Volume 296, Issue 3 -

The history of Theoderic the Great and the Goths has since the 1960s been studied primarily from the point of view of ethnogenesis und ethnicity; like other ethnic groups of the Migration period the Goths have generally been regarded as social groups constituted by a specific form of ethnic identity. This article takes a different perspective by treating the Goths that were led by Theoderic into Italy as a community of violence: a social group that not only consists of armed men who are experienced in fighting but actually comes into being and is held together by the collective use and/or threat of violence. Booty and subsidies were indispensable for the social cohesion and economic subsistence of this group. The analysis undertaken here is focused on two questions: How was Theoderich able to integrate this community of violence into the kingdom he was building for himself in Italy? The answer proposed runs: by transforming it into a class of landowners that fulfilled the task of a standing army, but was to stand apart from the civilian population – integration by separation. The second question to be analyzed is how this ethnically defined army again became a community of violence during the Roman-Gothic war and in ist course finally dissolved itself.

Between 1831 and 1914 alltogether 171 Belgian students had been enrolled at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität zu Berlin. For many of them it had been possible to study abroad as winners of the travel scholarships competition, organised by the Belgian government. How the number of Belgian ‚Berlin-students‘, as they are called in this article, had developed in this time period of approximately eighty years is described in the first paragraph. Subsequently, the second and third paragraph discuss the assessment of the education at the Berlin University in general and at the medical faculty in particular. The object is to show in what way their experiences abroad had an influence on their ideas about university education, and to what extent these (former) ‚Berlin-students‘ (now in the capacity of professors) attempted to introduce the foreign methods, ways of thinking and practices at their indigeneous institution. Although before 1880 the number of students at the medical faculty was relatively small, it was still mainly in this discipline that the positive reception of the German university model in Belgium could be noticed. Therefore a central question is to what extent the law of 1876, which introduced major reforms at the faculties of science and medicine, was effected by the pleas of these Belgian ‚Berlin-students‘. The concluding paragraph explores the attitude of these students towards their favourite university model in the process of the conversion of the University of Ghent by the German occupier during the First World War.

This article discusses global perspectives on regional history. The first section analyzes standard approaches of European regional historiography with regard to their suitability for research on emerging interregional relations. The following section demonstrates the usefulness of a trans-regional approach through examples from south-western Germany.  Looking in detail at the history of regional-global relations from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period, the focus is on institutions which collect and disseminate knowledge about distant worlds and on the individual and collective agency of the men and women involved. The final section presents some conclusions for future research on regional-global history. It highlights the relational character of the historical formation of space. The trans-regional approach uncovers the flexibility of internal and external borders as well as the overlapping layers of interregional relations. It thus contradicts the notion of a linear development towards ‚globalized regions‘. It is, at the same time, a corrective to state-centred ideas of territoriality. Histories of regional-global relations demonstrate the dynamics of European regionalism. A wider understanding of regional history finally provides insights into the local and regional dimensions of European global experiences and connected world orders.