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.