“It is good for those who are sad or down-hearted […] It brings one back to bodily strength, and makes one lusty and merry,” wrote Hieronymus Brunschwig of brandy in his Book of Distilling in 1532. Distilled liquors were was “wonder drugs” of the early modern period, prescribed medicinally both as prevention and cure for virtually every known malady, of the spirit as well as the body. According to Brunschwig, the capacity of brandy actually to lengthen one's life was the basis for its medieval appellation aqua vitae (water of life). The potential for the abuse of these “medicines,” however, was evident to medical and legal bodies alike; the “water of life” could become a “water of death,” as physician Sigismund Klose noted in 1697.

TheOstpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to isolate the GDR and its satellite allies and to avoid granting unilateral concessions to the Soviet bloc. Although such Staatsräson considerations were very significant for the Federal Republic's policymakers, they do not tell the whole story. Movement on Eastern policy was also significantly hindered by domestic factors, the most important of which was the influence of the Vertriebenenverbände—the pressure organizations purporting to represent the millions of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The role of these organizations has typically received passing reference in general studies of Ostpolitik, but the specialized literature on the topic has remained weak.

“O Gott, o Gott—ist das Revolution?” a wide-eyed Frau Dreissiger asks her husband, her pearl necklaces rising and falling with her heaving bosom, as chants of the angry crowd of weavers penetrate the sequestered drawing room. In this scene in Friedrich Zelnik's 1927 film Die Weber, Frau Dreissiger's question is far less naive than the impatient look of her nervous husband suggests. It resounds, rather, with the fears and expectations of Germans of the 1920s, convinced they were living in an era of revolutionary transformation, yet besieged by a cacophony of arguments as to whether or how an actual German revolution would come about. Historians of the Weimar era have posed comparable questions about which upheavals and ideas constituted a German revolution. Spurred by debates over whether an authoritarian German Sonderweg bypassed a bourgeois revolution, invigorated since unification by new perspectives on German democratization, and enriched by new approaches, they have considered an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena. The resulting studies have revealed myriad interactions between political ideologies, social groupings, economic practices, and external pressures.