In the last decades of the eighteenth century the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) flourished in Catholic Germany, developing a distinctive character there. Nothing lay more at the heart of enlightened interests than the reform of pedagogy, and in particular the education of children in parish schools and catechetical classes. This article focuses on the reform of popular education in the Prince-Bishopric (Hochstift) of Würzburg between 1765 and 1795 both to help in defining the goals and policies of the Catholic Enlightenment and to evaluate the extent of its success.

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.

The fixing of the disputed Polish-German border in Upper Silesia by referendum in 1921 has generally stood in a second rank behind other dramatic and difficult episodes of peacemaking and stabilization. Set in calmer times, the phenomenon of 1.2 million voters deciding whether their region would belong to one state or the other might reasonably rate as a remarkable event. Indeed, the German plebiscite victory in the face of an actual majority of “ethnic” Poles, the ensuing paramilitary war (May to July 1921), and the eventual partition of the province provide ample historical drama.