ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Francis Carsten’s writings were received by his colleagues in the Federal Republic in the 1950s and 1960s. Carsten’s broad perspective on Prussian history was too novel to win immediate acceptance from traditionally-minded German historians. The few academic reviews which appeared at the time, while recognising the thoroughness of his research, regretted the deliberate neglect of political history and insisted that developments in the separate Hohenzollern territories were more differentiated than he had allowed. Reviewers had criticised Carsten’s first book for failing to draw on comparative material from other German principalities. Carsten was more inclined, in line with his earlier beliefs, to argue that there existed a close connection between National Socialism and the old elites of Germany which had throttled the genuinely democratic aspirations of the so-called masses and of the working class in particular.
