No question today … either among learned men is more discussed or among the highest princes of the Christian world is more controversial than that of monarchy.…” Few persons in early seventeenth-century Europe could have spoken with greater authority on the matter of emperor and empire than that archival miner and assembler of political texts, Melchior Goldast. In his dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Bremen the political publicist proceeded to accuse the Papacy, more wolf than pastor, of having intruded upon both church and secular authority, arrogating to its own monarchy the supreme Sacerdotium and the supreme Imperium. The disturbed publicist concluded his account of papal usurpation and artifice: “If there were no Roman emperors, there would be no Roman pope: if there were no Roman pope, Roman emperors would still flourish.

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.

In the postwar search for German national heroes, preferably committed democrats, scholars have rediscovered the Berlin wit and journalist Adolph Glassbrenner (1810–76). In the series of exhibitions about Prussia which flooded West Berlin in 1981 Glassbrenner's memorabilia surfaced with regularity. He even merited a small exhibition of his own and a biography in the series Preussische Köpfe. Berlin enthusiasts and aficionados of German folk culture praise him as a quaint, local humorist while others, primarily academic Germanists and historians, point to his activities as a liberal opponent of the Prussian state before the revolution of 1848. None of these many admirers would argue, however, that Glassbrenner was a major literary talent or a particularly original political thinker.

In the summer of 1985, I visited a number of German corporate archives in search of reflective writings, diaries, memoirs, private commentaries on economic or political affairs, and the like by important German businessmen of this century. Much of the trip proved disappointing, probably because little of the sort of material I wanted ever came into being, let alone remains to be found. Executives are not given as a rule, regardless of their day or domicile, to ruminative prose. At the Degussa AG in Frankfurt, however, the archivist pointed me toward a discovery: the Biographische Unterlagen of Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Roessler (1870–1937), the son of Degussa's founder, member of its five- to six-man managing group (Direktion) from 1901 to 1924, and chairman of its supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) from the latter date until his death.

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.

When the Red Army moved through Eastern Europe in 1945, it faced the problem of creating what the men in the Kremlin called “friendly” governments. In several countries, Joseph Stalin in short order resolved the dilemma by putting into power Communists who had arrived in the van of his army. In the Western mind, Stalin represented a force inexorably driven by a logic inherent in all totalitarian systems. Stalin became the reincarnation of Hitler, a dictator who sought to impose his system on all territories under his sway—and whose appetite could not be sated. Such a view left little ambiguity in interpreting Stalin's foreign policy. It offered no room for an assessment that Soviet foreign policy was driven by a mix of motives, not only by aggression steeped in Communist ideology, but also by considerations of national security, opportunism, and compromise.