also highlighted the importance of sustaining Germany as a bulwark on behalf of western Europe against "Bolshevism". (The former Russian empire was undergoing its own Civil War agonies throughout this period.) Despite his support for conservatism, Kern was careful to steer clear of the extremist right. Nevertheless, at least during the immediate post-war period, Kern was no admirer of the new republican order, and viewed the emergence of democratic institutions and practices during 1918/1919 with deep misgivings. After the war December 1919 marked a reinvigorated return to political engagement as Fritz Kern became the producer of Die Grenzboten, a weekly (or sometimes fortnightly) literary and political magazine steeped in the still potent National liberalism that had emerged during the nineteenth century. His own contributions dealt with characteristic passion about the tragic denouement of the war, returning frequently to material included in the Tirpitz memoire. Over the next few years he engaged in politics through his parallel career as a journalist and commentator. Meanwhile, in 1922 he moved down-river, from Frankfurt to the University of Bonn, where Friedrich von Bezold, by now aged 73, had retired the previous year. Kern succeeded to the Bonn History professorship. His wife and children remained in the family home just outside Frankfurt for more than a year, but in July 1923 a suitable newly constructed "professor house" became available for rent in the Baumschulwäldchen quarter of the town and they joined him in Bonn. The period was one of domestic and international crisis, with the value of money collapsing and French forces still occupying the Rhineland as the government in Paris sought to exploit problems over reparations as justification for the permanent annexation of this coal-rich part of Germany, or at least the permanent conversion of it into a quasi-autonomous "buffer state" under French influence. Towards the end of 1923 Kern was involved in obtaining weapons from the army for the students "defending themselves against Rhineland separatists" who had launched an anti-government insurrection in Aegidienberg and the surrounding countryside. The background to the incident is one of desperate economic austerity coupled with considerable political complexity and disagreement over finding a way ahead: Kern's interest was presumably fuelled by the fact that the so-called Siebengebirge ("seven hills") insurrection took place a short distance upriver from Bonn where he was now working. During the middle and later 1920s various events took place which went some way towards