One hundred years ago a Prussian diplomat named Count Carl von Dönhoff reported from Dresden on a Saxon election campaign. His observations reflected a deep concern felt about the rise of mass politics in Germany. “Those who support the parties of order,” he wrote, “are apathetic and weary of elections.” The Reichstag in Berlin was attracting the public's exclusive attention, he noted, whereas “interest politics” were intruding at the local and regional levels of German political life. “From this,” he concluded, “arises the fear that men who represent only a narrow circle of interests and who have no understanding for the issues of state that bear on the general welfare of the people will enter the [Saxon] Landtag.”

For many Germans who lived through the historic events of 1989- 90, the electoral “game” seemed as tiresome and unrewarding as it had to Count von Dönhoff a hundred years earlier. In March 1990 voters in the German Democratic Republic gave a resounding “yes” to unification, though apparently to little else. They appeared to do so again in the all-German elections of December 1990. Yet over this period the process of political mobilization became the subject of intense and contentious debate.