The tendency of historians to characterize complex phenomena with some single commanding idea is nowhere more evident than in the status of current scholarship on the relationship between humanism and the Reformation in Germany. Beginning with the assumption that Martin Luther (or even his theology disembodied from the man) illustrates in an important sense what is meant by “Reformation,” scholars have analyzed this problem almost exclusively in theological terms. The result has been that, in the judgment of all but a few, the initial alliance between Luther and the humanists was founded upon a theological misunderstanding, and its ultimate breakup came because the likes of Erasmus, Zasius, Reuchlin, and Wimpheling decided to remain true to what had been their own religious convictions all along. Thus, with the queen of the sciences their guide, scholars have found and mapped a vast gulf between humanism and the Reformation, at least in Germany.

Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century was a continent divided along confessional lines. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. While other countries, in particular France and the Netherlands, drifted toward religious war, the Empire seemed to have settled its religious problems with the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. The treaty, which Emperor Ferdinand I had negotiated with the German princes, permitted Catholic rulers to impose Catholicism upon all their subjects and Lutheran princes to impose Lutheranism. This was a religiopolitical compromise that worked temporarily but became increasingly difficult to preserve as Germany's confessional picture continued to change in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The partitions of Poland can be likened to an assassination per-petrated on a victim who had long before succumbed to an al-most suicidal indifference to the dangers besetting him. Yet this episode in the “diplomatic slaughterhouse,” as Ludwig Dehio termed it, did not merely signify the demise, alternately ignominious and heroic, of an antiquated, quasi-medieval state which, at its height, had measured itself confidently against Habsburg Austria, striven for power in Russia, and scorned the pretensions of the Hohenzollern electors. The partitioning states soon discovered that by annexing large Polish territories and populations they had bequeathed to themselves a problem of political integration which, as modern nationalism spread through central Europe, proved to be increasingly intractable. The “Polish question,” settled in the treaty of 1797, and then again in 1815, never ceased to impinge on the minds of the governors of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, sometimes with the weight of an incubus, until their empires, antiquated in turn, collapsed in the wake of World War I.

The plan of the Deutschtümmler has been shattered…,” Metternich wrote exultantly to a subordinate in Berlin in November of 1831. Despite the advice of his foreign minister, Count Christian von Bernstorff, King Frederick William of Prussia had just agreed that any Prussian-South German military agreement had to be preceded by a preliminary political understanding between Austria and Prussia. Metternich was so relieved by this turn of events because he had been sure that current Prussian-South German military discussions were leading, not to plans for the defense of Germany in the face of the threatening French revolutionary government, but to the reorganization of the German Confederation along constitutional lines—under the aegis of Prussia. From Metternich's perspective such a change of politics and political leadership in Germany would only cause dissension among the German governments and benefit only their common enemy— “the all-devouring revolution.”

A few months ago the musical world observed the centennial of the first complete performance of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, which took place in the then barely completed Bayreuth Festspielhaus, August 13–17, 1876. Few works of art have had so long a gestation period; more than a quarter century separates Wagner's original sketches, which date from the fall of 1848, and the realization of the tetrology on the stage. The dramatic structure of the enormous music-drama became definitive by February 1853, when Wagner allowed to be printed privately the texts of the four operas. The music for Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and the first two acts of Siegfried was complete by the end of July 1857. There followed, however, an interval of almost twelve years before Wagner again took up work on the Ring in March 1869. He composed the music for the final act of Siegfried and for all of Gütterdämmerung between then and November 1874.

On November 28, 1904, a new commercial treaty was signed between Germany and Serbia. Though limited in economic impact, the treaty carried political implications which greatly magnify its historical importance. For both signatories this treaty proved consequential to their respective relations with Austria-Hungary. Indeed, for Serbia it became one of the bases from which to carry on the struggle for the fulfillment of her national ambitions. But while its final importance is political, and emphatically so, the treaty can scarcely be understood without an appreciation of the economic motivation behind it. It will not do to dismiss the treaty as merely another manifestation of German expansionism; money, not empire, seems to have lured Germany into this rockiest part of the Balkans. The Serbo-German commercial treaty, therefore, must be studied against the background of two rivalries, separate both in membership and in kind— one the rivalry, mainly political and national, between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and the other the commercial rivalry between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. In the pages that follow an attempt will be made to pursue the second aspect in some detail; the first can here only be summarized.

