The Revolution of 1848 is a favorite subject for historians of Germany because, in so many ways, it inaugurated contemporary German history. It is a Significant “watershed” in political, social, and even intellectual history. But our understanding of this great upheaval is nonetheless still vexingly deficient. In particular, the political impact of pre-March social change, though it is the subject of much recent inquiry, is not well understood. German society was so complex, so diverse, and in such a bewildering state of tranistion that general observations are hard to make; what is true in one place is often false in another. So there is no comprehensive study. for example. of the agrarian uprisings of 1848, and opinions differ widely on their scope, intensity, and siginifcance. The role of the working class is also murky and unclear, partly because that class was beginning its long-term transformation from a traditonal guild artisante to a modern factory proletriat, a process which gratly complicates sociological definitions.

On September 14, 1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party led by Adolf Hitler scored its first national triumph by polling over six million votes and winning more than a hundred seats in the German Reichstag. Its gains came mainly at the expense of the established bourgeois parties. The success of the National Socialists stemmed primarily from the ability of Hitler and his colleagues to articulate the anxieties and frustrated ambitions of the German middle class. These anxieties grew out of a multitude of factors, of which the world economic crisis was the most spectacular. But the dramatic character of the world economic crisis has generally obscured the extent to which these anxieties were the product of certain long-range factors present in the structure of German society ever since the end of the previous century. In the period before World War I the German economy underwent a series of changes which resulted in a partial rationalization of its productive and distributive processes. This process was accelerated during the course of World War I and reached a climax in the middle of the 1920's before the world economic crisis deprived German management of the capital it needed for the purposes of rationalization.

In 1965, Ralf Dahrendorf published his compelling work Society and Democracy in Germany. In this fruitful union of sociology and history, he argued convincingly that an overwhelming penchant for concord and synthesis has been the bane of the German mind for the past century and a half; not only in political thought but in traditional institutions such as the legal and educational systems, and ironically even in the supposedly radical Social Demorcatic Party. Everywhere in German life Dahrendorf preceived a quest for certainty—an obsessive need for some objective authority to deliver unimpeachable judgments that would find universal acceptance. More than settling disputes, such authorities were expected to obviate the need for disagreement altogether. The converse of this desire for harmony was an inability to accept conflict as normal; wherever conflict reared its ugly head, Germans sought to banish this unnatural phenomenon by appeal to a higher power. In this curious refusal to recognize ambiguity in life and society, Dahrendorf found the key to the German problem: what roadblocks the German ideology has placed in the way of development toward liberal parliamentary government.

The question Wer ist schuld am Krieg?, the focus of a propaganda battle already during the Great War, has obsessed German historians unlike any other issue in their recent history. In America the publishing success of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August, the acclaim of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, and the continual appearance of paperback introductions testify to an abiding interest in the outbreak of the First World War. But with the exception of the memorable debate between Sindey Fay and Bernadotte Schmidt, there have been no major American contributions because the issue of causes and responsibilities has been seen primarily as an academic problem.