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This chapter describes the basic features of the American free speech doctrine and then considers its application to various forms of extreme speech. This analysis reveals that most of the speech restrictions considered in this book, while consistent with the constitutional norms of other democracies, would be unconstitutional in the U.S. The leitmotif of contemporary American free speech doctrine is its intense hostility to content regulation of public discourse, particularly viewpoint regulation. In addition, Brandenburg v. Ohio narrowly confines governmental power to punish the advocacy of law violation. Hate speech bans, whether in the form of public order regulations, prohibitions against group defamation, or bans on Holocaust denial, would be deemed unconstitutional. Under Brandenburg, laws that prohibit mere advocacy of terrorism would also be held to violate the First Amendment. The chapter concludes that much of the explanation for American free speech exceptionalism lies in the U.S. Supreme Court's extensive experience with free speech issues, particularly the lessons it learned from its failure to protect adequately dissent in the early part of the 20th century.

This section argues that absolutism is an inappropriate label to attach to the German territories. Government activity expanded in the face of the need for reconstruction after 1648 and new ideas about the nature of government developed in the early Aufklärung (German Enlightenment). Conditions varied between Austria and Brandenburg-Prussia and smaller counties, knights' territories and imperial cities. The period saw a renewal of the court as a central agency of government (manifested in the construction of new castles and palaces in the baroque style), the development of armies, new relationships between princes and their subjects, and developments in both government and private economic enterprise. Rulers sought to impose confessional uniformity and to control phenomena such as Catholic popular piety or Pietism (Spener) and Protestant revivalism. Ideas of religious toleration emerged, reacting against the confessional conflicts of the past, as well as new forms of territorial patriotism.

The Siciliana lightens the tone of the G-minor Sonata with its dance-like rhythms (a siciliana being a dance related to the gigue) and with its looser construction into a series of parallel sections with heightening activity, both within sections and in the recurrence of sections. Comparison with some other parallel-section movements by Bach in many genres (including the C-major Two-Part Invention, two movements of the Sonata in A major for Violin and Keyboard, and the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2) highlights the construction of this movement and the slow movements to the other solo-violin sonatas. All these slow movements welcome ornamentation.

Although originating in the late eighteenth century, the German historical novel did not win a wider European significance until Fontane’s ‘Before the Storm’ in 1879. Many historical novels gained popularity in Germany and Austria during the course of the century, but were little known elsewhere. They took events in earlier German history as their themes, sometimes influenced by the historical drama of the 1770s to 1830s. Since Germany had played such a leading role in drama, poetry, and philosophy, it is difficult to explain the delay in winning recognition for its historical novel, perhaps due to the greater respect for drama, poetry, music, and philosophy. Willibald Alexis prepared the way for Fontane in many respects through his attention to provincial history and landscape. Himself influenced by Flaubert, Fontane’s influence in turn prepared the way for Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks’ in 1899—not an historical novel, but one in which the history of a fictionalized family plays a fundamental part. ‘Before the Storm’, like Galdós and Tolstoy, dealt with the problem of occupation by the French and the morality of resistance to Napoleon’s armies. The novel occasioned much criticism because of its construction, leaving the actual fighting until the very end, and luxuriating, as it were, in local and family details and conversations among friends and relatives. This, however, gives the book its particular strength as a provincial portrayal of life before national unification in 1871. Fontane’s lack of enthusiasm for the Prussian-created Second Reich is implicit throughout the novel.

This chapter examines developments in the musical career of Johann Sebastian Bach in Cothen during the period from 1717 to 1723. In December 1717, Bach accepted Prince Leopold's offer to become music director of his collegium musicum and in March 1721 he completed the composition and dedication of the six Brandenburgh Concertos, which were among the most buoyant and inspiriting of all of Bach's works.

Captain Thomas H. Hines, Lieutenant John M. Porter, and eighty men from the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry were sent by John Hunt Morgan to the area between Brandenburg and Covington, Kentucky, because crossing the Ohio River had to be completed before the entire division would be able to reenter the area. They were tasked with scouting for Federal occupation forces concentrations and determining which river sites were most appropriate for Morgan's operations. Porter chose the river crossing at Brandenburg but Hines and the others chose a river in Cincinnati. As they had already moved as far as Boston, Kentucky, Federal forces attacked them and several of Porter's men were killed and captured. While Porter was also seized, Hines escaped and was able to get the “Copperheads” to assist Morgan's command in Indiana.

