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The German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington, is a center for advanced study and research whose purpose is to facilitate dialogue and collaboration among historians across national and disciplinary boundaries. The GHI conducts, supports, and promotes research in three core fields: German, European, and Jewish history; the history of the Americas and transatlantic history; and global, transnational, and transregional history. Thematic focal points of GHI research currently include the history of migration and mobility, and the history of empires and their legacies. The GHI works closely with partner institutions to provide scholars from around the world with opportunities to extend their professional networks and build relationships across borders.

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71 results in Publications of the German Historical Institute

Page 1 of 4

Consensus in Conflict
  • Nazism and the Shared Foundations of German Intellectual Culture, 1918–1945
  • Simon Unger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2027
    Print publication:
    30 April 2027
  • Rather than focusing on the political conflicts in Germany during the interwar period, this book reveals a hidden intellectual consensus that united many political groups. Simon Unger retraces cultural themes which permeated across the ideological spectrum among writers, journalists, scholars, and other public figures, exploring the embedded nature of Nazi ideology in German culture before 1933. These ideas included fears of 'mass society' and 'cultural decline,' hopes for new forms of 'community,' contempt for rationalism and 'progress,' and ever-recurring notions of metaphysics, 'depth,' and spirituality. Together, these themes amounted to critiques of Western modernity that connected Nazism to other political currents, including parts of the left and the democratic center. Consensus in Conflict argues that the Nazi regime – despite its brutal reshaping of German and European societies – stood in greater intellectual proximity to Weimar culture than is normally recognized. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Making Germans
  • Race, Empire, and Assimilation in Nazi Europe
  • Bradley Nichols
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi regime presided over one of the largest campaigns of state-sponsored assimilation in modern history. Across Europe, millions of people were classified as members of the “master race” amid the horrors of the Second World War, a huge number of whom renounced their nationality to embrace Hitler's cause. Making Germans recounts this endeavor through the prism of its model, the Re-Germanization Procedure, a special initiative of demographic engineering run by Heinrich Himmler's SS which sent select foreign subjects to undergo conversion in the heart of the Third Reich. By documenting the experiences and relationships of the ordinary civilians who participated in the program, and examining the impact of their involvement, Bradley Nichols reveals a key interplay between Nazi empire-building at home and abroad. In that vein, this study offers a fresh take on the much-debated question of whether the Holocaust was a form of colonialism. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Foreign in Two Homelands
  • Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History
  • Michelle Lynn Kahn
  • Published online:
    31 August 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • What happens when migrants are rejected by the host society that first invited them? How do they return to a homeland that considers them outsiders? Foreign in Two Homelands explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany's largest ethnic minority, who arrived as 'guest-workers' (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their Muslim faith, and argued they could never integrate. In 1983, policymakers enacted a controversial law: paying Turks to leave. Thus commenced one of modern Europe's largest and fastest waves of remigration: within one year, 15% of the migrants—250,000 men, women, and children—returned to Turkey. Their homeland, however, ostracized them as culturally estranged 'Germanized Turks' (Almancı). Through archival research and oral history interviews in both countries and languages, Michelle Lynn Kahn highlights migrants' personal stories and reveals how many felt foreign in two homelands. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions
  • A Global History, c. 1750–1830
  • Edited by Jan C. Jansen, Kirsten McKenzie
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024
  • The political upheavals and military confrontations that rocked the world during the decades around 1800 saw forced migrations on a massive scale. This global history brings this explosion into full view. Rather than describing coerced mobilities as an aberration in a period usually identified with quests for liberty and political participation, this book recognizes them as a crucial but hitherto under-appreciated dimension of the transformations underway. Examining the global movements of enslaved persons, soldiers, convicts, and refugees across land and sea, Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions presents a deeply entangled history. The book explores the binaries of 'free' and 'unfree' mobility, analyzing the agency and resistance of those moved against their will. It investigates the importance of temporary destinations and the role of expulsion and deportation and exposes the contours of a world of moving subjects integrated by overlaps, interconnections, and permeable boundaries. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy
  • Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin, 1875–1933
  • Adam Bisno
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    02 November 2023
  • Through the colorful world of Berlin's grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics. Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the surface and failed to resolve in the following years. Doubting the ability of the Weimar Republic to contain these conflicts, a group of hotel owners, some of the most prominent Jewish industrialists and financiers in the country, chose to let Adolf Hitler use their hotel, the Kaiserhof, as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. From a splendid suite opposite the chancellery, Hitler and his henchmen engineered the assumption of power, the death of the Weimar Republic, and the ruin of their hosts, the Kaiserhof's owners: Jewish liberals now fleeing for their lives. Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy asks how this came about and explores the decision-making processes that produced such catastrophic consequences. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Refugee Crises, 1945-2000
  • Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison
  • Edited by Jan C. Jansen, Simone Lässig
  • Published online:
    13 October 2023
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020
  • This timely study examines responses to mass refugee movements by a range of actors, from local communities to supranational organizations. Bringing together ten case studies from around the world, encompassing the global North and South alike, Refugee Crises 1945–2000 explores a broad spectrum of types of migration and of international and domestic contexts. Whilst the driving forces and numbers of people involved, and the backgrounds (national, religious, social) of the migrants, vary considerably, this book highlights a common factor: that each receiving country was confronted with the crucial question of how to deal with the arrival of a large number of people seeking refuge. They could not simply be sent away, but they were also widely seen in the receiving countries as an unpredictable challenge to stability and social cohesion. Taking a long-term perspective, this is an eloquent contribution to the intense public debate about the impact of refugee migration on state stability, societal cohesion and as an impetus for social change.

