Fundamentally in common among the towns I mean was the self-containment and separateness of each; they faced the power of Napoleonic reform as individual communities. It seems best to begin thinking of their common experience as though it were the experience of one.

The fall of the Dual Monarchy in October 1918, after a half-century existence, gave rise to a Schuldfrage which prolonged by another fifty years the polemics begun in 1867 about the constitutional foundations of the reformed Habsburg state. Both before and after 1918 the pivotal problem of the controversy had to do with the political wisdom and implementation of the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the dispute over the Compromise in its successive historical settings through four generations of critics and, with benefit of their insight, to attempt a reassessment of the 1867–1918 edifice from a centennial vantage point.

In descriptions of the political structure of the Weimar Republic, the German Center Party is usually grouped as a party of the “middle,” together with the German Democratic Party and German People's Party, between the left-wing Social Democrats and the right-wing German Nationalists. In the years after 1928, the Center showed an increasing disinclination to work in coalition with the Social Democratic Party and finally, under the leadership of Dr. Ludwig Kaas, the last chairman of the Center Party, broke completely with the Socialists. During the same years Heinrich Brüning, Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, made persistent, though futile, attempts to find an acceptable coalition partner for the Center on the Right, hoping, among other possibilities, to encourage a secession movement from the Nationalist Party in 1930. Because of the rapid dwindling of electoral support for the other parties of the middle, very little attention has been paid to the Center's relationship with them. It is the purpose of this article to show that the mutual antipathies between these parties and the Center were as great or greater than its antipathy toward Social Democracy on certain matters which were vital to the Center's existence. By 1928, in fact, coalition with the parties of the middle had become as unsatisfactory to the leaders of the Center as coalition with the party of the Left. The turning-point in this development was the breakup of the Marx-Keudell right-wing cabinet of 1927. The failure of that government to attain the party's goals in the realm of Kulturpolitik, i.e., religion and education, confirmed the Center's disillusionment with the workings of the parliamentary system itself.

Ludwig Müller, former naval chaplain and confidant of Hitler, had managed in September 1933 to get himself elected bishop of the newly organized German Evangelical Church, which was intended to bring all the Evangelical churches under one head. His election had caused great controversy, and the conflict (Kirchenkampf) which soon developed led to the establishment of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) in opposition to the church government headed by Bishop Müller. This disorder in the church delayed Müller's formal installation, but it finally took place with great pomp on September 23, 1934, in the Berlin Cathedral, despite the deliberate absence of many churchmen as well as important political officials. Müller could not have been a particularly happy man on that day, although he had long sought this formal ecclesiastical blessing. He was definitely in hot water, and many sought his removal from office.