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.

Of the revolutionary transformations that shaped the nineteenth-century European world, no one of them touched more directly the lives of the broad masses than did the development of the schooled society. The effecting of state-directed systems of compulsory elementary education (schooling) introduced into Europe the age of mass pedagogy. In Prussia and several of the German states where schooling began early in the century, and in France and England where it came a generation or two later, it produced changes in the structure of individual life and society that were both celebrated and feared. Even where schooling was not effected—as in Russia—the debate surrounding it was clamorous and often strident. Some believed it to be the fount of greatness, whether in politics, arms, or production. Others thought it would open the floodgates of social upheaval. Where schooling came to be effected, as well as where it was not, the questions surrounding it were at the center of political and social controversy.

That many German intellectuals greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but showed little interest in importing it across the Rhine, is a well-known paradox in German history. For Jacques Droz this paradox resulted from the preoccupation of most German intellectuals with the purely ethical implications of the Revolution—in other words, the Germans dealt with the Revolution in the realm of thought but ignored it in the realm of politics. Behind this argument lay the assumption that because the Germans were for the most part “monarchists” rather than “republicans,” they were apolitical.

The shock administered to the power structure of southern and central German lands by the Peasants' War of 1524–25 had many ramifications. Among the most interesting was the further deterioration in the always tense relationship between the imperial cities of the area and the princes and nobility. This deterioration stemmed directly from a feeling on the part of the latter two groups that the imperial cities had not supported the suppression of the rebellion as fully as they might have. Indeed, despite the fact that only a few imperial cities actually cooperated in any way with the peasants, some princes charged the leadership of all imperial cities with secret support for the rebels.

This paper is an attempt to draw attention to some of the major as well as some of the lesser known collections in the archives of the German Democratic and the German Federal Republics. It will suggest broad topics and areas that might lead to fruitful research, and is not intended as a comprehensive survey of these holdings.

There can be little doubt that the German military leadership played an important role in the events leading up to the outbreak of World War I. Although there may be some disagreement as to the extent of the general staff's influence, its assessment of the European situation is known to have carried great weight in the decision-making councils in Berlin. Much significant research has been done on the activities of the German military hierarchy in the prewar period, but certain subjects remain to be explored. One of these is the relationship of the Berlin general staff with its counterpart in Rome. A great deal of evidence exists which indicates that in the period from December 1912 until August 1914 the chief of the general staff, Helmuth Graf von Moltke, and other military leaders in Berlin were greatly concerned about their southern ally. The German generals, probably influenced by the theories of Clausewitz with his great emphasis on the value of numerical superiority, saw Italy, with her large mass-conscripted army of over thirty divisions, as the balance of power in any conflict between the Central Powers and the Franco-Russian Alliance.

There are few politicians in German history who have so persistently held the attention of historians as the moderate liberals of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. That is not astonishing, for these moderates held political power—or thought they did—at a true historical watershed, and they provide one of the very rare examples of German liberalism at the helm. But it is surprising that after more than a century of historiographical scrutiny it is still possible to disagree about what sort of regime they really intended for the German state they believed they were creating. The parliamentary debates were stenographically recorded, the committee minutes have been published, their constitution was promulgated, and the leading participants have written their memoirs. Yet enough ambiguity remains to support quite drastically differing interpretations of their political and constitutional purposes.

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.

Kurt Ludecke's I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge, published in 1937, was one of the first accounts of Hitler by a person claiming to have been closely associated with the highest figures of the Nazi Party, and as such it was widely reviewed. The New York Times gave the memoir both a column in its daily “Books of the Times” and a full page in the Sunday book review section. Other leading publications treated the book with similar interest. The reviews ranged from enthusiastic (the New York Times reviewer, Email Lengyel, characterized the book as “a historic document” and “indispensable”) to dubious (the Saturday Review of Literature complained that “one can't believe him”).

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.

Ever since Heraklites' dictum “panta rhei,” historians have debated the relative priority of continuity and change. Although Nazi and Allied propagandists saw the Third Reich as the fulfillment of earlier traditions, postwar scholars stressed the unprecedented nature of its genocide, political repression, and external aggression. Sensitive to charges of “collective guilt,” many German historians preferred to see the Nazi era as something sui generis, an aberration from and not the culmination of German history. Handicapped by language, culture, and access to sources, American scholars often tended to concentrate on problems and themes within one of several airtight compartments such as the Wilhelmian Empire, Weimar Republic, or Third Reich. Because of efforts to restore the “historical consciousness of [the German] people,” the critical implications of Ludwig Dehio's and Hajo Holborn's revisionism were largely ignored. Hence the scholarly community reacted with anger and disbelief when Fritz Fischer drew attention first to the continuity of German expansionism and then to the continuity of historical apologetics in his provocative book on German Aims in the First World War.

The dissolution of the German party system during the Weimar Republic was well advanced long before either the world economic crisis descended upon Germany with all of its intensity in the early 1930s or the National Socialists scored their first decisive breakthrough into the ranks of Germany's middle-class parties. While both the onset of the depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, their principal effect was not so much to catalyze this process as to intensify disintegrative factors that had been present ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic. The ultimate cause of the dissolution of the bourgeois party system during the Weimar Republic lay precisely in the inability of established bourgeois parties such as the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP), the German People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP), the German National People's Party (Deutsdmationale Volkspartei or DNVP), and to a somewhat lesser extent the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) to integrate the diverse and increasingly antagonistic social and economic interests which constituted their material base into a viable and effective social force. The emergence of special-interest parties in the second half of the 1920s bore dramatic testimony to the failure of Germany's nonsocialist parties to provide the more traditional elements of the German middle class with the effective political representation they needed in order to maintain their social and economic position in the face of mounting economic adversity. Not only did the formation of such parries reflect the process of social and political decay that was at work within the German party system, but the increasing fragmentation of Germany's established bourgeois parties greatly facilitated the penetration of National Socialism into the ranks of the German middle strata.

In the last decade the field of studies focusing on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist period of German history has been invaded and nearly overrun by an international throng of journalists, essayists, memoirists, apologists, cultists, and hucksters busily engaged in advancing various interpretations, analyses, and portraits of Hitler. Among this group who are not scholars or professional historians, there seems a wide disparity of ability and expertise and an obvious dissimilarity of motives and objectives. It is, therefore, difficult to specify common points of similarity or agreement that might characterize this particular genre of Hitler studies (or enterprises). On one point only do the efforts seem to tally, in the unspoken but apparent agreement on an injunction by now axiomatic: Adolf Hitler sells.

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.