Synthetic works on Imperial Germany range from brief overviews to massive surveys. (Those that focus mainly on one period are listed under Chapters 1 and 2 below.) Relatively short works on the entire imperial period include Roderick McLean and Matthew S. Seligmann, Germany from Reich to Republic, 1871–1918: Politics, Hierarchy and Elites (London, 2000) and Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918 (London and New York, 1995, 2nd rev. edn 2006). Somewhat longer surveys include Edgar Feuchtwanger, Imperial Germany 1850–1918 (London and New York, 2001) and Volker R. Berghahn’s Imperial Germany 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Politics and Culture (Oxford, 1994, 2nd rev. edn 2005). German readers may consult Volker Ulrich, Die nervöse Großmacht 1871–1918. Aufstieg und Untergang des Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt a.M., 1997), which has been abridged for the Fischer Kompakt series as Ulrich, Deutsches Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 2006); Hans-Peter Ullmann, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Frankfurt a.M., 1995); Wilfried Loth, Das Kaiserreich. Obrigkeitsstaat und politische Mobilisierung (Munich, 1996); and Dieter Hertz-Eichenrode’s two volumes, Deutsche Geschichte 1871–1890 and Deutsche Geschichte 1890–1918 (Stuttgart, 1992–96).
Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985) first appeared in German in 1973 as Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918. It is stimulating and suggestive, but its overarching thesis is now largely superseded. Thus it is treated mainly as the classic statement of the Sonderweg thesis and as representative of the ‘Bielefeld school’. Twenty years of debate led Wehler to revise some but certainly not all of his conclusions when he included Imperial Germany in his massive five-volume societal history of Germany, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, covering 1700 to 1990; volume 3 is entitled Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995). A countervailing argument to Wehler’s, presenting a less authoritarian, more modern picture of the empire, is found in Thomas Nipperdey’s equally monumental Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918 (Munich, 1990–92): vol. 1 (Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist) focuses on social, economic, and cultural life, vol. 2 (Machtstaat vor der Demokratie) on politics. The third grand narrative published in the 1990s is Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s twovolume account, Das Ringen um den nationalen Staat. Die Gründung und der innere Ausbau des Deutschen Reiches unter Otto von Bismarck 1850 bis 1890 and Bürgerstolz und Weltmachtstreben. Deutschland unter Wilhelm II. 1890 bis 1918 (Berlin, 1993–95). Mommsen’s collection of essays, Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson (London, 1995) was first published in German in 1990; it is rich with insight but was not intended to serve as a general introduction to the period. Whereas many of Mommsen’s essays bring domestic and foreign policy together, the latter is covered in Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Außenpolitik 1871–1918, 2nd edn (Munich, 1994). David Blackbourn’s History of Germany 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997, 2nd edn 2003) combines thematic and chronological approaches (roughly half the book is devoted to the German Empire); it is elegantly written, balanced, and up to date.
Students are well served by historiographical and interpretative surveys of the field. An outstanding guide has just been published by Matthew Jefferies, Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918 (Oxford, 2007). Still useful is Roger Chickering (ed.), Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion (Westport, CT, and London, 1996). See also the essays in Part 2 of John Breuilly (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society 1780–1918 (London, 2001). Two German books published in different series complement each other, combining brief narrative overviews with longer historiographical surveys: on the empire’s political system see Hans-Peter Ullmann, Politik im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Munich, 1999), which appeared as vol. 52 of the Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte; more eclectic and thought-provoking is Ewald Frie, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich (Darmstadt, 2004), one of the Kontroversen um die Geschichte titles. An important Festschrift for Hans-Ulrich Wehler will include essays that take stock of research on Imperial Germany since the 1970s: Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse. Probleme und Perspektiven (forthcoming, 2008).
English readers seeking primary source materials in translation have long had to rely on slim collections such as Ian Porter and Ian D. Armour, Imperial Germany 1890–1918 (London and New York, 1991), which often combine narrative overviews and a selection of documents, mainly on diplomacy and high politics. A much broader and more accessible collection of sources in both German and English translation is now available online on the website of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC. For volumes 4 and 5 of a ten-volume project entitled ‘German History in Documents and Images’ (covering 1500 to the present), see James Retallack (ed.), Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany (1866–1890) and Roger Chickering (ed.), Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War (1890–1918): the common gateway to these volumes is http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/.
Among source collections in German, the following stress social relations and everyday life: Gerhard A. Ritter and Jürgen Kocka (eds), Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1870–1914 (Munich, 1982); Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1914. Ein historisches Lesebuch, 5th edn (Göttingen, 1992); Wolfgang Piereth (ed.), Das 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Lesebuch zur deutschen Geschichte 1815–1918, 2nd edn (Munich, 1997); Klaus Saul, Jens Flemming, Dirk Stegmann, and Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Arbeiterfamilien im Kaiserreich. Materialien zur Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland 1871–1914 (Düsseldorf, 1982); and Jens Flemming, Klaus Saul, and Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Quellen zur Alltagsgeschichte der Deutschen 1871–1914 (Darmstadt, 1977). Photographs of everyday life are featured in Günther Drommer, Im Kaiserreich. Alltag unter den Hohenzollern 1871–1918 (Leipzig, 2003) and Michael Epkenhans and Andreas von Seggern, Leben im Kaiserreich. Deutschland um 1900 (Stuttgart, 2007). Constitutional issues, foreign policy, and other political themes are more pronounced in volumes 2 and 3 of Ernst Rudolf Huber’s Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, 5 vols. (Stuttgart, 1961, 3rd rev. edn 1978–86); Hans Fenske (ed.), Im Bismarckschen Reich 1871–1890 (Darmstadt, 1978); Fenske (ed.), Unter Wilhelm II. 1890–1918 (Darmstadt, 1982); Fenske (ed.), Quellen zur deutschen Innenpolitik 1890–1914 (Darmstadt, 1991); and Rüdiger vom Bruch and Björn Hofmeister (eds), Kaiserreich und Erster Weltkrieg 1871–1918, 2nd edn (Stuttgart, 2002). Among the most important quantitative sources are Gerd Hohorst, Jürgen Kocka, and Gerhard A. Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch II. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1870–1914, 2nd rev. edn (Munich, 1978), and Gerhard A. Ritter with Merith Niehuss, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918 (Munich, 1980).
