Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History

(These eleven essays are concerned with the central debates about German history from Bismarck to Hitler. David Blackbourn is one of the leading historians in the field and this collection of writing, which includes pieces previously unpublished or hitherto unavailable in English, opens up many unfamiliar aspects of the period as well as providing fresh interpretations of more familiar themes.
The author questions many widely held assumptions, whether about the natural conservatism of the German peasantry or the 'feudalization' of the middle classes, and offers a new angle of approach to subjects such as liberalism, anti-semitism and the continuing importance of religion in German history. These essays bring together social, economic, cultural and political history, and cover subjects that range from Thomas Mann to agricultural tariffs, from Bismarck's politics to apparitions of the Virgin Mary. All are concerned, however, with the extraordinary social and political flux that characterized the period, and with the problems and opportunities it presented.
This book broadens our understanding of the tensions that existed in Germany before the First World War, and it advances powerful new arguments about the continuities that linked Imperial Germany with the Weimar Republic and the advent of National Socialism. It will be essential reading for all those who teach or study the history of modem Gennany)