Reshaping Capitalism in Weimar and Nazi Germany
  • Edited by Moritz Föllmer, Pamela E. Swett
  • Published online:
    20 January 2022
    Print publication:
    03 February 2022
  • In Weimar and Nazi Germany, capitalism was hotly contested, discreetly practiced, and politically regulated. This volume shows how it adapted to fit a nation undergoing drastic changes following World War I. Through wide-ranging cultural histories, a transatlantic cast of historians probes the ways contemporaries debated, concealed, promoted, and racialized capitalism. They show how bankers and industrialists, storeowners and commercial designers, intellectuals and politicians reshaped a controversial economic order at a time of fundamental uncertainty and drastic rupture. The book thus sheds fresh light on the strategies used by Hitler and his followers to gain and maintain widespread support. The authors conclude that National Socialism succeeded in mobilizing capitalism's energies while at the same time claiming to have overcome a system they identified with pernicious Jewish influences. In so doing, the volume also speaks to the broader issue of how capitalism can adapt to new times.

Exiled Among Nations
  • German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age
  • John P. R. Eicher
  • Published online:
    01 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • How do groups of people fashion shared identities in the modern world? Following two communities of German-speaking Mennonites, one composed of voluntary migrants and the other of refugees, across four continents between 1870 and 1945, this transnational study explores how religious migrants engaged with the phenomenon of nationalism. John P. R. Eicher demonstrates how migrant groups harnessed the global spread of nationalism to secure practical objectives and create local mythologies. In doing so, he also reveals how governments and aid organizations used diasporic groups for their own purposes - and portraying such nomads as enemies or heroes in national and religious mythologies. By underscoring the importance of local and religious counter-stories that run in parallel to nationalist narratives, Exiled Among Nations helps us understand acts of resistance, flight, and diaspora in the modern world.

Transnational Nazism
  • Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936
  • Ricky W. Law
  • Published online:
    10 May 2019
    Print publication:
    23 May 2019
  • In 1936, Nazi Germany and militarist Japan built a partnership which culminated in the Tokyo-Berlin Axis. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transnational Nazism was an ideological and cultural outlook that attracted non-Germans to become adherents of Hitler and National Socialism, and convinced German Nazis to identify with certain non-Aryans. Because of the distance between Germany and Japan, mass media was instrumental in shaping mutual perceptions and spreading transnational Nazism. This work surveys the two national media to examine the impact of transnational Nazism. When Hitler and the Nazi movement gained prominence, Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, nonfiction, and language textbooks transformed to promote the man and his party. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of Hitler and his regime created a niche for Japan in the Nazi worldview and Nazified newspapers, films, nonfiction, and voluntary associations.

