For over a century now, scholars have viewed the divergent paths of agrarian development east and west of the Elbe river as a watershed in German history. In the west, according to this view, peasants from the late Middle Ages on enjoyed increasing freedom from direct seigniorial interference in their social, economic, and judicial affairs. Seigniorial obligations (often commuted to cash rents) remained, as did a degree of seigniorial control over peasant lands in many regions, but peasants west of the Elbe increasingly shed the more onerous seigniorial obligations, and could generally move without the lord's permission.

In April 1909 Emil Schüler, a Jew of Lippstadt, a small town in Catholic Westphalia, died. The passing of this otherwise unremarkable man was noted in a number of newspapers because Schüler was known to be both a good “Israelite” and a loyal supporter of the Center Party—a party denounced as “ultramontane” by its enemies and acknowledged even by its friends to have a constituency almost entirely Catholic. The Jüdische Rundschau commented, however, that it considered this Lippstadt Jew's political allegiance “absolutely worth considering,” opining that recent proceedings in the Reichstag had shown that at least the religious interests of Jews found better representation within the Center than with, for example, either Liberalism or Social Democracy.

The study of history in Germany differs from its counterparts in other lands in that from the very beginning it possessed a unique theoretical and methodological conception, called “historicism,” to which German historians held with great tenacity until the 1960s. This point, which is hardly controversial, has recently been reinforced by Georg G. Iggers.

What has happened to quantitative history? Is it dead? Any working historian alive today in the English-speaking world surely knows that it has come under heavy attack at least since Lawrence Stone, one of its former proponents, began sounding its death knell in a provocative and widely cited essay written at the turn of this decade by declaring scientific history a “myth” and calling for a “revival of narrative.” Georg Iggers, perhaps the leading historiographer of European and especially German history, wrote recently that “the past few years have seen a profound disillusionment with the quantitative approaches which were at the core of would-be scientific history…. The heady optimism of Marxists, Annalists, and American cliometricians that history would become a rigorous science has been shattered. What has taken its place in recent historical writing is a return from analysis to narrative, with a central focus, as Stone says, on ‘man not circumstances. Indeed many pioneering American cliometricians have turned conciliatory like Robert Fogel, irritable and combative like Charles Tilly, or downright depressed like J. Morgan Kousser.