No question today … either among learned men is more discussed or among the highest princes of the Christian world is more controversial than that of monarchy.…” Few persons in early seventeenth-century Europe could have spoken with greater authority on the matter of emperor and empire than that archival miner and assembler of political texts, Melchior Goldast. In his dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Bremen the political publicist proceeded to accuse the Papacy, more wolf than pastor, of having intruded upon both church and secular authority, arrogating to its own monarchy the supreme Sacerdotium and the supreme Imperium. The disturbed publicist concluded his account of papal usurpation and artifice: “If there were no Roman emperors, there would be no Roman pope: if there were no Roman pope, Roman emperors would still flourish.

In the postwar search for German national heroes, preferably committed democrats, scholars have rediscovered the Berlin wit and journalist Adolph Glassbrenner (1810–76). In the series of exhibitions about Prussia which flooded West Berlin in 1981 Glassbrenner's memorabilia surfaced with regularity. He even merited a small exhibition of his own and a biography in the series Preussische Köpfe. Berlin enthusiasts and aficionados of German folk culture praise him as a quaint, local humorist while others, primarily academic Germanists and historians, point to his activities as a liberal opponent of the Prussian state before the revolution of 1848. None of these many admirers would argue, however, that Glassbrenner was a major literary talent or a particularly original political thinker.

In the summer of 1985, I visited a number of German corporate archives in search of reflective writings, diaries, memoirs, private commentaries on economic or political affairs, and the like by important German businessmen of this century. Much of the trip proved disappointing, probably because little of the sort of material I wanted ever came into being, let alone remains to be found. Executives are not given as a rule, regardless of their day or domicile, to ruminative prose. At the Degussa AG in Frankfurt, however, the archivist pointed me toward a discovery: the Biographische Unterlagen of Dr. Friedrich (Fritz) Roessler (1870–1937), the son of Degussa's founder, member of its five- to six-man managing group (Direktion) from 1901 to 1924, and chairman of its supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) from the latter date until his death.