Conference Group for Central European History
Newsletter
Spring 2002

Dear Colleagues,

Here is the Spring 2002 Newsletter.  Items of particular interest include the report of the Editor of Central European History, the report of the 2001-2002 Article Prize Committee, the announcement of the competition for the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize to be awarded in January 2003, the availability of free back issues of CEH, and guidelines for submitting proposals for panels to be presented at the AHA meeting.  To go directly to a subject listed in the table of contents, please click on the relevant line below.

Kees Gispen

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Contents

Report of the Business Meeting in San Francisco, 5 January 2002
        Welcome by the President
        Report of the Executive Secretary and Treasurer
        Report of the Editor of Central European History
        Report of the 2001-2002 Article Prize Committee
        Report of the Nominating Committee
        Report of the Archives Committee
        Report from the German Historical Institute
        Report from the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History
        New Business
              CGCEH Sessions at the annual AHA meeting
Announcements
        Guidelines for Submitting Panel Proposals to the CGCEH-Sponsored Segment of the AHA Program
        2002-2003 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize and Prize Committee
        Editorship of Central European History to become vacant in 2004
        Back issues of CEH (Vols. 1-23) available free of charge
        2002 Executive Committee
        Nominations for positions on the Executive Committee
        Contact the editor of the Newsletter

    Business Meeting, San Francisco

5 January 2002

Welcome and Introductory Remarks by the President
President Konrad Jarausch chaired the meeting and welcomed all those in attendance.  Jarausch  invited everyone to participate in the Bierabend (which commenced at 6:00 p.m. in the adjacent room and drew a large and energized crowd).  The minutes of last year’s business meeting were approved.

Report of the Executive Secretary and Treasurer
Kees Gispen reported on the Conference Group’s finances and gave the following overview.

Budget summary January 2001-January 2002

The business meeting approved the 2001 financial report. 

Report of the Editor of Central European History
Ken Barkin presented the following overview.

Publishing record for 2001:

At the publisher:

Current editorial status (January 2002):

Barkin read the following statement:

    "You may remember that Humanities Press went bankrupt some four year ago and was bought up by Brill Publishers of Leiden, The Netherlands.  Our contract with Humanities was taken over and continued in existence until last year, when we signed a somewhat revised contract with Brill for five years.  Brill has brought out the issues in a timely and professional manner and is doing an index of all the issues from CEH's first volume in 1968 through volume 34 (2001).  Since last January the publisher decided to change the cover of the journal and submitted the proposed cover for my consideration.  I recommended two changes and I was delighted to see that my suggestions were accepted.
    Since the change in publishers there have been some problems with circulation.  Some subscribers have not received renewal forms and others have not gotten copies of the journal despite having paid for the succeeding year.  In 1996 we had about 1,000 subscribers and are currently at 850.  We have made known our concerns to Brill and they have hired a firm to advise them about regaining lapsed subscribers.  As part of their effort Brill has sent free issues to those who have not renewed their subscriptions.
    Lastly, as some of you may have noticed, Brill decided to raise the subscription price for both individuals and institutions for the current volume.  The price in 2001 went from $42.00 to $68.00 for individuals and from $78 to $158.00 for institutions.  In part, this is a result of the cost of producing the index.  These decisions were made in Brill's headquarters in Leiden.  As a result of cooperation between Brill's American office in Boston and Kees Gispen, the secretary of the Conference Group, we have received a commitment from Brill/Europe to lower the prices for the next volume to $50.00 for individuals and $125.00 for institutions.  We owe a debt of gratitude to Kees and Patrick Alexander of Brill/Boston for the reduction in rates.
    Recently, Doug Unfug called me to say the storage of CEH issues from 1968 to 1991 at Emory University will no longer be possible.  The question arises: How many copies of each volume should be kept available for prospective purchasers.  The problem is complicated because Emory would like to send the issues to my office as soon as possible and, of course, the journal will be moving from Riverside in 2002 when a new editor assumes office.  Currently, Emory has the copyright for the pre-1991 issues, but according to Unfug, is willing to surrender it to CEH.  Lastly, storage is not readily available at Riverside.  If we decided to keep ten copies of each volume that would come to over 900 issues.  The executive committee met on this issue and decided to accept all of the issues available.  These will be donated to libraries in the United Sates that have incomplete runs or to libraries that have not been subscribers, and possibly to libraries in the formerly East German universities)."  
    (Newsletter editor's note: Please see below (free back issues) for details concerning the disposition of the approximately forty sets of CEH (vols. 1-23) that have become available.)

