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Anglophone historians of modern Europe know Karl Barth primarily as the intellectual leader of the anti-Nazi Church Struggle and the principle author of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which spoke a dramatic "No" to National Socialism's attack on the German churches. But Barth was also arguably the most important—and most prolific—theologian of the twentieth century. Aside from his unfinished magnum opus, the fourteen-volumeChurch Dogmatics, he published more than one hundred books and articles, and he quite literally wrote until the day he died in 1968. Barth's output has elicited an equally impressive secondary literature, produced mostly by students of theology and amounting to around fourteen thousand titles in twenty-five languages. As might be expected, theologians differ in their interpretations of Barth, seeing him as a formative voice in "neo-orthodox" Protestantism, a left-wing socialist, a fitting subject of deconstructionist philosophical theology, a thinker who showed the way "past the modern," or a "critically realistic dialectical theologian." In view of this record it may come as a surprise to find that until recently the Swiss was still "habitually honored but not much read," as theologian George Hunsinger wrote in 1991. Hunsinger was not the only observer to see that Barth's work was never fully integrated into the corpus of theological culture in Europe and the United States despite the scholarly interest in his thought. This situation may be changing, as a transatlantic "Barth renaissance" now gathers momentum, nearly forty years after the great theologian's death.

This article argues that historically specific, transnational structures and conjunctures influence the car's national belongingness. Neither historians nor sociologists have devoted sufficient attention to how the automobile mediates cultural processes in general and national identification in particular, the article maintains. Using a British motoring journalist's observations on the 1928 Berlin Auto Show, the discussion explores how the Mercedes worked as a symbol of German automotive tradition, a marker of international relations between Britain and Germany, and a spur to anxieties about the effects of mass production techniques and US automobility for both countries. The article then turns to small cars, demonstrating that the British observer's embrace of German and Continental small-car design belied longer-term anxieties about the level and nature of British automobility, while simultaneously mirroring German dissatisfactions and hopes regarding the potential for mass auto ownership in the form of the Volkswagen. If cars in some sense 'belong' to nations, the study concludes, then it is important to stress how the continuities and discontinuities that condition such belongingness often work across national borders in historically unique combinations.

Alexander von Vegasack and Mateo Kries, eds., Automobility – Was uns bewegt (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 1999), exhibition catalogue, Vitra Design Museum, 551 pp., ISBN 3-931-936-17-1. Paride Rugafiori, ed., La capitale dell'automobile: Imprendatori, cultura e società a Torino (Venice: Marsilio, 1999), 262 pp., Lire 35,000. ISBN 8-831-77194-9. Ulrich Kubisch, Das Automobil als Lesestoff: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Motorpresse, 1898–1998 (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1998), 80 pp., ISBN 3-895-00072-8. David Thoms, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon, eds., The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 307 pp., ISBN 1-859-28461-2. Sean O'Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 240 pp., ISBN 0-71-905506-7