization, and not just secularization.

Traditionally, the term boundary applies to the demarcation between a physical place and another physical place, most commonly associated with lines on a map As the essays in this volume demonstrate, however, a boundary can also function in a more broadly conceptual manner. A boundary becomes not an “imaginary line” but a tool for thinking about how to separate any two elements, whether ideas, events, etc., into categories by which they become comprehensible and distinct. The scholar contributors seek not simply to discern the boundaries, but, and perhaps more importantly, to understand the process of delination, and its consequences. With its maverick history and grass-root political traditions, the Netherlands provides an auspicious setting to examine the historical function of boundaries both real and imagined.

The study of German mining and metallurgy has focused overwhelmingly on labor, capitalism, and progressive engineering and earth science. This book addresses prospecting practices and mining culture. Using the divining, or dowsing rod as a means of exposing miner beliefs, it argues that a robust vernacular science preceded institutionalized geology in Saxony, and that the Freiberg Mining Academy (f.1765) became a site for the synthesis of tradition and new science. The tacit knowledge of dowsing was the mark of the experienced prospector, and rather than decline in importance through the Enlightenment, the practice transformed from a study of mineral vapors into an experimental branch of geophysics. Mining administrations openly hired practitioners through the eighteenth century.

This study of the Catholic Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg and its largely Protestant aristocracy demonstrates that shared family ties and traditional privilege could reduce religious based conflict. These findings raise fundamental questions about current interpretations of the Reformation era. Prince-bishops regularly appointed Lutheran nobles to administrative positions, and those Lutheran appointees served their Catholic overlords ably and loyally. Bamberg was a center for social interaction, business transactions, and career opportunities for aristocrats. As these nobles saw it, birthright and kinship ties made them suitable for service in the prince-bishopric. Catholic leaders concurred, confessional differences notwithstanding. This study tells the complicated story of how Lutheran nobles and their Catholic relatives struggled to maintain solidarity and cooperation during an era of religious strife and animosity

To kill someone purely in order to be sentenced to death and then to die at the hands of the executioner! Such murders were alarmingly frequent in eighteenth-century Lutheran Europe. The book traces the complex motives behind these crimes – an investigation that leads not only to the Pietist interest in saving the souls of those sentenced to death but also into some of the central elements of Lutheran soteriology and the idea of capital punishment as being divinely ordained.The murders prompted special legislation and challenged the religious basis of the death penalty, and the killings and the logic behind them played an important role in debates about capital punishment, following Beccaria.Although much less frequent than in Lutheran Europe, such crimes are still committed elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, and even in the present-day US. Thus they seem to go hand in hand with the death penalty, irrespective of time and space.At dræbe nogen alene for at blive dødsdømt og henrettet af bødelen!. Sådanne mord var alarmerende hyppige i 1700-tallets lutherske Europa. Bogen eftersporer de komplekse motiver bag disse forbrydelser - en undersøgelse der fører ikke bare til det pietistiske engagement i at frelse de dødsdømtes sjæle, men også til centrale dele af den lutherske frelseforståelse og til forestillingen om, at dødsstraffene var direkte beordrede af Gud.Bogen har selvmordsmordene i København og den danske stats bekæmpelse af selvmordsmordene som udgangspunkt, men indeholder også et europæisk udblik. Mordene førte til særlig lovgivning og udforderde de religiøst motiverede dødsstraffe. Her blev Danmark foregangsland, da man i 1767 helt ekstraordinært afskaffede dødsstraffen for disse mord.Om end meget sjældnere end i det lutherske Europa ses selvmordsmord også i det øvrige Europa i 1700-tallet såvel som i vore dages USA. De synes således at ledsage dødsstraffen overalt, hvor den er i brug.

This book presents a collection of twelve seminal essays by Czech historians on the history of the Czech lands from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, which originally appeared in Czech publications as articles and book chapters and are translated here for the first time in English. The essays address a broad range of topics, including politics, religion, demography, everyday life, crime, and rural and urban society. By bringing to English-speaking readers the rich history and historical writing of the Czech lands through the lens of Czech historians, the book seeks to expand knowledge about the place of these lands in late medieval and early modern Europe, and the rich mosaic and shared history of the peoples and cultures of Europe.

