The idea of writing a social and economic history of Munich painters in the period between the death of King Ludwig II and the end of the German inflation evolved from earlier work on literary and theatrical censorship in the city. It soon became clear that artists, compared with writers and especially dramatists, normally ran little risk of police interference. Although pictures were occasionally removed from exhibitions, or rehung, for religious, moral, or political reasons, such cases were rare and controversial. Generally speaking, only artist-contributors to satirical papers like Simplicissimus, or specialists in erotic book illustration, were at all likely to fall foul of the law. Most painters' principal concern was not legal but financial: how to survive economically in the uncertain market conditions which had followed the Gründerzeit art boom.

A requisite for determining the nature of a political movement is identifying the segments of society which provide its base of support. In the case of German National Socialism, however, historians and political scientists have often neglected an empirical analysis of the social composition of the party membership, concentrating instead on its “program,” its leadership, and its organization. From these aspects of Nazism, they have deduced that the movement must have had great appeal for certain dissatisfied groups in German society during the interwar period, and that those groups in fact made up the bulk of the party's rank-and-file members.

The decision of German employers in the Rhenish-Westphalian iron and steel industry to lock out workers in November 1928 rather than accept binding arbitration of a dispute over wages marked, in retrospect, the beginning of the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. The strongest group of German capitalists, from the center of German heavy industry, frontally attacked the governing parliamentary coalition. It did so to stop the extension of socioeconomic reforms, if possible to reverse those that had been instituted since 1918, and above all to challenge that policy of state intervention in economic affairs which regulated class conflicts and institutionalized labor union influence.