August 12, 1951. It’s a brilliant Sunday afternoon in the eastern sector of Berlin, the DDR’s capital, now an urban showplace of 1.7 million residents and proudly known on road signs as Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR—a simple declaration of the SED’s ongoing claim to the entire city as DDR territory. The boulevards are clean and neat in Alexanderplatz, the downtown area of East Berlin. Windows are bedecked with flowers, and flags from every nation of the globe festoon the buildings, which are draped with tapestries displaying the goal of world socialism in dozens of languages: Friede, Pokoj, Paix, Beke, Pax, Pace, Peace. But a walk off the main drag casts doubt on whether there is much cause to preen: six years after the war’s close, block after block of row houses are still gutted. The decrepit trolley cars are slow-moving war survivors; postwar automobiles are nowhere to be seen, except for a few “official” vehicles of the government and People’s Police. Rubble lines every side street. The National Reconstruction Program, a much-publicized campaign to repair the DDR’s war-scarred cities, is not slated to begin until late fall. Economic reconstruction is barely under way. But ideological reconstruction is well advanced. Waves of Blueshirts, 100 abreast, pass at the rate of 30 ranks per minute in the gala marking the climax of the two-week World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace. Sponsored by the international Communist Youth Organization, this year’s festival dwarfs its predecessors in Prague (1947) and Budapest (1949), as well as the “Storm Berlin” Deutschlandtreffen (German rally) of 500,000 youth in May 1950. The theme for the 1951 festival is “Stalin’s Call to Arms for Peace.” The vast majority of the participants belong to the FDJ and JP, which together boast almost three million members. Down the treeless center parkway of Unter den Linden—the lime trees were cut down years ago—and from the side streets filled with debris sweep one million East Germans, along with 26,000 foreign guests from 104 countries.

In the fall of 1990, a hit movie comedy opened to packed houses in eastern German theaters. Go, Trabi, Go!—the producers gave the film an English title—celebrated with rollicking Weltschmerz the misadventures of Georg, a hapless baby-blue Trabant 601—whose jinxed capers make him the undeniable screen successor to Herbie, the Disney VW Beetle of the 1960s. Georg stalls pitifully on the Autobahn, is shorn of his bumper in Munich traffic, is robbed of all four tires by pranksters during a camping stop, and even gets mistaken for scrap near an auto junkyard, an obvious metaphor for the DDR running out of gas—as it lurches toward unity. Go, Trabi, Go! begins with DDR German teacher Udo Struutz deciding to fulfill a long-deferred dream: his first journey to the West will be to travel from his hellhole hometown of industrial Bitterfield, the dirtiest city in all of Eastern Europe, to balmy Naples, thereby tracing the footsteps of his beloved Goethe, whose Italian Journey recorded his own (less quixotic) southern pilgrimage from Weimar in the 1780s. Herr Struutz packs his wife and daughter into little Georg, a family member for 20 years whom Herr Struutz lovingly wipes down with his own washcloth. “See Naples and Die!” scrawls Herr Struutz on Georg’s trunk, recalling Goethe’s clarion call to self-actualization: “Sterbe und werde!” (“die and become!”). The adventure turns out to be a story of Innocent Ossis Abroad and their psychological collision with the West. Numerous scenes in Go, Trabi, Go! allude to the region’s plight: putt-putting along on the Autobahn, little Georg strains to do his maximum speed of 60 mph as contemptuous Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, and BMWs fly by; broken-down in Bavaria, Georg costs the Struutz family a steep (an outrageously inflated) price for repair, which the intrepid socialist entrepreneurs earn by charging curious Bavarians DM 5 for a “Trabi Peep Show” and a five-minute joy ride in Georg. Reassuringly, the Struutz family eventually does reach its destination, albeit with the accident-prone but indomitable Georg—now minus his top—as a breezy convertible.

What was it like to be a junior faculty member and longtime SED supporter under the Honecker regime? “I had a place secured, a paved road before me,” came the answer, as if from a great distance. “You—you’ve spent your whole life competing. We haven’t. My career track was clear—Dozent, then Professor, then Ordinarius. In time, if I were reasonably productive, it would have all been there. Now, no university in Germany will have me. Probably I’ll have to emigrate. That’s the only way to escape everyone forever asking me what I did in the Party and why I did it.” On a cold, drizzling, smoggy Leipzig afternoon in December 1990, Jürgen, a wissenschaftlicher Assistent (lecturer) in political science, sits in a dingy, secondfloor cafe a few blocks from the Karl-Marx Universität, telling me in a low voice about his life as a Party activist and organizer at the University. Authorities have just announced that several departments—among them law, political science, journalism, and M-L, will soon be shut down; Jürgen expects to be released in six months. He has spent the last 10 years at the oldest university in eastern Germany, widely regarded as the second-leading DDR university after Humboldt University of East Berlin. Talk has been buzzing that Humboldt could soon be closed down altogether, since united Berlin doesn’t need a rival to the Free University—and since old Cold Warriors at the FU have hardly forgotten being driven from Humboldt in the late ’40s. Such a scenario would leave the Karl-Marx Universität the top university in the east. But Jürgen’s mind is elsewhere. Academic politics holds little interest for him now; it all seems curiously irrelevant. Abwicklung is the order of the day in Leipzig, a city of 560,000, the second largest in eastern Germany. Those who served the Karl-Marx Universität in “ideologically burdened” departments, or who held Party offices, or who had contact with the Stasi, will probably not retain their positions.

