There have been many programmatic appeals encouraging historians to reconstruct the emotional life of the past, to describe the major features of an inner landscape that has disappeared from view. Yet when emotion has been evoked, it has all too often figured as an unanalyzed residue, immune to closer scrutiny. Such has been particularly the case in the study of politics: the investigation of interpersonal relationships among the politically powerful has scarcely even been staked out. The present essay is an effort to take up this task; it is an exploratory venture into a hitherto neglected realm of political history—politics as psychological drama.

Interpreters who would make Karl Marx a democrat argue that a correctly informed socialist agitation can combine with economic conditions to create majority support for a proletarian revolution and a communist society. When the agitators themselves disagree about socialist theory, however, a dilemma is created. Should party leaders pose as guardians of orthodoxy and muzzle intraparty dissent, to the obvious detriment of democracy, or should they tolerate criticism of socialist dogma, and thereby perhaps weaken the chance for a successful revolution? Before Lenin imposed his answer to these questions upon the communist movement, the world's first mass-based and avowedly Marxist party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), grappled inconclusively with this intraparty dilemma of democratic socialism.

A MOST significant development has been taking place in the field of German history in the last half dozen years or so. Although largely overshadowed, especially in this country, by such emotion-laden issues as the Fritz Fischer debate and the ever popular history of Nazism, it has been quietly changing the terrain of German history and touching the historical consciousness of West Germans in essential ways. It is the maturation of the postwar period from 1945 to 1949 into a significant and sophisticated area of historical inquiry. In a larger West German cultural-political context this has meant the reclaiming of a piece of German history long regarded as lost together with the war and assorted eastern territories.

Until only recently, German history has concentrated on the view from the top. As officials and as individuals, prominent Germans have been especially diligent about maintaining their records, and great numbers of previously secret holdings were made public after the Allied victory in 1945. Add all this to the wealth of memoirs and monographs already available, and there is clearly much to engage the interested historian or scholar. In particular, our understanding of the imperial era has benefited from the infusion of these rich resources. However, the vast majority of this material centers on the state and national leadership, with the result that German history is most frequently viewed from their perspectives: the historiography of the German people has been virtually overlooked. Recently, statistical and behavioral-science techniques have increasingly been incorporated into historical methodology in an effort to achieve a greater understanding of the public at large. Quantitative history and group biography are only two manifestations of this trend, and they have made significant contributions to our understanding of imperial Germany. I would like to suggest that careful examination of the German press can also add valuable new dimensions to the study of the imperial era, and to offer some simple techniques to help make this possible.