Popular Marian devotion played a vital role in the Catholic Church of Germany during the early modern period, especially during the “golden age of religious revival” experienced by post-Tridentine, baroque popular Catholicism. For example, at least ninety-seven local Marian shrines scattered throughout the diocese of Augsburg attracted pilgrims in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most famous was certainly Andechs, which drew half a million visitors each year in the seventeenth century from all over the Holy Roman Empire. In turn, Catholics from the diocese of Augsburg traveled beyond the bishopric's borders to major and minor shrines near and far, such as Altötting in Bavaria. Yet while major sites dedicated to the Virgin Mary such as Andechs and Altötting reflected the intensity of ongoing popular Marian devotions, the breadth of the Virgin Mary's cultural significance is signaled by the large number of Marian shrines within the diocese itself, such as Kobel or Violau, which were mostly small, local affairs that attracted primarily nearby populations as pilgrims and supplicants.

In 1900, the Encyclopedia Britannica requested an original, previously unpublished portrait from Kaiser Wilhelm II for its forthcoming edition. The German emperor denied the request, instead advising the British publishers to find an existing photograph on the open market. A few years later, when a Berlin-based association for hunting dogs needed a cover shot for its journal, the Kaiser gladly sat for the picture. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Wilhelm's choice seems a bizarre case of misplaced priorities: the Kaiser took care to position himself among the hounds, but left his encyclopedia image in the hands of foreign publishers. Was this gaffe an example of what Wilhelm II's grandson, Louis Ferdinand, later criticized as the Kaiser's “deficient” sense of public relations, his feeling that “the imperial family stands high above the need to worry about publicity”? In England, mused the royal heir, “publicity is taken much more seriously”—after all, as early as the 1860s, Queen Victoria had courted public support by publishing her family portraits and private diaries.

In his seminal The German Empire, published in German in 1973, historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler posited that in respect to the German Empire's colonial policies only the SPD, unlike all other political parties, “retained its capacity to take a critical view on matters of principle.” Moreover, in Wehler's view, the SPD's critical stance on this and many other political questions along with the party's massive electoral gains in the 1912 parliamentary elections precipitated a situation in the years immediately preceding the Great War that prompted the German Empire's “old elites” to bet increasingly on a major military conflict to solve the Empire's internal political tensions (“leap into darkness”). Thus in Wehler's view the Social Democrats contributed in no small part to Imperial Germany's perceived domestic crisis, which prompted the infamous “old elites” to choose war over domestic reform in 1914.

On March 28, 1926, government officials and borderland activists staged a massive rally to protest the border with Poland in Oppeln (Opole), the capital of the German part of the Upper Silesian borderland. The Social Democratic interior minister of the Prussian state, Carl Severing, took the occasion to articulate the terms of a rivalry with the Polish neighboring nation-state to which the disputed drawing of the border here in 1922 had given way. In his speech he noted that he was “not speaking about an arms race” but rather “a struggle” for “Germandom and Kultur” that “should be fought out with the weapons of the spirit”—rather than with actual arms. As part of the struggle, the whole of this border society was to demonstrate that they were “better than the eastern neighbor” in their everyday work. This promotion of good stewardship was meant not only to ensure that Germany would not lose another “single foot-long of soil,” but also foremost “to uphold the faith of the Upper Silesian masses in Polish Silesia's speedy return to Germany.” This last phrase was coined by Aleksander Szczepański, the Polish Consul in Beuthen (Bytom) on the German side of the border. Like other government officials, and also the media, he followed this rally and was startled by how—in his words—“tirelessly” “all of Germany” was calling for the border's revision. In turn, Szczepański warned the Polish government that “it is easy to imagine a sad outcome”—such as the revision of the border in Germany's favor—if Poland did not step up its efforts to counter such propaganda.

Twenty years and a day after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, Hanover county administrator Helmut Janssen declared to an assembly of East Prussian expellee leaders that Germany was still destined to recover all of the territory it had possessed in 1937. One day, he claimed, the roughly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from the lost eastern territories and eastern Europe in the wake of the war would return home. Although by 1965 this political goal seemed “further away than ever before,” he repeated an expellee declaration of March 1960, which pledged that all expellees “still want to return to the Heimat [homeland]—now, in the future, and forever.”