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).

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.

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.

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.