In the surveys listed above, the Bismarckian period has often received less attention than the Wilhelmine period. Bismarck remains the defining personality of the pre–1890 era and he has been well served by recent biographers. The most comprehensive biography is the three-volume life and times by Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Modern Germany (Princeton, 1990): vol. 2, The Period of Consolidation, 1871–1880, and vol. 3, The Period of Fortification, 1880–1898, contain many fresh insights. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, trans. J. A. Underwood, 2 vols (London, 1986), was first published in German in 1980; it is an influential interpretation but a rather challenging read for students. The second volume of Ernst Engelberg’s two-volume biography Bismarck. Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin, 1990) covers the period after 1871 but has remained untranslated. The most up-to-date synthesis of recent scholarship on Bismarck and his era in a single volume is Katharine Anne Lerman, Bismarck (Harlow, 2004). Edgar Feuchtwanger has also written a short biography, Bismarck (London, 2002). Older interpretations, such as those by Erich Eyck, A. J. P. Taylor, and Edward Crankshaw, are now very dated. In German, Jost Dülffer and Hans Hübner (eds), Otto von Bismarck. Person—Politik—Mythos (Berlin, 1993) and Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Bismarck und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1992) are both useful collections of essays. Klaus Hildebrand, Otto von Bismarck im Spiegel Europas (Paderborn, 2006) and Lothar Gall, Otto von Bismarck und Wilhelm II. Repräsentanten eines Epochenwechsels? (Paderborn, 2000) offer different perspectives. See also Otto Pflanze with Elizabeth Müller-Luckner (eds), Innenpolitische Probleme des Bismarckreiches (Munich, 1983).
The key work on Bismarckian foreign policy is now Konrad Canis, Bismarcks Außenpolitik 1870–1890. Aufstieg und Gefährdung (Paderborn, 2004). This can be supplemented by Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the AngloGerman Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980); Imanuel Geiss, German Foreign Policy 1871–1914 (London, 1976); and Norman Rich, Friedrich von Holstein: Politics and Diplomacy in the Age of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1965). Gregor Schöllgen (ed.), Escape into War? The Foreign Policy of Imperial Germany (Oxford, 1990), discusses Bismarck’s foreign policy in the context of the origins of the First World War. Other important recent works in German include Ulrich Lappenküper, Die Mission Radowitz. Untersuchungen zur Rußlandpolitik Otto von Bismarcks (1871–1875) (Göttingen, 1990); Axel T. Riehl, Der Tanz um den Äquator. Bismarcks antienglischer Kolonialpolitik und die Erwartung des Thronwechsels in Deutschland 1883 bis 1885 (Berlin, 1993); Friedrich Scherer, Adler und Halbmond. Bismarck und der Orient 1878–1890 (Paderborn, 2001); and Herbert Elzer, Bismarcks Bündnispolitik von 1887. Erfolg und Grenzen einer europäischen Friedensordnung (Frankfurt a.M., 1991).
On the army, Gordon Craig’s The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1955) remains a classic study. On domestic politics, Lothar Gall (ed.), Otto von Bismarck und die Parteien (Paderborn, 2001), provides many insights into Bismarckian political culture. Important recent works in English include Ronald J. Ross, The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871–1887 (Washington, DC, 1998); Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997); and Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). Anderson’s earlier biography of the Centre Party leader and Bismarck’s adversary, Windthorst. A Political Biography (Oxford, 1981), offers a welcome alternative perspective to that of Bismarck’s biographers.
The implications of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s accession to the throne are explored in J. Alden Nichols, The Year of the Three Kaisers: Bismarck and the German Succession, 1887–88 (Chicago, 1987). John C. G. Röhl makes a compelling case for the significance of the imperial German monarchy in The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge, 1995). The first two volumes of Röhl’s biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II also contain much of relevance to Bismarckian Germany: Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1998) and Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004).
The classic introductions to the history of Wilhelmine Germany remain the complementary German studies by Thomas Nipperdey and HansUlrich Wehler (see General works, above, and for other introductory and historiographical surveys). For the views of some participants in the fierce historiographical debates of the 1970s and 1980s see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984); Geoff Eley, From Unification to Nazism (London, 1986); Richard J. Evans, Rethinking German History (London, 1987); and Jürgen Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), 3–16. Useful collections of essays that diverge from the Sonderweg perspective include Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930 (Oxford and New York, 2003); Geoff Eley (ed.), Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996); and the earlier Jack R. Dukes and Joachim Remak (eds), Another Germany: A Reconsideration of the Imperial Era (Boulder, CO, 1988). A concise résumé of divergent interpretations is provided in James Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Basingstoke and New York, 1996).
