One of the oldest commonplaces about the German Revolution of 1918 is that the leadership of the revolutionary left was ineffectual—that the revolution never found its Lenin. Yet anyone who seeks insight into particular leaders of this revolution will find little to go on. Apart from the peripheral but ever-popular Spartacist leaders and Kurt Eisner, only a handful of leading radicals and revolutionaries have been studied in any depth. Others, however important they were then, are shadowy figures to history. Among these is Ernst Däumig, intellectual leader of the Berlin Executive Council, foremost spokesman of the German workers' council movement, and sometime chairman of two important political parties during the revolutionary years: the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and the United Communist Party (VKPD).

In the struggle for increased educational and employment opportunities for women that took place in Europe and America during the second half of the nineteenth century, no profession was the subject of more controversy than medicine.1 Although the issues involved in this controversy were similar in most countries, the paths by which women eventually succeeded in entering the medical profession displayed an intriguing variety. In Britain and the United States, resistance from much of the medical establishment forced women to found independent medical schools for the training of female physicians. Women in France and Switzerland, in contrast, gained access to existing medical faculties in the 1860s; yet for many years very few French or Swiss women took advantage of the opportunities available. In both countries, Russian women generally comprised the largest number of female medical students during the period, especially in the years before 1873 and again between 1882 and 1897, when no courses were available to them inside Russia.

When Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg converted to Calvinism in 1613 he became the second major German prince, with the elector of the Palatinate, to renounce Lutheranism in favor of Calvinism. Unlike Frederick of the Palatinate and the dozen or so other minor German princes in the empire who had opted for Calvinism, the Hohenzollern decided not to impose his new faith on his subjects, who had been Lutheran since the days of Joachim II in the early sixteenth century. John Sigismund decreed instead that the two Protestant churches were to exist together in peace and harmony in his domains.

The idea of writing a social and economic history of Munich painters in the period between the death of King Ludwig II and the end of the German inflation evolved from earlier work on literary and theatrical censorship in the city. It soon became clear that artists, compared with writers and especially dramatists, normally ran little risk of police interference. Although pictures were occasionally removed from exhibitions, or rehung, for religious, moral, or political reasons, such cases were rare and controversial. Generally speaking, only artist-contributors to satirical papers like Simplicissimus, or specialists in erotic book illustration, were at all likely to fall foul of the law. Most painters' principal concern was not legal but financial: how to survive economically in the uncertain market conditions which had followed the Gründerzeit art boom.

Fully trained in the appropriate skills, Karl Marx, then in Brussels, went out to meet the revolutions sweeping Europe during 1848. He had already established himself as a genial thinker, inspiring or, if the circumstances required it, annihilating propagandist, and masterly leader. From London the Central Committee of the Communist League, recognizing Marx's quality and separated from the great events by the English Channel, entrusted him with the command of the organization. Up to then the bookman and journalist Marx had been simply and unofficially the league's chief ideologist. As leader Marx began badly. In his revolutionary optimism he lost himself in a fantasy of the great French Revolution repeating itself, tried to make a Belgian revolution in its image, and got himself arrested and expelled. In Paris at his next revolutionary station, however, he oriented himself immediately, and during the month he spent there acted with economic effectiveness. He made no mistakes in Paris. On the day of his arrival Marx spoke at a meeting of the revived Society of the Rights of Man, which he had joined: “I am a revolutionary. I want to march in the shadow of the great Robespierre.” This was sentimentality and diplomacy. He was not interested in France's revolution en soi. Enlisting a number of Germans he had found there, he proceeded to make use of it as a base for his revolution.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels emerged as socialist theoreticians of the first rank at a time when many of their rivals were still engaged in efforts to design visionary ideal societies. Although they did not hesitate to appropriate key concepts from some of the most original of these architects of the future, Marx and Engels were quite rightly convinced that one of their first tasks must be to still the siren song of the so-called utopian socialists if they hoped to build a politically effective movement. They therefore launched a polemic against the “systematic pendantry” and the “fanatical and superstitious belief[s]” of these builders of “castles in the air” which eventually proved so effective that many contemporary as well as later commentators denied, ignored, or at the very least vastly underestimated the significance of the millenarian appeal of Marxism itself.

A requisite for determining the nature of a political movement is identifying the segments of society which provide its base of support. In the case of German National Socialism, however, historians and political scientists have often neglected an empirical analysis of the social composition of the party membership, concentrating instead on its “program,” its leadership, and its organization. From these aspects of Nazism, they have deduced that the movement must have had great appeal for certain dissatisfied groups in German society during the interwar period, and that those groups in fact made up the bulk of the party's rank-and-file members.

