ABSTRACT
What role did the German past play in the rise of National Socialism? A muchdebated issue in the history of Nazi Germany is the degree to which it was prefigured by earlier events. Another way of framing this issue is to ask whether the onset of Nazism should be dated to the founding of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) after the First World War or whether its beginnings should be traced to German Imperial politics of the late nineteenth century, or to an even more distant past. Does the history of Nazi Germany begin with the emergence of Adolf Hitler as a political leader and the formation of his worldview? Should its ideological origins be sought as far back as the early nineteenth century in the conservative ideological reaction in Germany (and other countries) against the Enlightenment and the liberal and egalitarian values of the French Revolution? In an obvious sense, of course, history is a seamless web of sequential events, and it is impossible to pinpoint the precise starting point of any major historical development. On the other hand, history is always more or less openended at any given time, and the historian must guard against the fallacy of assuming that what actually transpired was the only possible course that history could have taken. In tracing historical genealogy and causation, caution is always advised. But Nazism cannot be properly understood without taking into account its nineteenth-century antecedents.
