This book is about what it meant to build a city in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores the physical spaces and mental attitudes that shaped lives, restructured society, and conditioned beliefs about the past and expectations for the future in the crucial German generations that formed the young Reich, fought the Great War, and experienced the Weimar Republic. Focusing on ordinary buildings and the way they shaped ordinary lives, this study shows how material space could influence the lives of citizens, from the ways the elderly slept at night to the economy of the city as a whole. It also shows how we integrate the spaces and places of our lives into our explanations of politics, culture and economics. It is aimed at those who want to understand urban modernity, Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, the use of space in social policy and politics, and the design of cities.

Bringing together incisive contributions from an international group of colleagues and former students, Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective takes stock of the field of German history as exemplified by the extraordinary scholarly career of Konrad H. Jarausch. Through fascinating reflections on the discipline’s theoretical, professional, and methodological dimensions, it explores Jarausch’s monumental work as a teacher and a builder of scholarly institutions. In this way, it provides not merely a look back at the last fifty years of German history, but a path forward as new ideas and methods infuse the study of Germany’s past.

Germany's Other Modernity explores the physical spaces and mental attitudes that shaped lives, restructured society, and conditioned beliefs about the past and expectations for the future in the crucial German generations that formed the young Reich, fought the Great War, and experienced the Weimar Republic. Focusing on ordinary buildings, this study shows how material space could influence the lives of citizens, from the ways the elderly slept at night to the economy of the city as a whole. It also shows how we integrate the spaces of our lives into our explanations of politics, culture, and economics. It is aimed at those who want to understand urban modernity, Wilhelmine, and Weimar Germany, the use of space in social policy and politics, and the design of cities.

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Michael Cowan presents a study of modernity's preoccupation with willpower. From Nietzsche's 'will to power' to a fantasy of the 'triumph of the will' under Nazism, the will - its pathologies and potential cures - was a topic of urgent debate in European modernity.

This catalogue focuses on the great aesthetic innovations that were made by artists throughout Germany in painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography, film and the decorative arts in the years from 1910 to 1937. The inter-related, fluctuating nature of modernist movements such as Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus and New Objectivity are emphasized as is the broader historical context in which the works were produced. The works chosen reflect the fascinating and complex ways in which artists responded to the forces of modernity and their passionate engagement with contemporary society, culture and politics. Exhibition: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 6 Aug - 6 Nov 2011.

Re-assesses Germany's relationship with the wider world before 1914 by examining the connections between nationalism, transnationalism, imperialism and globalization.