The relationship between the Roman Catholic church and the state in nineteenth-century German history appears to have been plagued by discord and mistrust. From the secularization of church lands and the dissolution of sovereign ecclesiastical territories at the beginning of the century to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, church and state found themselves repeatedly at loggerheads. One thinks of the negotiations between Prussia and Rome on a concordat after 1815, the Cologne mixed marriage controversy of 1837, the Frankfurt Parliament's debates on Article III of the Reich Constitution in 1848, and the hostility aroused by the Raumer decrees of 1852. In a recent article on the Catholic church in Westphalia during the 1850s and his book on popular Catholicism in nineteenth-century Germany, Jonathan Sperber has challenged the validity of this picture of conflict between church and state.

At a time when the Republican party in America seems to have abandoned its brief hopes of proclaiming a new paradigm, it may seem apropos to observe that old ones die hard—and not only in public life. A case in point from the scholarly world is the subject of this essay: the persistent historiographical notion of industrial factionalism. Throughout this century, students of German political economy have tended to see the country's business world as divided between two groupings. One comprises the classic heavy industries of the first Industrial Revolution and the Ruhr: coal, iron, and steel. Supposedly oriented toward domestic markets, burdened with high labor costs, doomed to flattening gains in productivity and profits, and habituated to hierarchy within their plants and the nation, executives in this grouping have figured in the historical literature as consistently and intransigently united against free trade, labor unions, and parliamentary government—indeed, against modernization itself.

In many respects, Hamburg and Berlin represent two societal models at work in Wilhelmian Germany. Hamburg and the other Hanseatic cities, Lübeck and Bremen, have traditionally been thought to represent bourgeois society as it might have been in Germany as a whole: self-assured, liberal, and antiaristocratic. Historians are generally in agreement with Richard J. Evans in his assertion that “neither the economic activity nor the social world nor finally the political beliefs and actions of the Hamburg merchants corresponded to anything that has ever been defined, however remotely, as ‘feudal.’” Berlin, on the other hand, was dominated by the imperial court and the aristocracy, which, it is said, seduced and fatally weakened not only the business elite of the capital, but in fact the most influential segment of the German bourgeoisie as a whole.

To what extent was liberalism a resurgent force in the last decade of the German Empire? Considerable debate has materialized around this question. After he became chair of the National Liberal caucus in the Reichstag, the Badenese attorney Ernst Bassermann gathered around himself a coterie of young reformers (the most notable of whom was Gustav Stresemann) who were eager to rejuvenate German liberalism. While opening themselves to alliances with social democracy and the working class, these self-consciously proud members of the business and educated middle classes vigorously asserted an aggressive liberal profile and busied themselves with the creation of new organizational structures to undergird a revivified liberal movement. We know a great deal about some of these political-organizational projects, most notably the Young Liberal movement and the Hansabund. Historians have, however, neglected the rural component of this revival—the German Peasant League (Deutscher Bauernbund, or DBB)—which Bassermann recognized as equally important to the National Liberal party's future as the Hansabund.

The Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, was occasioned, if not caused, by complex disputes over religion. Fought mainly in Germany, it was a European war, involving powers from Spain to Poland. The three decades of merciless warfare in the heart of Europe undermined the old awareness of a universal Christendom, shattered the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, and contributed to the consolidation of the territorial entity or nation state. The war ended with Germany weakened and divided, and with the once proud Kingdom of Bohemia bereft of its former national and confessionla identity.

Historians Max Braubach, Michael Doeberl, Erwin Hölzle, and Franz Schnabel developed in the interwar period a new understanding of the role of the “Third Germany,” in particular the south Germ an states of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Baden, in the shaping of the new European order in the beginning of the nineteenth century: they viewed these governments as masters of statecraft and as liberal counterforces to conservative and nationalist Prussia. Recent scholars have continued to focus on the “Third Germany” but in a different vein. Contemporary writers Helmut Berding, Christof Dipper, and Elisabeth Fehrenbach, for example, examined the reforms in Rheinbund-Germany and concluded that everywhere liberal innovations remained stunted and incomplete. Furthermore, they no longer view the “Third Germany” as an antithesis to Prussia but, instead, perceive all of Vormärz-Germany as engulfed by an overly statist and antipluralistic mind-set.

Arising from the French revolutionary upheaval and the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, nineteenth-century Baden, as a political and administrative structure joined to a social body, had few continuities with an earlier past. Though a Napoleonic progeny, its successful transition to modern statehood started as an act of dynastic and bureaucratic will, imposed upon a recalcitrant or disinterested population. Remarkably, the new creation struck roots within its inhabitants which are still evident today. Beyond doubt the Zähringen monarch and the grand duchy's officialdom were estranged from large segments of the population at midcentury, as the revolutionary events of 1848–49 show. Nonetheless, a sense of Badenese citizenship and patriotism had become widely institutionalized by 1848.

In a recent article on state-building in the “Third Germany” during the Rheinbund years, Hans Schmitt noted the “degrees of variation” that were to be found in the tempo, structure, and results of government reform programs among the German states. This variety stemmed not only from the uneven penetration of French influence, but also from the different historical conditions and levels of political development pertaining in each state. Schmitt concluded part of his analysis by pointing out that this variety which so characterized state-building between 1806 and 1813 continued after the fall of Napoleon and the unravelling of the Rheinbund. The multiplicity of state-building programs and agendas in Germany during the Restoration era confirms this assertion. For the monarchs of states such as Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Nassau, the end of the French Imperium was an opportunity—under the new auspices of the German Confederation—to continue the integration of new territories and subjects via bureaucratic centralization and experimentation with constitutional models.

The three articles of this symposium contribute to a vital debate about the nature of modern German politics. The works by Barbara Anderson, Loyd Lee, and Lawrence Flockerzie discuss the political culture upon which the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Germany rested. This political culture transcended the conventional concepts “liberal” and “conservative.” It was based on bourgeois ideals.