In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderweg thesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.

In the midst of the upheaval created by military defeat, the collapse of the Hohenzollern and other German monarchies, and the threat of radical social revolution, a movement that had been taking shape for some time became a visible presence in German public life. Intellectuals, writers, visual artists, and numerous others declared that they would no longer remain aloof from the world of politics, social reform, and even revolution. On the contrary, they would seek to merge the arts and politics into a synthesis that would help to mold a new and greatly improved society. They issued manifestos and programs, founded organizations and journals, joined political parties — primarily on the left — and went to the streets, at least to observe if not also to act. The majority of the participants in this movement were, at some point in their careers, part of new artistic trends and, as such, contributors to the formation and advancement of aesthetic modernism in Germany.

In debates on the nature and degree of democratization in the Kaiserreich, the dynamics of rural politics have received perhaps less attention than they merit. Indeed, though the picture is more nuanced now, for a long period the ability of rural elites to dominate nonelites (a core aspect of these dynamics) was simply assumed, as was the relationship of this dominance to Germany's troubled democratization. In his 1943 work Bread and Democracy in Germany, for example, Alexander Gerschenkron blamed Germany's entrenched and elitist aristocracy for this trait of bullying voters into antidemocratic politics spanning from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich. More subtly, the landmark 1966 study of Barrington Moore, Jr. noted the potential for an alliance between entrenched aristocracies and small peasantries, with each as reservoirs for antidemocratic (and potentially fascist) sentiment in several countries, with obvious application to the German case as well.