For those of us who were raised politically on the vicarious experience of National Socialism, its graduation into an apparently successful and overpowering regime was a cataclysm of unparalleled proportions. The movement seemed an enormous, overbearing force whose source was beyond time and the changes associated with time. It appeared not so much to grow and develop as to manifest in apparently different, but internally affinitive, ways the relentlessly consistent potentialities which had ever been in it. Nazi opportunism was well known to us, of course, but it did not so much define the movement as express it, generalizing National Socialism and equipping it to act characteristically on all kinds of objects in all kinds of situations. Nazism, in short, was a massive central reality, sui generis. We were uneasy about Italian fascism, saddened by the Spanish version, regretful at the east European varieties, and divided both within and among ourselves vis-à-vis the instrumental similarities of the Soviet dictatorship. But Nazism was in a class by itself, at once invincibly individual and supremely representative, an inimitable compound of Germanism, fascism, and regressive autocracy that was reducible to none of these ingredients and yet intensified each of them to its ultimate power. Thus Nazism was connected to the past and contemporary worlds sufficiently to make its impact universal, but in these connections it was ever Nazism that was the senior partner: it was not German history or fascism or absolutist tradition that made Nazism relevant to us but the other way around. Nazism abolished the limitations of time and space for us: the clutches of atavism and the tentacles of technology alike could now reach to any individual anytime anywhere. It was at once fact and symbol. It marked both the climax of German history and the point at which, as the ultimate authoritarianism, this German finality met the destiny of humanity.

Communist countries are notably history-minded. Since they see mankind as advancing toward socialism and communism as part of a law-determined historical process, they base their legitimacy in large part on historical antecedents. East Germany, being faced with the opposing claims of West Germany, has been particularly concerned with establishing its historical legitimacy. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) traces its roots back into a distant past, along a road on which medieval peasant risings, socioreligious upheavals, Reformation and Peasants' War, the War of Liberation against Napoleon I, and the revolutions of 1848 and 1918 stand as significant milestones. Perhaps no Communist leadership ever did its homework in history more thoroughly prior to its assumption of power than did the East German leaders. From the mid-1930s on, in their Moscow exile, they devoted considerable attention to the exploration of historical questions from the Marxist perspective; later, Marxist historians and Communist party officials began drawing up plans for historical study programs, textbooks, and monographs in preparation for the day when they would be able to take over power in Germany. They knew it would be important to prepare the way “historically,” too, for the transformation of Germany from a capitalist into a socialist society.

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.

Often enough to make it worthy of attention, one encounters the assertion that the annual peacetime turnover of enlisted men in the eighteenth-century Prussian army amounted to 20 percent or more of the total. As put by Robert Ergang in his recently reprinted biography of Frederick William I: “The enlistment, it is true, was for life, not for a short period. Frederick William's soldier was a miles perpetuus. … Accordingly the number of those mustered out each year was not overwhelming. Nevertheless, the aged and sick who were dismissed each year amounted to about 20 percent of the standing army.” In addition, “the number of deserters … was large. … The total for the entire reign was 30,216, the lowest number in any one year being 401 in 1739.” The same figures can be found in Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army: “In no single year of this reign did fugitives from the army number fewer than 400, and the total number of desertions between 1713 and 1740 was 30,216. More important sources of attrition were age and sickness which led annually to the discharge of 20 per cent, of the effective force.”

Reparations after World War I can be divided into two categories: non-German reparations, which remain largely terra incognita to the historian, and German reparations, an excruciatingly tangled thicket into which only a few intrepid explorers have ventured. Understandably, most students of twentieth-century history have preferred to sidestep the perils of travel on territory of extreme financial complexity and, as a consequence, a number of misconceptions about the history of German reparations remain in circulation. This brief summary is not addressed to those few brave trailblazers, whose work it indeed salutes, but rather to those many who have assiduously avoided the subject and to the myths about reparations which still adorn studies of the Weimar Republic and interwar history.

