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Book Reviews
The research sponsored by the Commission Internationale pour
l’Histoire des Assemblées d’Etats built on, among other things, the
work of Otto Hintze. A short time before, in 1930, he had published
a highly regarded contribution to the typology of the constitutions of
the Estates in the Western world, and he had included eastern central
Europe—in his terminology, the ‘peripheral marginal lands’—in his
universal doctrine of zones. Hintze’s constitutional and social history
studies stimulated the study of the history of the early modern
Estates in eastern central Europe in particular. Otto Hoetzsch should
also be mentioned here, and later Hans Rothfels, who, during his
years at Königsberg, developed a novel overall programme for looking
at the regional structures of eastern central Europe. Rothfels saw
the traditions of a state based on Estates (Ständestaat) as one of the
main factors in unifying the region. And in the corporative element
he re-discovered the German element in the colonized ‘East’. He
explained the strength of liberal elements derived from the Estates in
terms of a struggle between nations which he projected into the past.
Thus the ‘pressure of foreign peoples’ in the colonized areas ‘preserved
the ideas of independence and self-administration’. Elsewhere,
he saw the Danzig corporation functioning as a ‘national defence’.
Throughout, Rothfels’s work focuses narrowly on the Germans,
and this perspective was later ideologically expanded and radicalized
in national-political terms by Theodor Schieder. In his Deutscher
Geist und ständische �reiheit im Weichsellande (his Habilitation thesis of
1940), whose arguments were presented more succinctly in ‘Landständische
Verfassung, Volkstumspolitik und Volksbewußtsein’
(published in 1943 in the Brackmann �estschrift), Schieder explained
the history of the eastern central European Estates entirely in the
light of ‘east German national groups’. Schieder defended the constitution
of the Estates against the tradition of ‘Borussian’, statist historiography
because, he argued, in the various ‘German border areas’
it had helped to preserve the ethnic group (Volkstum). In contrast to
internal German territories, in the east, from the Baltic countries to
Transylvania, ‘German corporative forms of life’ had been defended
with the autonomy of the Estates. This interpretation of the creation
and preservation of corporate identity as an ‘achievement’ of ethnic
history—a thoroughly national and thus anachronistic interpretation
of the processes by which the Estates in eastern central Europe had
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