Beyond the political, social, cultural, and diplomatic histories listed below, biographies constitute an important means of recapturing contemporaries’ varying perspectives of the Wilhelmine era. On the politics of the imperial court one can turn to the volumes by John C. G. Röhl (see Ch. 1); Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, 2 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989–96); Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II (Harlow, 2000); Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge, 1982); and Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (eds), The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003). On domestic politics in the 1890s, dated but still useful are J. Alden Nichols, Germany After Bismarck: The Caprivi Era, 1890–1894 (Cambridge, MA, 1958) and John C. G. Röhl, Germany without Bismarck: The Crisis of Government in the Second Reich, 1890–1900 (London, 1967). For government, state, and the military, see Katharine Lerman, The Chancellor as Courtier: Bernhard von Bülow and the Governance of Germany, 1900–1909 (Cambridge, 1990); Konrad Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT, 1973); Norman Rich’s biography of Friedrich von Holstein (see Ch. 1); Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001); and Jonathan Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battlefleet (London, 1965). Finally, the following biographies of politicians, industrialists, bankers, journalists, and intellectuals are useful: Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton, 1959); Gary Steenson, Karl Kautsky, 1854–1938 (Pittsburgh, 1978); Richard Abraham, Rosa Luxemburg (Oxford, 1989); Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols (Oxford, 1966); John G. Williamson, Karl Helfferich, 1872–1924 (Princeton, 1971); Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany, 1888–1918 (Princeton, 1967); Harry F. Young, Maximilian Harden (The Hague, 1959); Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley, 1961); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1980); James J. Sheehan, The Career of Lujo Brentano (Chicago, 1966); Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New York, 1973); and Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (London, 1996).
Many surveys (see General works) provide excellent overviews of social and economic developments; especially important for quantitative study is the Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch II by Hohorst et al. For a broad view of economic transformations in nineteenth-century Europe see the pioneering work of Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957), or a textbook synthesis such as Tom Kemp, Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 2nd edn (London, 1985). For Germany’s place in nineteenth-century globalization the key work so far is Cornelius Torp, Die Herausforderung der Globalisierung. Wirtschaft und Politik in Deutschland 1860–1914 (Göttingen, 2005). Toni Pierenkemper and Richard Tilly, The German Economy during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004), provides a synthesis from the perspective of economic historians; cf. Sheilagh Ogilvie and Richard Overy (eds), Germany: A New Social and Economic History, vol. 3, Since 1800 (London and New York, 2003). Older works that focused on Imperial Germany’s early economic development include Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht. Studien zum Verhaltnis von Wirtschaft und Staat während der Reichsgründungszeit 1848–1881 (Cologne and Berlin, 1966) and Hans Rosenberg, Große Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967). One of the comparative research projects on the German bourgeoisie during the 1980s was centred in Bielefeld: see Jürgen Kocka with Ute Frevert (eds), Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, 3 vols (Munich, 1988); this collection was distilled for English readers as Jürgen Kocka and Alan Mitchell (eds), Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford and Providence, RI, 1993).
First-hand accounts of urban working-class conditions are found in The German Worker: Working-Class Autobiographies from the Age of Industrialization, ed. and trans. Alfred Kelly (Berkeley, 1987). For context see the survey by Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde, Arbeiter im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1914 (Bonn, 1992). On German agriculture, see Kenneth D. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization, 1890–1902 (Chicago, 1970) and J. A. Perkins, ‘The Agricultural Revolution in Germany’, Journal of European Economic History, 1 (1981), 71–118. Regional economic variations are an important topic: see the groundbreaking work by Frank B. Tipton, Jr, Regional Variations in the Economic Development of Germany during the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, CT, 1976) and the more recent and incisive Gary Herrigel, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power (Cambridge, 1996). Herrigel’s work builds on earlier work by Sidney Pollard, Hubert Kiesewetter, Klaus Megerle, and other scholars.
On social mobility, training, bureaucracy, and the middle classes, Klaus Bade, Jürgen Kocka, and Hartmut Kaelble have published numerous important works. See, for example, Klaus Bade (ed.), Auswanderer—Wanderarbeiter—Gastarbeiter. Bevölkerung, Arbeitsmarkt und Wanderung in Deutschland seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols (Ostfildern, 1984) and Bade (ed.), Population, Labour, and Migration in 19th- and 20th-Century Germany (Leamington Spa and New York, 1987); Jürgen Kocka, Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (New York, 1999); and Hartmut Kaelble, Soziale Mobilität und Chancengleichheit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen, 1983). Also emphasizing demographic mobility, see David Crew’s Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860–1914 (New York, 1979). Our knowledge of rural Germany is less developed, but see Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Landleben im 19. Jahrhundert, 2nd edn (Munich, 1988) and the older work by Frieda Wunderlich, Farm Labor in Germany, 1810–1945 (Princeton, 1961). Gendered perspectives on the centrality of work are provided in Kathleen Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca, NY, 1996) and Barbara Franzoi, At the Very Least She Pays the Rent: Women and German Industrialization (Westport, CT, 1985) (see also Ch. 6). A new survey of the history of social security from its roots in the imperial era is Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Arbeitsmarktpolitik und Arbeitsverwaltung in Deutschland 1871–2002. Zwischen Fürsorge, Hoheit und Markt (Nuremberg, 2003).