Since the early 1960s we have witnessed in West German historical writing noteworthy changes in the interpretation of the causes of the First World War and, therefore, of the meaning of that war for Germany. One is particularly struck by the refreshing debate which ensued among German scholars on Germany's war aims specifically and on Imperial Germany's foreign policy prior to the World War in general. The so-called captured German documents of the Foreign Office and other branches of the government were returned to Germany, and a younger generation of historians eagerly examined the newly available material. Remarkable, if at times controversial, studies were the result of the scholarly reexamination of the German imperial era. Yet, in all the commotion and controversy, there was one area of German foreign policy which conspicuously remained ignored or treated with astonishing marginality

The German industrial revolution that transformed the unified Reich into the leading European economic power by the eve of the First World War was accompanied by an equally notable demographic revolution. In 1871 less than a third of the country's population lived in urban areas (population over two thousand); by 1910 more than 60 percent of Germans were city dwellers. That urban growth was brought about by a great internal migration. Among the millions who forsook the countryside for the expanding industrial centers were large numbers of Poles, Reich subjects native to the eastern provinces of Prussia. Thousands of them—perhaps as many as half a million—attracted by jobs in foundries and mines and courted by labor recruiters, migrated to the prototypical German industrial complex, the Ruhr (Ruhrgebiet). There the Poles not only experienced the universal problems of adjustment from rural to urban and preindustrial to industrial patterns, but were also threatened with the loss of ethnic identity.

In August 1914 Kurt Riezler accompanied Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the Supreme Headquarters in Koblenz and Luxembourg. His duties were not clearly defined and included a variety of things: He worked on war aims, parliamentary speeches, revolutionary movements, and domestic political questions. He helped interpret the chancellor's policies to the press, establish guidelines for censorship, and write anonymous articles supporting Bethmann Hollweg's policies. He could be called Bethmann Hollweg's assistant for political warfare.

Unlike most Germans Riezler sensed from the beginning that a German victory was not assured. On August 14, 1914, in his first diary entry after the outbreak of war, he noted that although “everybody was apparently happy to be able for once to dedicate himself unreservedly to a great cause, … no one doubts or appears to consider even for an instant what a gamble war is, especially this war.” Riezler also realized that the “ideas of 1914” would not retain their strength forever. “Just as the storm frightens the vermin out of the air—when it becomes quieter again, everything crawls out of its refuge—and emerges again in the state as well as in individual human beings.” This realization protected Riezler from the naive belief that Germany could bear a long war without an obvious effort to achieve a negotiated peace, without a new European order which at most allowed Germany indirect control, and without domestic political concessions to the German masses.

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.

The function and importance of welfare in the industrial state is usually inversely proportional to the degree of commitment to progressive social reform. The greater the concern of government with solving the problems of economic dislocation and endemic poverty, the less the need for welfare as an economic equalizer. Conversely, an unwillingness to redress the socioeconomic consequences of industrialization—by allocating an increasing share of the national income to social services—forces a heavy dependence on relief and related financial support systems, if only to avoid the political repercussions of poverty. Welfare policies therefore deserve closer attention as useful barometers of national priorities. An analysis of the economic and political implications of Nazi welfare will not shake the consensus that labor was low on the regime's list of priorities, but it will shed light on its handling of the sensitive issue of labor relations within a command economy. For a state attempting to achieve a political basis for an expansionist foreign policy, the implications of welfare posed a particular problem: how to reap the political benefits of progressive social services—which could justify the necessary labor regimentation—without a heavy commitment of public revenues; that is, how to shift the financial burden of an embattled welfare system not easily dismantled during the economic crisis of the thirties.

Among the organizations of the National Socialist Party the Hitler Youth has long been regarded as unique because of its large working-class membership, estimated as high as seventy percent, its egalitarianism, and its espousal of social revolutionary doctrines. The NSDAP, we know, was overwhelmingly a lower Mittelstand entity, being composed principally of small shopkeepers, craftsmen, peasants, lower civil servants, and white-collar workers. With the onset of the depression there occurred a fairly large influx of new members from the upper Mittelstand, consisting of independent businessmen and executives, middle and higher ranking civil servants, and members of the academically trained free professions. The arrival of these groups gave the party a somewhat more conservative but also considerably more respectable complexion and contributed much to bring Hitler to power.

Shortly after the turn of the century a Social Democratic newspaper characterized middle-class liberals as forming at best the “tail” (Schwanz) of Social Democracy, at worst the “tail of the Prussian Conservatives.” If the remark reflects the contempt which Marxists as well as radical rightists have manifested toward the middle parties, it also suggests the precariousness, the uncertain orientation of the middle posture. Flanked on one side by the still politically dominant landed aristocracy and the influential industrial magnates, on the other side by an inexorably growing industrial working class was a variety of social and occupational groupings weakly unified by a claim to some degree of status and a consciousness of being bürgerlich. In the imperial period the meaning of bürgerlich was shifting from “nonaristocratic” to “nonlaborer” without having attained the intermediate connotation of “civic.” The bürgerlich social and occupational groupings found their political representation primarily in the liberal and Catholic parties, secondarily in allegedly nonpolitical institutions and an array of regional, peasant, and anti-Semitic parties, increasingly in economic pressure groups.