THIS BOOK HAS PROVIDED revisionist interpretations in regard to two entrenched narratives. First, it has followed the actions of individual German bourgeois citizens and their civic engagement within their local communities. By contributing toward the funding of museums, high schools, and social-welfare institutions, citizens were able to transpose their individual and collective visions for German society onto cityscapes. In doing so, these Wilhelmine-era citizens and donors shaped society according to their visions, which sometimes overlapped with the visions propounded by the authoritarian state and at other times conflicted with that state's visions. Civil society and the civic engagement of individual citizens developed sometimes in competition with, sometimes in cooperation with, and sometimes in conflict with the state. By focusing on the actions of individual German donors and their donations, this book has offered a much-needed corrective to traditional accounts of German history, which are all too often written from the “top down” and in which there is little space for individual agency.

The donations of German citizens to scholarship funds, archaeological societies, museum associations, and social-housing enterprises proved essential to the creation and survival of institutions that shaped German society. It would be hard to imagine Berlin's museums without the Ishtar Gate or the bust of Nefertiti. These donations did not just enrich public institutions; they also shaped these institutions according to the artistic and aesthetic visions developed by donors such as James Simon. And while scholarship endowments contributed to the determination of the social composition of the student bodies at high schools and universities, social-housing companies developed architectural designs that defined the “proper” size and structure of working-class families. There is no aspect of German society that has not been influenced by philanthropy.

This book contributes, furthermore, to the disentanglement of the connection between civil society and democracy. Twentieth-century social scientists used Alexis de Tocqueville's observations of voluntary associations in the United States in the early 1830s to establish a causal relationship between philanthropy and democracy, and in the process made the United States the beacon of civil society and philanthropy. Civil society, so the argument goes, could only flourish in American democracy, while it was absent from authoritarian systems such as the Wilhelmine Empire.