Since the 1980s, religion has been a major focus of interest in the historical literature on the German Empire. Important studies in English include Ellen Evans, The German Center Party, 1870–1933 (Carbondale, IL, 1981); Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1984); and Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s biography of Ludwig Windthorst (see Ch. 1). Anderson’s Practicing Democracy and Jonathan Sperber’s The Kaiser’s Voters (see Ch. 1) also argue for the centrality of religious forces in German political culture after 1871: Anderson examines the place of religion in processes of partisan mass mobilization, showing that religion was deeply implicated in the transitions we associate with ‘modernization’; Sperber argues that the most fundamental cleavages in the electorate were confessional in character. David Blackbourn’s Marpingen. Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1993) uses the methods of micro-history and social history to explore the resonances of religious difference at every level of German society and highlights the importance of confessional antagonisms. Helmut Walser Smith’s German Nationalism and Religious Conflict. Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, 1995) emphasizes confessional fault-lines in the associational landscape of German politics but also explores the links and affinities that transcended religious boundaries. Ronald J. Ross’s study of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (see Ch. 1) focuses on the mismatch between the objectives formulated by Bismarck and the means available to sustain his campaign against the Catholics.
A number of recent studies in German have focused specifically on the Catholic experience in Imperial Germany. Norbert Busch, Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne. Die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte des HerzJesu-Kultes in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem Weltkrieg (Gütersloh, 1997), examines the history of the cult of the Sacred Heart as a means of reconstructing the history of Catholic piety. Thomas Mergel, Zwischen Klasse und Konfession. Katholisches Bürgertum im Rheinland 1794–1914 (Göttingen, 1994), analyses the tension between confessional and class identities among Rhenish middle-class Catholics, showing that after 1870 many found it difficult to reconcile their position within an urban bourgeois elite with the imperatives of confessional solidarity. Other important works include Werner K. Blessing’s incisive overview of Bavarian Catholicism, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft. Institutionelle Autorität und mentaler Wandel in Bayern während des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1982); Otto Weiss’s monumental study of a specific Catholic order, Die Redemptoristen in Bayern (1790–1909). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ultramontanismus (St Ottilien, 1983); and Wilfried Loth’s Katholiken im Kaiserreich. Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelminischen Deutschlands (Düsseldorf, 1984). Important studies of Protestant piety include Lucian Hölscher, Geschichte der protestantischen Frömmigkeit in Deutschland (Munich, 2005) and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter (Munich, 2004). On the Jews, antisemites, and continuing efforts to integrate Jewish history and German history, one might begin with Michael A. Meyer with Michael Brenner (eds), GermanJewish History in Modern Times, vol. 3, Integration in Dispute, 1871–1918, ed. Stephen M. Lowenstein et al. (New York, 1996); the survey provided in Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen. Gründerjahre des Antisemitismus (Frankfurt a.M., 2003); and Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford and New York, 2001). The best recent overview of confessional relations in the empire is Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhlemann (eds), Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus—Mentalitäten—Krisen (Gütersloh, 1996).
The superb recent study by Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918 (Basingstoke and New York, 2003), fills a long empty place in the historiography of the German Empire; it provides an overview of the artistic and cultural movements which played a crucial role in defining Germany in the decades after its founding. It supplants two helpful, brief, and provocative chapters on imperial culture which are still worth consulting: Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Culture and Politics in the German Empire’, in Mommsen, Imperial Germany (see General works); and Robin Lenman, John Osborne, and Eda Sagarra, ‘Imperial Germany: Towards the Commercialization of Culture’, in Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York, 1995).
A number of notable recent studies treat important intellectual trends and figures. Illuminating German academic culture is Suzanne Marchand’s Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, 2003). George S. Williamson’s The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, 2004) explores the cultural influence of intellectuals engaged with religion and myth in modern life. Stimulating explorations of the many aspects of intellectual, social, and cultural responses to modernity are to be found in Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin-de-Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004). A welcome re-issue of R. J. Hollindale’s trustworthy and comprehensive biography of Friedrich Nietzsche will help readers approach this enigmatic figure, by now the most widely read philosopher in the world and a key intellectual in the shaping and the critique of Imperial German culture: see his Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, 2nd edn (New York, 2001). For the other towering figure of German intellectual culture in this period, the Anglo-American reader can hardly do better than consult Reinhard Bendix’s Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, 1978), which does justice to Weber’s full range of thought while suggesting his place in his own times.
On musical life and composers, the irreplaceable work of Carl Dahlhaus can be read in overview in his Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), which provides a powerful synthesis of aesthetic, social, cultural, and compositional aspects of European musical life in general. For Dahlhaus’s interpretation of the most influential aesthetic idea in nineteenth-century German musical culture, see The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago, 1991). Walter Frisch’s important recent study, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley, 2005), integrates German composers such as Arnold Schoenberg into their broader cultural and artistic milieu. Jim Samson illuminates the social history of music in The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991), while Jon Finson’s Nineteenth-Century Music: The Western Classical Tradition (New York, 2001) provides a reliable overview of the canonical German composers in their European context. For three stimulating and contrasting approaches to Richard Wagner, his music, his thought, and his significance, see the monumental new biography by Joachim Köhler, Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven, CT, 2004); the intellectual biography by Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York, 2002); and the provocative interpretation of his operas by Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (New York, 1997). Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography (New York, 1999) reveals the man behind the beard, as well as providing rich accounts of Brahms’s music and his cultural milieu.
