The representative form of government is in a somewhat difficult situation today. Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau judged in 1762 that “à l'instant qu'un Peuple se donne des Réprésentans, il n'est plus libre, il n'est plus,” representative government has been exposed to a steady stream of harsh criticism. The number of critics eventually increased to include Marxists, communitarians, and radical democrats. On the other hand, it is a matter of fact that over the last decades, representative systems were developed in, or at least formally adopted by, the vast majority of nations. For example, more than 140 out of the nearly 200 world's states formally have parliaments associated in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Institutions such as parliaments and parties, and procedures such as elections and legislation form a ubiquitous and at the same time heavily disputed part of the present political landscape.

The image of the Enlightenment as an era has proved to be remarkably constant, repeatedly resisting protracted and subtle attempts to de-ideologize, pluralize, and reperiodize it. Historians have turned away from a pure history of ideas in favor of a cultural history of publishing and reading, a social history of intellectual sociability, and the situating of ideas within historical-political constellations. The concept of a homogeneous, quasi-monolithic Enlightenment has been pluralized and parceled into a large number of geographically and thematically distinct Enlightenments. At the same time, the chronological scope of research interests has been extended and refined. Whereas the decades of the high Enlightenment in Britain and France were the initial focus of interest, the phase of the radical early Enlightenment has since achieved a firm place in a total panorama that also takes account of chronologically different developments in various national contexts. Nonetheless it is true, although necessarily a generalization, to say that the interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole concentrates on an “Enlightenment thinking” characterized as rational, critical of dogma, and systematic, and whose main emphases are seen as political ideas, philosophy, criticism of superstition, and the experimental sciences. The intention here is to focus on the aspect of active mass participation in the intellectual project of the Enlightenment and to supplement the image of an intellectual history centered on the triad of ideas, authors, and texts (more rarely books) with a perspective that focuses on learned practice.

Albert Ballin was one of Imperial Germany's most successful business leaders. He early recognized the impact and possibilities of the expansion and integration of global markets. Within little more than a decade after he had joined the management of the Hamburg-Amerikanische-Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) in 1886, he turned an already significant enterprise into the world's largest steamship line. As a leading manager and later as HAPAG director general, Ballin was a major force behind Hamburg's rise to Imperial Germany's second largest city. Due in no small part to HAPAG's spectacular growth, Hamburg emerged as a key global port for passengers and freight by the turn of the century. But Ballin was not just a gifted business leader in a highly innovative economic sector; he also had access to some of the highest figures in Berlin. Ballin repeatedly met with the Kaiser and government members, and he used his long-standing contacts in England on several diplomatic missions to ease rising tensions between the two powers, albeit without lasting success.

On the morning of October 21, 1941, the custodian of Odessa's Museum of Western Civilization summoned twenty-three-year-old Eugenie Anissimoff and her middle-aged mother to lead an unusual and most demanding tour group. Having fled the besieged metropolis weeks earlier to their former residence in suburban Odessa, the two women had returned to their bombed-out apartment in the recently occupied city. Homeless, the pair had sought refuge with the museum's caretaker, an old family friend. Unable to communicate with the delegation of SS and Wehrmacht officers who queued for admission, the Russian-speaking janitor hoped that the two Volksdeutsche women would help to disarm the menacing visitors by granting them a German-language tour. Although ostensibly to inspect the building for booby traps, the visit's true purpose became clear as the Germans began loading paintings, rugs, and even a golden saddle into their vehicles. At the conclusion of the tour-cum-robbery, the group's leader, SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Klaus Siebert, thanked the two women and complimented their excellent German. Hearing of their dire situation, Siebert advised Anissimoff and her mother to register for support at the local SS-run Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic German Liaison Office (hereafter VoMi), bureau in a former music conservatory on Novovlaskaia Street.

Over the course of the 1970s, West Germans fought one another in an attempt to defend democracy. Frustrated with the seemingly ineffectual speeches and demonstrations of the 1960s protest movements, militant groups such as the Red Army Faction (RAF), June 2nd Movement, and the Red Cells took up arms. They declared war on the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) for its failure to rid itself of the vestiges of fascism, for its hierarchical-authoritarian structure, and for the abuses of western consumer society. Inspired by national liberation movements in the formerly colonized world, the groups aimed both to raise revolutionary consciousness among the West German population and to demonstrate the state's vulnerability through illegal action. The RAF, in particular, stressed the importance of violence as a simultaneous act of emancipation and defense—the latter understood as counterviolence necessitated by state-initiated violence. The repeated violation of norms would, its members argued, undermine Germans' traditional “habit of obedience” and, at the same time, force the state to reveal openly its fascism. These tough-love tactics, in short, aimed to save West Germans from themselves and thereby save German democracy.

An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.