One of the many issues currently under dispute by historians of Wilhelmine Germany is the question of “parliamentarization”: was the German political system, or was it not, evolving into a parliamentary democracy in the years before 1914? The answers to this and related questions have important implications for explaining modern German history.

In contrast to virtually every other aspect of Napoleon's German policy, his treatment of the German press has never been subject to much scholarly controversy. For good reason: on the one occasion when Napoleon had a German publisher entirely in his hands, he had him shot—an act whose simplicity, indeed finality, does not leave much room for quibbling as to details. The execution of J. P. Palm did not reflect Napoleon's entire policy; but it may serve as a reminder that, among the ruling personalities of Europe, it was the Emperor of the French who esteemed the power of the press most highly. Napoleon had seen an aroused nation first hand, and as the leader of Europe's first postrevolutionary society he brought to the regulation of public opinion a degree of determination unknown to the Old Regime. One of his first acts as First Consul had been to suppress most of the newspapers published in France, and he soon domesticated those that remained. His aim was not to expel public opinion from the political arena, but to remove it from the hands of the public, and to make it serve him. The same purpose guided his press policy in Germany. As the young Count Metternich noted in a dispatch from Paris, the new century would be “a century of words,” and Napoleon meant his word to be the last.

This article is a further attempt to demonstrate the role played by warrior clubs as components of the Germanic social structure and in the formation of tribal units. Since this presentation is based on a hypothesis, it is necessary to explain the methodology and in particular the model employed.

Close contemporaries, heroes of the Great War for which they volunteered in their teens, both becoming officers when they were barely twenty, then gravely wounded and decorated for outstanding valor, Ernst Jünger (1895– ) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) spent the period of “l'entre deux guerres” in roughly the same circumstances. Malaparte began as a combat observer with the Italian legation in Poland where he saw Trotsky's army lay siege to Warsaw in 1920, Jünger as a Reichswehr officer moving between Hanover and Berlin during the deep unrest of the immediate postwar years; both men at this time wrote books based on their war experiences which excited attention, Jünger's memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920), and Malaparte's polemic account of the retreat from Caporetto, La Rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921); the Italian became an early and militant Fascist, no stranger to the hooliganism of Mussolini's squadristi; the German a national bolshevist, militarist, and a friend of such street fighters as Ernst von Salomon and Otto Strasser. Jünger like Malaparte was, for a time, a journalist, and his editing of the weekly Standarte, with its strong nationalist ideology, found its parallel in Malaparte's editorship of the radical Fascist Conquisto dello stato.

As the founder of German East Africa, Carl Peters exercised a continuing hold on the German imagination in the 1890s despite the growth of a general “colonial-weariness” (Kolonialmüdigkeit) in the population. Among a group of colonial adventurers which had failed to produce any man of truly heroic proportions, he still seemed to many a man of unusual mettle, and the entire colonial effort was closely associated with his name. Knowing this, the Colonial Division for four years kept hidden from the public the story of Peters' misbehavior on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in 1891 and 1892. The Division did not simply refuse to pursue the case expeditiously but refused to admit the facts at all. It was a dangerous game, but one which the government felt it had to play in order to preserve the integrity of the colonial movement. The unfortunate result was that when the story did break in 1896 as a consequence of Social Democratic revelations, the Colonial Division found itself as much on the defense as Peters himself. Not only had a person of Peters's stature violated basic human rights, but the government had put itself in the position of implicitly condoning the brutal suppression of a colonial people. The “civilizing mission,” no one could deny, had been misused for private gain and pleasure, and the Social Democratic attacks on colonialism gained a new moral credibility which could be used to strengthen the party's popularity, much to the chagrin of government officials.

In recent years, the popular literature of the masses (so-called Trivialliteratur) has received increasing attention from literary and cultural historians, as has the response of the social elite to this form of popular culture. Yet few scholars have seriously investigated the history of what must surely be one of the most pervasive genres of mass literature: pornography. This is unfortunate since (as Steven Marcus has shown in his pioneering study of sexuality in Victorian England) the view of human sexuality that surfaces in a society's pornographic subculture is often a reflection, however distorted or reversed, of officially sanctioned attitudes toward sex. Likewise, the extent to which a society seeks to control a popular phenomenon like pornography is an indication of the fears, both conscious and unconscious, harbored toward that object; stigmatization and repression of pornographic literature helps define and uphold the authority of socially sanctioned sexual norms, while at the same time revealing something about how stable or vulnerable that society imagines its established values to be.

For most historians in the West, the German Communist Party (KPD) belongs among the gravediggers of the Weimar Republic. Other culprits certainly abounded; still, the Communists are held to have made a major contribution to the fall of Weimar by preaching violence, promoting civil disorder and economic disruption, and deliberately trying to weaken the republic's chief supporters, the Social Democrats (SPD). With such policies, Western scholars have charged, the Communists in effect collaborated with the Nazis and their allies on the right to bring about the destruction of Germany's first parliamentary democracy. Furthermore, with a leadership corps that had been “Bolshevized,” then “Stalinized,” and that took all its orders from Moscow, the KPD by the final years of Weimar was incapable of modifying its policies, even when their disastrous consequences were plain for all to see. As might be expected, East German historians present a very different picture, arguing that the KPD was the sole Weimar party to have defended working-class interests, resisted militarism and imperialism, and fought to prevent the establishment of fascist rule. Since the Weimar Republic, in the Marxist view, was a class state operating to oppress German working people, there was little about it worth fighting for. While conceding that workers suffered even more under the Nazi dictatorship, East German writers deny that the KPD carries any responsibility for Hitler's triumph. On the contrary, they contend, the Communists alone recognized what National Socialism represented and sought to devise the political tactics that would block a Nazi takeover.

In Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, resistance, save perhaps in the ranks of the SS, sooner or later manifested itself in every quarter and over a range of forms from mere footdragging to outright conspiracy. Of the many types that could be enumerated, however, there was only one that (1) had enough access to instruments of power to give promise of attaining a turnover; (2) represented, except for the Communists, a full range of social, political, and religious forces in German society; and (3) repeatedly produced concrete plans and preparations for seizing the reins of government.

On February 12, 1942, Adolf Hitler, eulogizing his renowned highway builder Fritz Todt, proclaimed that the Westwall, Todt's Wunderwerk, would protect the Reich's western borders “under any circumstances” and “against any attack.” “No power on earth,” the Führer contended, would be able to break through “this most gigantic fortified zone of all time.” Like many of Hitler's declarations of confidence in military technology, this was a mixture of propaganda, intimidation, and obsolete information. Conveniently obscured, for example, was the neglect of the Westwall since the defeat of France in 1940. In fact, the vaunted line was to be no match for enemy forces superior in numbers and matériel. In the fall of 1944 American troops penetrated the Westwall south of Aachen and captured this westernmost city in the fortified line. Further advance was halted by the surprise Ardennes counterattack in December (Battle of the Bulge), but by February 1945 breakthroughs in the Eiffel mountains initiated the drive to the Rhine and the final defeat of Germany.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) of Austria claimed a particular development and an identity which differed from the larger party in the Reich. Unlike the latter, the Austrian Nazis traced their roots to the prewar Habsburg Empire. They also identified with regional objectives and local mentors; they accepted Adolf Hitler's 1934 and 1936 proclamations that their activities were a domestic, not an international affair. Austrian National Socialists further believed their movement was a different entity with different problems and different leaders, despite the repeated advice, support, and protection they received from Germany. The local Nazis also expected to control their own country, developing the new principles as they saw best—not as others dictated.

Ludwig beck was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1880. He joined No. 15 Prussian Field Artillery Regiment in Strassburg in 1898, attended the War Academy in Berlin from 1908 to 1911, was called into the Great General Staff in 1912, served in general-staff positions through the First World War, and held troop-command and staff positions after the war. From October 1929 to September 1931, as a colonel, he commanded No. 5 Artillery Regiment in Fulda, Ludwigsburg, and Ulm; from October 1932 to September 1933 he commanded the First Cavalry Division in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Since the early 1960s, social and economic historians of modern Germany have increasingly turned their attention to the study of the First World War and the postwar revolution. Yet of all the ink that has flowed extremely little has trickled down to the peasantry. Excellent monographs examine the wartime experience of several cities. Historians looking for the origins of proletarian radicalism in the revolution of 1918–19 have carefully scrutinized workers of all sorts, and those in pursuit of the birth or perhaps adolescent crisis of “Organized Capitalism” have studied industrialists and the changing role of the state. But no one has looked very closely at the country cousin. When historians have turned to the agricultural sector, they have with few exceptions focused on estate owners and their workers east of the Elbe.

In recent years the biographical literature about Adolf Hitler has continued to grow. Publications centering on the Führer of the Nazi party are now so numerous that not long ago, one reputable British historian felt compelled to apologize for introducing yet “another book about Hitler.” But with all this activity, most scholars agree that few if any of the new studies on Hitler have significantly extended our understanding of the German dictator beyond that provided by Lord Alan Bullock's authoritative biography, first published in 1952 and now a classic. Novel and trendy approaches to the subject, such as those of the “psychohistorians,” have not broken new ground. Gerhard L. Weinberg's balanced judgment of Robert G. L. Waite's psychobiography of Hitler is that “the very great strengths of the book are precisely in the more traditional portions, and the weaknesses in the least traditional.” The more current life histories—such as Joachim Fest's, which was clearly designed to supersede Bullock's work as well as to be a huge commercial success—remain of questionable value either because they restrict themselves to known factual information as their basis of documentation or because they lack truly original insights.

Resistance under conditions of close to total control is fraught with enormous, almost insurmountable, difficulties. And in the Germany of 1933–45 they were compounded by the fact that the “totalitarianism” of the state was effective not merely by virtue of controls it exercised, but also of the consensus it had managed to whip up. But the most agonizing difficulties were of an ethical order: unlike the Resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied countries, the German Resistance was bound to come into conflict with the “national interestü and it thus got involved in the dilemma of risking the charge of treason in order to assert the prerogatives of higher laws, natural or divine. The “foreign policy” of the German Resistance, involving contacts abroad before the war and during the war, takes us to the most exposed aspects of our problem.

This paper originated as part of a panel in which the author's intended role was to bring comparative perspectives formed in the study of other parts of Hitler-dominated Europe to bear upon the German opposition to Hitler. After giving hard thought to my comparative assignment, I came to the conclusion that internal opposition, as in Germany between 1933 and 1945, is fundamentally incomparable to resistance to a foreign occupation. The constraints of patriotism and the problems of legitimacy that face a domestic opposition, especially in wartime, are of an altogether different order than the more narrowly corporeal dangers facing resistance to a foreign occupation. Very few even of the most determined opponents of Hitler were willing to accept the defeat of the German Army or the overthrow of the German state as necessary for Hitler's removal, while very few resisters outside Germany believed that his removal could be accomplished in any other way. Such unbridgeable differences of perception make comparative discussion of resistance to Hitler inside and outside Germany so general as to be of little use. I have even used different terms here, referring to struggles against foreign occupation as “resistance” and to the anti-Hitler movements within Germany as “opposition.”