HAJO HOLBORN died in Bonn on June 20, 1969, the day after he had received the first Inter Nationes Prize in recognition of his services in increasing understanding between Germany and America. He was a former Chairman of the Conference Group for Central European History, and an active member of the Board of Editors of Central European History from the beginning. He was also the first historian born and trained outside the United States to be elected President of the American Historical Association, in 1967.

Fundamentally in common among the towns I mean was the self-containment and separateness of each; they faced the power of Napoleonic reform as individual communities. It seems best to begin thinking of their common experience as though it were the experience of one.

In January 1949, Thomas Mann wrote to a correspondent: “I must acknowledge the arrival of your book on Kleist and assure you of my earnest attention to it. Of loving attention I cannot speak, since much about this writer, even in your incisive study, strikes me as really dreadful; and, after reading it, I find I can warm to his genius less than ever… In the Hermannsschlacht…one can see what a hysterical—Goethe said hypochondriacal—spirit he was on the whole, and one recoils in horror.”

As the centennial of the Franco-Prussian War and the founding of the German Empire approaches, historians are likely to find renewed interest in the Bismarckian political edifice. It may be hoped that studies which result will examine the Empire from points of view different from those which have dominated most treatments during the last half century. However valuable some of these may have been, they have sought answers to questions other than those which properly should concern the profession in the future. Twentieth-century students of German history have lived and worked under the impact of two catastrophic world wars. They have understandably been mostly interested in exploring those aspects of German history which seemed to offer an explanation for Germany's role in bringing about those catastrophes. In recent years several scholars have begun to investigate the impact on German politics during the Bismarck era of various old and new socio-economic groupings as they responded to the sweeping changes which the nineteenth century brought to the German and the world economic structure. Their work has contributed new and valuable insights as well as opening the way to further research and controversy. What follows is still another effort to cast familiar ingredients into a new mold so that the product will be at once a closer approximation of the reality of the past and more meaningful to scholars of the present.

The relationship of the lay community to clerical institutions during the Middle Ages and especially in the pre–Reformation Era has long been a subject of methodical investigation. It has, however, proven extremely difficult to gain reliable evidence regarding subjective attitudes towards the clergy. Once the basic literary sources have been culled, further elucidation of the development of attitudes on the part of the majority of the people tends to become vague and hesitant or to rely on post hoc explanations. In this brief study, I have experimented with a statistical approach to the problem by tabulating the records of donations to three church institutions of the Lahngau in order to be able to trace, if at all possible, the evolution of attitudes which they reflect. I have, furthermore, attempted to test the hypothesis that the subjective attitudes of a social class towards a church institution are partially conditioned by the effective power exercised on the institution in question at the local level by the donor group.

The fall of the Dual Monarchy in October 1918, after a half-century existence, gave rise to a Schuldfrage which prolonged by another fifty years the polemics begun in 1867 about the constitutional foundations of the reformed Habsburg state. Both before and after 1918 the pivotal problem of the controversy had to do with the political wisdom and implementation of the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the dispute over the Compromise in its successive historical settings through four generations of critics and, with benefit of their insight, to attempt a reassessment of the 1867–1918 edifice from a centennial vantage point.

More than any other man of his generation Max Weber remains today influential as well as controversial. Neither intellectually nor politically are scholars done with the man and his work. However, his impact has not been steady over the five decades since his death. At various times Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto, and Sigmund Freud have attarcted more attention and approbation. Among these members of the “generation of 1890”—as H. S. Hughes has called them—Durkheim emerges, in the long run, as Weber's closest rival in sociology. In one respect his reception has outstripped Weber's: he was incorporated with less strain into stuctural functionalism, the only contemporary “school” in American sociology that may deserve the lable. It is indicative of this difference that the Parsonian or Durkheimian approach is often contrasted with the Weberian, usually as a juxtaposition of an integration versus a conflict model of society. However, the Weberian approach has not given rise to a comparable school, perhaps because its practitioners are concerned less than functionalists with a general systems theory.

