History textbooks speak of an American, an English, a French, and a Russian revolution, but historians do not recognize a “German Revolution.” For this reason the formation of a German national state was long described as an aspect of a German “divergent path” (Sonderweg) or exceptionalism. While this concept established itself in post-1945 West Germany, German historical scholarship had even earlier insisted on a uniquely German transition from the Old Regime to the modern state, fundamentally different from what took place in the other western European countries. Still earlier, German idealist thinkers had declared the national state (Reich) to be the German people's historical objective. Around 1900 the Reich was understood to be not a rational community based on a contract between independent individuals, as were France and England, but a national community of destiny. The German ideal was not a republic split up into political parties but an organic community between the Reich's people and its rulers. This is why German history had never known a successful revolution from below. During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, this alleged unity was seen in a positive light, but after 1945 it inspired an explanation, which quickly became canonical, of why German history had led to a catastrophe. German exceptionalism was now understood, especially by German social historians, as a one-way street toward the National Socialist regime.

The German Peasants' Revolt of 1525 represented an unprecedented challenge to the princes and other petty political rulers of the areas involved. While localized uprisings had occurred with increasing frequency in the decades prior to the 1525 revolt and an uneasy awareness of growing levels of peasant discontent was widespread among most rulers of southern and central German lands, the extent of the major rebellion that developed in early 1525 took everyone by surprise. No one was prepared to respond, either militarily or through more peaceful means. Even the Swabian League, the peacekeeping alliance of Imperial princes, prelates, nobility, and cities that eventually assumed primary responsibility for suppressing the revolt, did little to mobilize its resources for almost six months after the first appeals for help from its members against disobedient subjects reached it. When the League did mobilize, its decision created further problems for League members, since most sent their required contingents to the League's forces only to discover that they needed the troops badly themselves once the revolt spread to their own lands. Since the Council of the Swabian League adamantly refused to return any members' troops because this would hinder the League's own ability to suppress the peasant disorders, many members found themselves virtually defenseless against the rebels.

Historians have conventionally depicted the Habsburg Monarchy as the largest modern European imperial polity to disappear from the map because of its inability to accommodate the national aspirations of its peoples. It is the locus classicus for the failure of an old-fashioned dynastic empire to develop among its subjects a broader civic identity and loyalty to the state to counter the rise of nationalist demands for self-government. For later historians as well as many contemporary observers of the frequent internal crises after the 1890s, this was already a failed state even before World War I brought on the tragic denouement. In this perspective the monarchy's participation in the war was not a purely exogenous factor that led eventually to the polity's demise. Most scholars have agreed that the monarchy's entry into the war came largely because of its need to preserve its status as a Great Power, defend its position in the Balkans, and counter the challenges of its own nationalist political movements, some of them allied with political forces beyond the borders. Older western European and North American histories also tended to view nationalist politics in Habsburg central Europe, in contrast to western European experience, as an intolerant and ultimately anti-democratic force that helped doom hopes for parliamentary democracy both under the monarchy and in the post-1918 successor states.

The debate over “what should be done with Germany after Hitler” became so intense in America in 1943–44 that competitive organizations were created to influence public opinion and official postwar planning. German refugees fought on both sides in the crossfire of opinion. Recent historical scholarship has discussed the failure of the German political emigration to gain formal political recognition from the United States government and the right to participate in Allied planning for postwar Germany. Though correct, this contention should not obscure the significant role that some of the anti-Nazi exiles played in framing the public debate on the treatment of Germany. They swam against the tide of extreme anti-German sentiments at the height of the Second World War, and their views found considerable resonance among American intellectuals. The public debate on the Allied policy for postwar Germany was more extensive than many historical accounts suggest in focusing on the proposals of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the infighting within President Roosevelt's administration. German antifascist emigrants in America devised the arguments and rhetorical tools against the movement for a draconian peace long before the political controversy over the Morgenthau Plan in September 1944. Their contribution to the wartime debate on Germany's future helped to prepare Americans to accept the modification of Washington's tough policy for occupied Germany before the Cold War turned a onetime enemy into an ally. By the terms in which they cast this debate, they contributed also to the marginalization of the Holocaust in the wartime discourse on Germany more than historians have hitherto recognized.

How did the inter-German border, created in 1945, become one of the most formidable boundaries in the world by 1952? The early boundary was not fenced, but just years in the wake of National Socialism's “Thousand Year Reich” Germans on both sides broadly accepted and enforced it against other Germans. These early divisions made possible the GDR's physical closure and fortification of the border after 1952. The hastily drawn demarcation line between Allied zones of occupation had rather quickly expanded into a legal, economic, political, and social boundary—in which both East and West developed a stake.