1. Quoted in Winkler, Heinrich August, “Ein Erneuerer der Geschichtswissenschaft: Hans Rosenberg 1904–1988,” Historische Zeitschrift 248, no. 3 (1989): 532CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Ritter, Gerhard A., “Hans Rosenberg 1904–,”1988,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 284.Google Scholar

2. Rosenberg, Hans, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft, und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin/West, 1967), 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Auocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) hereafter BAA, QuotationsGoogle Scholar, ibid., 229, 109. On generational cohorts in Weimar Germany, see Peukert, Detlev J. K., Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1987).Google Scholar

4. Rosenberg, Hans, “Rückblick auf ein Historikerleben zwischen zwei kulturen,” address delivered in Bielefeld on 2 11 1977, in Rosenberg, Hans, Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjunkturen: Studien zur neueren deutschen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Göttingen, 1978), 11–23, quotation from 23, 19; see also 13.Google Scholar

5. Quotations from BAA, 229–30, 234, and “Rückblick,” 20. The paperback edition of BAA appeared iln 1966. It was identical in text and pagination to the first edition, with the exception that Rosenberg omitted from it the hardcover version's “Postcript,” 229–38. The postscript's commentary on the linkage between Prussian traditions and Nazism, and its angry censure of the conservative and restorationist tendencies of post–1945 West German hestoriography, make it a valuable document for the purposes of the present article (whilch cites the first edition throughout the text below). In 1977, Rosenberg defended the “combative and polemical undertones” of the original book, and especially the postscript, but held that the latter's exclusion in later issues was justified because it had been “superseded,” presumably because of progressive developments among the younger generation of historians in West Germany; “Rückblick,” 20–21.

6. Rosenberg to Meinecke, 6 May 1946, quoted by Gerhard A. Ritter, “Rosenberg,” 292. In Winkler's citation of this passage, fuller than Ritter's the word “democratic” does not qualify “restructuring”; Winkler, “Ein Erneuerer,” 541. Rosenberg, Hans, “The Rise of the Junkers in Brandenberg-Prussia, 1410–1653,” appeared in The American Historical Review 49, nos, 1–2 (1943–1944): 1–22, 228–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMeinecke, Friedrich, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen first appeared in 1946 and, in English, in 1950 (Boston).Google Scholar

On Rosenberg's life and career, intellectual formation, political and philosophical convictions, and scholarly accomplishments, see his own accounts in “Rückblick” and BAA (“Postscript”), as well as in his introductions to Rosenberg, Hans, Politische Denkströmungen im deutschen Vormärz (Göttingen, 1972 [reissued essays of 1929–1931]), 7–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rosenberg, Hans, Die Weltwirtschaftskrise 1857–1859 (Göttingen, 1974 [reissue of original edition of 1934]), v–xxvGoogle Scholar, Ritter's and Winkler's articles of 1989 (cited in n. 1, above) are the best secondary accounts, but also valuable are Ritter, Gerhard A., ed., “Vorwort,” in Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft: Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin/West, 1970), v–x;Google ScholarWehler, Hans-Ulrich, ed., “Vorwort,” Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag (Göttingen, 1974), 9–21;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBüsch, Otto, “In Memoriam Hans Rosenberg, 1904–1988,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 37 (1988): 523–28;Google ScholarSchulin, Ernst, ed., Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945–1965) (Munich, 1989), 20–22, 270–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Schissler, Hanna, “Explaining History: Hans Rosenberg,” in Lehmann, Hartmut and Sheehan, James, eds., An Interrupted Past:Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1991).Google Scholar For a critique of Rosenberg's analytical method, focused on his treatment of business cycles, see Eley, Geoff, “Hans Rosenberg and the Great Depression of 1873–1996: Politics and Economics in Recent German Historiography, 1960–1980” in Eley, Geoff, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston, 1986), 23–41.Google Scholar

7. Quotations from “Rückblick,” 19

8. Quotations from BAA, 229, and “Rückblick,” 21. In BAA, 235, n. 8 Rosenberg criticized Gerhard Ritter especially harshly for apologetic treatment of German conservative traditions. In the mid-1960s Ritter threw his considerable weight against a German translation of Rosenberg's book; see Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte Heute, 17.

