In May 1951, the Hamburger Freie Presse published an article on the alleged experiences of Hans Schmidt, an East German police officer (Volkspolizist) who had sought to register earlier that year for political asylum in West Berlin. The newspaper profile followed the twenty-one-year-old Schmidt from his unit's barracks in the northern city of Rostock, across the still undefended border between Brandenburg and West Berlin, to a police station in the northwestern district of Spandau, where he announced his intention to flee to West Germany.

In the East German Marxist-Leninist analysis of German history the role of Prussia, of the Prussian state and the Junkers, of Prussian militarism and agrarianism have received a great deal of attention. Since they are regarded as major causes of the catastrophes that subsequently befell Germany, this concern is of course not surprising. Moreover, class interests, special socio-economic configurations, the transition from feudal conditions to a capitalist-industrial system played so manifest a role in Prussia's rise that Marxist scholars, if only for that reason, were bound to turn to the investigation of these developments.

Recent German scholarship on the old Reich underscores the strength of the corporate loyalties at work within the ranks of the imperial knights. The carefully drawn analyses of Gerhard Pfeiffer and Dieter Hellstern, to name but two examples, point up the success which attended these sovereign aristocratic families as they worked aggressively through a well-organized system of circles (Kreise) to combat the persistent threat of encroachment by their more powerful neighbors. This emphasis on the success of the knights is squarely on target. The imperial barons do survive, their rights more or less intact, right down to the dissolution of the empire. This essay seeks to draw attention to yet another dimension of this success, to document some of the tensions arising within the corps of knights and to demonstrate the knights' determination to contain these pressures and to prevent them from shattering their corporate unity. In the case of the Reichsritterschaft, not only did corporatism provide the occasion for rivalry among various groups within the corps. It also defined the outer limits to which internal rivalries could safely be pursued.

Over the years, scholars have identified the Weimar period as among the most pivotal in the development of the German social state (Sozialstaat). Noting what appears to have been an almost unbroken pattern of expansion in the compass of social work since the late nineteenth century, social scientists and historians have recognized the 1920s as a time of especially acute growth in public assistance. Government expenditures from the First World War onward show a particularly marked increase in three areas: public housing, public health, and social insurance. Together, these three spheres constituted the primary sites of Weimar social interventionism. Analysts have found it more difficult, however, to agree on the historical significance of these interventions, with discussion largely centered on the question of whether, and to what extent, the social programs of the Reich and municipalities overburdened the social state and thus contributed to the demise of the Weimar political order.

The archetype of the modern student movement is the German Burschenschaft of the Restoration era. Some events in the history of the Burschenschaft are well known: the Wartburgfest of 1817; the national federation of Burschenschaften in 1818; the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand; and the resultant Karlsbad Decrees of 1819. Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the post-Karlsbad history of the Burschenschaft, which is the concern of this article. Emphasis will be given to the role which a network of secret, inner circles played in both the survival of the Burschenschaft and its continued involvement in revolutionary conspiracy. These inner circles contained not merely representatives of the normal four-year student classes, but also permanently radicalized Burschenschafter. In some cases such “old boys” did not participate directly but maintained informal ties with key members of the inner circles. Since many of the radical alumni became secondary school teachers, they became the source of a continuous supply of indoctrinated recruits. The Burschenschaft of the Restoration era owed both its survival and the continuity of its traditions to an exclusive, self-perpetuating group of radicals dominated by veteran revolutionaries.

In the wake of Germany's military defeat in 1918, social and economic programs that previously could have been left to academicians or party theoreticians suddenly acquired a new urgency and immediacy. One of the more interesting—and controversial—of these was an ambitious proposal by the engineer Wichard von Moellendorff, who served in 1918 and 1919 as Under State Secretary in the Reich Economics Office (later the Economics Ministry), to redesign the entire edifice of the German economy through the implementation of a system of economic “collectivism” or “planning” (Gemeinwirtschaft or Planwirtschaft). With the assistance of his superiors, the right-wing Social Democrats August Müller and Rudolf Wissell, Moellendorff endeavored to institutionalize his plans in the months after the November Revolution, until a negative cabinet decision in July 1919 precipitated his resignation.

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.

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.

In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs's children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Blümchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children.

