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Open research questions in European history and politics

478 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 6,249 European history and politics papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • OnI> local communities rrpresentrttives ot’ths Lvere In ;L position between the citizen and his society, because in the community: the is scarcely IBU’s to bc rhr idea l‘rderal to founding dll‘ferentlated that govcrnmr‘nt mcdiatt’ The France-German Slsrer Citier .

    The ideals and origins of the Franco-German, sister cities movement, 1945–70 · 1987 · DOI

  • Whoever wishes to control what is not yet understood has to control everybody and everything.

    GENETICS AFTER AUSCHWITZ · 1987 · DOI

  • The paper identifies a gap in understanding the impact of the Junkerschulen on SS recruits. The study examines how the ideology changed as the goals of the Regime changed.

    Disseminating Ideology in the SS: The Nazi SS-Junkerschulen · 2026 · DOI

  • The paper identifies a gap in understanding how language is used to define national belonging. The analysis addresses the need to examine the interplay between language ideologies and statistical categories.

    The Construction and Contestation of National Identity via Language as a Statistical Category in Germany · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should examine the topic-specific conflicts that lead to attacks on scholars in other contexts. It should also study the patterns of attacks against scholars in other countries using survey studies.

    Patterns of attacks against scholars in Germany: controversial topics as contexts and accelerators of science hostility · 2026 · DOI

  • The gap is that prior work has not examined the topic-specific conflicts that lead to attacks on scholars in the context of Germany. The gap is also that prior work has not studied the patterns of attacks against scholars in Germany using a survey study.

    Patterns of attacks against scholars in Germany: controversial topics as contexts and accelerators of science hostility · 2026 · DOI

  • There is a lack of comprehensive English-language accounts of Budapest's wartime history. The history of Budapest's wartime experience has often remained confined to Hungarian historiography.

    LeBor, Adam. The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance, 1940-1945. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2025, pp. 512 · 2026 · DOI

  • The paper's analysis is limited to the magazine "Die Freundin" and its content. The paper's analysis is also limited by the historical context of the Weimar Republic.

    Dzik i dama · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could analyze other magazines and their representation of non-normative identities. Future research could also examine the impact of the magazine "Die Freundin" on the lesbian and trans community.

    Dzik i dama · 2026 · DOI

  • Limited to the first year of the Treuhand's existence for internal rating scores, - Excluded firms that were restituted to previously expropriated owners or municipalized, - Limited to firms with available data on labor productivity and ownership

    The big sell: Privatizing East Germany’s economy · 2025 · DOI

  • Little evidence exists on how industrial policy is designed and implemented. There is a lack of understanding of the role of labor productivity in privatization decisions. The paper identifies a gap in the literature on the implementation of privatization policies in the context of the East German economy.

    The big sell: Privatizing East Germany’s economy · 2025 · DOI

  • Although Leningrad homosexuals had been under surveillance and selectively prosecuted by the secret service since the early 1930s, their consistent prosecution in the summer and autumn of 1933 was not only a result of growing and organized homophobia on the part of the Soviet state, but also connected to a little known campaign to establish a link between homosexuality and fascism.

    The Recriminalization of Homosexuality under Stalin: New Sources, New Answers · 2025 · DOI

  • While there is some evidence that governments respond to such petitions, little is known about the nature of this responsiveness: can petitions influence resource allocation and yield tangible improvements to citizens’ livelihoods? To answer this question, we assemble a novel panel of housing-related petitions to the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all housing constructed between 1945 and 1989.

    Do Autocrats Respond to Citizen Demands? Petitions and Housing Construction in the GDR · 2025 · DOI

  • The JRU has remained a somewhat understudied body relative to other Jewish organizations active in DP camps and this article, based on personnel files and field reports archived at London’s Wiener Library and the London Metropolitan Archives, centres JRU aid workers as valuable objects of study in their own right, in line with increased historiographical interest in the backgrounds and world-views of postwar UNRRA operatives.