9. See, for its historiographical analysis and citation of the literature (as well as for its high assessment of Rosenberg's contribution), Kocka, Jürgen, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a discussion of the Sonderweg problem from a different but related angle, see Feldman, Gerald D., “The Weimar Republic: A Problem of Modernization?” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 26 (1986): 1–26.Google Scholar On nationalist elements in German historiography, see Iggers, George C., The Geman Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1983)Google Scholar and Faulenbach, Bernd, Ideologie des deutschen Weges: Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980).Google Scholar On post-World War II devlopments, see Schulze, Winfried, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989).Google Scholar A very influential version of the Sonderweg argument was presented by Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967 [German original, 1965]).Google Scholar

On the debates triggered by the Sonderweg thesis as argued in the work of Wehler, Hans-Ulrich and his colleagues, and synthesized in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1973)Google Scholar, see the arguments and literature presented in Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Historiography in Germay Today,” in Habermas, Jürgen, ed., Observations on “ The Spiritual Situation of the Age”: Contemporary German Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass., 1984 [German original, 1979]), 221–59.Google Scholar Also useful are Moeller, Robert G., ‘The Kaiserreich Recast? Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography,” Journal of Social History 17, no. 4 (1984): 655–83;CrossRefGoogle ScholarRetallack, James N., “Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler's Das deutsche Kaiserreich,” German Studies Review 8, no. 3 (1984): 423–50;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFletcher, Roger, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics,” German Studies Review 8, no. 3 (1984): 451–80;CrossRefGoogle ScholarEvans, Richard J., “The Myth of Germany's Missing Revolution,” New Left Review 149 (1985): 67–94;Google Scholar and Maier, Charles A., The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 100–120.Google Scholar

The Sonderweg thesis, because it derives National Socialism from the weakness of liberal-democratic political institutions in Germany, corresponds to the interests of philosophical and ideological liberals. The conservative nationalist position, as argued for example by Ritter, Gerhard in Das deutsche Problem (Munich, 1962 [first edition, 1948])Google Scholar, rejected this approach, on historicist grounds and because it opposed judgment of German developments by liberal teleologies and Westem norms. Marxist historiography has treated the relationship between liberallism and industrial capitalism either as a temporary connection typical of the age of bourgeois revolution or, more subtly, as entirely contingent on prevailing political culture. In this perspective, the only indispensible condition for capitalist development is the clearing away of legal, institutional, and other structural impediments to industrial growth and the private accumulation of capital, which can be effected by various political means other than parliamentary liberalism. This condition having been met in Germany through the foundation of the Bismarckian Empire, arguments concerning a German Sonderweg only obscure the unhappy circumstance that fascism is one potentiality of bourgeois society. Still, since radical fascism (in the form of National Socialism) occurred only in Germany, neither conservative nor Marxist historians can avoid offering their own “special path” arguments. In the “classic” literature, see Engels, Friedrich, The Role of Force in History, ed., Wangermann, Ernst (New York, 1968);Google Scholar for the Marxist-Leninist approach, see Herrmann, Joachim et al., Deutsche Geschichte in 10 Kapiteln (Berlin/East, 1988);Google Scholar on the Frankfurt School's approach to fascism, see Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, 1973);Google Scholar for recent Westem Marxist analysis, see Eley and Blackbourn, Peculiarities of German History, passim, and Eley, Geoff, “What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?” Politics and Society 12, no. 1 (1983): 53–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Herzfeld, Hans and Berges, Wilhelm, “Bürokratie, Aristokratie, und Autokratie in Preussen,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 11 (1962): 282–96, quotations from 284, 288–89;Google ScholarOestreich's, Gerhard review appeared in the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 52 (1965): 276–81, quotations from 277–78Google Scholar. Other reviews were brief and, though respectful of Rosenberg's accomplishment, more or less critical of his arguments. See American Historical Review 64, no. 3 (1959): 646–47 (Simon, W. M.): Journal of Modern History 31, no. 4 (1959): 362–63Google Scholar (Dorwart, Reinhold A.): German Life and Letters 12 (1959–1960): 253–36Google Scholar (Paret, Peter); Historische Zeitschrift 191 (1960): 212–13 (Fritz Terveen).Google Scholar

