produce new insights into this complex period of transition and
transformation in German History. Secondly, the previous render-
ings listed above are prodigious accomplishments approaching or
easily passing a thousand pages, and all except Sheehan's impres-
sive tome are in German. The present work strives to be more
accessible to students and historians in the English-speaking world
without losing the interest of German scholars.

Like previous studies, this is a work of synthesis and interpreta-
tion. During the last thirty years, scholarship has deepened in the
traditional areas of political, diplomatic, military, and economic his-
tory while simultaneously widening and deepening to include the
history of work, gender, religion, race, and the various branches of
art or culture. The scholar's focus has also broadened from Prussia
and Austria, Germany's feuding giants, to include the rich diversity
of the rest of German Europe. The approach taken in the present
work is to consider, select, and combine evidence from older and
newer studies in these many fields to produce a composite image of
Germany between 1789 and 1871. Let us put many of the available
pieces together, step back, and see what the mosaic looks like.

All readers need to know the source of the evidence. For this rea-
son the bibliography is limited to those works actually used in writ-
ing the book. There are frequent quotations from the literature,
moreover, making it easy to determine which works from the bibli-
ography have been most influential. To enhance readability, on the
other hand, only direct quotes are cited. Finally, a word about the
book's scenes or vignettes. I employ these literary devices to accus-
tom readers in an artful way to the subject matter and themes which
follow, but they are factual -- and documented -- not fictional. In
these ways the present work stays within the accepted limits of his-
torical scholarship without crossing over the boundary to literature.

I want to thank Marion Berghahn for giving me an opportunity to
write this book; the readers at Berghahn Books for insightful com-
ments that improved the manuscript; as well as persons close to me
who patiently and lovingly waited for it to appear.

Eric Dorn Brose, Philadelphia, April 1997

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