German literature in the second half of the nineteenth century is best appreciated by reading it, but a guide to what to read can be found in volumes 9 and 10 of the reliable Camden House History of German Literature series: Clayton Koelb and Eric Downing (eds), German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832–1899 (Rochester, NY, 2005), and the first two chapters of Ingo R. Stoehr (ed.), German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism (Rochester, NY, 2001). A number of studies of literature in context by historians of Imperial Germany are worth noting, starting with Gordon A. Craig’s urbane and lively study, Theodore Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich (New York, 1999). Katherine Roper has also examined Fontane as well as a number of other authors in her German Encounters with Modernity: Novels of Imperial Berlin (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1991). Kirsten Belgum studies the most widely read magazine of the period in her Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln, NE, 1998). Peter Jelavich illuminates the literature and culture of the dramatic arts in two books, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1985) and Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
German art of the imperial period, like German literature, needs to be experienced directly (in this case, seen not read) to be appreciated for its variety, richness, and illumination of its world. For readers interested in the context of art, one should begin with a superb new study by Beth Irwin Lewis, Art for All? The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2003). Older but equally illuminating is Peter Paret, Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, 1988). See also Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914 (Manchester, 1997). A more politically focused and local study of artistic culture is Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, NY, 2003). An institutional study that illuminates both art and its public is James J. Sheehan’s Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (New York, 2000). Architectural modernism finds a stimulating new treatment in Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (New York, 2000). At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum is the urge to historism, illuminated by Robert R. Taylor in Castles of the Rhine: Recreating the Middle Ages in Modern Germany (Waterloo, Ont., 1998). Studies of specific artists and artistic movements also abound. On Expressionism, Donald E. Gordon’s Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT, 1987) is helpful, as is Barry Herbert, German Expressionism: Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (New York, 1983). On Peter Behrens, see the definitive work of Tilmann Buddensieg et al., Industriekultur. Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, MA, 1984). Important works on the secession movements include Maria Makela, The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton, 1990) and Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1980).
Until now only certain aspects of the history of Imperial Germany have been studied from a gender perspective. On the place of gender history within German historiography, see the insightful remarks by a pioneer of German women’s and gender history, Karin Hausen, ‘Die Nicht-Einheit der Geschichte als historiographische Herausforderung. Zur historischen Relevanz und Anstößigkeit der Geschlechtergeschichte’, in Hans Medick and Anne-Charlott Trepp (eds), Geschlechtergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte. Herausforderungen und Perspektiven (Göttingen, 1998), 17–55. Some initial reflections on the integration of gender history into the literature on Imperial Germany can be found in essays dealing with the contradictions of modernity in Eley (ed.), Society (see Ch. 2). See also the very recent collection edited by Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert, Gendering Modern German History: Theories—Debates—Revisions (Oxford and New York, 2007).
The history of women in Wilhelmine Germany has been studied most intensively thus far. Recommended overviews are Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford and Washington, DC, 1990) and Gisela Bock, who discusses the history of German women in a European context in her Women in European History (Oxford, 2002). In his Imperial Germany (see General works), Volker R. Berghahn swims against the tide of meta-narratives on the history of Wilhelmine Germany by drawing attention not just to minorities but also to gender-specific particularities and differences in the population. The two pioneering studies on the German women’s movement are still worth reading: Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London and Beverly Hills, CA, 1976) and Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981). Apart from a number of monographs, most of them in German, new inspiration for the study of the women’s movement is also offered by the path-breaking work of Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991). Allen compares the Wilhelmine women’s movement with its Anglo-American counterparts and investigates the model of ‘spiritual motherhood’ as a phenomenon distinct from the Nazi view of women. Allen concludes that the German women’s movement, with its emphasis on essential difference between the sexes, opened new paths to individual autonomy and new occupational fields for women, garnering them a good deal of attention in the social reform debates of Imperial Germany. See also Angelika Schaser, Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1848–1933 (Darmstadt, 2006).
One of the best-informed and most detailed accounts of girls’ schooling is James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women (Princeton, 1988). Individual aspects of girls’ and women’s education are presented in the essay collection edited by Elke Kleinau and Claudia Opitz, Geschichte der Mädchen- und Frauenbildung, vol. 2, Vom Vormärz bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt a.M., 1996). A number of monographs have been published on female students. Pioneering works on this subject include Edith Glaser, Hindernisse—Umwege—Sackgassen. Die Anfänge des Frauenstudiums in Deutschland (Pfaffenweiler, 1992) and Claudia Huerkamp, Bildungsbürgerinnen. Frauen im Studium und in akademischen Berufen 1900–1945 (Göttingen, 1996). Harriet Pass Freidenreich’s Female, Jewish, and Educated: The Lives of Central European University Women (Bloomington, IN, 2002) also examines German Jewish women.
For important works on labour from a gender history standpoint, see Karin Hausen (ed.), Geschlechterhierarchie und Arbeitsteilung. Zur Geschichte ungleicher Erwerbschancen von Männern und Frauen (Göttingen, 1993) and Kathleen Canning’s Languages of Labor (see Ch. 3). These studies call into question the model of the apparently sexless working class common in older works of German social history. More recently, Canning has pointed out once again the new horizons that gender historical approaches can open up for the ‘old labour history’. See her Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY, 2006).
Some initial studies have now appeared in the fields of legal history, national history, and the history of masculinity. In legal history, gender studies have concentrated on marriage law and women’s political rights. Ute Gerhard has opened up a new perspective with her stimulating edited collection, Frauen in der Geschichte des Rechts. Von der frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1997). This book not only demonstrates how legal discrimination against women could be extremely obvious or very subtle, but also attempts to trace the effects of the legal situation on women’s actual lives. One of the authors in this collection, Beatrix Geisel, has now published a very instructive monograph on the legal advice centres maintained by the women’s and labour movements: Klasse, Geschlecht und Recht. Vergleichende sozialhistorische Untersuchung der Rechtsberatungspraxis von Frauen- und Arbeiterbewegung (1894–1933) (Baden-Baden, 1998). The topic of women and the nation in Imperial Germany is treated in three essay collections, each with a knowledgeable introduction by the editors. See Frauen & Geschichte Baden-Württemberg (eds), Frauen und Nation (Tübingen, 1996); Ute Planert (ed.) Nation, Politik und Geschlecht. Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 2000); and Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (eds), Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York, 2000), which addresses the subject in a transnational framework. Jürgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz trace the path from women’s studies to the study of masculinity in their excellent introductory study, Es ist ein Junge! Einführung in die Geschichte der Männlichkeiten in der Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2005). Their book provides a wealth of inspiration, not just for the history of masculinity but for gender history more generally. The fragility and ambivalence of masculinity in the nineteenth century is emphasized in Martina Kessel, ‘The “Whole Man”. The Longing for a Masculine World in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, Gender & History, 15 (2003), 1–31.