11. Quotations from Ritter, “Rosenberg,” v, viii, ix; Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte Heute, 16. Characteristic of Wehler's views on the German Empire was his mis-citation of Rosenberg's book of 1967 as “Grosse Repression und Bismarckzeit” ibid., 19, n. 3. Krieger, Leonard, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Chicago), (1957).Google Scholar

12. Augstein, Rudolf et al. , “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987).Google Scholar For analysis of the debate and references to the now extensive literature in English, see Baldwin, Peter, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston, 1990).Google Scholar

13. Winkler, “Ein Erneuerer,” 529–56, passim; quotations from 551, 553. Winkler found the Sonderweg thesis set forth in Rosenberg's Habilitationsschrift, Rosenberg, Hans, Rudolf Haym und die Anfänge des klassischen Liberalismus (Munich, 1933), as well as in all his subsequent works; Winkler, “Ein Erneuerer,” 533–34, 542–43Google Scholar. In other eulogies, Otto Büsch, “ In Memoriam,” 524, honored Rosenberg as the “most significant cofounder” of the school “of ‘the critical history of society”’ Ritter, “Rosenberg,” 299, acclaimed Rosenberg, especially on account of his Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, as “the exemplar and mentor of the ‘critical’ social history that eastablished itself at the end of the 1960s and thought of itself as ‘historical social science.’” On the Fischer controversy, see the symposium in Central European History 21, no. 3 (1988): 203–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. BAA, viii, 2.

15. BAA, 2. With such words as “barbarous” and ” Rosenberg alluded to the crimes of National Socialism. So far as I have discovered, he never wrote plainly of the Nazis’ murder of the Jews, or of other groups of victims. Leaving aside its psychological functions, such reticence, not untypical of well-educated German and German-Jewish survivors of his generation, seems to display a deep reluctance to associate “the State—with its idealist attributes of reason and morality—with bloody savagery.

16. BAA, 24, viii.

17. BAA, 23, 19, Cf. also 11.

18. On the “Great Depression of 1618–1650,” Ritter, “Rosenberg,” 292 For views challenging Rosenberg's (and F. L. Carsten's) on the role of the noble estates in the emergence of absolutism, see Asch, Ronald G., “Estates and Princes after 1648: The Consequences of the Thirty Years' War,” German History 6, no. 2 (1988): 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hagen, William W., ”Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg: The Thirty Years' War, the Destabilization of Serfdom, and the Rise of Absolutism,” American Historical Review 94, no. 2 (1989): 302–35. On Carsten, see n. 19, below.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. BAA, 109, 148. Rosenberg argued (ibid., 169), though without evidence, that Frederick II promoted an aristocratic resurgence in government “because he came to fear the power of the royal servants.”

On Prussian historiography, see Mirow's, Jürgen useful study, Das alte Preussen imdeutschen Geschichtsbild seit der Reichsgründung (Berlin/West, 1981);Google ScholarBüsch, Otto and Erbe, Michael, eds., Otto Hintze und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft: Ein Tagungsbericht (Berlin/West, 1983) especially the contributions by Dietrich Gerhard (3–18), Otto Büsch (25–41), and Peter Baumgart (60–77);Google Scholar and, although it is not strictly a historiographical study, Büsch, Otto ed., Das Preussenbild in der Geschichte: Protokoll eines Symposions (Berlin/West, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially the contributions of Hans-Ulrich Wehler (27–31), Francis L. Carsten (53–63), and Peter Baumgart (“Epochen der preussischen Monarchie im 18. Jahrhundert,” 65–96). It would overburden the present essay beyond measure to test Rosenberg's analysis in detail against the subsequent scholarly literature, the more so since much of the specialist literature on Prussian history published in West Germany since the 1950s, heavily stamped by methodological and political conservation, has tended to pass over the argument of his book in silence. See, for example, Heinrich, Gerd, Geschichte Preussens: Staat und Dynastie (Frankfurt am Main, 1981)Google Scholar, whose extensive bibliography omits Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, Autocracy.

