The Prussian Landwehr, the citizen militia improvised in 1813 and placed on an equal footing with the army of the line by the Defense Act of 1814, lasted in its original form for only five years. Its subordination to the regular army in 1819 has usually been seen as the victory of aristocrat over bourgeois, conservative over liberal, Potsdam over Weimar. This approach has been increasingly popular in recent years as scholars tend to study military history in its social and political context. The Landwehr's loss of status, however, reflected the circumstances of its origin as well as the malice of its enemies. The Defense Act of 1814 did not create a new institution; it formalized an existing one. The structure, the image, the character of the Landwehr had already been fixed and tempered by two years of battle. In those two years the Landwehr had established solid impressions of its potential as a military instrument among critics and supporters alike. It had established equally solid impressions of the best means of maintaining that potential.

Prussian-English relations pose one of the most interesting problems of Frederick II's foreign policy after the Seven Years' War, and one which has repeatedly drawn the attention of historians, especially in our century. Despite the impressive number of monographs, scholars are nevertheless surprisingly united on the key points. It has become a commonplace that relations between the two countries after 1763 were rather poor and that they were conditioned either by Frederick's dislike of England after the Seven Years' War, or by the apparent absence of any common interests, or by Prussian sympathy for the Americans struggling for their independence.

When in July 1944 the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, one of the leaders of conservative resistance against Hitler, visited Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's former country-seat in the Sachsenwald, no one with open eyes could doubt that Bismarck's Germany lay in its death-throes. Hassell wrote—and his words are worth quoting in full, since shock at the imminent collapse of Prussia-Germany as a Great Power also signalled the turning point in the national-conservative interpretation of Bismarck

The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, hastily begun on March 13, 1920, and ingloriusly ended with the resignation of Dr. Wolfgang Kapp on March 17, has already been the subject of significant study. The details of the putsch itself, the character of the conspirators, and their motives, the positions taken by the political parties and leaders, and the reasons for its failure are fairly Well known. It is generally agreed that the circle of conspirators had too narrow a social base and was too divided in its purposes to be successful. In essence, it was a revolt of unemployed reactionary East Elbian officials like Kapp himself and his “Minister of the Interior,” Traugott von Jagow, disgruntled conservative military officers, the most important of whom was Freiherr von Lüttwitz, and military adventurers like Colonel Max Bauer, Major Pabst, and Captain Ehrhardt. Where Kapp sought far-reaching constitutional and political changes, Lüttwitz strove for more short-term goals, i.e., reconstruction of the cabinet to give it an “expert” character, new elections, and a larger army. The Kapp regime was doomed because of the refusal of the government bureaucracy to serve it and because of the general strike called by the trade unions on March 14.

Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was a relatively simple operation; it took only a few weeks for Prussian armies to rout the French forces. But integrating this prize of war into Imperial Germany proved far more difficult than anyone had imagined. It is indeed a rather pathetic spectacle. While some of the highest civilian officials of the territorial administration sought to integrate the Reichsland into the Reich, the highest military officers sought to impose a military dictatorship; and on the sidelines, powerful German textile, tobacco, and iron and steel interests hoped to minimize competion from Alsace-Lorraine by sabotaging all government efforts at conciliation and integration. It is this latter aspect of the problem, what one might term the economic subversion of political integration, which we shall examine here.

The archetype of the modern student movement is the German Burschenschaft of the Restoration era. Some events in the history of the Burschenschaft are well known: the Wartburgfest of 1817; the national federation of Burschenschaften in 1818; the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Karl Sand; and the resultant Karlsbad Decrees of 1819. Relatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the post-Karlsbad history of the Burschenschaft, which is the concern of this article. Emphasis will be given to the role which a network of secret, inner circles played in both the survival of the Burschenschaft and its continued involvement in revolutionary conspiracy. These inner circles contained not merely representatives of the normal four-year student classes, but also permanently radicalized Burschenschafter. In some cases such “old boys” did not participate directly but maintained informal ties with key members of the inner circles. Since many of the radical alumni became secondary school teachers, they became the source of a continuous supply of indoctrinated recruits. The Burschenschaft of the Restoration era owed both its survival and the continuity of its traditions to an exclusive, self-perpetuating group of radicals dominated by veteran revolutionaries.

In the East German Marxist-Leninist analysis of German history the role of Prussia, of the Prussian state and the Junkers, of Prussian militarism and agrarianism have received a great deal of attention. Since they are regarded as major causes of the catastrophes that subsequently befell Germany, this concern is of course not surprising. Moreover, class interests, special socio-economic configurations, the transition from feudal conditions to a capitalist-industrial system played so manifest a role in Prussia's rise that Marxist scholars, if only for that reason, were bound to turn to the investigation of these developments.

