ABSTRACT
This chapter mainly focuses on the methods of cultural studies. The claims of continuity since the 1860s or before must rest on certain cultural concepts rather than on any formal organizational history, political facts or class analysis. The study of cultural phenomena is crucial to an understanding of the growth of these political and social movements in this case, popular liberalism and National Socialism. The cultural phenomenon called popular liberalism in Catholic south Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also represents a kind of response. In the nineteenth century, a response to the dominant Catholic culture as well as to the dominant north German–Prussian–Protestant–liberal culture. The chapter suggests a new framework for understanding the German men and women, voters and party members, whether in the popular radical-liberal camp or the National Socialist camp. In south Germany, the "consensus" of the region was, among other things, radical-liberal.
