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This book deals with the transformation of Germany after the Second World War and the Holocaust into a Western, democratic, and therefore civilized country. It proceeds in three stages, beginning with the Allied post-war policies of demilitarization, denazification, and decartelization. In the second part, it concentrates on the Westernization, inner democratization and generational rebellion of the 1960s, concluding with a section on the repudiation of Communism, the return to normalcy, and the issue of immigration during the 1990s.

»Die Ursachen der Entstehung einer Bewegung unter den deutschen Studenten 1815-1848«. The student revolt of 1968 inspired historical investigations for its historical antecedents, one of which was the radical movement of the Burschenschaft. This was a national and liberal association of German students, founded at the end of the Napoleonic wars, repressed by Metternich's reaction, which resurfaced in the 1820s, was once again persecuted in the following decade, only to reemerge as a progressive democratic challenge before and during the revolution of 1848. In contrast to older organizational and ideological approaches, this essay looks more critically at the evolution of student subculture. Moreover, on the basis of enrollment statistics and matriculation registers, it explores the overcrowding crisis of the 1830s, the diversification of social origins of the student body and the specific motivations of the radicals. Offering a social explanation of activism, the article proposes an intermediary framework of radicalism, stressing "a value gap, political repression, institutional malfunction, and social frustration."

In the late 1960s great fanfares announced the emergence of a "new history of education." According to John E. Talbott, "historians have begun to stake new claims in the history of education." A formerly neglected and somewhat stagnant field started to bustle with excitement in anticipation of novel insights. In retrospect, it took quite a peculiar conjunction of circumstances to create this history of education in "a new key." While the claims of social history were transforming the study of the past, a gradual "rehistorization" opened the social sciences to longer time perspectives and the political debate about the "troubled state of contemporary education" made educators more interested in the antecedents of the current crisis. J Though all the talk of relevance made it sometimes difficult to determine what the programmatics were about, three features eventually became synonymous with the "new history of education." First, the new writing was explicitly critical of the celebratory Whig tradition and looked at educational institutions and processes in a self-consciously radical way. Second, the new research shifted attention from the development of pedagogical ideas to the relationship between education and society, whether that meant economic development, social mobility, or the like. Third, much of the new work used social science concepts and became quan