In the article by Hermann Rebel, “What Do the Peasants Want Now?”, vol. 34, no. 3 (2001), the below listed footnotes should read as follows:

77. James C. Scott, Domination, 187–92 passim …

78. James C. Scott, Domination, 191–92.

79. Ibid., 103.

82. James C. Scott, Domination, 198.

In late July 1914, upon partial mobilization of the Austro-Hungarian army, an urgent appeal to “Austria's women” circulated widely in the Viennese press. It urged women to “perform service in the time of war” and reminded them that in this moment of state peril, women had to suppress their “differences” and display the “strongest solidarity” among themselves. “Women's unity, women's energy, and women's work” would be crucial for the survival of Austria. The notice was published by one of the women's groups in what would become the Frauenhilfsaktion Wien, an umbrella organization founded in early August, comprising the major women's groups in the city. Together with similar subsequent appeals to duty, service, sacrifice, and an inner bond uniting all women, the notice marked the beginning of World War I as a potential turning point in women's relationships with each other and with the state. Across the political spectrum, noble, bourgeois, and working-class women, Christian and Jewish, German-speaking, and others, were asked to put aside their differences and perform war service as “Austria's women.”

In 1835, Ferdinand Gustav Kühne, a Saxon writer and teacher, estimated that the Germanic realm was inundated with spas and that nowhere else were there as many as in Central Europe. In France there were “only ten springs, in Italy eight, Hungary had twelve, Sweden three, Spain two, England two, in Denmark and in vast Russia there was only one mineral spring of note in each, whereas in German-speaking countries, that is, including Bohemia and Switzerland, 149 facilities claimed to possess healing springs.” Although Kühne's estimate of foreign spas was too low—according to recent studies, the number of spas in England and France was significantly higher—contemporary accounts and recent local studies support his finding that Germans had the most bathing facilities in Europe. Fred Kaspar has isolated ninety-nine spas and mineral springs in Westphalia alone. Beginning in the last third of the eighteenth century, the number of spas and spa goers in particular increased rapidly in the Germanic realm. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, whereas fifty years later there were close to 4,000 and by the turn of the century 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors. Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1,424 guests proper (not including peasants who were not considered guests proper) reaching 2,800 guests by the middle of the century, and around 19,000 by 1900.

This rather brief essay represents an attempt to raise a problem relating to the direction that much of recent research on Imperial Germany has taken. The deliberations that follow emerge from a renewed and quite extensive reading of the secondary literature on the history of the German Empire that I undertook in connection with my contribution to the 1806–1918 volume of the 10th edition of Gebhardt's Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Although my research interests had moved into other fields of German and European history following my work on the sociopolitical history of the Wilhelmian period, I confess that, like so many fellow historians, I continue to be fascinated by those decades before 1914. So, even if I have not been back to the archives, I have been trying to follow the no doubt rich “post-Bielefeld” output of what are by now at least two consecutive generations of younger scholars in this field.

I am grateful to Volker Berghahn for the chance to clarify our differences as well as for the characteristic civility of his critique. In what follows, I will 1) take issue with his view of German historiography; 2) rebut his charge that the recent scholarship has left us with a “fragmented,” ultimately undecipherable picture of the Kaiserreich; and 3) explain why I think my own argument in Practicing Democracy, which he agrees takes seriously the oppressive features of German society, is more persuasive than his picture of “deterioration to the point of impasse and ungovernability.”