The soul of die Prussian army is in its officers,’ wrote the Prussian general, military theorist, and writer Baron Colmar von der Goltz in his widely read book The Nation in Arms. These officers, he continued, must be recruited from the privileged social classes “who exercise even in ordinary life a natural superiority over the masses.’ Goltz went on to underline the army's concern over restricting its leadership to the better elements of society when he cautioned that the nation's merchants, manufacturers, and private gentlemen were unlikely to provide good long-term officers.

It is often assumed, especially in the Anglo-American literature, that Frederick William I (1713–40), by establishing the “canton System” in 1733, lessened his need to rely on foreign mercenaries for military manpower and moved in the direction of a national, conscript army. As put by Robert Ergang: “The establishment of this so-called ‘canton system’ not only assured… a large permanent supply of recruits; it was also a long step toward making the Prussian army a national one. Recruiting abroad was still continued, but it was only supplementary. Native recruits now formed the backbone of the Prussian army.” This persistent assumption, stated in different ways by different authors, has even penetrated the textbook literature. A closely related assumption holds that Frederick the Great after 1740, by increasing the proportion of foreign manpower to as much as two-thirds of the total, “reversed” the trend toward making the army more national in character. The purpose of this essay will be to demonstrate that both of the above-mentioned assumptions are false; they depend on a misunderstanding of the real trends in Prussian recruiting bolstered, in the latter case, by faulty statistics.

When I assumed the editorship of CEH in 1991 the discipline of history was changing rapidly. Political, diplomatic, and economic history seemed to be fading after a long run, and even the nation state was being challenged as a central focus of research. Given the increasing interest in gender, race, post-colonialism, and memory, I had to consider “whither goeth” CEH. In part that decision is made for the editor by the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. My own belief is that excellent history can be written based on a variety of theories, and with the employment of a diverse number of methodologies. I also concluded that weak and unconvincing history could equally be based on very different foundations as well.

To what extent was liberalism a resurgent force in the last decade of the German Empire? Considerable debate has materialized around this question. After he became chair of the National Liberal caucus in the Reichstag, the Badenese attorney Ernst Bassermann gathered around himself a coterie of young reformers (the most notable of whom was Gustav Stresemann) who were eager to rejuvenate German liberalism. While opening themselves to alliances with social democracy and the working class, these self-consciously proud members of the business and educated middle classes vigorously asserted an aggressive liberal profile and busied themselves with the creation of new organizational structures to undergird a revivified liberal movement. We know a great deal about some of these political-organizational projects, most notably the Young Liberal movement and the Hansabund. Historians have, however, neglected the rural component of this revival—the German Peasant League (Deutscher Bauernbund, or DBB)—which Bassermann recognized as equally important to the National Liberal party's future as the Hansabund.

Our Topic is a complex one and therefore necessarily subject to certain limitations. They recommend themselves not only for practical reasons, namely the brief time at our disposal, but, more important, for logical ones as well. In the first place we want to discuss the issue precisely as stated, the problem of change in the balance of power, without injecting into it any value questions of whether such changes are to be welcomed or not from different ideological viewpoints.

Disabled veterans were certainly in a rotten mood following World War I, and not without reason. A lost war, unrest at home, and physical pain were not things to celebrate. Most aggravating of all, however, were the problems associated with obtaining an adequate pension: for years after the end of the war the pension system caused bitterness among people who felt wronged by the very government that was supposed to take care of them.

The Treaty of Rapallo, concluded between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic on April 16, 1922, has been interpreted by Western historians as a logical result of the process of the reestablishment of the close economic ties which Germany and Russia had shared before the First World War. “A long tradition built on a solid foundation of common interest,” writes Edward Hallett Carr, “favoured the rapid development of commercial relations. … Links so strong and so profitable to both parties were not easily broken.” Strengthened by the limitations imposed on German exports by the Allies after the war, this natural tendency “impelled the whole of German industry to face east.” The revival of a substantial commerce between the two countries was forestalled, however, by the Allied blockade, until it was lifted in January 1920, and by German hopes for the collapse of the Soviet regime and fears of Bolshevism. These last two obstacles, it is claimed, disappeared in early 1921, at the same time that the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia was stimulating even greater German interest in the restoration of trade with her. “During the rest of 1921 there took place a steady thickening of the Russo-German link. … At first this took a predominantly economic form,” in which “rapid strides” were made. Opening up “the Russian market became a major preoccupation of German policy” in the latter half of that year. Thus economic goals were an important reason —one historian calls them “the real inducement”—for the Rapallo Treaty.