How anyone today first comes to hear the name Max Nordau says much about his interests. He might, if his literary tastes so dictate, chance across him in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where Mina Harker cites Nordau as evidence that the count is a criminal and therefore of imperfectly formed mind. For Dracula's and Nordau's contemporaries, however, no such fortuitous encounters were necessary. Nordau was a household name whose most popular books appeared in scores of editions in a dozen languages. As a personality he was as colossal as his reputation. As critic, philosopher, novelist, playwright, sociologist, versifier, orator, journalist, polyglot, Zionist, psychologist, and physician, his versatility is impressive even when measured against an age when many tried their hand at more than one thing.

If in the 1890s any one aspect of economic development under capitalism confounded the prognostications of German Marxists it was the agricultural. The peasants had not obliged the pundits of German Social Democracy by permitting themselves to be ruined and liquidated as a class. The realization, based on a plethora of statistical evidence, that the peasant would be for years to come a hardy perennial disposed many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) to coquette with reformist approaches to the agrarian problem. This provoked the great debate of 1893–95 in the course of which traditional lines between orthodoxy and reformism became blurred. Some of the party's best men were compromised, and the “whole conception of the movement as that of a class which harbors goals of the broadest revolutionary compass” was put into question. The erosion of principle was such that not only men of the standing of Georg von Vollmar and Bruno Schoenlank in South Germany but also August Bebel, who was the generalissimo of the SPD, Ignaz Auer, and Wolfgang Heine in North Germany were to be labelled by Otto Wels, the later Social Democratic Reichstag leader, shining examples of opportunism. The problem of the small farmer was to be a major factor in the subsequent rise of revisionism, for Eduard Bernstein, that brilliant wandering star in many constellations, was to stress the indispensable auxiliary role of the peasantry in engineering the gradualist transformation of society along Social Democratic lines.

Most historians of modern Germany, in describing the final year of World War I, generally note that a massive strike broke out in Berlin at the end of January 1918, spread to virtually every other major city of the empire, and then quickly collapsed. This said, they then usually move on to consider the events of great portent that followed: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia, the spring offensive in the west, the military defeat of Germany, and the abortive revolution of 1918–19. The weakness of this approach is clear: it pays too little attention to the importance of the January strike.