Submitted by: Shelley Baranowski To H-German subscribers: It seems to me that, by implication, the most important matter that Kenneth Barkin's article raises is whether postmodernism deals effectively with human agency. His focus on biographies of Bismarck and his concern as to how postmodernism will help us deal with the Holocaust obviously bring such an issue to the fore. Because the very course of German history has necessarily evoked moral, as well as intellectual, concern, the tensions in the field have usually arisen from debates as to where (on whom) one places the responsibility for the horror of Nazism. Therefore I don't believe that the narratives that have arisen during those debates can simply be written off as examples of the American domination of the field and the "stability" of the Cold War, although there is certainly something to Michael Geyer's and Konrad Jarausch's argument (the Germans, for example, found the subject of Nazism difficult to confront, except in ways I consider exculpatory, especially in the early postwar years). And while I myself am searching for ways of understanding how the postwar period, and particularly 1989, alter our approach to German history, I am concerned that the Third Reich and the reasons for its existence will become merely a "rupture," the horror of which becomes less and less accessible or moving. I have found Foucault (to take one example) to be very revealing in exposing the insidious workings of power, particularly the ways that power can conceal or protect those who exercise it. (Whether this is an accurate interpretation of Foucault is open to question, because I often wonder whether, according to him, we can even identify agents.) Nevertheless, there is the danger in the midst of "decentering" and questioning the efficacy of representation, of losing sight of real actors who do very nasty things with even nastier weapons on behalf of the nastiest of ideologies. There are obvious dangers in locking into approaches that, it seems to me, are extremely pessimistic about the possibility of historical explanation, which in turn yields an additional pessimism as to whether a productive debate about the responsibility of historical actors (particularly elites) can even take place. Shelley Baranowski University of Akron .