Submitted by: Gerald D. Feldman I have been following this debate with my usual anthropological interest in the current state of our profession and field. Since the semester is about to begin, and I am teaching a course in Germany as an industrial society to graduate students, I would be curious if there is anything useful produced by poststructuralists, postmodernists usw. in connection with institutions of central importance to modern German history and, indeed, even modern European and world history like the Reichsbank and Bundesbank. Have they produced anything to help me help my students to understand the division of economic and social responsibilities between the federal government, the states, and local governments, an issue interesting not only for Germany, but also for the United States, these days. Lest I be thought to be narrow-minded and conventional and a representative of an older generation, I hasten to point out that these issues tend to be neglected in most conventional German history courses and that they cannot be called "old-fashioned" because "old-fashioned" history studiously neglected them and still does. The Marxists did not care about them, but then Marxism lies in ruins and is in no position care to care about anything. The old fashioned historicists concentrated on other things. As for the post-modernistists and post-structuralists, they are at the movies. What worries me is that the students interested in the real world will go to Political Science rather than history. Insofar as the deepest moral issue we face in our field is concerned, namely the teaching of the Holocaust, I regret to say that I found Hayden White's essay on "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," and Sande Cohen's "Between Image and Phrase: Progressive History and the `Final Solution' as Disposession" in Friedlander's Probing the Limits of Representation irresponsible and repugnant. Of course there are some useful things in recent historiographical trends, postmodernist and otherwise, and of course we should revise our syllabi, but we really have some responsibility toward our students and readers to present arguments that are defensible and to reflect priorities that have something to do with the real world. I don't think that the MLA programs reflect responsible scholarship, and I think it would be a grave mistake for historians to go that route, particularly German historians. Symbolic capital has now come to replace false consciousness as the charge against people who argue in the mode presented here. All currencies are, of course, representations, but we all know that you can buy more with some than with others. My own preference is to hold some mix of strong ones which enables me to use the cheaper ones on such occasions as they are useful. The recent fads in our profession, like some of the older fads, are cheaper currencies, which may or may not have their uses but at some point, alas, the vacation in Baja California comes to an end. Gerald D. Feldman, University of California at Berkeley .