This book, whatever its shortcomings, has benefited greatly from the assistance of others. If good advice has not always been taken, it has always been freely given. Thanks to The Lehrman Institute in New York, the chapters have been presented in draft form before a seminar of historians and other German experts. Many of the participants have been kind enough to write detailed commentaries. In particular, I should like to thank Hans Gatzke, Peter Katzenstein, Fritz Stern, and Henry Turner, as well as my old friends and colleagues at the Institute, Harold van Buren Cleveland, Robert Heilbroner, Lewis Lehrman, and Nicholas Rizopoulos.

Kendall Myers, Edward Keeton, and Robert Skidelsky, colleagues and former colleagues at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, have been no less generous. I am particularly grateful to Stephen Schuker, of Brandeis University and S.A.I.S., for his advice on the manuscript's final version. A long list of students and research assistants have made major contributions, in particular Jacqueline Tammenoms-Bakker, Jordan Barab, John Berger, Andreas Credé, David Haettenschwiller, John Harper, Marnix Krop, Eric Melby, and Prescott Wurlitzer. The dissertations of four of my students – Robert Dahlberg, Simon Newman, Francis Rome, and Benjamin Rowland – have greatly contributed to the further education of their professor and to this book in particular.

Another important source of advice and criticism has been two distinguished German scholars at the University of Cologne, Hans-Peter Schwarz and Andreas Hillgruber. Both read the manuscript in an early draft and went out of their way to make numerous helpful comments. My thanks, too, for the good advice of my friends Wolfram Hanrieder, Eckehard Loerke, and Joan Cleveland.