Bashir Bashir, Amos Goldberg, and seventeen contributors have produced a powerful and incisive book that deserves the attention of everyone interested in central European history. Bashir and Goldberg's volume engages readers methodologically as well as intellectually, politically, ethically, and personally. It challenges us to think, write, and do things differently, to take risks, and to welcome the invigorating and disruptive presence of people in every aspect of our work.

As archival scholarship on National Socialism moved under way during the later 1960s, study of the Right's broader intellectual history relied on a small number of then canonical works—by Klemens von Klemperer (1957), Otto E. Schüddekopf (1960), Fritz Stern (1961), Hans-Joachim Schwierskott (1962), and Kurt Sontheimer (1962), shadowed by Armin Mohler's Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932. Grundriβ ihrer Weltanschauungen (1950)—soon to be joined by George Mosse (1964), Herman Lebovics (1969), and Walter Struve (1973). At this stage, with the exception of Fritz K. Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (1967) and Reinhard Bollmus's study of Alfred Rosenberg's office and its opponents (1970), there was virtually nothing taking a broader social or institutional approach to the contexts of Nazi ideology and the sociology of knowledge under the Third Reich. Gerhard Kratzsch's Kunstwart und Dürerbund. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1969) stood very much alone as a nuanced, archivally researched case study alive to the complex ambivalences of cultural nationalism in the Wilhelmine years.

We are in the midst of a remarkable moment of historical change, in which the very meaning of “Europe” — as economic region, political entity, cultural construct, object of study—is being called dramatically into question, and with it the meanings of the national cultures that provide its parts. While perceptions have been overwhelmed by the political transformations in the east since the autumn of 1989, profound changes have also been afoot in the west, with the legislation aimed at producing a single European market in 1992. Moreover, these dramatic events — the democratic revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the expansion and strengthening of the European Community (EC) — have presupposed a larger context of accumulating change. The breakthrough to reform under Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the stealthful reorientations in Hungary have been matched by longer-run processes of change in Western Europe, resulting from the crisis of social democracy in its postwar Keynesian welfare-statist forms, capitalist restructuring, and the general trend toward transnational Western European economic integration.

Taken as a whole, these developments in east and west make the years 1989-92 one of those few times when fundamental political and constitutional changes, in complex articulation with social and economic transformations, are occurring on a genuinely European-wide scale, making this one of the several great constitution-making periods of modern European history.