When in 1919 Friedrich Meinecke gave the highest priority to a “union with our Austrian brothers,” he was not alone in the historical profession. Implicit in this demand was a new political role for the Austrians that had been scarcely thought possible before 1918. This political conception quite naturally influenced historical writing. “The Anschluss,” wrote Hans Herzfeld, “was one of the strongest forces in Weimar historical thought.” This was true although the acceptance of Anschluss seemed to violate the heretofore preponderant kleindeutsch tradition in German historiography. This paper traces the attempt of these new forces to undermine the old kleindeutsch history.

In descriptions of the political structure of the Weimar Republic, the German Center Party is usually grouped as a party of the “middle,” together with the German Democratic Party and German People's Party, between the left-wing Social Democrats and the right-wing German Nationalists. In the years after 1928, the Center showed an increasing disinclination to work in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and finally, under the leadership of Dr. Ludwig Kaas, the last chairman of the Center Party, broke completely with the Socialists. During the same years Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, made persistent, though futile, attempts to find an acceptable coalition partner for the Center on the Right, hoping, among other possibilities, to encourage a secession movement from the Nationalist Party in 1930. Because of the rapid dwindling of electoral support for the other parties of the middle, very little attention has been paid to the Center's relationship with them. It is the purpose of this article to show that the mutual antipathies between these parties and the Center were as great or greater than its antipathy toward Social Democracy on certain matters which were vital to the Center's existence. By 1928, in fact, coalition with the parties of the middle had become as unsatisfactory to the leaders of the Center as coalition with the party of the Left. The turning-point in this development was the breakup of the Marx-Keudell right-wing cabinet of 1927. The failure of that government to attain the party's goals in the realm of Kulturpolitik, i.e., religion and education, confirmed the Center's disillusionment with the workings of the parliamentary system itself.

One of the views most widely encountered in the literature on the Crimean War is that Austrian policy aimed at acquiring the Danubian Principalities in one form or another. Austria's purposes were not merely defensive, but expansionist. She wanted to replace the existing Russian protectorate by an exclusive protectorate of her own, to make herself the heir to the Ottoman Sultan's suzerain rights, and thereby pave the way to ultimate annexation. Or, if this proved impossible, she wanted at least to exercise an exclusive political influence in the Principalities, and to incorporate them permanently into her economic sphere and military system. The evidence for this view seems, on the surface, quite impressive. For Austria did force Russia to evacuate the Principalities by diplomatic ultimatum and military demonstration in the summer of 1854, and immediately moved in to occupy them herself. Her military commanders attempted to exclude the Turks from a share in the occupation, and failing this, tried to limit the Turkish role as much as possible. During the occupation, they interfered in matters of local administration and supported officials friendly to Austria against the wishes of the Turks and the local magnates. Austria also undertook the development of roads and a telegraph system, surveying, and other projects designed to aid her economic penetration of the territory. Her occupation was prolonged until 1857, and ended then only under heavy pressure from the Western Powers.

The notion that Hitler's Third Reich was a monolithic and efficient dictatorship has by now been safely buried, although it may persist in the popular imagination. This essay is intended as a contribution to the newer phase of the historical postmortem on National Socialism, the attempt to trace the precise mechanism of decision-making and internal policy-diversion in the Third Reich. Distortion of policy, as the result of disagreements among leaders or of bureaucratic sabotage, is a feature common to all modern political systems. In the grim context of the Third Reich, all attempts to distort or divert policy which tended to ameliorate inhuman aspects of Hitler's rule have been dignified by the term “resistance.” This study will show that successful local resistance was possible, even to the SS, perhaps the most powerful political force in the wartime Reich. The inquiry has its juridical aspects, since admission of the existence of successful resistance to policies and organizations declared by international and German courts to have been criminal, resistance even by those who accepted the basic premises of the regime, implies a varied distribution of criminal guilt. This distribution will not be attempted here, but the judicial analogy should not be forgotten. The historian is relieved of the responsibility of passing sentence, but, like the judge, he is concerned with more than the determination of individual actions. An understanding of the political system of Hitler's state requires as well an investigation of motivation.

