An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

It has long been held that Weimar democracy lacked the symbolic appeal necessary to bind collective sentiment and to win popular support. While recent revisionist histories of Weimar politics and culture take their cue from Peter Fritzsche's argument that “Weimar is less a cumulative failure than a series of bold experiments,” the turn toward new approaches and perspectives is uneven and incomplete even in those studies that avoid conflating the fragility of Weimar democracy with the overall lack or absence of democratic identifications. Detlev Peukert, while admonishing his readers not to minimize the Weimar experiment in democracy, also argues that the first German republic had no founding ritual, and that this absence in national history attests to a general lack of legitimacy. Eric Weitz, in his eloquent survey of the republic's promises and tragedy, has little to say about the proponents and forms of Weimar democratic culture. Thomas Mergel, who shows that the Weimar parliament was marked by a cooperative atmosphere of pragmatic republicanism, attributes to the republican Left a certain tendency “toward a rationalistic understanding of politics, toward the underestimation of the emotional attachment to a flag.” This assessment is entirely in line with the earlier claim that the rationalistic optimism (Gotthard Jasper) of the republican forces led to a “consequential underestimation of the integrative power of state symbols” (Klaus Wippermann).