Rosenburg himself was not an exemplary citizen of the republic of letters. He made no effort to debate interpretations in conflict or competition with his own. Especially egregious was his dismissal, with only the most perfunctory of citations, of the formidable scholarship of his fellow refugee, Carsten, Francis L., notably Carsten's Origins of Prussia (Oxford, 1954), whose Whiggish argument contrasts interestingly with Rosenberg's views.Google Scholar In his recent (and still Whiggish) History of the Prussian Junkers (Brookfield, Vt., 1989 [German original, 1988])Google Scholar, Carsten pays Rosenberg the compliment of endorsing his arguments on aristocratic dominance within the political system of Prussian absolutism.

For an interesting challenge to Rosenberg's argument, stressing the advance under Hohenzollern absolutism of economic development and bourgeois talent, see Behrens, C. B. A., Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (New York, 1985).Google Scholar Respectful of Rosenburg's views, but modifying them, is Neugebauer, Wolfgang, “Zur neueren Deutung der preussischen Verwaltung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 26 (1977): 86–128.Google Scholar

With varying emphases, Rosenberg's fundamental arguments on the tripartite relationship of nobility, bureaucracy, and princely power under the Prussian old-regime—that is, from the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century—are integrated into the analyses, more many-sided than Rosenberg's, of Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, 3rd ed., (Munich, 1985);Google ScholarWehler, Hans-Ulrich, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Vom Feudalismus des alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reformära 1700–815 (Munich, 1987);Google Scholar and Sheehan, James J., German History 1770–1866 (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar Supportive of Rosenberg's perspective are Schissler, Hanna, Preussische Agrargesellschaft im Wandel: Wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche, und politische Transformationsprozesse von 1763 bis 1847 (Göttingen, 1978);CrossRefGoogle ScholarPuhle, Hans-Jürgen and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, eds., Preussen im Rückblick (Göttingen, 1980);Google Scholar and Berdahl, Robert M., The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology 1770–1848 (Princeton, N.J., 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar More critical is Reif, Heinz, “Der Adel in der modernen Sozialgeschichte,” in Wolfgang, Schieder and Volker, Sellin, eds., Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland: Entwicklungen und Perspektiven im international Zusammenhang, 4 vols. (Göttingen, 1987), vol. 4, Soziale Gruppen in der Geschichte, 34–60.Google Scholar

Barrington Moore, Jr., joined Rosenberg's high estimate of the historical weight of the Prussian Junkers with Carsten's, F. L. and Max, Weber's in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966).Google Scholar

20. BAA, 188.

21. BAA, 222, 226–27. While subsequent interpretations of the Reform Era stand in Rosenberg's debt, they invest the ruling bureaucracy with an independence of the nobility's interests much greater than he allowed, and with a modernizing or liberalizing function he was loath to acknowledge. See Koselleck, Reinhart, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution: Allgemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung, und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848 (Stuttgart, 1981)Google Scholar, as well as Rosenberg's enlistment of Koselleck's arguments on behalf of his own in Rosenberg, Hans, Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), 103;Google ScholarSperber, Jonathan, “State and Civil Society in Prussia: Thoughts on a New Edition of Rienhart Koselleck's Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 57, no. 2 (1985): 278–96;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBarbara, Vogel, ed., Preussische Reformen 1807–1820 (Königstein/Taunus., 1980).Google Scholar For critiques both of Rosenberg's and Koselleck's positions, see Levinger, Matthew, “Hardenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Constitutional Question in Prussia 1815–22,” German History 8, no. 3 (1990): 257–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Rosenberg frequently acknowledged the influence upon him of Eckart Kehr, whose work—together with that of Alfred Vagts and a small number of older German historians under the Weimar Rebublic—encourged his turn toward social and economic history inspired by liberal-domocratic commitments; see BAA, 206; Politische Denkströmungen, 12–13; Weltwirtschaftskrise, 10; “Rückblick,” 14. Rosenberg's debunking and demystifying approach to the history of the Prussian state and its ruling elites undoubtedly bears Kehr's stamp, but Kehr was less interested in emphasizing the Junkers' primacy than Rosenberg was. Kehr rahter sought, in Social Democratic fashion foreign to Rosenberg's liberalism, to emphasize the complicity between Prussian authoritarianism and German capitalism. Nor was Kehr much concerned with the German Sonderweg, in part because he did not live to witness the history of the Nazi dictatorship, but in part because he, in harmony with Marxism then and now, was more interested in the common features, both political and socioeconomic, of nationally organized capitalist systems. But Kehr certainly shared, and probably helped inspire, Rosenberg's harsh criticism of reactionary Prussianism.

