Debates about Liberalism in imperial Germany have focused almost exclusively on the national level. This book investigates liberal politics in local government; the only sphere in which liberals had direct access to power throughout Germany. Through the study of one of Germany's most progressive cities, Frankfurt am Main, Jan Palmowski examines more generally the processes of politicization and policy formulation at the local level. He argues that in Frankfurt as elsewhere, local affairs had become politicized not around 1900, as is generally assumed, but by the 1870s. Once in power, the liberals' concern for religion, social policy, and education, as well as their skilful use of fiscal policy shows that liberals in Germany were as sophisticated as liberals in Britain or France. Even in the face of an authoritarian state structure, German liberals received and made use of freedom for renewal and reform. German liberalism was not inherently weak. Instead, the crucial problem lay in the country's complicated federal structure, which made it impossible to transfer innovations from the local level to the state and national levels.

Germany's imperial era (1871-1918) continues to attract both scholars and the general public alike. The American historian Roger Chickering has referred to the historiography on the Kaiserreich as an 'extraordinary body of historical scholarship', whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. This Companion is a significant addition to this body of scholarship with the emphasis very much on the present and future. Questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry and while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German and European history. The volume allows 25 experts, from across the globe, to write at length about the state of research in their own specialist fields, offering original insights as well as historiographical reflections, and rounded off with extensive suggestions for further reading. The chapters are grouped into five thematic sections, chosen to reflect the full range of research being undertaken on imperial German history today and together offer a comprehensive and authoritative reference resource. Overall this collection will provide scholars and students with a lively take on this fascinating period of German history, from the nation’s unification in 1871 right up until the end of World War I.

An important examination of the colorful histories of urbanization and social reform in Imperial Germany

How workers fought for municipal socialism to make cities around the globe livable and democratic - and what the lessons are for today Winner of the International Labor History Association (ILHA) 2023 Book of the Year Award for labor history For more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting to make cities livable and democratic. At every turn propertied elites challenged their right to govern. Prominent US labor historian, Shelton Stromquist, offers the first global account of the origins of this new trans-local socialist politics. He explains how and why cities after 1890 became crucibles for municipal socialism. Drawing on the colorful stories of local activists and their social-democratic movements in cities as diverse as Broken Hill, Christchurch, Malmö, Bradford, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Hamilton, OH, the book shows how this new urban politics arose. Long governed by propertied elites, cities in the nineteenth century were transformed by mass migration and industrialization that tore apart their physical and social fabric. Amidst massive strikes and faced with epidemic disease, fouled streets, unsafe water, decrepit housing, and with little economic security and few public amenities, urban workers invented a local politics that promised to democratize cities they might themselves govern and reclaim the wealth they created. This new politics challenged the class power of urban elites as well as the centralizing tendencies of national social-democratic movements. Municipal socialist ideas have continued to inspire activists in their fight for the right of cities to govern themselves.

Although often viewed as ineffectual intellectuals, or a spent political force, Left Liberals had become the third largest party in German politics by 1914 and in the German Revolution of 1918/19 it was Left Liberals who effectively wrote the new Weimar constitution. This study, based on extensive original research, investigates Left Liberals in the locality, as well as at the national level, with case studies ranging from Kiel to Kattowitz. Overturning old notions of German liberalism as the helpless victim of mass mobilization and political polarization, it is central to understanding both increasing left liberal influence and support on the eve of the First World War, and why liberal values could not be consolidated after 1918. This study has powerful general implications for the history of imperial Germany, reassessing the role of political parties, public perceptions of politics, and the impact and character of the state.

’Long live liberty, equality, fraternity and dynamite’ So went the traditional slogan of the radical liberals in Greater Swabia, the south-western part of modern Germany. This book investigates the development of what the author terms ’popular liberalism’ in this region, in order to present a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural patterns in Germany up to the early 1930s. In particular, the author offers an explanation for the success of National Socialism before 1933 in certain regions of South Germany, arguing that the radical liberal sub-culture was not subsumed by the Nazi Party, but instead changed its form of representation. Together with the famous völkish fraction and the leftist fraction within the chapters of the Nazi Party, there were radical-liberal associations, ex-members of radical-liberal parties, sympathizers with these parties, and notables with a radical orientation derived from family and regional traditions. These people and associations believed that the Nazi Party could fulfil their radical - liberal vision, rooted in the local democratic and liberal traditions which stretched from 1848 to the early 20th century. By looking afresh at the relationship between local-regional identities and national politics, this book makes a major contribution to the study of the roots of Nazism.