In September of 1894, Emperor William stood before his Junkers in Königsberg. He reprimanded them for their outspoken opposition to the policies of his government, particularly to the treaties leading to lower duties on grain. He called it a “thing of nonsense” for Prussian noblemen to oppose their king, though, he said, as a good father he was willing to forget such unruly behavior. The Prussian nobility, he declared, must gather now about the House of Hohenzollern “in the struggle for religion, morality, and order against the parties of revolution.”

Armed with high-powered computers able to shoot out statistical tables faster than speeding bullets, American social scientists have, over the past few decades, carried on a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and perhaps more often than not the American way. Whereas almost no social malady, institution, theory, or type of human behavior has escaped their attack, the statistical warriors have been more successful in shooting holes through traditional arguments and preconceptions, and sometimes through each other, than they have been in erecting defensible new theories which explain the complexities of human behavior. The scholarly war against crime has proved no exception. After countless studies we still do not know very much about what causes crime, and we certainly have done little to help control it. To provide just one supporting example: there were fewer homicides in sum for all the years between 1873 and 1906 in the single city of Berlin than there were in the city of Detroit, Michigan, in the year 1980 alone. This should provide sufficient shock value to demonstrate that the battle for truth and justice will benefit by an understanding of more than just the American way.

In a pioneering work on the regional expansion of the Nazi party (NSDAP) in Schleswig-Holstein before 1933, Rudolf Heberle suggested that “if one wants to understand the reason for its final success, one should study the Nazi movement in its rural strongholds.”1 As early as 1928, the Nazi party could rely on rural strongholds, ranging from Schleswig-Holstein to Baden. The party received particularly firm support from small and medium-sized Protestant farmers. By July 1932 the NSDAP won over fifty percent of the popular vote, not only in the province of Schleswig-Holstein but also in many smaller rural Protestant electoral districts in Germany. Most historians have attributed this rural electoral swing to the NSDAP to a combination of factors which usually include the deterioration of the farmer's economic position, the farmer's alienation from the “Weimar System,” and the Nazi party's antiurban propaganda which appealed to “certain deep-seated resentments and sentiments.”2

The decision of German employers in the Rhenish-Westphalian iron and steel industry to lock out workers in November 1928 rather than accept binding arbitration of a dispute over wages marked, in retrospect, the beginning of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. The strongest group of German capitalists, from the center of German heavy industry, frontally attacked the governing parliamentary coalition. It did so to stop the extension of socioeconomic reforms, if possible to reverse those that had been instituted since 1918, and above all to challenge that policy of state intervention in economic affairs which regulated class conflicts and institutionalized labor union influence.

The totalitarian pretensions of the Nazi party's leadership are nowhere better illustrated than in the belief that the entire German people could be “educated” to a sense of service to the Volk, that mythical national community whose sum was allegedly infinitely greater than its parts. Excluded from real power in the state— whatever was claimed about “the unity of party and state”—the party in the Third Reich assumed the role of “spiritual leader” of the community, with the task of reorienting the aspirations of men, women, and children away from the satisfaction of personal desires and ambitions and toward service. Germans were not merely to accept passively the wisdom of the regime's policies, but were positively to channel their concern and their energy into supporting them. In this way, ran the message, they would find deeper satisfaction than in the pursuit of selfish pleasure.

Considered in isolation, the experiences of the ethnic German minority of Slovakia hardly warrant more than a footnote in the history of East-Central Europe during the years of World War II. The wartime experiences of this numerically small German minority, known as the Carpathian Germans, do, however, stand out in vivid contrast to those of the other German minority group of Czechoslovakia, the much-publicized Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia. And it is this glaring contrast that lends significance to a study of the Slovakian German experiences, both with the Third Reich and with the ephemerally independent Slovak state. The juxtaposition of the estimated 130,000 Carpathian Germans of Slovakia and the more than 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans of central and western Czechoslovakia suggests a natural and dramatic comparison, which reveals that no blanket generalization can be offered regarding the wartime experiences of any of the German minorities of Europe.

Consider the subject of beer. For millennia this homely brew has been a staple of the human diet and a central ingredient of our social activity. Records dating as far back as 2800 B.c. show that there were four types of beer brewed in the Babylonian culture, and that the ancient Egyptians were often sealed into their tombs with a ceremonial supply of the frothy beverage. But of all the cultures producing beer, the Germans are the most closely associated with it in modern times. It was the Germans who perfected the practice of adding wild hops to the brew to give it its characteristic tang, and also to help preserve it. Whereas elsewhere in northern Europe brewing was usually a cottage activity, the Germans began very early to treat brewing as an important commercial activity. In 1146, even before the founding of the great city of Munich, the abbey in Weihenstephan in Bavaria received a patent from the local duke to brew beer. In 1516 the Bavarian dukes instituted the brewing code which stipulated that thereafter beer must be brewed naturally with grain, hops, water, and yeast. This has since been the standard for purity in brewing throughout Germany.