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During the last two decades of the nineteenth century protection for agriculture became an important feature of the economic and political landscape in Germany. The large landlords, who specialized in arable agriculture, used their political power to get high levels of protection. Peasants, who specialized in animal husbandry, received lower but substantial and rising levels of protection. Material interest can thus help explain the peasants' political alliance with the landlords. Protection encouraged German agriculture to modernize along intensive lines, bringing to the countryside the social and political developments dreaded by the same conservative elites who promoted protection.

"The pessimism of my book". Carl Einstein in the first blasphemy trial of the Weimar Republic
ABSTRACT: The conviction for blasphemy imposed in 1922 on the writer Carl Einstein for the comedy Die schlimme Botschaft provides us with the opportunity of using the debate on crimes against religion to reflect on the epochal transition from the Wilhelminian Empire to the Weimar Republic. A picture emerges marked by strong contradictions, which manifest themselves also in violent street clashes and innumerable political murders, highlighting that the change of regime and the promulgation of the Constitution were not enough to overcome the profound resistance of a strongly conservative culture, still deeply rooted in the administration, judiciary and army leaders.
SOMMARIO: 1. Un triste anniversario - 2. La blasfemia: un dibattito 'ponte' tra primo e secondo Reich - 3. Il riformismo di Kahl e la tregua tra classici e moderni - 4. Dall'abrogazionismo militante di Thümmel alla conservazione di Moser - 5. La vexata quaestio del bene giuridico - 6. L'insuccesso dei progetti di riforma - 7. La formazione critica di Einstein tra poetica e politica - 8. Primitivo, immediato, proletario - 9. Dalla rivolta alla rinuncia - 10. Sanguinosamente serio - 11. Rassegnazione e blasfemia: La cattiva novella - 12. Verso il processo - 13. Un procedimento 'per sentito dire' - 14. La parola all'imputato: "Dio ridotto in articoli" - 15. "Invecchiati troppo in fretta"

"The article takes the recent (re-)emergence of punitive concepts as a starting point to reflect on the relation between the notion of childhood as a happy phase of life and disciplinary styles of education. While the two ideas seem incommensurable at first glance, several interconnections can be found in a historical perspective. The example of the 'Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung' reveals how romantic notions of childhood were activated between 1896 and 1914 to reproduce the hierarchical structures of Wilhelminian Germany. Moreover, analysis shows that happiness was seen as having a conditional and limited character in relation to children and therefore may also refer to disciplinary concepts of education." (author's abstract)

The term "Mitteleuropa" has experienced a general renaissance since the mid-1970s and since the mid-1980s there has been a lively discussion again in geographic circles. It is constantly marked by a vagueness of the spatial relevance and creates for the author the opportunity to follow the changes in meaning of the term. This ist done from a typological view which roughly retains the chronology of the discussion from its first mention in 1808 up until the present. Before 1918 the location of Germany in the centre of Europe was considered precarious as it was subject to attacks by enemy states. The drafts of Central Europe made in the Wilhelminian era revolved, therefore, in its spatial expansion around a German-Austrian-Hungarian nucleus with the aim of expanding the German remains of the empire of 1871 under the leadership of Prussia, without Austria, economically and in political power. Germany's and Austria's policy after 1918 was marked by the attempt at revising the Versailles and related treaties. Structural "Mitteleuropa" concepts, which aimed at determining German settlements and cultural space, gained in importance. These ideas were interpreted aggressively and militarily by Hitler's fascist lebensraum ideology. The Mitteleuropa concept was therefore disavowed after the second World War. Nevertheless, the term continued to be used after 1945 less historically and methodologically to define the European regions. During these years there were an increasing number of concepts to define Mitteleuropa as an on-going acculturation process over 1,000 years which is revealed in a historic-geographical spatial analysis. The discussion on the term starting in the mid-1970s, mainly in the successor countries to the Danube monarchy, did not aim at a geographically designated central Europe but was an appeal to a regionalistic and across-block world picture and feeling moulded by humanistic ideas. With reference to a common central European history and culture Mitteleuropa is used by the states formerly belonging to the east block as a claim to rapid integration in the European Union and Nato. In view of the multi-layered content and the political burden of the term the author pleads for its de-spatialization. Mitteleuropa describes mainly people who think and feel "mitteleuropäisch" in very many different ways. There is a great number of such people in the following states: Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Germany and the Italian regions Friaul and south Tirol, Switzerland, in the Baltic states as well as in Croatia, the Slowakian Republic and west Ukraine.