War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars
  • Edited by Mischa Honeck, James Marten
  • Published online:
    18 February 2019
    Print publication:
    21 February 2019
  • The histories of modern war and childhood were the result of competing urgencies. According to ideals of childhood widely accepted throughout the world by 1900, children should have been protected, even hidden, from conflict and danger. Yet at a time when modern ways of childhood became increasingly possible for economic, social, and political reasons, it became less possible to fully protect them in the face of massive industrialized warfare driven by geopolitical rivalries and expansionist policies. Taking a global perspective, the chapters in this book examine a wide range of experiences and places. In addition to showing how the engagement of children and youth with war differed according to geography, technology, class, age, race, gender, and the nature of the state, they reveal how children acquired agency during the twentieth century's greatest conflicts.

Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770–1914
  • Jeffrey T. Zalar
  • Published online:
    09 November 2018
    Print publication:
    29 November 2018
  • Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access to knowledge unimpeded by any religious authority. But how would the history of freedom change if these conceptions were false? In this panoramic study of Catholic book culture in Germany from 1770–1914, Jeffrey T. Zalar exposes the myth of faith-based intellectual repression. Catholic readers disobeyed the book rules of their church in a vast apostasy that raised personal desire and conscience over communal responsibility and doctrine. This disobedience sparked a dramatic contest between lay readers and their priests over proper book behavior that played out in homes, schools, libraries, parish meeting halls, even church confessionals. The clergy lost this contest in a fundamental reordering of cultural power that helped usher in contemporary Catholicism.

Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany
  • Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990
  • Sarah Thomsen Vierra
  • Published online:
    31 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018
  • As the largest national group of guest workers in Germany, the Turks became a visible presence in local neighbourhoods and schools and had diverse social, cultural, and religious needs. Focussing on West Berlin, Sarah Thomsen Vierra explores the history of Turkish immigrants and their children from the early days of their participation in the post-war guest worker program to the formation of multi-generational communities. Both German and Turkish sources help to uncover how the first and second generations created spaces of belonging for themselves within and alongside West German society, while also highlighting the factors that influenced that process, from individual agency and community dynamics to larger institutional factors such as educational policy and city renovation projects. By examining the significance of daily interactions at the workplace, in the home, in the neighbourhood, and in places of worship, we see that spatial belonging was profoundly linked to local-level daily life and experiences.

The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century
  • Competition and Convergence
  • Edited by Christof Mauch, Kiran Klaus Patel
  • Published online:
    12 October 2018
    Print publication:
    30 August 2010
  • The United States and Germany during the Twentieth Century presents a wide ranging comparison of American and German societies during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The two countries - the world's leading 'rising powers' of the time - were both more similar and more different than is widely understood. Above all, their dual encounter with modernity brings out the richness of both societies as they faced unprecedented internal and external challenges, sometimes in isolation, but more often in combination or in parallel with one another.

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland
  • Upper Silesia, 1848–1960
  • Brendan Karch
  • Published online:
    14 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018
  • In the bloody twentieth-century battles over Central Europe's borderlands, Upper Silesians stand out for resisting pressure to become loyal Germans or Poles. This work traces nationalist activists' efforts to divide Upper Silesian communities, which were bound by their Catholic faith and bilingualism, into two 'imagined' nations. These efforts, which ranged from the 1848 Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War, are charted by Brendan Karch through the local newspapers, youth and leisure groups, neighborhood parades, priestly sermons, and electoral outcomes. As locals weathered increasing political turmoil and violence in the German-Polish contest over their homeland, many crafted a national ambiguity that allowed them to pass as members of either nation. In prioritizing family, homeland, village, class, or other social ties above national belonging, a majority of Upper Silesians adopted an instrumental stance towards nationalism. The result was a feedback loop between national radicalism and national skepticism.