This biography of the musician Franz Liszt contributes to our understanding of national identity formation and its interaction with cosmopolitanism. Liszt exemplified the nineteenth-century quest for subjective definition and fulfillment. Seeking to gain agency, authority, and community, Liszt experimented with various subject positions from which to forward his goals. The stances he selected, anchored in ideas about nation, religion, and art, allowed him to retain his cosmopolitan sensibility while making specific aesthetic and creative claims. Quinn’s analysis of Liszt’s correspondence and musical criticism, as well as of contemporary reviews of his performances, compositions, and essays, demonstrates the lack of a nationalist exclusivity in Liszt’s life was a historical phenomenon rather than a personal quirk as previous scholarship has often claimed.

Hundreds of rural communities tasted political freedom in the Holy Roman Empire. For shorter or longer periods, villagers managed local affairs without subjection to territorial overlords. In this first book-length study, Beat Kümin focuses on the five case studies of Gochsheim and Sennfeld (in present-day Bavaria), Sulzbach and Soden (Hesse) and Gersau (Switzerland). Adopting a comparative perspective across the late medieval and early modern periods, the analysis of multiple sources reveals distinct extents of rural self-government, the forging of communalized confessions and an enduring attachment to the empire. Negotiating inner tensions as well as mounting centralization pressures, Reichsdörfer provide privileged insights into rural micro-political cultures while their stories resonate with resurgent desires for greater local autonomy in Europe today.

Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance challenges the narrative of a simple progression of tolerance and the establishment of confessional identity during the early modern period. These essays explore the lived experiences of religious plurality, providing insights into the developments and drawbacks of religious coexistence in this turbulent period. The essays examine three main groups of actors—the laity, parish clergy, and unacknowledged religious minorities—in pre- and post-Westphalian Europe. Throughout this period, the laity navigated their own often-fluid religious beliefs, the expectations of conformity held by their religious and political leaders, and the complex realities of life that involved interactions with co-religious and non-co-religious family, neighbors, and business associates on a daily basis.Contributors are: James Blakeley, Amy Nelson Burnett, Victoria Christman, Geoffrey Dipple, Timothy G. Fehler, Emily Fisher Gray, Benjamin J. Kaplan, David M. Luebke, David Mayes, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, William Bradford Smith, and Shira Weidenbaum.

At its core, Coping with Life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) explores how people tried to survive the Thirty Years’ War, on what resources they drew, and how they attempted to make sense of it. A rich tapestry of stories brings to light contemporaries’ trauma as well as women and men’s unrelenting initiatives to stem the war’s negative consequences. Through these close-ups, Sigrun Haude shows that experiences during the Thirty Years’ War were much more diverse and often more perplexing than a straightforward story line of violence and destruction can capture. Life during the Thirty Years’ War was not a homogenous vale of gloom and doom, but a multifaceted story that was often heartbreaking, yet, at times, also uplifting.

In an age characterized by religious conflict, Protestant and Catholic Augsburgers remained largely at peace. How did they do this? This book argues that the answer is in the “emotional practices” Augsburgers learned and enacted—in the home, in marketplaces and other sites of civic interaction, in the council house, and in church. Augsburg’s continued peace depended on how Augsburgers felt—as neighbors, as citizens, and believers—and how they negotiated the countervailing demands of these commitments. Drawing on police records, municipal correspondence, private memoranda, internal administrative documents and other records revealing everyday behavior, experience, and thought, Sean Dunwoody shows how Augsburgers negotiated the often-conflicting feelings of being a good believer and being a good citizen and neighbor.

Surely, Christian history in Germany principally followed the outlines of a Catholic and Protestant narrative, right? On the contrary, for Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda this dominant framework largely obscures the historical experience of most Christians, specifically rural Christians. The rural Christian narrative, animated for more than a millennium by agricultural and communal forces, principally followed an indigenous path characterized by long-term surges and setbacks. This path eventually bifurcated not in the 1517-1648 period but rather in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it did so not into Catholic and Protestant storylines but rather into those Christian corpora (Gemeinden) which maintained their local civil-sacred unity into the twentieth century and those which lost that unity after succumbing to Westphalia's divisive effects.

Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era.

The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.

This book offers a new interpretation of German law and politics during the era between the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution. Liberal ideas of freedom and equality were prototyped in Germany in property law: through the free disposition of estates, freedom from taxation and other extractions, and free use of paper money. Civil liberty, ideas about equality, and restrictions on arbitrary state power were real, recognized, and meaningful. These freedoms were enjoyed by all classes of Germans. They were thought to have been built atop Germans’ ancient heritage of freedom and a federalist imperial constitution which inspired Montesquieu and the American Founders. Driving these trends were ideas about political economy, enlightened reform, practical problem-solving, as well as forces of supply and demand in everything from the market for books to the market for justice. This book places the story of early modern German freedom close by the side of more familiar stories of England, North America, France, and the Netherlands.