This opening statement from Robert Mohl's study of ministerial responsibility, published in 1837, summed up an axiom of mid-nineteenth-century German liberalism. However, as Otto Pflanze has shown recently, most German liberals did not demand the political or parliamentary responsibility of ministers. They believed that legal responsibility, or the chambers' right to impeach ministers, would guarantee constitutional government and thereby fulfill their Rechtsstaat ideal, which called for the strict observance of public law.

The murder of the minor reactionary poet and alleged Russian spy August von Kotzebue in March 1819 by the Jena student Karl Ludwig Sand was a clarion calling the forces of conservatism in Germany to unite against dissidents and extremists in the universities and in the student reform movement, the Burschenschaft. Metternich, reacting to what appeared to be a groundswell of opposition, wrote Friedrich von Gentz in June that the political stability of Central Europe would not be threatened by academics and professors; rather, any threat would likely come from the more practical-minded Advocaten, or counselors at law. Mathias Edler von Rath, Austrian member from April 1820 until June 1824 on the Mainz Central Investigating Commission, formed in September 1819 by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt on Main to investigate “revolutionary activities” in Germany since 1810, concluded that there were no more than eight key “facts” that deserved the Commission's attention: six of these had occurred in one specific area of the Southwest—the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Duchy of Nassau.

Working—Class women in the Weimar Republic faced a complex and disorienting political situation. The revolutionary government granted women the right to vote in November 1918, but then ousted many women from their wartime jobs with the assistance of the trade unions and factory councils. The growing radicalism of working women during the latter phases of the First World War, marked especially by heavy female participation in the general strike of January 1918 in the munitions industry, was checked by the expulsion of women from exactly those sectors of employment which were most conducive to radicalism, the large plants in the metal industry. In other sectors, however, there was a large expansion of union membership among women during there volutionary period from November 1918 until May 1919, and many women in light industry and rural areas simultaneously joined unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Urban women working in large plants who might have supported the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) or the Communist Party (KPD) were fired to make room for returning war veterans, and this led to an eclipse of female radicalism from 1919 until 1923. The inflation of 1923 again activated many women who were attracted to the Communist Party by its neighborhood price control committees, and women took an active part in pressuring food shops to keep prices down and joined in plundering shops or stealing from the fields of landlords and peasants when hunger left them no alternative. The economic chaos of 1923 pushed even women in light industry to the left, and textile workers in Berlin, Saxony, and Thuringia gave the Communists a majority in union elections.

There have been many programmatic appeals encouraging historians to reconstruct the emotional life of the past, to describe the major features of an inner landscape that has disappeared from view. Yet when emotion has been evoked, it has all too often figured as an unanalyzed residue, immune to closer scrutiny. Such has been particularly the case in the study of politics: the investigation of interpersonal relationships among the politically powerful has scarcely even been staked out. The present essay is an effort to take up this task; it is an exploratory venture into a hitherto neglected realm of political history—politics as psychological drama.

The development of social interaction between Jews and Gentiles offers a fertile area of research to historians of modern Central Europe. Examining the place of Jews in Gentile society, of course, furthers understanding of both the proponents and victims of political anti-Semitism. Yet such study is also needed to deepen our knowledge of the values and social structures that characterized German and Austrian liberal society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Too often in recent years historians have studied Central Europe in the half century before World War I merely to seek the roots of the traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s. Consequently, the rise of the radical right and left has been examined in some detail, and historians have generally emphasized the fragility of liberal culture. One tends to assume that in the late nineteenth century few among the Central European middle classes took liberalism seriously enough to accept extensive or sustained Jewish participation in Gentile society, but in fact little systematic work has been done on the actual social relations between Jews and Gentiles.

Interpreters who would make Karl Marx a democrat argue that a correctly informed socialist agitation can combine with economic conditions to create majority support for a proletarian revolution and a communist society. When the agitators themselves disagree about socialist theory, however, a dilemma is created. Should party leaders pose as guardians of orthodoxy and muzzle intraparty dissent, to the obvious detriment of democracy, or should they tolerate criticism of socialist dogma, and thereby perhaps weaken the chance for a successful revolution? Before Lenin imposed his answer to these questions upon the communist movement, the world's first mass-based and avowedly Marxist party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), grappled inconclusively with this intraparty dilemma of democratic socialism.

Late in October 1923, troops of the German Reichswehr removed the government of Saxony and in the process touched off yet another political crisis in Berlin, one which nearly destroyed the Weimar Republic. This event in Saxony was not unprecedented, for the Reich had used force to remove state (Land) governments in 1919. But while the earlier interventions demonstrated a new republic's determination to enforce order, the intervention in 1923 reflected the weakness and confusion of a political system prematurely aged by five years of dissension and economic collapse. Gustav Stresemann's Great Coalition, in power at the time of the intervention, appeared to some knowledgeable observers, including Stresemann, the last chance to save the republic during the chaos produced by French intrusion into the Ruhr and the collapse of the currency. Talk of a dictatorship was in the air as men, groping for adequate words to measure catastrophe, went about gravely intoning “finis Germaniae.” Although this time both Germany and the republic escaped doom, the Saxon affair destroyed the Great Coalition and later ended Stresemann's career as chancellor. Since the men responsible understood something of the risks involved for the republic, it seems worthwhile to inquire into the way in which the dispute grew between Saxony and the Reich government and into the process by which the Reich reached its decision to intervene.

On February 10, 1831, word reached Vienna that revolution had broken out in central Italy, first in the Duchies of Modena and Parma, then in the Legations, the northern provinces of the Papal State. The news was shortly followed by appeals from the threatened Italian princes for Austrian military intervention, and for Metternich, there could be no doubt as to the proper reply: these revolts were not merely another blow at the tottering conservative order, already hard hit by the July Revolution and its aftermath, but a “question of life and death” for the Habsburg Empire itself. At the Congress of Vienna, Metternich had established Austrian predominance in Italy as a fundamental component of her international position, vital for her status as a great power. Revolution in central Italy, if allowed to go unchecked, would end that predominance, for it would surely spread throughout the peninsula, to create in the end a united and independent Italian state.

The returns of a tax called the common penny (gemeiner Pfennig) survive in considerable number, and when they are fully exploited they will help to make pre-Reformation Germany much more intimately known than ever before. Registers of this levy are likely to turn up in archives where they might not be expected. It is important, as a result, to know how to recognize and use these materials, most of which still remain to be identified. I will briefly review the common penny and its collection, and then I will demonstrate its potential as a resource for the study of social and demographic history.

Surveying the German political situation in the spring of 1913, the chairman of the National Liberal Party in Baden, Edmund Rebmann, could only see “black,” the adjective commonly used to describe the Catholic Center Party. The Center was systematically tightening its grip on the states of south Germany: Bavaria had already fallen under its domination; Württemberg and Alsace-Lorraine were wavering; even Baden, the last stronghold of liberalism south of the Main, was threatened. Rebmann was deeply concerned. “A united south Germany with purely black governments,” he warned a meeting of National Liberal leaders in Karlsruhe, Baden's capital, “would be an enormous prize for the Center” and might ultimately undermine the unity of the German empire. His assessment was shared by other political observers who had witnessed at first hand the way in which the Center Party had insinuated itself into a virtually impregnable position in German politics. While there is no evidence of a conspiracy to break up the empire, the Center, with its solid block of votes in the Reichstag, its growing representation in the Landtage of south Germany, and its famous tactical flexibility, was able to exert considerable influence over government policy both nationally and regionally in the decade before World War I. The party once designated by Bismarck as an enemy of the Reich had become a conservative friend of the status quo.

On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler assumed dictatorial authority over the young National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP). There were at this point in the party's history some twenty-five local groups of the NSDAP scattered throughout Germany, but the party's base, its nerve center, and its strength lay in the Munich group. This parent cell from which so much was to develop should certainly be of interest to the historian and to the sociologist and political scientist as well. Yet little has been done in the way of a careful analysis of the membership of that group.

A MOST significant development has been taking place in the field of German history in the last half dozen years or so. Although largely overshadowed, especially in this country, by such emotion-laden issues as the Fritz Fischer debate and the ever popular history of Nazism, it has been quietly changing the terrain of German history and touching the historical consciousness of West Germans in essential ways. It is the maturation of the postwar period from 1945 to 1949 into a significant and sophisticated area of historical inquiry. In a larger West German cultural-political context this has meant the reclaiming of a piece of German history long regarded as lost together with the war and assorted eastern territories.

Until only recently, German history has concentrated on the view from the top. As officials and as individuals, prominent Germans have been especially diligent about maintaining their records, and great numbers of previously secret holdings were made public after the Allied victory in 1945. Add all this to the wealth of memoirs and monographs already available, and there is clearly much to engage the interested historian or scholar. In particular, our understanding of the imperial era has benefited from the infusion of these rich resources. However, the vast majority of this material centers on the state and national leadership, with the result that German history is most frequently viewed from their perspectives: the historiography of the German people has been virtually overlooked. Recently, statistical and behavioral-science techniques have increasingly been incorporated into historical methodology in an effort to achieve a greater understanding of the public at large. Quantitative history and group biography are only two manifestations of this trend, and they have made significant contributions to our understanding of imperial Germany. I would like to suggest that careful examination of the German press can also add valuable new dimensions to the study of the imperial era, and to offer some simple techniques to help make this possible.

I recall a remarkable statement made by Hitler to some visitors, of whom I was one, at Obersalzburg in 1932. The death sentence had just been pronounced on the murderers at Potempa, and the unforgotten declaration of solidarity with the murderers made by the leader of the Party had just become publicly known. A nation—so ran the declaration—may overlook and forget anything in so disturbed a time as the present, if it happens in an open conflict between holders of opposed views. If the Storm Troopers were given a free hand, if it came to street fighting and twenty to thirty thousand Germans lost their lives, the nation would be able to recover from that. The wound would heal. It would be like fighting in the field. But a miscarriage of justice, a death sentence pronounced after cool deliberation, and pronounced and carried out against the people's unerring sense of justice, an execution of men who had acted in national passion, like those who had been sentenced at Potempa as common murderers —that would never be forgotten. —Hermann Rauschning

From my point of view it is certain that the whole affair [Potempa] must be regarded less as a political but much more as a criminal one, even taking as a basis the yardstick that any fighter for the movement takes in view of the events of that time. —The Kreisleiter of the NSDAP in Rosenberg, Upper Silesia