A good place to begin reading on the bourgeoisie is Jonathan Sperber’s ‘Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), 271–97, which offers a critical discussion of most of the relevant literature published to that date. Among the works reviewed there, particularly useful are David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (eds), The German Bourgeoisie (London, 1991), with essays on various groups (e.g., lawyers, civil servants, the business elite, doctors) and relationships (with the state, the working class, liberalism), and Klaus Tenfeld and Hans-Ulrich Wehler (eds), Wege zur Geschichte des Bürgertums (Göttingen, 1994), with similar essays in German. Since the late 1990s historians have turned their attention increasingly to the culture of the bourgeoisie: good examples include the broad collection edited by Peter Lundgren, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums (Göttingen, 2000); Thomas Althaus (ed.), Kleinbürger. Zur Kulturgeschichte des begrenzten Bewusstseins (Tübingen, 2001), on the lower middle class; Jan Palmowski’s Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914 (Oxford, 1999); Simone Lässig’s Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004), on the Jewish middle class; and Manfred Hettling and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (eds), Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel (Göttingen, 2000), on middle-class values more generally.
The notes to this chapter cite some of the most influential works on middle-class reform. Particularly useful is Kevin Repp’s Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 2000), an exemplary treatment of the interconnections and relationships that held one of the major reform milieux (the left-liberal milieu) together. There is a rich overview of reform movements in Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke (eds), Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933 (Wuppertal, 1998). The classic grim assessment of the potentials of bourgeois reform is Detlev J. K. Peukert, ‘The Genesis of the “Final Solution” from the Spirit of Science’, in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (eds), Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York, 1993). Recent monographs seeking to revise that perspective include Andrew Lees’s Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, MI, 2002), which examines the biographies of a number of liberal moral reformers and concludes that they were not confused anti-modernists; Corinna Treitel’s A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, 2004), which does something similar for occultism, as does Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago, 2000) for sexology; and both William Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997) and Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity (Cambridge, MA, 2004), which seek to rehabilitate German conservationism. Among the vast number of studies of eugenics, contrasting interpretations are found in Sheila Faith Weiss’s ‘The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, 1904–1945’, in Mark B. Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Britain and Russia (New York, 1990) and Paul Weindling’s Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1989). Ute Planert’s ‘Der dreifache Körper des Volkes: Sexualität, Biopolitik und die Wissenschaften vom Leben’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 26 (2000), 539–76, provides a stimulating overview of body-focused, biologistic reform thought. The complexities of the ‘life reform’ movement are taken up in Kai Buchholz et al., Die Lebensreform (Darmstadt, 2001), a treasure trove of interesting essays. Michael Hau’s The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 2003) is particularly stimulating in making connections among life reform, aesthetics, and medical discourse.
The literature on conservative reformers is less well developed. Ute Planert’s Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische Mentalität (Göttingen, 1998) is a fascinating study of the intellectual world of right-wing reformers and anti-reformers, particularly those in the League Against Women’s Emancipation. Conservative Christian moral reform is treated in Isabel Lisberg-Haag, ‘Die Unzucht, das Grab der Völker’ (Hamburg, 2000); Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘The Men’s Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914: Some Reflections on Sex, Politics, and Sexual Politics’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003); and Andrew Lees, ‘Deviant Sexuality and Other “Sins”: The Views of Protestant Conservatives in Imperial Germany’, German Studies Review, 23 (2000). At the other end of the spectrum of opinion on sexuality, Lutz Sauerteig has studied the Society for Combating Venereal Diseases; for a good introduction see his essay ‘“The Fatherland is in Danger, Save the Fatherland!”: Venereal Disease, Sexuality and Gender in Imperial and Weimar Germany’, in Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (eds), Sex, Sin, and Suffering: Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870 (New York, 2001).
The literature on bourgeois women and reform is immense in its own right. For an English-language overview on the non-confessional women’s movement (with references to much of the literature), see Angelika Schaser, ‘Women in a Nation of Men: The Politics of the League of German Women’s Associations (BDF) in Imperial Germany, 1894–1914’, in Blom et al. (eds), Gendered Nations (see Ch. 6). On religious women’s organizations, Ursula Baumann, the leading scholar on Protestant women, gives a good overview in ‘Religion, Emancipation, and Politics in the Confessional Women’s Movement in Germany, 1900–1933’, in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (New York, 1998). Among works published since that essay, on Jewish women see particularly Christina Klausmann, Politik und Kultur der Frauenbewegung im Kaiserreich. Das Beispiel Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt a.M., 1997); on Catholic women see Gisela Breuer, Frauenbewegung und Katholizismus. Der Katholische Frauenbund 1903–1918 (Frankfurt a.M., 1998). An excellent recent study of women’s charities is provided by Jean H. Quataert’s Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001). On women and social reform more broadly, see Iris Schröder, Arbeiten für eine bessere Welt. Frauenbewegung und Sozialreform 1890–1914 (Frankfurt a.M., 2001).
