History preserves numerous images of workers' protests. Both contemporaries and later historians, inspired by fear or enthusiasm, have scoured the records of the past for examples of popular rebellion, workplace militancy, or class mobilization. Indeed, a large literature exists that seeks to explain collective behavior by puzzling out the links between class formation and collective protest as well as the relationships between the individual's “objective” class situation and thought and action. But this literature—like the subjects of its inquiry itself—is in transition. It was once assumed that protest had its own iron logic and that “radical” consciousness was the necessary end product of the changing labor process under industrial capitalism; all other behavior was easily dismissed as “false” consciousness.

The German navy of 1848–52 was born in the stormy sessions of the Frankfurt Parliament and died amid equally acrimonious debates in the diet of the restored German Confederation. Denmark's blockade of the North Sea and Baltic ports during the Schleswig-Holstein war inspired this first attempt to create a German battle fleet, and the temporary resolution of German-Danish differences, combined with the Confederation's unwillingness to assume responsibility for the warships, brought it to an early end. The scant scholarly literature on the first German navy tends to view it purely as a north German concern, but on this question, as in all other activities of the Frankfurt Parliament and German Confederation, Austria had a considerable voice in determining the outcome. During its four years of existence the fleet became a pawn in the greater Austro-Prussian struggle for hegemony over Germany.

The Allied defeat of the German Wehrmacht in May 1945 brought the military struggle against fascism in Europe to an end. Yet with the occupation of Germany the struggle against fascism was to continue on other fronts. Germany was to be “demilitarized,” the economy “decartelized,” and the society “denazified. ” Ultimately Germany was to be “democratized.” The newly established media were to play a major role in the transformation of German attitudes, in this attempt to “reeducate” the Germans.