THIS BOOK PRESENTS a radical reinterpretation of German history based on my own research into private support for social-welfare institutions, higher education, and cultural institutions and on the growing body of literature produced by German scholars of philanthropy over the last three decades. The accounts of philanthropic institutions and philanthropic practices force us to embrace an interpretation of German history in which German citizens actively shaped their society according to their own views, which included authoritarian concepts of rule. German bourgeois might have lost their chance at political control of the German states in 1848, but they used their economic and financial power to realize bourgeois worldviews through philanthropic engagement within the Wilhelmine Empire. Control over public institutions through their philanthropic support provided an alternative power base for the bourgeois class. Philanthropy was, after all, the strategic and targeted investment of excess funds by individual citizens for the support of public social, cultural, and educational institutions and was intended to further the progress of these institutions as much as it was intended to enhance the social standing of the donors.

My study of philanthropic giving in Germany from 1815 to 1989 provides a “bottom up” perspective on the history of a country that has too often been written from the “top down.” In doing so, this book calls attention to a major shift in interpretation that has been underway in the field of German historiography since the early 1990s.2 While American and British historians continue to subscribe to an interpretation in which German society appears as state-centered, German historians led by Jürgen Kocka have begun to embrace an interpretation in which that society was characterized by private initiative and a vibrant civil society.3 This book shows how actions undertaken by state authorities were supplemented and sometimes even surpassed by the efforts of men and women who sought to further both cultural goals and the amelioration of social problems through voluntary actions, both individual and collective. My study not only diverges from interpretations that emphasize the supposedly authoritarian German special path but also argues in favor of a view according to which, in certain respects, German society—at least in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—was even more “civil” than British or American society.