Between 1890 and 1914 the Center party was, in Friedrich Naumann's words, “the measure of all things” in German politics. Throughout this period it possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and held the balance of power between left and right. Its importance from the standpoint of Bismarck's successors as chancellor stemmed from the electoral and parliamentary decline of the National Liberals and Conservatives, the parties which had formed theKartell through which Bismarck governed the Reichstag. After 1890 these no longer commanded a majority, and other parties had to be won over by the government. With the Social Democrats permanently hostile, this narrowed the government's choice down to the Progressives and Center, either of which would give the Kartell parties a majority, and both of which were to be used to this effect. However, the Progressives were used only sparingly (above all during the Biilow Bloc of 1907–9) because of their increasing shift to the left. The historic reason for this was the party's antimilitarism; and this move to the left was reinforced by fears among Progressive leaders that their supporters might otherwise defect to the Social Democrats. The Center was therefore the only alternative. For most of the Wilhelmine period successive chancellors depended for their parliamentary majorities on the Center, which in turn showed itself willing to become a “party of government.”

Until very recently, almost no serious research into the history of feminism and female emancipation in modern Germany has been published. This neglect is indeed far deeper than that from which women's history in Britain, France, or the United States has suffered. In some measure, it is connected with the reasons for the general neglect of social history in modern Germany—the concern of German historians with questions of political power, foreign policy, and intellectual development, the perversion of historical studies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the dominance in West German historiography of a close professional elite whose intellectual roots went back to the period before 1933. This situation is now changing, and there is growing interest in both West and East Germany in women's role in the German past. Yet, so far at any rate, this interest has not inspired in Germany any major work of research or synthesis. Even more surprising is the fact that the numerous recent American discussions of women and modernization in Europe almost entirely fail to discuss Germany, confining themselves instead to taking examples from Britain and France. In view of the centrality of the German model to more general discussions such as that in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, it seems astonishing that so little has been done to investigate the German dimension of women's history.

Many historians have taken an interest in the last few months of the Weimar Republic. The relationship between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the General Confederation of Labor (ADGB) has become a subject of particular attention, as scholars sought a way in which working-class organizations might have stopped the Nazi movement before Hitler became chancellor. Some scholars have written about a bitter feud between socialist party and union officials that weakened the left's resistance to Nazism. Others have described in tones of condemnation secret agreements supposedly concluded by union leaders behind the backs of union members, and without the approval of the SPD leaders. However, two articles published recently have undermined the main pieces of evidence for the latter version—protocols of two meetings in the second half of 1932 attended by top union officials and figures in the government. The incriminating documents are shown to have been forged. These two new articles also contain genuine evidence regarding union attitudes and conduct toward General Schleicher. Yet the SPD had its own contacts with the general, a fact that scholars have not emphasized sufficiently.

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.

Because of the politically sensitive and often quite unsavory aspects of their work, but also because they wish to protect their former agents, secret services usually do not like to say very much about their past activities and try to keep their records out of the hands of historians and other outsiders for as long as possible. The army intelligence service of Imperial Germany—officially known as the Geheime Nachrichtendienst des Heeres or, more simply, as the “N.D.”—was no exception to this rule. While the last chief of that organization, Walter Nicolai, and some of his former subordinates wrote a number of books and articles after 1918 in which they described the functions of the N.D. and some of its accomplishments, they remained studiously vague on many issues, particularly with regard to the espionage operations which had been conducted in the Entente countries in the years prior to the Great War. As might be expected, various other German publications on the background of the war which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, including Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette and other such editions of government documents, similarly maintained a discreet silence on this subject.

In the past twenty years the German Revolution of 1918–19 has been the subject of an ongoing debate. In chronological order the discussion has focused on 1) the Majority Socialists' fateful alliance with the unreformed army officer corps for the purpose of suppressing Bolshevism; 2) the thesis that the republic's institutions were crippled from birth because they were “improvised” under pressure of military and governmental collapse; 3) the search for a “third way,” i.e., for an alternative to Bolshevism or bourgeois parliamentary democracy that would have provided a healthier start for the Weimar Republic.

In the past forty-three years Marxologists were compelled to absorb two new manuscripts of extraordinary significance. Although prepared in Moscow by D. Rjazanov, the Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe was issued in Berlin in 1932 and contained the first publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts In 1939 and 1941 respectively, single volumes of a limited two-volume edition of the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie were published by the Foreign Language Publishers in Moscow. Generally, this edition went unnoticed until a single-volume publication of the Grundrisse was issued by Dietz Verlag of Berlin 1953. and shortly thereafter the Grundrisse became a manuscript of enormous importance to Marxist theory. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the Grundrisse caused a revolution in the interpretation of Marxism. The Marx of the Second International, of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, the Marx of Bolshevism, of Lenin and Stalin and “Diamat,” was completely revised. In essence, the publication of these new sources commenced forty-three years of extensive revision and intensive contention which still continue. This was not surprising, because the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the Grundrisse proved to be major repositories of Marxist philosophy: they revealed for the first time the full amplitude of Marxist humanism.