In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic political parties and affiliated organizations were formed in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. These movements, variously referred to as “subcultures,” “ghettos,” the Dutch Catholic “pillar,” and the German “tower,” have only begun to break down and become integrated into national society within the last thirty or forty years. The best known of these parties, the German Center, has been called “a strange product of German history and … of conditions in Europe around 1870,” an ill-assorted alliance of interest groups who, if not actually the “mobilization against the state” of Bismarck's rhetoric, were opposed to the way in which the Bismarckian Reich was created: an alliance which was given an extension of life by Bismarck's decision to wage war against the party and the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf. Several recent interpretations have seen the Center as a byproduct of Germany's transition from a precapitalist agrarian society to a modern capitalistic society, representing those peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and traditional preindustrial bourgeoisie whose interests were being injured by liberal economic and social policies introduced after 1867. According to these interpretations, the party is defined primarily by its anticapitalism and antiliberalism, rather than by ethnic allegiance. Any satisfactory analysis of the Center's place in the German political spectrum, however, must account for the striking parallel provided by the history of similar Catholic parties in Switzerland and the Netherlands.

In his The Man Without Qualities the Austrian writer Robert Musil examines the declining state patriotism of the Austro-Germans in 1913–1914. He describes a fictional Patriotic Campaign (Parallelaktion) in a land he calls Kakania because the Habsburg ruler was Kaiser (emperor) in Austria and König (king) in Hungary and the state's joint institutions were labeled “k. u. k.” The organizers of this Campaign hoped ostensibly to discover a Kakanian idea or mission for the upcoming celebration of the ruler's seventy-year reign in 1918, but in fact their real objective was to put a stop to the growing enthusiasm of the Austro-Germans for the German Reich. As the head of the Campaign, His Highness the Imperial Liege-Count Leinsdorf put it, he hoped “to win over precisely that section of Kakanians of German descent who felt less allegiance to their country than to the German nation.” This was no easy task as the Austro-Germans were even less loyal to their government than the other peoples of Austria-Hungary. As a result Leinsdorf planned first to gain the support of the other nationalities, “for only when one had been successful in this would all the German circles see themselves compelled to join in, since, it is, of course, much more difficult to hold aloof from something that everyone else is doing than to refuse to be the first to begin.

This paper examines the war aims advocated during the First World War by Lujo Brentano, one of the founding members of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the organization serving as the forum for the sociopolitical activities of the Kathedersozialisten. Though Brentano's career has been surveyed, James J. Sheehan's necessarily brief account of his attitudes and conduct during the First World War does not fully explore the impact of wartime annexationism on Brentano. A lifelong Anglophile and advocate of liberal ideals in social, economic, and political questions, Brentano serves as a case study of the impact of nationalism in times of stress on individuals who, on the basis of their previous record, might have been expected to be more resistant to its appeals.

The purpose of these remarks is to contribute to the exposure of the egregious errors, tendentious misconstruals, and outright inventions contained in David Abraham's Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, 1981). Clearly, therefore, this is not a normal book review. I would not consider it appropriate to review this book in any case, since I read two versions of the manuscript for the Princeton University Press in 1979 and recommended its publication. I did so despite severe disagreements with the methodology and the argument. I assumed, however, that the scholarship on which the argument was based was sound and respectable and that the argument of the book would stimulate fruitful discussion. Since publication, the book has been widely reviewed, and while reviewers have divided over the theses of the book, most have praised its scholarship. The notable exception was Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., who must be credited with first drawing attention to the book's deplorable scholarship. Turner, as well as another scholar whose review is soon to appear, Ulrich Nocken, had the advantage of knowing many of the documents with which Abraham “worked,” and thus had reason to be suspicious. Most other reviewers, as was true in my own case, operated under the usual assumptions, namely, that a scholar with a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from a respected institution who was teaching at Princeton University, where high tuitions are paid for instruction by carefully chosen persons of demonstrated competence, would operate in conformity with accepted scholarly standards.

For more than a year and a half Gerald Feldman has waged an unrelenting campaign against my work and character. By his own declaration, the object of this campaign has been to deny me employment as a professional historian, and to establish within the historical profession that my work is a fraud, and that I am a liar. Hitherto Professor Feldman has used private correspondence, countless phone calls, irregularly circulated “open” letters, and lapel-grabbing confrontations with interested (and some not so interested) colleagues to advance these ends. After much of that, he has availed himself of the services of a scholarly journal. I am pleased with his decision to do so, and grateful to this journal's editor for the opportunity given me to respond. But there is no escaping history. And to understand the present exchange, some history is required.

Iregret that David Abraham's lengthy, bizarre, obfuscating, and often mendacious reply to my charges requires me to impose on the generosity of CEH once again, but readers will understand why I insisted that Abraham not be allowed to have the kind of “last word” granted him in the AHR. In my article, I deliberately refrained from a discussion of the various circular letters sent around by Abraham, myself, and others for the simple reason that most readers would have no direct means of checking the evidence for themselves, that the whole affair had been utterly confusing, and that it was most appropriate in this journal to concentrate on what had appeared in print. This is not a tabloid, but a scholarly journal, and I find the airing of Abraham's personal grievances against me inappropriate in this forum. The way in which I treated Abraham can have no bearing whatever on the reliability of his book or other writings. Although I initially contemplated writing a detailed reply to Abraham's plaints, I have concluded that this would be an abuse of CEH's hospitality. Since this is a historical journal, however, falsifications of the historical record and certain charges should not go totally without comment, and I will now make a number of brief responses to certain of Abraham's charges for that purpose.

In opening this exchange, Gerald Feldman accused me of “egregious errors,” systematically “tendentious misconstruals,” “outright inventions,” and “fabrications.” In my reply, I made what I believe to have been a good faith effort to address and evaluate these charges. Because an understanding of the arguments in my book was essential to that evaluation, I first restated those arguments, and my overall thesis. In the face of a fantastic portrayal of business-Nazi conspiracy, it was necessary to set the record straight. Making repeated reference to what I actually said in my book, as opposed to what Feldman insinuates that I said, the substance of my reply was this: First, I openly acknowledged my commission of error. I did not trivialize or minimalize my mistakes. I apologized for them, and said they were “inexcusable.” Second, and not inconsistently, I argued that Feldman was nonetheless wrong to claim that the errors undermined the fundamental arguments of my book. Third, I showed that there was no consistent pattern to the errors—the correction of some hurt the argument; the correction of many others strengthened it—and that there was, therefore, no systematic tendentiousness evident in my mistakes. Fourth and finally, I refuted the many charges of mendacity, invention, fabrication, and fraud, and provided a variety of sorts of evidence to show that these charges—surely the most serious that Feldman made—were utterly baseless.