ABSTRACT
Thirty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich, and almost half a century after the Nazi seizure of power, the shadow of the past still darkens the surface of German politics. The interpretation of German history put forward by Gerhard Ritter in the early years of the Konrad Adenauer era provides their starting-point. West Germanys Federal Republic increasingly appears, despite the occasional panic about urban terrorism or the activities of equally tiny groups of neo-Nazi extremists, to be a stable and well-established parliamentary democracy. The Marxist ideology of the pre-1933 Social Democrats has become increasingly embarrassing to their presentday successors. In 1885, for instance, Bismarck inaugurated mass expulsions of some 32,000 Poles from the Eastern Prussian provinces, a third of these unfortunates were Jews. Nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism, then, were in this view important elements of the Bismarckian Reich and the rule of the old elites.