Most relevant to Rosenberg's work in the context of the present article was Kehr's “ZurGenesis der preussischen Bürokratie und des Rechtsstaates: Ein Beitrag zum Diktaturproblem,” first published in 1932 and reprinted in Hans-Ulrich, Wehler, ed., Moderene deutsche Sozialgeschichte (Cologne/Berlin, 1968), a very influential collection of articles (including two of Rosenberg's).Google Scholar On Kehr, see Hans-Ulrich, Wehler, ed., “Einleitung,” in Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preussisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin/West, 1965), 1–29Google Scholar, and Craig's, Gordon A. introduction to Kehr, Eckart, Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Poilicy: Essays on German History (Berkeley, 1977), vi–xxiGoogle Scholar, as well as, in the same volume, Kehr's “Modern German Historiography,” 174–88. Toward nondogmatic Marxism, it might be added, Rosenberg's attitude was friendly; see Weltwirtschaftskrise, xxi; Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte, 110, 116.

22. BAA, 143, 150, 201. On the European plane, Rosenberg pronounced dynastic absolutism a “passing phenomenon,” important primarily for bequeathing the administrative structures it pioneered to the modern world; ibid., 13. But Frederick II, in reestablishing through the provincial Landschaften structures of limited local representation of the nobility's interests, “sponsored … a partial restoration … of the old territorial Ständestaat”; ibid., 169. The former judgment is an underestimation, the latter an exaggeration; see Peter, Baumgart, ed., Ständetum und Staatsbildung in Brandenburg-Preussen (Berlin/West, 1983)Google Scholar. Rosenberg occasionally doubted whether the nobility in state service—the Landräte, for example—regarded themselves principally as representatives of aristocratic interests, and only secondarily as servants of the state; see BAA, 163.

23. Rosenberg also conceded that dynastic absolutism entailed a “limited broadening of the social base for recruiting governmental personnel,” while “shifting the foundation of public affairs from ‘private’ to ‘public’ law”; BAA, 168. Preceding quotaions: BAA. 19, 42; Grosse Depression, 194, n. 188a; BAA, 46.

24. BAA, 128, 133, and 123ff. Rosenberg's treatment of Cocceji was his only tribute to the Prussian state's championship of enlightened reform, though he offered no explanation of Frederick II's support for it. He might have pursued the interpretive possibilities presented by Brunschwig, Henri, La crise de l'état prussien à la fin du XVIIIe siècle et la génèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris, 1947), a work he cited.Google ScholarCf. Johnson, Hubert C., Frederick the Great and His Officials (New Haven, 1973);Google ScholarMittenzwei, Ingrid, Friedrich II. von Preussen (Berlin/East, 1980);Google ScholarBirtsch, Günter, “Friedrich der Grosse und die Aufklärung,” in Oswald, Hauser, ed., Friedrich der Grosse in seiner Zeit (Cologne/Vienna, 1987), 31–92;Google Scholar Charles Ingrao, “The Problem of ‘Enlightened Absolutism’ and the German States,” and Weis, Eberhard, “Enlightenment and Absolutism in the Holy Roman Empire: Thoughts on Enlightened Absolutism in Germany,” Journal of Modern History 58, Supplement, (1986); 161–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Klippel, Diethelm, “Von der Auflärung der Herrscher zur Herrschaft der Aufklärung,” Zeitschrift fü Historische Forschung 17, no. 2 (1990): 193–210.Google Scholar

25. BAA, viii, 231.

26. BAA, 22–23, 41.

27. Quotations from BAA, 24–25, 230, 232–34.

28. Grosse Depression, ch. 3, passim. In BAA, 230, Rosenberg described the Nazis as “‘tamers’ of the restive and directionless mass of the people.” For examlples of Rosenberg's talent for compendious definitions of social groups and movements (and even of his own qualities) see Rosenberg, Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte, 87; “Rückblick,” 12; Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjunkturen, 60.

