Wilhelminism and Its Legacies

<p> What was distinctive-and distinctively modern-about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently bourgeois formation in German public culture the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany's extraordinarily dynamic society they also grapple with the ambivalent cross-cutting nature of German modernities and reassess their impact on long-term developments running through the Wilhelmine age.</p>