I MET Hajo Holborn for the first time in the fall of 1923 in the archives of the German Foreign Office. Holborn then was finishing his dissertation and editing the Radowitz papers. This first encounter was followed by many brief and hurried talks amid the files of the German Foreign Office: Holborn showed me an exciting note by Bismarck which he had just discovered, or we talked about German politics. I remember vividly a gloomy morning after the election of Hindenburg as President, which gave a severe shock to those who had set their hopes on the development of a democratic Germany. On walks in Heidelberg where Holborn became a Privatdozent in 1926 I could observe how the southern softness of this corner of Germany enchanted this quiet and deliberate North German and I felt happily confirmed in my pride in my native Baden. Perhaps because of the striking difference my next clear recollections of meetings with Holborn are again those of walks, this time in Hyde Park in London on summer afternoons of 1934. The Londoners' joyful surrender to the rare pleasures of sunny weather stood in sharp contrast to the disquieting news from the Continent on which conversation inevitably turned and which confirmed—more convincingly than anyone could have wished—the correctness and necessity of the decision to leave Germany. But I remember that I admired Holborn's ability to shake off the worry about the events in Germany and to study attentively the English life which surrounded him.

My friendship with Hajo Holborn lasted through a lifetime, almost fifty years to be exact. Holborn used to reminisce about the rather unconventional manner of the beginning of our friendship: as neighbors in one of Meinecke's courses we fell into a conversation—quite contrary to the customary conduct of German students at the time. It so happened that I could be present when, on what was to be his last day, Holborn received the German Inter Nationes award at Godesberg. In a very direct and informal manner he spoke as to friends about his life and his work, thankful “für das, was ich insgesamt als ein glückliches Leben betrachte.”

When in spring 1914 Otto Hintze was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Science he indicated in his inaugural address that his publications in the field of Prussian history most likely had earned him this honor. He added, however, that the history of Prussia was by no means the exclusive aim of his work as a historian. Alluding to the fact that his professorship at the University of Berlin was a chair for general constitutional, administrative, and economic history as well as for political science (Politik), he continued: “The real goal towards which my scholarly endeavors are directed has always been a universal comparative constitutional and administrative history of the West [der Neueren Staatenwelt—a term which for Hintze, as in Ranke's Epochen der Neueren Geschichte, comprised both medieval and modern Europe], especially of the Romance and Germanic speaking nations. It is in this context that Ranke's lifework could and should be complemented.”

Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen's Pillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on the Communist Manifesto without indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.

One of the ironical facts in the history of the Jews in Germany is that it was not until after Hitler came to power that they united and formed for the first time a central organization to represent their interests in politics. Before 1933 German Jews made several attempts to create a separate political platform or pressure group. The first venture had perhaps the best prospects of success. It started around 1900, a time when the ideological divisions that later polarized the German Jews into liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist camps were not yet strongly felt, and when cooperation between liberal and Zionist leaders was possible. Despite what appeared to be an opportune moment, all efforts came to naught. Historians can argue at length over whether or not German Jews committed a grave error in failing to form an independent political front, and whether or not it was possible in Germany for Jews to follow the example of Russian Jews and form an autonomous party. A more fruitful discussion will begin only when historians consider why Jewish leaders, who had stood within the existing party framework since 1848, decided in the late 1890's to organize independently of the liberals to whom they felt indebted for emancipation, and why they never achieved their goal. This essay attempts to answer these questions and to shed light on the political behavior of Jewish notables in Wilhelmian Germany.

During the Second Empire, tens of thousands of poor people from East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Posen moved to Berlin every year. They came primarily to improve their economic position. A large number of them were transient agricultural laborers who had been accosted by private employment agents in Berlin railway stations. Others were provincial craftsmen in declining trades who sought to start a new life in the city: for example the cigar maker hoping to make enough money to buy a tobacco shop. Coming on the mere chance of a job, such men were likely to end up as anything from a coal carrier or hackdriver to kitchen help in the Charité hospital. Most of them became factory hands. Journeymen on the tramp who arrived on foot from as far as the Bohemian border were better off as far as job opportunities went. They had not as yet burnt their bridges and could still move on with a small travel allowance from their guilds if nothing lucrative turned up in Berlin. But Berlin needed young looksmiths, turners, carpenters, molders, tinsmiths, and harnessmakers. (In 1905,72 per cent of the workers in Ludwig Loewe's machine-tool factory were immigrants from outside Berlin.) There were also those who became Berliners in the course of their military service: after two or three years of garrison duty in or near Berlin, a country boy often had no wish to renounce the “big-city life” and would go to great lengths to find a living there.