29. Quotations from BAA, 59, 150.

30. BAA, 16, 18–19, 49; Grosse Depression, 78–79, and passim; Hans Rosenberg, “Zursozialen Funktion der Agrarpolitik im Zweiten Reich,” in Rosenberg, Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte, 76–77 and 51–80, passim. On the problem of bourgeois “feudalization,” see David, Blackbourn and Evans, Richard J., eds., The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century (London, 1991).Google Scholar

31. Rosenberg, Hans, “Theologischer Rationalismus und vormärzlicher Vulgärliberalismus,” first published in the Historische Zeitschrift (1930), in Politische Denkströmungen, 18–50Google Scholar. Quotation in text from Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte, 52.

32. Rosenberg, Politische Denkströmungen, 10; “Rückblick,” 12.

33. Ritter, “Hans Rosenberg,” 292–93. In “Rise of the Junkers,” 242, Rosenberg bluntly concluded that “the Junkers outwitted the German liberals and democrats of the nineteenth century.”

34. Hans Rosenberg, “Die Ausprägung der Junkerherrschaft in Brandenburg-Preussen, 1410–1618,” in Machteliten und Wirtschaftskrisen, 24–82. Quotations in text from ibid., 76–77, and BAA, 49. For perspectives critical of Rosenberg's arguments, see Hagen, William W., “How Mighty the Junkers? Peasant Rents and Seigneurial Profits in Sixteenth-Century Brandenburg,” Past and Present 108 (1985): 80–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Melton, Edgar, “Gutsherrschaft in East-Elbian Germany and Livonia, 1500–1800: A Critique of the Model,” Central European History 21, no. 4 (1988): 315–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Supportive of Rosenberg's emphasis on the landed nobility's economic dominance, but critical of Rosenberg's appraisal of the Junkers' political hegemony, is Hahn, Peter-Michael, Struktur und Funktion des brandenburgischen Adels im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin/West, 1979).Google Scholar

35. “Ausprägung.” 32, 36, 47; BAA, 72, n. 25.

36. Quotations from “Ausprägung,” 27, 61–63. In Rosenberg's view, the villagers' efforts at self-defense alleviated seigneurial oppression only minimally; ibid., 74ff., and Grosse Depression, 151.

37. Quotations from “Ausprägung,” 76, 78. Rosenberg credited the Junkers themselves with their transformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into maximizing landlords. But he emphasized the role of progressive-minded bourgeois managers of crown estates in the eighteenth century with setting standards that the landed nobility then followed. The importance of bourgeois entrepreneurship in large-estate agriculture in the nineteenth century was even greater; see, apart from BAA and “Ausprägung,” Hans Rosenberg, “Die Pseudodemokratisierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse,” in Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 287–308.

Although Rosenberg acknowledged the economic and political liberalism of many east-Elbian estate owners in the period from the late eighteenth century to 1848; it did not harmonize well with his larger arguments and he offered no explanation of it; see Grosse Depression, 75ff. Cf. the analysis, which addressed Rosenberg's dilemma, by Obenaus, Herbert, “Gutsbesitzerliberalismus: Zur regionalen Sonderentwicklung der liberalen Partei in Ost- und Westpreussen während des Vormärz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 14, no. 3 (1988): 304–38;Google Scholar also Retallack, James, “‘Ideology without Vision?’ Recent Literature on Nineteenth-Century German Conservatism,” Bulletin, German Historical Institute London 13, no. 2 (1991): 3–22.Google Scholar

38. Quotations from BAA, 89–90. Rosenberg harnessed to his own enterprise not only Weber's and Elias's arguments, but also Gerhard Oestreich's emphasis on the social discipline imposed by absolutism. See Oestreich, Gerhard, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates (Berlin, 1969).Google ScholarCf. Schulze, Winfried, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff ‘Sozialdisziplinierung in der frühen Neuzeit,’” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 14, no. 3 (1987): 265–302.Google Scholar On this and other, broader issues, see Melton, James Van Horn, “Absolutism and ‘Modernity’ in Early Modern Central Europe,” German Studies Review 8, no. 3 (1985): 383–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39. Quotation from Rosenberg, “Theologischer Rationalismus,” 48. Cf. “Rückblick,” 13–14.

