What was distinctive—and distinctively ‘modern’—about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently ‘bourgeois’ formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany’s extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple with the ambivalent, cross-cutting nature of German ‘modernities’ and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.
قائمة المحتويات
Foreword
Volker R. Berghahn
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Geoff Eley and James Retallack
Chapter 1. Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of ‘Citizenship’ in Wilhelmine Germany
Geoff Eley
Chapter 2. Membership, Organization, and Wilhelmine Modernism: Constructing Economic Democracy through Cooperation
Brett Fairbairn
Chapter 3. ‘Few better farmers in Europe’? Productivity, Change, and Modernization in East-Elbian Agriculture, 1870-1913
Oliver Grant
Chapter 4. The Wilhelmine Regime and the Problem of Reform: German Debates about Modern Nation-States
Mark Hewitson
Chapter 5. Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism
Matthew Jefferies
Chapter 6. Imperial Socialism of the Chair: Gustav Schmoller and German Weltpolitik, 1897-1905
Erik Grimmer-Solem
Chapter 7. ‘Our natural ally’: German Social Democrats, Anglo-German Relations, and the Contradictory Agendas of Wilhelmine Socialism, 1897-1900
Paul Probert
Chapter 8. The ‘Malet Incident, ‘ October 1895: A Prelude to the Kaiser’s ‘Krüger Telegram’ in the Context of the Anglo-German Imperialist Rivalry
Willem-Alexander van’t Padje
Chapter 9. Colonial Agitation and the Bismarckian State: The Case of Carl Peters
Arne Perras
Chapter 10. The Law and the Colonial State: Legal Codification versus Practice in a German Colony
Nils Ole Oermann
Chapter 11. Max Warburg and German Politics: The Limits of Financial Power in Wilhelmine Germany
Niall Ferguson
Chapter 12. Continuity and Change in Post-Wilhelmine Germany: From the 1918 Revolution to the Ruhr Crisis
Conan Fischer
Chapter 13. A Wilhelmine Legacy? Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ‘Paneuropa’ as an Alternative Path towards a European (Post-)Modernity, 1922-1932
Katiana Orluc
Chapter 14. Ideas into Politics: Meanings of ‘Stasis’ in Wilhelmine Germany
James Retallack
Notes on Contributors
List of Publications by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann
عن المؤلف
James Retallack is Professor of History at th Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. As a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation, in 2002-03 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Göttingen.