For a comparative perspective on the bourgeoisie, a good starting point can be found in Kocka and Mitchell (eds), The Bourgeoisie (see Ch. 3). On reform see Axel Schäfer’s American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920 (Stuttgart, 2000), and on the development of associational life across Europe, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 269–99.
The most important study of German electoral culture in the imperial era is Anderson’s Practicing Democracy (see Ch. 1). Its focus on national elections and its optimistic view of German democratization need to be counterbalanced by such regional studies as Andreas Gawatz, Wahlkämpfe in Württemberg. Landtags- und Reichstagswahlen beim Übergang zum politischen Massenmarkt (1889–1912) (Düsseldorf, 2001) and Thomas Kühne, Dreiklassenwahlrecht und Wahlkultur in Preussen 1867–1914. Landtagswahlen zwischen korporativer Tradition und politischem Massenmarkt (Düsseldorf, 1994). English readers can gain a flavour of regional peculiarities from James Retallack (ed.), Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830–1933 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000). Important local studies include Rudy Koshar, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986) and Palmowski, Urban Liberalism (see Ch. 7). Wide-ranging appraisals of German political culture and its dynamics are found in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany: New Perspectives (Cambridge and New York, 1992).
Many studies of changing political styles, with or without a regional emphasis, now take the Bismarckian period seriously. The following provide useful starting points: Lothar Gall (ed.), Regierung, Parlament und Öffentlichkeit im Zeitalter Bismarcks. Politikstil im Wandel (Paderborn, 2003); Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche (eds), Liberalismus und Region. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert (Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 19) (Munich, 1995); Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Wahlen und Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland (Düsseldorf, 1997). On Bismarck and his parliamentary opponents, see Hans-Peter Goldberg, Bismarck und seine Gegner. Die politische Rhetorik im kaiserlichen Reichstag (Düsseldorf, 1998). A pioneering study of political parties is Thomas Nipperdey’s Die Organisation der deutschen Parteien vor 1918 (Düsseldorf, 1961). See also Karl Rohe, Wahlen und Wählertraditionen in Deutschland. Kulturelle Grundlagen deutscher Parteien und Parteiensysteme im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 1992), and Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters (see Ch. 1).
Students interested in the history of liberalism are well advised to consult Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. Christiane Banerji (Princeton, 2000) and James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978). On conservatives, see James Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (Boston and London, 1988), and Retallack, The German Right, 1860–1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, Buffalo, London, 2006). Sperber’s Popular Catholicism (see Ch. 4) not only provides intriguing insights into the rise of the Catholic milieu but is also a path-breaking exploration of social milieux in general. Wilfried Loth’s Katholiken im Kaiserreich (see Ch. 4) is a model study of how parties in parliament responded to social change. Thomas M. Bredohl, Class and Religious Identity: The Rhenish Center Party in Wilhelmine Germany (Milwaukee, 2000) offers a regional perspective. Those interested in Social Democracy will eventually have to consult the German literature, including Gerhard A. Ritter, ‘Die Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive’, Historische Zeitschrift, 249 (1989), 295–362; Gerhard A. Ritter with Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (eds), Der Aufstieg der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung. Sozialdemokratie und Freie Gewerkschaften im Parteiensystem und Sozialmilieu des Kaiserreichs (Munich, 1990); or the fine local study by Thomas Adam, Arbeitermilieu and Arbeiterbewegung in Leipzig 1871–1933 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1999).
Connections between nationalism and the new political style that revolved around community and festivals are not yet well researched. Among the most innovative studies in exploring the rise of a new nationalism from below, see Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT, 1980, 2nd edn 1991), and Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston, 1984). See also Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der ‘kleinen Leute’. Die Kriegervereine im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 (Munich, 1990) and Ute Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Rheinprovinz von der französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1806–1918) (Essen, 1995). Future research can still profit from George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York, 1975).
There are several good introductions to the problem of militarism in German history. They include Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979 (Cambridge, 1981) and the older study by Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, Civilian and Military (New York, 1959). The classic histories are Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk. Das Problem des ‘Militarismus’ in Deutschland, 4 vols (Munich, 1956–68), which is available in English translation as The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in German History, 4 vols (Coral Gables, FL, 1969–88), and Gordon A. Craig’s study of the Prussian army (see Ch. 1).
Most of the scholarship on the militarization of German society is in German, but several English-language studies provide an introduction, including Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy (see Ch. 7) and Derek Linton, ‘Who Has the Youth, Has the Future’: The Campaign to Save Young Workers in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1991). On the confessional dimensions of the problem, see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism (see Ch. 4); and Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004). The literature on German antisemitism in the Wilhelmine era is immense. A good place to start is the essay by Shulamit Volkov on ‘Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code’, which has now been published in an extended form in Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006), 67–158.
The historiography of radical nationalism has been marked by a number of controversies, some of which have had immediately to do with the polemics over the German Sonderweg. The opposing poles in one controversy can be found in Wehler, German Empire (see General works) and Eley, Reshaping the German Right (see Ch. 8). The poles in another controversy lie in Eley’s book and Chickering, We Men (see Ch. 8). Aside from the latter book, which analyses the Pan-German League, and Eley’s, which focuses on the Navy League, most of the literature on the individual radical nationalist organizations is in German. Marilyn Shevin Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York and Oxford, 1990) is an exception. The major titles in German include Gerhard Weidenfeller, VDA. Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland. Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (1881–1914). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich (Berne and Frankfurt a.M., 1976); Adam Galos et al., Die Hakatisten. Der Deutsche Ostmarken-Verein (1893–1934). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Ostpolitik des deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin, 1966); Rainer Hering, Konstruirte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg, 2003); and Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Die nationale Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreichs (Düsseldorf, 1997).