One of the most important analyses of the rise of German nationalism was Koppel Pinson's Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (1934). This study was one of the first to apply the methodology of Tawney, Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Weber to the analysis of early nationalism. Pinson held that the intellectual and social content of seventeenth–century Lutheran pietism “unknowingly” created many preconditions of the peculiar type of German nationalism that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pinson argued that the qualities of pietism which were transferred to later German nationalism were strong emotional fervor, moral purity, the experience of conversion, and the cultivation of the German language. All social classes would be able to cultivate these spiritual aims, producing what Pinson called a general priesthood of believers, or salvation within and through the group. The identification of the qualities of the good German with those of the good Christian was for Pinson the crux of the process.

In December 1935, Heinrich Himmler established an SS agency designated as Lebensborn, or the “Well of Life” society, ordering it to perform a twofold task: to administer welfare assistance to SS families having a large number of racially valuable children; and to extend maternity and child-care facilities to expectant mothers, whether they were married or not, if they could prove the biological excellence of their expected children. Even with the emphasis placed on racial value as a criterion for Lebensborn involvement, the agency might appear to have been a curious blend of an SS “fringe benefit” combined with a charitable SS gesture toward unwed mothers. In reality, Lebensborn functioned as one unit within a comprehensive eugenics policy begun earlier in 1931 when the Reichsführer issued his famous “marriage decree” to the SS. The contribution which Lebensborn made to this eugenics program is examined below with emphasis placed on the socio-biological motives that prompted the Reichsführer's concern for childbearing and ultimately lay behind the agency's founding.

The Slovak State was the first satellite of the Third Reich. It came into existence on March 14, 1939, preceding by one day the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. Berlin regarded independent Slovakia as die Visitenkarte Deutschlands almost from the beginning. Therefore the way the Nazis treated this tiny state could indicate their general line toward other clients in southeastern Europe, and perhaps also on the rest of the Continent.

In 1866, as the result of the Seven Weeks' War with Prussia and Italy, the Austrian Empire lost both her primacy in Germany and the last remnants of her position on the Italian peninsula. The historical dualism of the empire as both a German and a non-German power was, of course, not ended by the conflict—nor, because of Bismarck's prudent moderation, was Austria destroyed as a great power. But the half-century of Austria's predominant influence in European politics was over. The leadership of Germany passed decisively into the hands of Prussia—as would the leadership of Europe in a few short years—and although Austria retained Italian-populated territories, her dominance over the peninsula was irretrievably lost.

It is a textbook cliché that the diplomatic history of Europe between 1815 and 1914 was characterized by the increasing prominence of military men and military considerations in policy-making. It is almost as generally accepted that the Franco-Prussian War was a milestone in the development of this process, particularly in the new German Empire. What must not be overlooked in the search for future portents, however, is the consistently minor role soldiers on both sides actually played in the diplomacy of 1870. This essay offers some generalizations on the background and structure of the relationships between soldiers and statesmen during the Franco-Prussian War.

Ernst Nolte, Professor of History at Marburg University, challenged the attention of all students of recent European history as well as specialists on totalitarian dictatorship some years ago by a new and intersting interpretation in his Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963). In it he undertook to see the Action Française group of Charles Maurras and his friends, Fascism, and National Socialism as cut from the same cloth.It was a view based upon a strong emphasis on the ideological features of these movements, rather than their conduct of politics. Like all syntheses, it encountered sharp criticism by specialists in the three national histories and cultures, with their vested interests in their particular specialties. I myself considered it a very valuable contribution, having always stressed the kinship of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, in conduct as well as ideology—in opposition to Hannah Arendt, who inclined to an ideal-typical restriction of the notion of totalitarianism to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia on the ground that “the essence of totalitarianism is total terror”; this has always seemed to me like restricting the concept of absolute monarchy to Louis XIV and Peter the Great.

In the final years of his life, the Heidelberg historian and political journalist Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805–71) was an unpopular figure in Germany. During the 1860's, the formerly prominent intellectual and revered partriot lost the respect of the German nation. His refusal to applaud the newly created German Empire and his denunciations of Bismarck's policies made him the object of scorn or pity to many of his contemporaries. Some thought the Gervinus of the 1860's had simply been “overtaken by events.” Others considered his opposition to Bismarck's unification proof of personal pettiness or political irresponsibility. Still others used Gervinus's failure to accept the glorious new age as cause to denounce everything he had done both before and after Bismarck as the work of a “writer without style, a savant without method, a thinker without depth, a politician without foresight, and a man without charm or personality.”The

In “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” in the issue of December 1969, Sally Marks argued that the reparation issue was misunderstood and deserved new thought. I agree, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Miss Marks believes that the German hardship was exaggerated. I suggest that the destrucive effect of reparations has never been appreciated. Not even the Germans, however much they complained, realized just how bad reparations were.

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.