That many German intellectuals greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm, but showed little interest in importing it across the Rhine, is a well-known paradox in German history. For Jacques Droz this paradox resulted from the preoccupation of most German intellectuals with the purely ethical implications of the Revolution—in other words, the Germans dealt with the Revolution in the realm of thought but ignored it in the realm of politics. Behind this argument lay the assumption that because the Germans were for the most part “monarchists” rather than “republicans,” they were apolitical.

There are few politicians in German history who have so persistently held the attention of historians as the moderate liberals of the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. That is not astonishing, for these moderates held political power—or thought they did—at a true historical watershed, and they provide one of the very rare examples of German liberalism at the helm. But it is surprising that after more than a century of historiographical scrutiny it is still possible to disagree about what sort of regime they really intended for the German state they believed they were creating. The parliamentary debates were stenographically recorded, the committee minutes have been published, their constitution was promulgated, and the leading participants have written their memoirs. Yet enough ambiguity remains to support quite drastically differing interpretations of their political and constitutional purposes.

The dissolution of the German party system during the Weimar Republic was well advanced long before either the world economic crisis descended upon Germany with all of its intensity in the early 1930s or the National Socialists scored their first decisive breakthrough into the ranks of Germany's middle-class parties. While both the onset of the depression and the rise of National Socialism greatly accelerated the dissolution of Germany's bourgeois parties, their principal effect was not so much to catalyze this process as to intensify disintegrative factors that had been present ever since the founding of the Weimar Republic. The ultimate cause of the dissolution of the bourgeois party system during the Weimar Republic lay precisely in the inability of established bourgeois parties such as the German Democratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP), the German People's Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP), the German National People's Party (Deutsdmationale Volkspartei or DNVP), and to a somewhat lesser extent the German Center Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei) to integrate the diverse and increasingly antagonistic social and economic interests which constituted their material base into a viable and effective social force. The emergence of special-interest parties in the second half of the 1920s bore dramatic testimony to the failure of Germany's nonsocialist parties to provide the more traditional elements of the German middle class with the effective political representation they needed in order to maintain their social and economic position in the face of mounting economic adversity. Not only did the formation of such parries reflect the process of social and political decay that was at work within the German party system, but the increasing fragmentation of Germany's established bourgeois parties greatly facilitated the penetration of National Socialism into the ranks of the German middle strata.

In the last decade the field of studies focusing on Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist period of German history has been invaded and nearly overrun by an international throng of journalists, essayists, memoirists, apologists, cultists, and hucksters busily engaged in advancing various interpretations, analyses, and portraits of Hitler. Among this group who are not scholars or professional historians, there seems a wide disparity of ability and expertise and an obvious dissimilarity of motives and objectives. It is, therefore, difficult to specify common points of similarity or agreement that might characterize this particular genre of Hitler studies (or enterprises). On one point only do the efforts seem to tally, in the unspoken but apparent agreement on an injunction by now axiomatic: Adolf Hitler sells.