Transnational Germany is a fairly recent field of academic inquiry, and so far no comprehensive synthesis using this approach has appeared. A good beginning point is the collection Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004), edited by Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel. It is important to keep in mind, however, that some of the themes now revisited under a transnational agenda were raised in earlier scholarship on foreign policy, economics, migration, and colonialism—even if connections to German society were frequently not spelled out in the older literature.
Much of the current interest in questions of transnationality has been sparked by postcolonial approaches and cultural studies. Important works shaped by this concern with issues of representation include the pioneering volume by Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998) as well as Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a.M., 2003); Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Pre-colonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC, 1997); and Alexander Honold and Klaus R. Scherpe (eds), Mit Deutschland um die Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Fremden in der Kolonialzeit (Stuttgart, 2004). In this context, the way the colonial encounter has shaped academic disciplines has been the subject of several richly documented studies, in particular Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001) and H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
A further field of scholarly activity is the gendered dimension of the colonial encounter, most importantly Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, NC, 2001). Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten. Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien (Cologne, 2003) is also helpful. In the wake of the cultural turn, much transnational scholarship is concerned with questions of representing and appropriating the ‘other’. Dirk van Laak’s impressive study Imperiale Infrastruktur. Deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas 1880 bis 1960 (Paderborn, 2004) follows colonial planning far beyond the official demise of the empire. By contrast, questions of colonial rule have scarcely been addressed: notable exceptions are the well-researched works by Michal Pesek, Koloniale Herrschaft in Deutsch-Ostafrika. Expeditionen, Militär und Verwaltung seit 1880 (Frankfurt a.M., 2005) and George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, 2007).
Finally, the repercussions of the colonial experience have been examined with particular attention to connections between colonialism and the Holocaust. Jürgen Zimmerer has been most prominent here, provocatively probing the complex issue of continuities between the Herero war of 1904–8 and the genocide of the Jews in the 1940s—a debate with which historians and the larger public will continue to grapple. See Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz. Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2007) and Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (eds), Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904–1908 and its Aftermath (London, 2007).
Whereas a rediscovered interest in Germany’s colonial past has spawned and provided much of the dynamic behind research into German transnationalism, it is equally clear that Germany’s shortlived colonial empire was only one among many possible points of reference in a world rapidly integrating globally. In light of current interest in the history of globalization, it is to be expected that the larger, global context of German history will receive increasing attention in the years to come. For two works explicitly addressing the issue of globalization, see Torp, Herausforderung der Globalisierung (see Ch. 3) and Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006).
The two best recent general histories of Germany during the war are Roger Chickering’s Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1998, 2nd edn 2004) and Holger H. Herwig’s The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London, 1997). Those who read German can consult Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, and Irina Renz (eds), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2003). Students interested in the vast historiography on the First World War should read Jay Winter’s and Antoine Prost’s The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005). See also the online collection of documents and images on the war edited by Roger Chickering (listed in General works). A superb overview—both of the events themselves and of the vast debate on the outbreak of the war—can be found in Holger H. Herwig’s chapter on ‘Germany’ in Richard F. Hamilton and Herwig (eds), The Origins of World War I (Cambridge, 2003), 150–87. John C. G. Röhl’s The Kaiser and His Court (see Ch. 1) captures the peculiarities of Wilhelm II’s personality and explores their significance for German history. On German public opinion at the outbreak of the war, see Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000). The Burgfrieden and wartime developments within the German Social Democratic Party are well described in Wolfgang Kruse, Krieg und nationale Integration. Eine Neuinterpretation des Sozialdemokratischen Burgfriedensschlusses 1914/1915 (Essen, 1993).
The military history of the war is also quite extensive. Hew Strachan’s The First World War: A New History (London, 2003) is a good place to start. Bernd Ulrich, in his Die Augenzeugen. Deutsche Feldpostbriefe im Krieg und Nachkriegszeit 1914–1933 (Essen, 1997) and in his collection of published documents (with Benjamin Ziemann), Frontalltag im Ersten Weltkrieg. Wahn und Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt a.M., 1994), has described the wartime experience of the common soldier. Gerald Feldman’s early study Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966) remains unmatched in its account of the difficulties Germany experienced in developing wartime economic institutions. Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967) is also still worth reading, especially for its description of the lobbying efforts of right-wing industrialists.
Attention has turned recently to everyday life and to women. Ute Daniel, in The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War (Oxford, 1997), persuasively argues that the war did not ‘modernize’ women’s position in German society (and hence did not ‘emancipate’ them). Belinda J. Davis, in Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), notes that women were at the very least ‘empowered’ and analyses how they used this power on a local, everyday level. A number of local studies have added to our understanding of such issues. See especially Jay Winter and JohnLouis Robert (eds), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, 1997) (vol. 2, subtitled A Cultural History, was published in 2007); Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923, trans. Alex Skinner (London, 2006); and Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2007). There is an excellent overview of German propaganda in the First World War in David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, 1914–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000).
Wilhelm Deist’s essay, ‘The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth,’ War in History, 3 (1996), 186–207, is essential reading for those interested in understanding the morale of the German army in 1918. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, in Max Weber (see Ch. 2), uses Weber’s perspective on German internal politics as the basis for his own broad, profound analysis. Of course Weber’s writings themselves are still worth reading. The most important texts have been translated and appear in Max Weber, Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 1994). A very interesting account of the result of these political developments, the revolution of 1918, can be found in Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–1919 (La Salle, IL, 1973).
The legacy of the war is well described in George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990); Robert Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1919 (Ithaca, NY, 1984); and Deborah Cohen, War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, 2001). More generally, see Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995).