If every German had had his own home,” wrote the National Socialist Karl Fiehler in 1932, “the revolution of 1918 would not have been possible.” Typical of the Nazi tendency toward exaggeration, Fiehler's assertion nevertheless recognized the role of housing in a stable society. Article 155 of the Weimar constitution of August 11, 1919, promised suitable housing for every German, but that promise remained unfulfilled. The Weimar regime, in fact, left many promises unfulfilled, and the collapse of the republic might be attributed to a lack of effectiveness in solving basic social and economic problems. Existing studies of the Weimar republic provide inadequate treatment of the problem-solving process employed to attack specific problems such as the housing shortage. Students of Weimar Germany have been fascinated with the beginning and the end of the republic, paying little attention to the relatively stable years from 1924 to 1929. Examination of the German housing problem will not explain why the republic fell. Historians have already supplied a rich variety of “explanations” for the fall of the republic: the burden of Versailles, reparations, inflation, depression, constitutional deficiencies, political fragmentation, and unhealthy compromises between the republic and the military, labor and management, and federal and state governments. Not everyone has been convinced. The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf criticizes “explanations that do not explain, statements that do not state anything.” Perhaps, as Michael Stürmer suggests, it is time to go beyond the origins and collapse of the Weimar republic. The historical significance of the Weimar republic lies in how it functioned as well as how it fell.

A few hours before his sudden death last year in Bonn, Hajo Holborn remarked that in spite of the ill health of his last years his life had been a happy one. He had an unusually successful career in his beloved profession, first as a young man in Germany, then as a leading scholar in his field in the United States; and he was able to finish his magnum opus, A History of Modern Germany, before his death. Its first volume appeared in 1959; its third and last, in 1969. As a disciple of Wilhelm Dilthey and of Friedrich Meinecke, Holborn gave special attention to the “realm of ideas,” to the religious, intellectual, and artistic achievements of Germany. While he wrote primarily political history and succeeded in ordering the mass of information which he provides into a meaningful narrative which holds the reader's interest, the high points are his discussion of the thinkers and poets from Germany's rapid cultural rise in the late eighteenth century to its decline after the mid-nineteenth century. One of the best of these subchapters is the one on Marx and Engels, a masterpiece of objectivity. It is to be found in the second volume of the History, though chronologically Marx and Engels belong in the third volume, which covers the period from 1840 to 1945. (After all, the two young men met and their public activity began only after 1840 and their thought and dedicated life began to exercise their impact only decades later.) By 1945, when Holborn's History ends, Marx had become the most widely known German, whose influence shaped history on a worldwide scale and to a degree surpassing by far that of the other great German with whom Holborn starts his History, Martin Luther.

Theodore S. Hamerow provided the driving force within the Conference Group for Central European History for the creation of this journal. Both he and the editor became historians under the sensitive supervision of Hajo Holborn, as did many others who read Central European History. Less directly, Holborn taught other colleagues who never registered for a course at Yale; any roster of these would start with his fellow students in Germany in the 1920's and include all of us who ever met the man. It seems imperative, therefore, that the formative influence Holborn exerted as a teacher not be overlooked in this number of Central European History, least of all in a reviewessay on the Festschrift presented him in 1967; for—directly or indirectly—he taught all twenty-four contributors. Twelve can loosely be described as Holborn's colleagues. The remaining dozen studied with Holborn (I include his daughter). Taken together, they comprise a remarkable array of talent. Holborn himself might well have memorialized these friends in the lines from Addison that he once quoted on the relationship between Prince Eugene and Marlborough: “To souls like these in mutual friendship joined / Heaven dares intrust the cause of human kind.”

One of the perquisites of the scholarly profession is the gradual leave-taking of our friends and colleagues which eases the pain of good-by. Despite the approximate conjunction of Hajo Holborn's death with the completion of his great History of Modern Germany, a conjunction which seemed to seal the finality of the abrupt stillness, he actually had in hand several lines of unfinished business which will keep his inimitable and indispensable historical spirit with us still during the coming months. These enterprises, which represented Hajo Holborn's integration of the variegated concerns in his wide-ranging career and his definitive settling of accounts with them, included two kinds of projects: on the one hand, collections and editions of his own writings and, on the other, interpretive essays prefacing new editions of other historians and of their historical works on themes with which he had long associated himself. He left these enterprises in various stages of execution, ranging from books ready for the printing to unrealized designs which can testify only to his mature intentions but which, at least, are being carried through to publication in his spirit by those who have been close to him.