Barkin also announced rotations in the editorial board of CEH.  Celia Applegate, Jonathan Sperber, and Bill Hagen have left the board; Mary Lindemann, Alon Confino, and Roger Chickering have filled the vacancies.
    

Report of the 2001-2002 Article Prize Committee
The next item of business was the report of the article prize committee, which consisted of Atina Grossmann, Isabel Hull, and Craig Koslofsky (chair).  The prize was awarded to George Williamson (University of Alabama) for his article, "What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819" published in the Journal of Modern History 72 (December 2000): 890-943.  Koslofsky came to the podium and read the following statement explaining the award. 

     The article prize committee of the Conference Group for Central European History is pleased to award the prize for the best article published in 1999-2000 to George S. Williamson for "What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819" published in the Journal of Modern History 72 (December 2000): 890-943. George S. Williamson is assistant professor in History at the University of Alabama .
    Williamson's article is a broad, deeply researched, and creative re-evaluation of an emblematic event of the early 19th-century: the murder of the popular writer August von Kotzebue by the student Karl Sand on March 23, 1819 . Kotzebue's murder was the proximate cause of the Karlsbad decrees and thus marked the definitive end of the Napoleonic reform period and the beginning of the repressive era of Metternich. Despite the significance of the event, it has been shrouded in clichés from the start. Williamson reinterprets the murder by framing it within the wide context of the new, post-Napoleonic, bourgeois civil society and its literary self-expression.
    Truly impressive is Williamson's skill in integrating questions about anti-Semitism, Jews in German society, and the gendered consumption of literature with nationalism and German Protestantism, thus crafting a compelling a story about individual fates and idiosyncrasies that successfully touches on all the major themes of nineteenth-century German history. The article is engagingly written and solidly based in the history of literature, of sexuality, of politics, and in philosophy. More than just intellectual history, it explains why this murder, rather than some other event, became emblematic of a sea-change in Central European politics. It breaks through the stereotyped opposition of liberalism to conservatism and reveals the death of "Enlightenment" at the hands of the new liberals. In our own historical moment, this case study of an act of terror by a self-proclaimed "holy martyr" who kills to strike against the corruptions of a feminized and commercialized cosmopolitan culture is especially apposite and provocative.

Williamson was not present to accept the award in person.

Report of the Nominating Committee
Next on the agenda was the report of the 2001 nominating committee.  President Jarausch announced the nominees: Jonathan Sperber for Vice-President Elect and Dagmar Herzog for a three-year term on the executive committee.  Both nominations were approved by voice vote.  The term of service for these positions commenced January 6, 2002.

The business meeting also approved the executive committee's recommendation that Roger Chickering and Gerald Feldman be reappointed to their positions as the Conference Group's delegates to Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington.

Report of the Archives Committee
David Barclay, chair of the Archives Committee, presented the following report. 

