‘Western history since 1800,’ Charles Tilly has written, ‘is violent history.’ And so it is, though the German southwest – by which I understand Nassau, Hesse-Darmstadt, the Rhenish (Bavarian) Palatinate, Baden, Wüirttemberg, as these polities emerged after 1815 – constitutes an anomaly so striking as to tax historical imagination. I realize that I risk resurrecting a caricature of ‘the German’ – the obsequious and officious Spiesser, the kowtowing burgherpedant – or at least of appearing to lend credence to that image by suggesting that German social strife was contention with civility.