40. Quotation from Winkler, “Ein Erneuerer,” 531. On Rosenberg's inaugural lecture, the text of which appears not to have survived, see Ritter, “Rosenberg,” 289. See also Rosenberg, Hans, Die nationalpolitische Publizistik Deutschlands: Vom Eintritt der Neuen Ära in Preussen bis zum Ausbruch des Deutschen Krieges. Eine kritische Bibliographie, 2 vols. (Munich, 1935).Google Scholar

41. Quotations from BAA, 229, and Rosenberg, “Pseudodemokratisierung,” 288. In the latter essay (301), he described the Junker conservatives under the Bismarckian Empire as “demokratisierte Reaktionäre.”

42. Quotations from BAA, 183; Rosenberg, “Rise of the Junkers,” 2.

43. Quotations from BAA, 65–66, 68, 73, 81, 147.

44. Quotations from “Ausprägung,” 32, 78, 80; “Rise of the Junkers,” 1, 241; “Pseudodemokratisierung,” 299. Rosenberg charged the Prussian aristocracy collectively with moral corruption, from late-medieval gangsterism to early-modern bribe taking and diversion of public monies into their own pockets, and to cynicism and immorality in their demagogic politics under the Bismarckian Empire; “Ausprägung,” 32, 55, 58–59; “Pseudodemokratisierung,” 304; BAA, ch. 5, passim.

45. BAA, 41.

46. “Pseudodemokratisierung,” 296. In sixteenth-century East Prussia the Junkers “inoculated” their village subjects with “veneration of authority” (Obrigkeitsfrömmigkeit) and, in general, brought them “to heel” with the help of the Lutheran clergy; “Ausprägung,” 48.

47. Quotations from Rosenberg,“Zur sozialen Funktion,” 63–64, 72–73; Grosse Depression, 68, 72, where he also argued (152) that in the 1870s the centuries-long expansion of east-Elbian estate land at the expense of peasant landholdings reversed itself, suggesting—though he does not clearly draw the conclusion—that a material basis had emerged for the political alliance of Junkers and peasant farmers sealed in the Bund der Landwirte and Reichslandbund in the period 1893–1933. Cf. Hagen, William W., “The German Peasantry in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: Market Integration, Populist Politics, Votes for Hitler,” Peasant Studies 14, no. 4 (1987): 284–88 and 274–91, passim.Google Scholar

48. Quotation from BAA, 235; Probleme der deutschen Sozialgeschichte, 143; Politische Denkströmungen, 7; “Rückblick,” 18. Cf. “Ausprägung,” 25–26.

49. Weltwirtschaftskrise, XXV.

50. “Ruckblick,” 21.

51. Rosenberg ratified the self-congratulatory couplet associated with Junker reactionaries: “und der König absolut, wenn er uns den Willen tut”; BAA, 152.

52. See Deppermann, Klaus, “Der preussische Absolutismus und der Adel: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der marxistischen Absolutismustheorie,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 8, no. 4 (1982): 538–53.Google Scholar

53. On officially arbitrated registers of peasant rents and seigneurial obligations, see Hagen, William W., “The Junkers' Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1763–1811,” in Evans, R. J. and Lee, W. R., eds., The German Peasantry: Conflict and Community in Rural Society from the Eighteenth to the Twenteith Centuries (London, 1986), 71–101.Google Scholar

54. Quotations from BAA, 231. On the corporate nobility's policy toward peasant emancipation, see Vetter, Klaus, Kurmärkischer Adel und preussische Reformen (Weimar, 1979)Google Scholar and Hartmut Harnisch, “Vom Oktoberedikt des Jahres 1807 zur Deklaration von 1816: Problematik und Charakter der preussischen Agrarreformgesetzgebung zwischen 1807 und 1816,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Sonderband, (1978): 231–93. On the relationship between village protest and state policy, see the arguments and literature in Hagen, “Junkers' Faithless Servants” and ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis in Brandenburg,”

55. Cf. Jelavich, Peter, “Contemporary Literary Theory: From Deconstruction Back to History,” Central Europeon History vol. 22, nos. 3 and 4 (1989); 374–80Google Scholar, and Baldwin, Peter, “Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 37 and 5–37, passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar