The first edition of this volume contained rather a brief preface in which, in the limited space that was then available to me, I tried to bring out some of the salient features of my attempt to make sense of the confused and confusing history of modern Germany and to delineate how this study differed from other, older textbooks of this kind. This second edition provides me with an opportunity not only of expanding and updating Chapter 6, the Statistical Tables and the Select Bibliography, but also of elaborating on the perspectives I am trying to offer.

As I argued in the first edition, all textbooks tend to have a framework and to operate with broader underlying hypotheses. Their main themes reflect, in different ways, the authors' overall views of recent German history. Seen in this light, it seems fair to say that the books listed in my bibliography were written essentially in a ‘failure-of-liberalism’ mould. This was clearly also the perspective of Gordon Craig's Germany, which, conceived twenty years earlier, was finally published in 1978 and which, significantly, took the year 1866 as its starting point, later ending with the following ‘message’: