A FULL GENERATION HAS PASSED since the end of the
Second World War. Since 1970 a complex series of international
and intra-German agreements has gone a long way toward de-
fining the international status and reciprocal relations of the
two German states and Berlin. Despite inevitable imperfec-
tions and inequities, this network of accords represents the
tentative stabilization of central Europe and, as such, a mile-
stone in German history. The purpose of this book is to look
back and retrace Germany's path to this milestone. The four
chapters of narrative are supplemented by a brief chronology,
a selected bibliography, twelve maps, and an index. The first
two chapters interpret the history of central Europe from an-
tiquity through the eighteenth century, providing the back-
ground for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are
treated in the third and fourth chapters.

History is the seamless garment of the past. Political, social,
economic, and intellectual history do not exist separately, but
are interwoven in a fabric that includes them all. Scanning two
thousand years of German history, I have followed the thread
of political events, examining other strands only when they
became politically predominant -- as in the case of the reli-
gious reform movements that disrupted Germany in the elev-
enth century and again in the sixteenth. "Whatever else history
may be," observed the Cambridge historian Geoffrey Elton not
long ago, "it must at heart be a story, a story of the changing
fortunes of men, and political history therefore comes first be-
cause, above all the forms of historical study, it wants to, even
needs to, tell a story." ^*

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