    Anglo-Jewish Humanitarianism and the Jewish Relief Unit, 1943–1950 · 2022 · DOI

  • Despite his apparent prominence as one of the five ‘Young German’ writers whose work was banned by the Bundestagsbeschluß of December 1835, Heinrich Laube is an author whose Vormärz publications are underresearched and inadequately contextualized.

    Heinrich Laube’s European Moment · 2022 · DOI

  • 1 Rarely studied by historians of the Holocaust, the questions brought to rabbis, and the advice and answers they gave, provide a close-up and rare glimpse into how Jewish communities responded at the time to the attacks on their lives, and provide telling witness of the Nazi attempt to make European Jews the agents of their own destruction.

    Rabbinic Responsa and Spiritual Resistance during the Holocaust: The Life-for-Life Problem · 2019 · DOI

  • By examining his Geschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten europäischen Völkern (1792), written in response to the French Revolution and the contemporary circumstances of the Holy Roman Empire, this article sheds new light on his work, as well as on an under-researched line of thought in the 1790s.

    BOURGEOIS MODERNITY VERSUS THE HISTORICAL ARISTOCRACY IN CHRISTOPH MEINERS'S POLITICAL THOUGHT · 2018 · DOI

  • Kelman (bio), Tony Michels (bio), and Riv-Ellen Prell (bio) Sensing that 1968 was a critical, but underexplored, turning point in the reenvisioning and reimagining of Jewish life in the United States, we organized a conference on "The Jewish 1968 and its Legacies.

    Introduction, The Jewish 1968 and its Legacies · 2018 · DOI

  • More specifically, the book tries to understand what caused the different patterns of behavior adopted by the Holocaust’s Jewish victims in three important, but understudied communities—Minsk (USSR), Kraków (Poland), and Białystok (Poland 1922–1939, USSR 1939–1941).

    Choice and Survival Across Approaches and Disciplines · 2018 · DOI

  • This paper will survey much of that scholarship for the English-speaking world; it will probe the contents of the two works in which his primary concepts are presented; there will be detail on Naumann's excursions into Nazism�based to some degree on information found in a 2001 �biographical novel� by his son Andreas Naumann, which has not yet been assessed by Naumann scholars.

    Hans Naumann's gesunkenes Kulturgut and primitive Gemeinschaftskultur · 2014 · DOI

  • The narrative describes in considerable detail the inevitable friction between citizens steeped in the ways of democracy and Nazi [End Page 122] administrators whose experience was limited to the blunt exercise of power.

    Occupied: Denmark's Adaptation and Resistance to German Occupation 1940-1945 by Nathaniel Hong · 2013 · DOI

  • The article makes a clear distinction between the violent (and under-researched) offences of the self-styled neo-Nazi groups and the activities (which have been well documented) of the larger right-wing extremist political parties, namely Republikaner, Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and Deutsche Volksunion (DVU).

    Much More Than a Phantom Menace! Assessing the Character, Level and Threat of Neo-Nazi Violence in Germany, 1977–2003 · 2006 · DOI

  • Abstract Based on an important source which has hardly been used to date, data drawn from the 1939 Nazi Party membership census, this article contributes to our limited knowledge of the sociography of the membership of the Nazi Party at the micro‐level and that of its most important specialist organisations during the Third Reich.

    The Sociography of the Nazi Party in a Catholic County: The 1939 Census of the Membership of the NSDAP in County Aachen · 2005 · DOI

  • If so much previous historical writing on this period has been limited by a heavy reliance on prescriptive, halachic sources that do not necessarily describe the dynamics of everyday Jewish life, we will not solve the problem of obtaining a more balanced and nuanced picture by switching our confidence to personal autobiographies, which have their own set of methodological difficulties.

    "She Sees That Her Merchandise Is Good, and Her Lamp Is Not Extinguished at Nighttime": Glikl's Memoir as Historical Source · 2004 · DOI

  • It focuses on the open questions that addressing the Shoah in education raises—vis‐a‐vis the sequence of generations after 1945, political issues, moral philosophy, and Christian‐Jewish relationships.

    ‘EDUCATION AFTER AUSCHWITZ”— PERSPECTIVES FROM GERMANY · 2000 · DOI

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478 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 6,249 European history and politics papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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