A social history of West Germany's Bundesgrenzschutz (BGS, Federal Border Police) that complicates the telling of the country's history as a straightforward success story.

Scholars have debated the role of the occult in Nazism since it first appeared on the German political landscape in the 1920s. After 1945, a consensus held that occultism - an ostensibly anti-modern, irrational blend of pseudo-religious and -scientific practices and ideas - had directly facilitated Nazism's rise. More recently, scholarly debate has denied the occult a role in shaping the Third Reich, emphasizing the Nazis' hostility to esoteric religion and alternative forms of knowledge. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship on the topic, this volume calls for a fundamental reappraisal of these positions.
The book is divided into three chronological sections. The first, on the period 1890 to 1933, looks at the esoteric philosophies and occult movements that influenced both the leaders of the Nazi movement and ordinary Germans who became its adherents. The second, on the Third Reich in power, explores how the occult and alternative religious belief informed Nazism as an ideological, political, and cultural system. The third looks at Nazism's occult legacies. In emphasizing both continuities and disjunctures, this book promises to re-open and re-energize debate on the occult roots and legacies of Nazism, and with it our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century.

Contributors: Monica Black; Jeff Hayton; Oded Heilbronner; Eric Kurlander; Fabian Link and J. Laurence Hare; Anna Lux; Perry Myers; John Ondrovcik; Michael E. O'Sullivan; Jared Poley; Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael T. Schetsche; Peter Staudenmaier.

Monica Black is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Eric Kurlander is Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University.

Millions of former German soldiers (known as Heimkehrer, literally "homecomers," or returnees) returned from captivity as prisoners of war at the end of the Second World War, an experience that had profound effects on German society and touched almost every German family. Based on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis ofthe history of the German returnees, explored as a history of memory, both during Germany's division and after unification. At its core lies the question of how the experiences of war captivity were transformed into individual and collective memories. The book argues that memory of the experience of captivity and return is complex and multilayered and has been shaped by postwar political and social frameworks. Christiane Wienand is a Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded research project "Reverberations of War: Communities of Experience and Identification in Germany and Europe since 1945." She holds a PhD in History from University College London.

After 1945, France and West Germany were involved in a bitter dispute over the Saar, a small, coal-rich, culturally German territory bordering France's Lorraine region that France had occupied at war's end. French officials and the Saar's political elite attempted to wrest the territory from Germany and make it an independent nation oriented culturally towards France. Although France's occupation officially ended in 1947 with the ratification of a new constitution and elections, the new Saar state was not fully sovereign, as French control persisted until 1955. The Saar's status was an increasing concern for West Germany, partly due to its implications for the division of Germany. After lengthy negotiations, France and West Germany agreed to turn the Saar into a European territory and the seat of European institutions, much as today's Brussels. Saarlanders, however, saw this as a French ploy to maintain control, and in a heated 1955 referendum voted against it, leading to the territory's reunification with West Germany. This is the first study in English dealing with the German research of recent decades and citing original French and German sources.Bronson Long is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Highlands College.

When it broke out in 1906, the scandal surrounding Prince Philipp Eulenburg, closest confidant of Emperor Wilhelm II, shook the Hohenzollern monarchy and all of Europe to the core. Sparked by accusations by the journalist and publicist Maximilian Harden, the scandal dominated European headlines until 1909; it was the first modern scandal in which homosexuality was openly discussed. Particularly shocking was Harden's claim that Wilhelm had long been under the influence of a homosexual camarilla led by Eulenburg. Allegedly, this clique had brought about Bismarck's dismissal, cut off the emperor from his people, and, with its undue pacifism, maneuvered Germany not only into isolation, but to the brink of war during the Morocco Crisis of 1905/6. The scandal came to be a forum for the German public to debate diverse political, social, and cultural issues: honor, friendship, marriage, privacy, sexual mores, anti-Semitism, spiritualism, class struggle, submission to authority, and enthusiasm for the military. Norman Domeier's book, now in English translation, is the first scholarly monograph on the scandal. It draws on a wealth of primary material, including ca. 5,000 newspaper articles as well as minutes of court trials, private correspondence, government files, pamphlets, diaries, memoirs, and images. Domeier's historical analysis offers fascinating insights into the cultural history of German politics in the fateful years of transition from the Belle Époque to the 'Iron Age' of the world wars. Norman Domeier is Assistant Professor at the University of Stuttgart's Historical Institute.

The first comprehensive biography in English of the leader of the Bavarian Revolution and Republic of 1918/19, the first Jewish head of a European state and a man who embraced and embodied modernity.

By the time of his death, Edgar Julius Jung (1894-1934) was well known in Germany and Europe as one of the foremost ideologues of the political movement that called itself the Conservative Revolutionand as a right-wing opponent of the Nazis. He was speechwriter for and confidant of Franz von Papen (first Hitler's predecessor as chancellor, then Hitler's vice-chancellor), which put him at the center of political events right up until the Nazi seizure of power. Considered by Baldur von Schirach and Goebbels to be one of the worst enemies of the Nazis, Jung was assassinated by the Nazi regime inJune 1934. The eleven years of Nazi rule that followed contributed to Jung's neglect by historians, as did distaste, since the war's end and the founding of the Federal Republic on democratic principles, for his strongly antidemocratic stance.
Although there have been several studies on Jung's political thought, there has been until now no biography in German or English. Roshan Magub's booktherefore fills a serious gap in German historical literature. It shows that Jung's opposition to National Socialism dates from the earliest days and that he had a very close relationship with the Ruhr industry, which supported him financially and enabled him to reach a nationwide audience. Magub uses, for the first time, all the available material from the archives in Munich, Koblenz, Cologne, and Berlin, and the whole of Jung's Nachlass. Her book sheds new light on Jung and demonstrates his importance in Germany's political history.

Roshan Magub holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Largely unnoticed among English-speaking scholars of German history, a major shift in interpretation of German history has been underway during the past three decades among German historians ofGermany. While American and British historians continue to subscribe to an interpretation of German society as state centered, their German counterparts have begun to embrace an interpretation in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century German society was characterized by private initiative and a vibrant civil society. Public institutions such as museums, high schools, universities, hospitals, andcharities relied heavily on the support of wealthy donors. State funding for universities and high schools, for instance, accounted only for a fragment of the operating costs of those institutions, while private endowments running into the millions of marks funded scholarships as well as health care for teachers and students. Private support for public institutions was essential for their existence and survival: it was the backbone of Germany's civil society. This book is the first to provide the English-speaking reader with this revisionist interpretation of the role of the state and philanthropy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany: a society in which private actors claimed responsibility for the common good and used philanthropic engagement to shape society according to their visions.

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Thomas Adam is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published extensively in the field of transnational history and the history of philanthropy.