In recent years there has been a general rejection among a rapidly growing number of historians of Germany of any attempt to construct explanatory or analytical historical narratives (so-called metanarratives or grand narratives) that span significant periods of time. As a result, they have dismissed efforts to make sense of historical phenomena whose roots lie as much in institutionalized structures as they do in temporal contingency. Volker Berghahn best summarized the situation when he wrote that “we must also continue to investigate if groups and individuals had agency and Eigensinn. But are we not in danger of forgetting that they were equally embedded in socio-economic and political power structures? If women and men made their own history, please could we also think once more about the conditions under which they willy-nilly had to operate?”

As this study has shown, in order to understand and explain the role of artisans (and other social status groups) in the course of Hamburg and German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we must firmly plant ourselves in the reality of historical continuity and, in order to analyze that continuity, we must also be open to adopting and applying theoretically based concepts— such as social action, social structure and social order— to focus and enhance scholarly understanding. Only in this way can historians avoid the dangers inherent in the empiricist relativism emerging from the various turns in recent historiography, whereby “a sheer mass of detail, freed from the restraints of an overarching story, could end up obscuring rather than clarifying the bigger picture.”

What story, then, has the use of voluntarist social theory in my research revealed about the function of artisanal corporate politics in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism in the city-state of Hamburg (and, by implication, in Germany as a whole)? First it has underscored the role of institutionalized normative structures as a bedrock of historical continuity. Jürgen Kocka in an important article on status groups and economic class in modern Germany observed that “the mechanisms with whose help the estate model survived for so long are manifold and hardly analyzed.”