Submitted by: Diethelm Prowe Thank you to Mitchell Ash for getting the debate back to the level of serious discussion. The last couple contributions, which certainly contained a great deal of interesting material, did begin to sound more like pronouncements by political parties, claiming the high ground for themselves and having nothing but contempt for anyone who could argue otherwise. Certainly the three people involved in the initial GSR articles are all first-rate historians - among the very best in the profession. I would still be interested in reactions to some of Ken Barkin's cardinal arguments, especially the close link he posits between the fundamental assumptions of Romanticism and post-structuralism, the problem he sees - with Saul Friedlaender - in dealing with the Holocaust, and whether 20th-Century German history does in fact pose problems for which a post-structuralist approach yields fewer insights. Might this have something to do with the fact that this approach has been less attractive to German historians, at least in Germany, rather than block-headedness or simple provincial backwardness, as some commentaries have suggested down from a rather high horse. Are these issues that should cause postmodernists to reconsider some essential assumptions, without rejecting the whole package? Might this be particularly true for German historians, especially as they face a major rethinking of German history after reunification and European integration, as Geyer and Jarausch reminded us? After all, contrary to the impression one might sometimes get from the imperative style of a Foucault, his, like other approaches that have preceded it, is only one possible approach to understand the complex thing we call "history," and, as Jonathan Sperber pointed out, it arose primarily in reaction to the (structually Marxist) social history of the E.P. Thompson generation, surely in part because many did not feel satisfied with the answers, insights, and fullness of coverage this social history could provide. Diethelm Prowe DProwe@Carleton.edu .