The responsibility for the outbreak of World War I weighed heavily upon Imperial Germany's fifth Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. “This war torments me,” he confessed to the Liberal Conrad Haussmann during the struggle. “Again and again I ask if it could have been avoided and what I should have done differently.” This soul searching led Bethmann to believe that “all nations are guilty; Germany, too, bears a large part of the blame.” Arguing that “our fate is too colossal to have its origins in singular events,” the Chancellor stressed the larger causes of the conflict. Imperialist rivalry, the anti-German coalition, the growing isolation of Berlin, and Vienna's relative decline, “all that forced us to adopt a policy of utmost risk, a risk that increased with each repetition, in the Moroccan quarrel, in the Bosnian crisis, and then again in the Moroccan question.” But he also admitted candidly: “Lord yes, in a certain sense it was a preventive war,” motivated by “the constant threat of attack, the greater likelihood of its inevitability in the future, and by the military's claim: today war is still possible without defeat, but not in two years! Yes, the generals,” he repeated. “It could only have been avoided by a rapprochement with England, that is still my conviction. But after we had decided for a [common] policy with Austria, we could not desert her in such danger.”

At a session of the December 1968 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Professor Gerhard Weinberg Suggested during the discussion that the entire history of German reparations needs to be restudied. He further remarked that the key question is not how much but, rather, who paid. Professor Weinberg is of course right on both counts but perhaps a brief second look should also be given to the question of how much. Both the world in general and the historians in particular have tended to be mesmerized by the figure of 132 billion marks. The assumption has been that this sum, by definition outrageous, was brutally imposed at gunpoint upon a prostrate Germany by greedy and vengeful victors. The fact that the 1921 Schedule of Payments soon collapsed and was revised downward by the Dawes Plan is often presented as proof of the unreasonableness of die Allied powers and of their Schedule of Payments. It is not surprising diat world opinion has never penetrated the arcane mysteries of Reparations Commission prose, particularly since die public was meant to be fooled, but there is no excuse for the historians. The relevant documents, memoirs, and monographic studies have been available for thirty and forty years. A close examination of them clearly indicates that Germany was never in fact asked to pay anydiing remotely resembling 132 billion marks and that, in actuality, the London Schedule of Payments of May 1921 constituted a tremendous German victory.

Our Topic is a complex one and therefore necessarily subject to certain limitations. They recommend themselves not only for practical reasons, namely the brief time at our disposal, but, more important, for logical ones as well. In the first place we want to discuss the issue precisely as stated, the problem of change in the balance of power, without injecting into it any value questions of whether such changes are to be welcomed or not from different ideological viewpoints.

Ludwig Müller, former naval chaplain and confidant of Hitler, had managed in September 1933 to get himself elected bishop of the newly organized German Evangelical Church, which was intended to bring all the Evangelical churches under one head. His election had caused great controversy, and the conflict (Kirchenkampf) which soon developed led to the establishment of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) in opposition to the church government headed by Bishop Müller. This disorder in the church delayed Müller's formal installation, but it finally took place with great pomp on September 23, 1934, in the Berlin Cathedral, despite the deliberate absence of many churchmen as well as important political officials. Müller could not have been a particularly happy man on that day, although he had long sought this formal ecclesiastical blessing. He was definitely in hot water, and many sought his removal from office.

Fifty years ago Germany and her allies were crushed in war. The armistice and peace that followed defeat were held to be ruinous for her by many both inside and outside Germany. One might have expected Germany's removal as a major power in the European balance. Perhaps the time has come to take another look, and to examine how factors that operated to remove from the scene Germany's Austro-Hungarian ally had the opposite effect of maintaining and even strengthening Germany's position.