The Archives Committee convened on 5 January 2002 at Max’s Diner in San Francisco .  Noting that the meeting was attended by Geoffrey Giles ( University of Florida ) and Alan Steinweis ( University of Nebraska ), the chair promptly declared a quorum and proceeded.
    The Committee reviewed several issues that had come up during the preceding year.  These included the temporary but extraordinarily ill-timed and inconvenient closing of the Landesarchiv in Berlin; the transfer to the National Archives of approximately 250 rolls of microfilm from the Berlin Document Center, most of which contain personnel files concerning teachers in the NS-Lehrerbund as well as judges in the party courts (plus some files on the Volksgericht); the recent court case involving Helmut Kohl and the question of scholarly access to Stasi records; and the recent Executive Order in the United States limiting access to Presidential records from the Reagan and first Bush administrations, which, among other things, could have negative consequences for scholars working in Central European history during the latter years of the Cold War.   The Committee also discussed matters pertaining to access and use of other archives in Central Europe .  The general consensus was that things are running rather smoothly and that most scholars are encountering little difficulty in accessing the materials they need. The chair especially praised the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin for doing a good job under sometimes difficult conditions.
    Later that day, the chair presented his report to the full business meeting of the CGCEH.  It was agreed that the Landesarchiv matter was now moot, as the archive has reopened.  It was also noted that archival operations are running smoothly in Prague .  Much of the discussion centered on the Kohl case and access to Stasi records.  Some members favored sending a letter to Wolfgang Thierse in support of a Gesetzesnovelle in the Bundestag that would regularize the question of scholarly access; other members were wary of such a course of action.  The membership agreed to study the issue further.  The meeting also agreed to the following:
    1)  With regard to the Executive Order on Presidential papers, the chair will contact the AHA Coordinating Committee and express CGCEH support for that committee’s response to the Executive Order;
    2)  The Archives Committee will send a letter of appreciation to Dr. Timothy Mulligan (National Archives) for his fine efforts in connection with the transfer of microfilm from the Berlin Document Center ;
    3)  The Archives Committee will send a letter of appreciation to the Director of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, thanking the archive for its fine efforts in recent years;
    4)  The Archives Committee will use H-GERMAN to solicit both complaints AND praise from archive users.

Report from the German Historical Institute in Washington
Richard Wetzell, Research Fellow at the GHI, gave the following report from the German Historical Institute in Washington.  

    I. The GHI has a new Director: Dr. Christof Mauch, who had been serving as Acting Director since the fall of 1999. Starting June 2002, the new Deputy Director will be Dr. Dirk Schumann, currently DAAD Professor at Emory University .
    II. The GHI has strengthened its programs for doctoral students and recent Ph.D.s. The are now four annual programs, two of which are new:
             1. The Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar, which brings together North American and European doctoral students working on German history. The upcoming (eighth) Seminar is dedicated to German History 1945-1990 and will take place at the ZZF in Potsdam in May 2002.
             2. The Young Scholars Forum, for North American doctoral students and recent Ph.D.s, dedicated to a different topic every year. The first one, on “Gender, Power and Religion--Forces in Cultural History,” took place in March 2001. The upcoming Forum, meeting at the GHI in March 2002, will deal with “War and Society: Germany and Europe in Comparative Perspective.”
             3. The Medieval History Seminar, for doctoral students from Europe and North America . The first one took place in the fall of 2001. The next one will meet in Berlin in October 2002.
             4. The Summer Seminar in Paleography and Archival Studies, for North American doctoral students interested in getting an introduction to old German handwriting and German archives, which takes place in Germany every June.
     III. As of Jan. 1, 2002 , the GHI has gotten much-needed additional space by occupying the fourth floor of the building on New Hampshire Ave. The German-American Center for Visiting Scholars (GACVS), which formerly occupied the fourth floor, has been dissolved.
    IV. The Friends of the German Historical Institute have intensified their fundraising activities. Funding for the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize is now assured for the next ten years thanks to generous grants from the Zeit-Stiftung, the German Marshall Fund and many individual donors.
    V. The GHI is offering a new fellowship, the Thyssen-Heideking Fellowship established in memory of Jürgen Heideking. This is a one-year post-doctoral fellowship to be spent in residence at the University of Cologne for North American recent Ph.D.s working in twentieth-century international history.

 Further information on GHI fellowships, programs and upcoming conferences can be found at the Institute’s website: http://www.ghi-dc.org

Report from the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History
Gary Cohen, Executive Secretary of the SAHH, presented the following report. 

The executive committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History met during the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2002 in San Francisco and elected Prof. Pieter M. Judson (Swarthmore College) as the new executive secretary to serve until January 2004.   Prof. Lawrence Wolff (Boston College) was elected as a new member of the executive committee to serve until January 2007.  The current membership of the executive committee is

Elected members:
Prof. Gary B. Cohen (University of Minnesota), Jan. 1998-Jan 2003: recording secretary (to Jan. 2003)
Prof. Pieter Judson (Swarthmore College), Jan 1999-Jan 2004: executive secretary (Jan 2002-Jan 2004)
Prof. Lois Dubin (Smith College), Jan. 2000-Jan 2005
Prof. Howard Louthan (University of Florida), Jan 2001-Jan. 2006
Prof. Lawrence Wolff (Boston College), Jan. 2000-Jan 2005