Western Berlin, October 3, 1991. Tag der Einheit: “Unity Day.” The first anniversary celebrating German reunification. Or perhaps “marking” reunification is a more accurate term. No jubilant talk of a New Germany, no flag-waving nearby. My forehead pressed against the cool glass of the third-storey living-room window, I watch a half-dozen skinheads swagger in the street below. “Asylanten Raus!” (“Asylum Seekers Out!”) they chant. “Deutschland den Deutschen!” (“Germany for the Germans!”). Black jeans, jackboots, bomber jackets stabbed with Waffen SS insignias. Dirty blond hair clipped close on the sides, Hitler-style, with a single long forelock. Punk turned political with a vengeance. Waving swastikas, shouting the inevitable yet overwhelming “Sieg Heil!” they’re heading toward the Breitscheidplatz, West Berlin’s central square. Behind me, the Thursday evening news. The sparkle of holiday fireworks gives way to the explosion of terror sweeping across the country. Shelters for asylum seekers torched in Karlsruhe in the southwest and Dusseldorf in the northwest. On the island of Rügen, in the Baltic, a dormitory for refugees razed and incinerated; two Lebanese children severely burned. A hostel for foreigners firebombed in Bremen. “. . . at least 16 racist assaults within 48 hours, bringing the number of attacks to 1,387 since the beginning of the year: the worst outbreak of violence since Hitler’s Germany.” The right-wing German People’s Party, which has just captured an alarming six seats in Bremen’s local elections, does not denounce the violence; its spokesman instead urges immediate restrictions on immigration. A conservative minister pitches Prime Minister Kohl’s proposal to push through a constitutional amendment curbing Germany’s liberal provisions for asylum, which have already opened the doors to more than 1.3 million foreigners since 1989. An interview with historian Golo Mann: “It’s 1933 again.” But dinner is ready. Wolfgang, 44, a wissenschaftlicher Assistent (lecturer) in sociology at the Free University of Berlin, joins me at the window. He takes a long drag of his cigarette. “The Hitler Youth of the ’90s,” Wolfgang says. “German Unity!?! Who knows what this ‘new Germany’ will lead to?” He turns his back on the receding parade of young faschos.

This chapter focuses on the German slave traders who played, at most, a minor part in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. The ending of the Brandenburg slave trade came quite abruptly after 1700, not only because of financial constraints but also because the English and French chose to stop buying slaves from the Germans. German involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was always dependent on broader political and economic conjunctures, as the German states were unable to provide sufficient resources to promote trading companies on their own. Although the Germans did not play a major role in the slave trade, the history of their involvement, especially that of Brandenburg-Prussia, provides an interesting example of how smaller states tried to share this trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Chapter Five considers how the imagery of message-sending was adopted, in the early sixteenth century, by prints that figured contemporary Humanists—such as Erasmus of Rotterdam—in the guise of letter-writing saints. This chapter proposes the condition of interception, in which private letters were brought to press, as a context in which to consider Dürer’s engraved portraits of his contemporaries. These images announce themselves as faithful representations at the same time that they allude proleptically to their already obsolescent resemblance to their prototypes.

As Capellmeister, Bach was in charge of all musical matters at the court of Cöthen. Although the prince’s Reformed religious faith ruled out the performance of church cantatas, Bach did compose occasional vocal works for special occasions. His chief works of this period, however, were suites, sonatas, and concertos for the court instrumental ensemble, as well as keyboard music for his family and pupils. Among the famous compositions composed or completed at Cöthen and discussed in this chapter are the inventions, Well-Tempered Clavier, organ sonatas, cello suites, sonatas and partitas for violin and flute, and Brandenburg Concertos.

Shortly after the war, preservationists lobbied for funds to carry out emergency repairs to key structures on Unter den Linden. The SMAD displayed little interest, and German Communist politicians sought to efface monumental buildings as symbols of the Prussian-German monarchy and military. The adoption of socialist realism in 1950 meant that valuable architecture should be restored as national cultural heritage. Buildings created for cultural purposes were readily rehabilitated, while those with militaristic place-based meaning prompted debate over how best to reinterpret them. Socialist realism allowed multiple possibilities, and decision-makers sought a solution that best mitigated concerns over militarism while maintaining conceptual and formal continuity.

This chapter examines the conditions that may facilitate or impede state building. It explores case studies that illustrate the effect of border norms on weak states, examining four cases at its initial stage—Brandenburg-Prussia in 1640, Argentina in 1810, Lebanon in 1943, and Congo in 1960. The preconditions explored are economic conditions, arbitrary borders and ethnic diversity, administrative capacity, and population density.

This chapter examines case studies of weak states in a world of flexible borders—Brandenburg-Prussia, Argentina, and Poland-Lithuania, It first examines the weakness of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1640 and the territorial pressures exerted on Brandenburg-Prussia between that year and 1740. This is followed by an examination of the effects of territorial pressures on state building in Argentina in the period of 1810 to 1880. Finally, the chapter explores state building in Poland-Lithuania from 1648 to 1795.