Of all of the cultural figures of fin de siècle Germany, the dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) is one of the hardest to comprehend. He does not fit easily into standard literary categories. His concern with sexuality causes some scholars to classify him with Jugendstil or Dekadenz; his grotesque caricatures, frenetic dialogue, and occasionally surreal imagery make others view him as a protoexpressionist; and his biting criticism of bourgeois society seems to make him both a wayward naturalist and a precursor of Sternheim, Brecht, and Dürrenmatt. Wedekind's resistance to tagging suggests that studies conducted solely in terms of the literary currents of his time will not uncover the essence of the man or his work. A more productive method seems to consist in examining the clash of the ideal and the real in Wedekind's life, the way in which his views on art and the artist were confounded by the economic reality of literary production. It was the shattering of the classical idealist conception of the artist by a total commercialization of the arts that gave birth to Wedekind's dramas.

It is now generally accepted that prior to the outbreak of the First World War German Social Democracy did not, as a rule, count foreign policy among its more central concerns. It is often further assumed that the right wing of the prewar German labor movement was still less interested in foreign policy problems than were left-wing or centrist party spokesmen. This assumption requires qualification, for the work of East German historians and others has shown that social imperialist thought had made heavy inroads into the revisionist wing of prewar Social Democracy. In fact, revisionists and reformists from Vollmar onwards frequently manifested a deep and enduring concern with the problems of Germany's position in the world. Yet there remains in the person of Eduard Bernstein—in many ways the father of revisionism and certainly its intellectual leader and chief publicist—one prominent revisionist whose pre-1914 foreign policy position continues to defy satisfactory categorization and generalization.

Although Gilbert Allardyce's recent article in the American Historical Review is useful in reminding us of “What Fascism Is Not,” even he recognizes the Führerprinzip, or leadership principle, as one of the few ideas common to all fascist movements in Europe during the interwar years. The fascists had little difficulty in deciding what they were against: “Marxism,” liberalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, and often, but not always, Judaism. They could also agree that they favored such vague and general ideas as a “‘new world,’ love of power and the dramatic appeal of youth, elite consciousness and mass influence, revolutionary ardor and veneration of tradition.” They were ultranationalistic and hoped to reunite their socially divided people into “people's communities.” In common with many nonfascist regimes they limited civil liberties and tolerated the existence of only one, all-encompassing political party. They stressed emotion and sentiment over reason, action instead of words, violence in place of peace.

The 1970s were an interesting and significant decade for the historiography of contemporary Austria. Among Austrian scholars, the tradition of Koalitionsgeschichtsschreibung, a reflection of the political and bureaucratic system of Proporz which reigned in the 1950s and 1960s, began to break down. With the triumph of Social Democracy under Bruno Kreisky, fewer historians—especially those of the “left”—were willing to continue sharing in the orderly division of responsibility for the recent past. Moreover, some of the controversy aroused in Germany by Fritz Fischer's work began to invigorate Austrian historical studies. Both in Austria and abroad, historians became less inclined to treat Austria as a unique case, and increasingly interested in the Alpine state as a study in the general development of contemporary central Europe. The publication of Norbert Schausberger's Der Griff nach Österreich in early 1978—the fortieth anniversary of the Anschluss—marked in some respects a milestone in this direction; it provides the opportunity to review a sampling of the more interesting recent literature, and to reflect, as well, on some general problems of conceptualizing contemporary Austrian history.