Ex officio members:
Prof. Gary B. Cohen, Director, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota
Prof. Franz Szabo, Director, Canadian Centre for Austrian Studies, University of Alberta
Prof. Charles Ingrao (Purdue University), Editor, Austrian History Yearbook

On behalf also of the Center for Austrian Studies and the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, Cohen further reported that Dr. Christa Gaug has been awarded the ACF Dissertation Prize for 2001 for her University of Texas, Austin, doctoral thesis, entitled "Situating the City:  The Textual and Spatial Construction of Late-Nineteenth Century Berlin and Vienna in City Texts by Theodor Fontane and Daniel Spitzer."  The jury for the prize commented that "This dissertation is impressive in its methodological and disciplinary scope, identifying a literary genre, the 'city text,' in order to come to conclusions about the creation of an urban identity parallel and connected to the national identities of Austria and Germany."

The ACF Book Prize for 2001 was awarded to Evan Burr Bukey's Hitler's Austria:  Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).  The jury praised Prof. Bukey's book for its wide-ranging research in source documents and its new, highly nuanced perspectives on differences in support of the Nazi regime and ideology among various age groups and social classes and on tensions and rivalries within the Nazi governing apparatus

New Business

Status and future of CGCEH Sessions at the annual AHA meeting
    President Jarausch reported on the status and the presence of Conference Group sessions at the annual AHA meeting.  He recounted how three different paths have evolved by which the CG marks its presence at this year's AHA meetings.  First, the vice-president and president customarily organize and encourage panels for submission to the AHA program committee.  If accepted, these panels are listed in the AHA program as co-sponsored by the AHA and the CGCEH.  Second, the AHA has in recent years given the Executive Secretary a list of all the panels with Central European themes approved by the program committee.  After panel organizers give their express approval, these panels, too, have been listed in the AHA program as jointly sponsored by the AHA and the CGCEH.  
    Third, a number of panels that the 2001 AHA program committee rejected nonetheless appeared in the printed program and took place with the sole sponsorship of the CGCEH.  This road to the program is new.  In 2001 the AHA made a number of changes allowing closer integration of the official AHA program and the numerous sessions that AHA-affiliated societies have long organized under their own auspices.  In the new system, such solo-sponsored panels by the affiliates are fully integrated into the main part of the AHA program, printed in the program in the same size and with the same font as the AHA-sponsored panels.  The AHA administrative staff handles all the details of room and time-slot assignments.  There is no financial cost to the affiliates.  The only difference in the printed program is another numbering system and a by-line showing that the panels in question are solo-sponsored by the affiliate society.  
    The question Jarausch raised for discussion was whether the current three-pronged system should be kept in place, and if so, whether any formal procedures should be adopted in this regard.  Following discussion, the business meeting voted to maintain the status quo of 2001/2002.  It was decided that the CGCEH will not develop a separate program committee of its own.  Instead, the CGCEH will limit itself to considering for solo-sponsorship those Central-European panel proposals that the AHA's program committee has rejected.  The CGCEH's executive board will decide whether any or all of the rejected panels are to be solo-sponsored.  The procedural guidelines for decisions in this regard will essentially be the same as those observed by the AHA: No one is allowed to present a paper in two consecutive years. 

The business meeting adjourned at 6:30 p.m.  Incoming president David Crew began his official duties by inviting those in attendance to the Bierabend, which had started in the room next door thirty minutes earlier.

Announcements

Guidelines for Submitting Panel Proposals to the CGCEH-Sponsored Segment of the AHA Program

AHA panel organizers whose proposals were rejected by the AHA program committee but who would like their proposals to be reconsidered for solo-sponsorship by the CGCEH are encouraged to submit copies of their AHA proposals to the CGCEH's executive secretary.  The decisions of the Executive Board will be communicated as soon as possible.

