For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book, German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only was German Home Towns original and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.

These words introduced a collection entitled Deutsche Wehrlieder für das Königlich-Preussische Frei-Corps (German Military Songs for the Royal Prussian Volunteer Corps), that appeared in March 1813 immediately after Prussia declared war on France. It was not only in this songbook that the patriotic national mobilization for the struggle against Napoleonic rule was closely linked to the propagation of “valorous manliness” (wehrhafte Mannlichkeit). In the period of the Wars of Liberation between 1813 and 1815, the press and topical literature teemed with similar phrases and cultivated a veritable cult of manliness. A new breed of “patriotically”-minded, “combat-ready” men was needed if, as intended, a “people's army” of conscripts was to fight a successful “national war” against France. This phenomenon has generated scant interest in the extensive historical literature about the time between 1806 and 1815, which is considered as the birth period of the German national movement.

Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German struggles with memory. In recent years, however, this state of affairs has begun to change. As the epochal events of 1989–90 have forced Germans to confront still another burdensome historical legacy—that of communism—the increasing calls for a “second” Vergangenheitsbewältigung have, for better or worse, broken the monopolistic hold of the Third Reich on the nation's historical consciousness. course of this new Vergangenheitsbewältigung by comparing it to the experience of coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism.

Historians have mostly, and with good reason, examined the industrial exploitation of concentration-camp prisoners from the standpoint of its injustice. Studies have covered either the politics which led to forced labor, the involvement of individual factories where prisoners suffered starvation and death, or the harrowing experience of the Victims. Yet few have considered forced labor as the perpetrators saw it: coldly, as a colossal managerial problem. A surprisingly small number, no more than 200 top and mid-level bureaucrats within the Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt of the SS (WVHA), brokered prisoners to labor sites across the Reich, and, after 1941, across the breadth of Europe. Of course, many more German managers were involved in the execution of forced labor programs, and an examination of the WVHA can by no means capture the whole picture.

Holocaust literature is one of the richest devoted to a single event; it is also one of the newest. In the 1950s and '60s one could count on one's fingers the monographs that dealt with the destruction of the Jews. Then came a surge of interest in the 1970s, perhaps due to the arrival on the scene of a European generation innocent of this heinous crime. Since then, the production of books, articles, and films on the subject has continued unabated; in fact, it is growing. Yet the thousands of books and the tens of thousands of articles, many of them not only accurate and scholarly but also beautifully written, have not achieved their purpose. They may have persuaded other scholars but not the public. For when Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust was published, in 1996, with new claims, it was as if the previous literature had never existed.