In the last decades of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) flourished in Catholic Germany, developing a distinctive character there. Nothing lay more at the heart of enlightened interests than the reform of pedagogy, and in particular the education of children in parish schools and catechetical classes. This article focuses on the reform of popular education in the Prince-Bishopric (Hochstift) of Würzburg between 1765 and 1795 both to help in defining the goals and policies of the Catholic Enlightenment and to evaluate the extent of its success.

For over a century now, scholars have viewed the divergent paths of agrarian development east and west of the Elbe river as a watershed in German history. In the west, according to this view, peasants from the late Middle Ages on enjoyed increasing freedom from direct seigniorial interference in their social, economic, and judicial affairs. Seigniorial obligations (often commuted to cash rents) remained, as did a degree of seigniorial control over peasant lands in many regions, but peasants west of the Elbe increasingly shed the more onerous seigniorial obligations, and could generally move without the lord's permission.

From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century many of the territories and cities in Central Europe were the scene of witchcraft trials. As recent research shows, it was especially in the years around 1590, 1610, and 1630, and again in the 1650s, that many parts of Germany were overwhelmed by what might be called a tidal wave of witch-hunting, with thousands upon thousands of victims: women mostly, yet also men and children. So far, despite a large number of detailed studies, there is no convincing explanation of why witch-hunting should have played such a prominent role in Germany from the 1590s to the 1650s.

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.

One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century state building was the formation of standing armies. Kings and princes throughout Europe, responding to conditions of almost constant strife, were compelled to transform ineffective feudal levies and unruly bands of mercenaries into regularized bodies of professional troops, making ever larger and more costly military establishments instruments of rational foreign policy rather than the preserves of the old nobility or freebooting condottieri. In building armies of the new type, European monarchs had to surmount determined opposition from two sources: the local representative bodies (estates) which were reluctant to grant rulers the powers of taxation necessary for the maintenance of permanent troops, and the mercenary colonels who were expected to relinquish their rights as independent recruiting masters and subordinate themselves to the state. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, various territorial sovereigns were successfully mastering this opposition to their political authority and were able to take an essential step in the direction of true standing armies by routinely keeping strong military forces under their command at the conclusion of a campaign, thereby diminishing their reliance on contingents approved by the provincial estates or soldiers hastily raised by private entrepreneurs to meet specific emergencies.

In April 1909 Emil Schüler, a Jew of Lippstadt, a small town in Catholic Westphalia, died. The passing of this otherwise unremarkable man was noted in a number of newspapers because Schüler was known to be both a good “Israelite” and a loyal supporter of the Center Party—a party denounced as “ultramontane” by its enemies and acknowledged even by its friends to have a constituency almost entirely Catholic. The Jüdische Rundschau commented, however, that it considered this Lippstadt Jew's political allegiance “absolutely worth considering,” opining that recent proceedings in the Reichstag had shown that at least the religious interests of Jews found better representation within the Center than with, for example, either Liberalism or Social Democracy.

The study of history in Germany differs from its counterparts in other lands in that from the very beginning it possessed a unique theoretical and methodological conception, called “historicism,” to which German historians held with great tenacity until the 1960s. This point, which is hardly controversial, has recently been reinforced by Georg G. Iggers.

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). His Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigung or VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.

The fixing of the disputed Polish-German border in Upper Silesia by referendum in 1921 has generally stood in a second rank behind other dramatic and difficult episodes of peacemaking and stabilization. Set in calmer times, the phenomenon of 1.2 million voters deciding whether their region would belong to one state or the other might reasonably rate as a remarkable event. Indeed, the German plebiscite victory in the face of an actual majority of “ethnic” Poles, the ensuing paramilitary war (May to July 1921), and the eventual partition of the province provide ample historical drama.

What has happened to quantitative history? Is it dead? Any working historian alive today in the English-speaking world surely knows that it has come under heavy attack at least since Lawrence Stone, one of its former proponents, began sounding its death knell in a provocative and widely cited essay written at the turn of this decade by declaring scientific history a “myth” and calling for a “revival of narrative.” Georg Iggers, perhaps the leading historiographer of European and especially German history, wrote recently that “the past few years have seen a profound disillusionment with the quantitative approaches which were at the core of would-be scientific history…. The heady optimism of Marxists, Annalists, and American cliometricians that history would become a rigorous science has been shattered. What has taken its place in recent historical writing is a return from analysis to narrative, with a central focus, as Stone says, on ‘man not circumstances. Indeed many pioneering American cliometricians have turned conciliatory like Robert Fogel, irritable and combative like Charles Tilly, or downright depressed like J. Morgan Kousser.

The historiography of the Peasants' War is currently dominated by Peter Blickle's The Revolution of 1525. Blickle builds upon Günther Franz's Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, long the standard history of the Peasants' War. Blickle uses the concept of “the Revolution of the Common Man” to describe the Peasants' War. The common men in both the towns and villages were united in a revolutionary effort to establish the “communal Reformation.” Blickle writes: “Evangelical doctrine gripped urban and rural communities alike, and the lay community claimed the right to decide right doctrine.… Thus, the Reformation's dependence on community erased the barriers between urban and rural communities, between burghers and peasants.”

The consolidation of territorial states in Central Europe undermined the local customs and institutions that had shaped village life since the Middle Ages. By the end of the eighteenth century unitary law codes overrode rural customs. By distinguishing between public and private law, these codes stripped the organized village community of legal substance. Police and judicial functions once performed within the community were assumed by bureaucrats, and the state meddled with the use of local resources by liberalizing marriage and residence laws. Deprived of political autonomy, the village did remain the core economic and social unit in rural life, controlling access to communal forests and enforcing the rules of three-field agriculture. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century this limited autonomy was undermined as well. Freedom of contract, security of individual property, free transmission of property between generations, and commercialization of landed property struck at the ability of villages to control their material world in customary ways.

Rudolf Hilferding's appointment as finance minister in the newly formed coalition government headed by Social Democrat Hermann Müller in June 1928 marked the peak of an outstanding political career in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). A prominent member of the Party Central Committee and its “chief ideologue,” Hilferding was an ardent supporter of the coalition tactic. He opposed those in the party's left wing, who demanded that the SPD remain in permanent opposition to the bourgeois state. Instead, he advocated a more flexible political strategy that did not rule out the formation of an SPD alliance with the moderate bourgeois parties. When the SPD leadership announced its willingness to form a coalition government in the wake of the successful Social Democratic electoral performance in May 1928, it reflected the strength of Hilferding and his supporters within the party.