In January 2003 the Conference Group will award its biennial Hans Rosenberg prize of $750 for the best book in Central European history.  Central European history is understood to include all German-speaking countries as well as areas previously included within the Habsburg monarchy.  This year the prize competition is open to books published in 2000 or 2001, in English, by permanent residents of North America. The Conference Group discourages submissions of reprints, second editions, multi-authored anthologies, and document publications.  Letters of nomination for the prize may be submitted by authors, publishers, or others, and should be addressed to the chair of the book prize committee, Prof. Jeffry Diefendorf.  Nomination deadline: June 30, 2002. 

For further information, please contact the executive secretary of the Conference Group, Kees Gispen, Department of History, University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677, email: hsgispen@olemiss.edu, telephone: 662-915-7148, fax: 662-915-7033.

Editorship of Central European History

The editorship of Central European History will become vacant in the spring of 2004, when current editor Ken Barkin will retire.  Individuals or teams interested in the editorship of Central European History are encouraged to contact any one of the members of the ad hoc committee for selecting a new editor: Ken Barkin, David Blackbourn, David Crew, Kees Gispen, Konrad Jarausch, or Pieter Judson, for further information.  The ad-hoc committee has set a deadline of July 1, 2002 for submission of complete, written proposals to take over the editorship.  Proposals must include a statement concerning the amount and a guarantee of financial support and should be sent to the Executive Secretary.

Back issues of CEH (Vols. 1-23) available free of charge

At the business meeting it was announced that Emory University and Douglas Unfug, the former publisher and editor of CEH, have generously agreed to make available for donation to university and institute libraries their remaining stock of back issues of CEH.  Approximately forty complete sets of back issues for the years 1968-1990 (volumes 1-23) are now available upon request from the Executive Secretary.  Prospective recipients should meet two conditions: (1) the sets are for institutional  libraries only and not intended for personal libraries; (2) the sets can be shipped only if the recipient agrees to pay for the cost of shipping, plus a $20.00 handling fee.  The handling fee is to defray the cost of private, commercial storage, sorting, and packing.  The sets will be given out on a first-come first-served basis.  At the time of the Newsletter's publication ten (10) institutions have already signed up.  Interested scholars who have checked with their libraries or other institutional representatives should contact the Executive Secretary as soon as possible.

2002 Executive Committee

The members of the Conference Group’s 2002 executive committee are:
President: David Crew, University of Texas at Austin
Vice-President: David Blackbourn, Harvard University
Vice-President Elect: Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri, Columbia
Immediate Past President: Konrad Jarausch, University of North Carolina and University of Potsdam
At-Large Member (exp. January 2003): Doris Bergen, University of Notre Dame
At-Large Member (exp. January 2004): Peter Black, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
At-Large Member (exp. January 2005): Dagmar Herzog, Michigan State University
Editor of Central European History, Kenneth Barkin, University of California, Riverside
Executive Secretary and Treasurer, Kees Gispen, University of Mississippi

2002 Nominations Committee

The Conference Group’s 2002 nominating committee is made up of the executive committee.  The committee has nominated Roger Chickering, Georgetown University, for the position of Vice-President Elect and Kevin Repp, Yale University, for a three-year term on the executive committee.  Nominations will be voted on at the January 2003 business meeting.  Members are invited to submit additional nominations to the Executive Secretary.

Subscriptions to Central European History

The publisher of CEH, Brill Academic Publishers, is in the process of producing an index to CEH, volumes 1-34.  The index will appear in the first quarter of 2002 as volume 34 (2001), no. 5, and is included in the cost of last year's subscription.  Brill may be contacted at the following addresses:

Brill Academic Publishers
112 Water Street, Suite 400
Boston MA 02109 USA
Phone: 1-800-962-4406 or 1-877-999-7575 (toll free)
Phone: 1-617-263-2323
Fax 617-263-2324
Email: cs@brillusa.com

Subscribers outside North America, please contact:
Brill Academic Publishers
P.O. Box 9000
2300 PA Leiden
The Netherlands 
Phone: +31-71-535-3566 
Fax: +31-71-531-7532 
E-mail: cs@brill.nl

Brill is located on the web at: http://www.brill.nl/

Readers who would like to post information of interest to other members of the Conference Group or have questions should contact the executive secretary:

Kees Gispen
Department of History
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
Telephone: 662-915-7148
FAX: 662-915-7033
Email: hsgispen@olemiss.edu  

This document was last updated 03/04/02