In a pamphlet published in 1932 entitled “Women's Status and Women's Vocation,” the chairwoman of the German Women Teachers' Association, Emmy Beckmann, looked back at how the position of women in German society had developed since the founding of the Weimar Republic. She painted a pessimistic picture:

It is well known how things have developed since the Weimar Constitution came into force. How little it has been possible for women to make their views and their goals count in the machinery of party politics, which quickly srestabilized itself and slipped back into old patterns; how soon the rise of unemployment made women's paid employment come to be viewed merely in terms of competition. At the same time, a new generation of women has grown up, equipped with the education which a previous generation had fought for so hard, and with new rights and freedoms. These young women now see the tasks and lifestyle which await them as an unwanted burden and responsibility, a cold and empty substitute for the fulfillment to be gained from a peaceful home and the close family ties of husband, wife, and child. And, just as among the German people generally over the last ten years the concepts of liberty and the individual personality have faded like waning stars in the firmament of our values while other stars have begun to outshine them, so for these young women the ideal of liberation into a condition of enlightened humanity, which the previous generation followed with such conviction, has faded away.

The ignominious and total collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989/90 revealed all too clearly the disastrous state of the country's economy, especially in comparison to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This fact must not, however, be seen in isolation from another, apparently contradictory one: From the beginning to the end of its existence, the GDR was the shining economic and technological star in the communist firmament in Eastern Europe. GDR electronics and optics were crucial to the Soviet space program and to East-bloc military production, which counted among communism's few technological successes. Its chemical and automobile industries were also well regarded in the Eastern bloc and in many developing countries. The GDR's technological prowess—especially when combined with its favored and very lucrative relationship with the FRG—made for a reasonably high standard of living, not just in relation to other countries in the Soviet bloc, but in relation to other industrialized countries as well.

Horst Fuhrmann's recent survey of medieval hostility toward Germans and their political structures, chiefly the Empire, has a subtitle (Origins of German Imperialism), that might very well be applied to the fate of the historiography of medieval Germany in the English-speaking world from its considerable prominence up to the eve of the First World War to its low point in the aftermath of the second.