The tendency of historians to characterize complex phenomena with some single commanding idea is nowhere more evident than in the status of current scholarship on the relationship between humanism and the Reformation in Germany. Beginning with the assumption that Martin Luther (or even his theology disembodied from the man) illustrates in an important sense what is meant by “Reformation,” scholars have analyzed this problem almost exclusively in theological terms. The result has been that, in the judgment of all but a few, the initial alliance between Luther and the humanists was founded upon a theological misunderstanding, and its ultimate breakup came because the likes of Erasmus, Zasius, Reuchlin, and Wimpheling decided to remain true to what had been their own religious convictions all along. Thus, with the queen of the sciences their guide, scholars have found and mapped a vast gulf between humanism and the Reformation, at least in Germany.

Until very recently, almost no serious research into the history of feminism and female emancipation in modern Germany has been published. This neglect is indeed far deeper than that from which women's history in Britain, France, or the United States has suffered. In some measure, it is connected with the reasons for the general neglect of social history in modern Germany—the concern of German historians with questions of political power, foreign policy, and intellectual development, the perversion of historical studies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the dominance in West German historiography of a close professional elite whose intellectual roots went back to the period before 1933. This situation is now changing, and there is growing interest in both West and East Germany in women's role in the German past. Yet, so far at any rate, this interest has not inspired in Germany any major work of research or synthesis. Even more surprising is the fact that the numerous recent American discussions of women and modernization in Europe almost entirely fail to discuss Germany, confining themselves instead to taking examples from Britain and France. In view of the centrality of the German model to more general discussions such as that in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, it seems astonishing that so little has been done to investigate the German dimension of women's history.

Many historians have taken an interest in the last few months of the Weimar Republic. The relationship between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the General Confederation of Labor (ADGB) has become a subject of particular attention, as scholars sought a way in which working-class organizations might have stopped the Nazi movement before Hitler became chancellor. Some scholars have written about a bitter feud between socialist party and union officials that weakened the left's resistance to Nazism. Others have described in tones of condemnation secret agreements supposedly concluded by union leaders behind the backs of union members, and without the approval of the SPD leaders. However, two articles published recently have undermined the main pieces of evidence for the latter version—protocols of two meetings in the second half of 1932 attended by top union officials and figures in the government. The incriminating documents are shown to have been forged. These two new articles also contain genuine evidence regarding union attitudes and conduct toward General Schleicher. Yet the SPD had its own contacts with the general, a fact that scholars have not emphasized sufficiently.