Beyond the Racial State
  • Rethinking Nazi Germany
  • Edited by Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman, Richard F. Wetzell
  • Published online:
    10 November 2017
    Print publication:
    16 November 2017
  • The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'être, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

Decades of Reconstruction
  • Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War
  • Edited by Ute Planert, James Retallack
  • Published online:
    04 July 2017
    Print publication:
    13 June 2017
  • As wars and other conflicts increase on a worldwide scale, the alleged 'new wars' of the present day have taught that military victory does not necessarily result in a sustained state of peace. Rather, societies in conflict experience a 'status mixtus' - a transformative period that includes substantial changes in economy, politics, society and culture. Focusing on these decades of reconstruction in Europe and North America, this book examines the transformation of state systems, international relations, and normative principles in international comparison. By putting the postwar decade after 1945 into a long-term historical perspective, the chapters illuminate new patterns of transition between war and peace from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Experts in the field show that states and societies are never restituted from a 'zero hour'. They also demonstrate that foreign and domestic policy are intermixed before and after peace breaks out.

Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s
  • Edited by Eckart Conze, Martin Klimke, Jeremy Varon
  • Published online:
    27 January 2017
    Print publication:
    28 November 2016
  • This book brings together cutting-edge scholarship from the United States and Europe to address political as well as cultural responses to both the arms race of the 1980s and the ascent of nuclear energy as a second, controversial dimension of the nuclear age. Diverse in its topics and disciplinary approaches, Nuclear Threats, Nuclear Fear and the Cold War of the 1980s makes a fundamental contribution to the emerging historiography of the 1980s as a whole. As of now, the era's nuclear tensions have been addressed by scholars mostly from the standpoint of security studies, focused on the geo-strategic deliberations of political elites and at the level of state policy. Yet nuclear anxieties, as the essays in this volume document, were so pervasive that they profoundly shaped the era's culture, its habits of mind, and its politics, far beyond the domain of policy.

Thieves in Court
  • The Making of the German Legal System in the Nineteenth Century
  • Rebekka Habermas
  • Translated by Kathleen Mitchell Dell'Orto
  • Published online:
    18 November 2016
    Print publication:
    14 November 2016
  • From the seemingly insignificant theft of some bread and a dozen apples in nineteenth century rural Germany, to the high courts and modern-day property laws, this English-language translation of Habermas' Diebe vor Gericht explores how everyday incidents of petty stealing and the ordinary people involved in these cases came to shape the current legal system. Habermas draws from an unusual cache of archival documents of theft cases, tracing the evolution and practice of the legal system of Germany through the nineteenth century. This close reading, relying on approaches of legal anthropology, challenges long-standing narratives of legal development, state building, and modern notions of the rule of law. Ideal for legal historians and scholars of modern German and nineteenth-century European history, this innovative volume steps outside the classic narratives of legal history and gives an insight into the interconnectedness of social, legal and criminal history.

Paying for Hitler's War
  • The Consequences of Nazi Hegemony for Europe
  • Edited by Jonas Scherner, Eugene N. White
  • Published online:
    05 March 2016
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016
  • During World War II, Germany occupied much of continental Europe. Although the social and political history of this occupation has been studied extensively, the economics of the unprecedented transfer of resources has received surprisingly little attention. Allies, neutrals, and conquered nations under German hegemony were a vital source of supplies for Hitler's war machine. Without the war material, consumer goods and labor they provided, Germany would not have been able to wage a prolonged multi-front war. All of these countries suffered enormous losses, but each had a distinct experience that depended on Germany's wartime needs, whether they were allied, occupied or neutral, and their place in Nazi racial ideology. Paying for Hitler's War is a comparative economic study which explores these different experiences through case studies of twelve nations spanning the European continent.

Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism
  • Gerald D. Feldman
  • Introduction by Peter Hayes
  • Published online:
    05 October 2015
    Print publication:
    15 September 2015
  • This book is the English translation of Gerald D. Feldman's contributions to the multi-author, two-volume study Österreichische Banken und Sparkassen im Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkeriegszeit, which was originally published in German by C. H. Beck in 2006. Austrian Banks in the Period of National Socialism focuses on the activities of two major financial institutions, the Creditanstalt-Wiener Bankverein and the Länderbank Wien. It details the ways the two banks served the Nazi regime and how they used the opportunities presented by Nazi rule to expand their business activities. Particular attention is given to the role that the Creditanstalt and Länderbank played in the 'Aryanization' of Jewish-owned businesses. The book also examines the two banks' relations with their industrial clients and considers the question of whether bank officials had any knowledge of their client firms' use of concentration camp prisoners and other forced laborers during World War II.

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