The phrase fin de siècle conjures up images of artistic experimentation and political decadence. The contributors to this volume argue that Wilhelmine Germany—best known for its industrial and military muscle—also shared these traits. Their essays look back to the years between 1885 and 1914 to find in Germany a mixture of sociopolitical malaise and experimental exhilaration that was similar in many ways to the better-known cases of France and Austria. Revising the view that the German Second Reich was merely a precursor to the Third, this broad-scoped study presents pre–World War I Germany in its own fascinating and often contradictory terms. The foundations of the antiliberal passions that would plague the Weimar Republic are evident, but Wilhelmine society also had a lighter, more playful and moderate spirit, one that was largely extinguished by the Great War. Blending social, cultural, and intellectual history, the contributors—a distinguished cross-section of older and younger scholars—trace changing German views on liberalism, penal reform, race, women, art, popular culture, and technology. They juxtapose better-known figures such as Max Weber, Thomas Mann, and Martin Heidegger with now-forgotten individuals like the Jewish feminist novelist Grete Meisel-Hess and the iconoclastic Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. Their essay topics range from the esoteric and erotic poetry of Stefan George to the Jewish comedy of the Herrnfeld Theater. “Modernity” is examined from the perspectives of bourgeois cinema-goers and judicial reformers, as well as from the viewpoint of Carl Jung. The result is a variegated picture of an unsettled world, rich in its innovations, ambitious in its undertakings, and often apocalyptic in its dreams.

John Breuilly brings together a distinguished group of international scholars to examine Germany's history from 1780 to 1918, featuring chapters on economic, demographic and social as well as cultural and intellectual history. There are also chapters on political and military history covering the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the post-Napoleonic period, the revolutions of 1848-1849, the unification of Germany, Bismarckian Germany and Wilhelmine Germany, and Germany during the First World War. This new edition, which retains the helpful further reading suggestions for each chapter and a chronology, has been completely updated to take account of recent historiography. The statistical data has been expanded, more maps and images have been introduced, and there are two new chapters on transnational approaches and gender history. Finally, the editor has added a conclusion which reflects on the key developments in the history of Germany over the “long nineteenth century”. Providing clear surveys of the central events and developments and addressing major debates amongst historians, Nineteenth-Century Germany is vital reading for all those wishing to understand this crucial period in modern German history.

Austria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. Ethnic identity was not the final structuring principle of everyday politics, as it was in the Czech lands. Rather social class, occupational culture, and religion became more prominent variables in the sortition of civic interests, exemplified by the emergence of two great ideological parties, Christian Socialism and Social Democracy in Vienna in the 1890s. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire, with the Crown self-destructing in the face of military defeat, chronic domestic unrest, and bitter national partisanship. But this crisis also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the German-speaking Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. Initial attempts to make this new project of democratic nation-building work failed in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the catastrophe of the 1938 Nazi occupation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation, which fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense partisanship, resulting, by the 1970s, in a successful republican system, organized under the aegis of elite democratic and corporatist negotiating structures, in which the Catholics and Socialists learned to embrace the skills of collective but shared self-governance.

During the twentieth century, German government and industry created a highly skilled workforce as part of an ambitious program to control and develop the country’s human resources. Yet, these long-standing efforts to match as many workers as possible to skilled vocations and to establish a system of job training have received little scholarly attention, until now. The author’s account of the broad support for this program challenges the standard historical accounts that focus on disagreements over the German political-economic order and points instead to an important area of consensus. These advances are explained in terms of political policies of corporatist compromise and national security as well as industry’s evolving production strategies. By tracing the development of these policies over the course of a century, the author also suggests important continuities in Germany’s domestic politics, even across such different regimes as Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, and post-1945 West Germany.