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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.

Geoff Eley is the Sylvia L. Thrupp Collegiate Professor of Comparative History and has taught at the University of Michigan since 1979. His primary appointment is in History, with a cross appointment in German Studies and an additional affiliation with Film and Video Studies.

James Retallack is Professor of History at th Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. As a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Humboldt Foundation, in 2002-03 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Göttingen.