history, he does believe in a special German mentality () that emerged in the late 18th century. Bracher wrote that: The German "" should be limited to the era of the Third Reich, but the strength of the particular German mentality [] that had arisen already with its opposition to the French Revolution and grew stronger after 1870 and 1918 must be emphasized. Out of its exaggerated perspectives (and, I would add, rhetoric) it become a power in politics, out of a mythic reality. The road from democracy to dictatorship was not a particular German case, but the radical nature of the National Socialist dictatorship corresponded to the power of the German ideology that in 1933–1945 became a political and totalitarian reality In a 1983 speech, Hildebrand denied there had been a and claimed that the applied only to the "special case" of the Nazi dictatorship In a 1984 essay, Hildebrand went further and wrote: It remains to be seen, whether future scholarship will initiate a process of historicization of the Hitler period, for example by comparing it with Stalinist Russia and with examples such as the Stone Age Communism of Cambodia. This would doubtless be accompanied by terrifying scholarly insights and painful human experiences. Both phenomena could, , even relativize the concept of the German between 1933 and 1945 In response, Heinrich August Winkler argued that there was a before 1933 and that Germany was a country deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, which meant there was no point of comparison between Hitler on one hand and Pol Pot and Stalin on the other. Since mid-1960s Starting in the 1960s, historians such as Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that unlike France and Britain, Germany had experienced only "partial modernization" in which industrialization was not followed by changes in the political and social spheres which in the opinion of Fischer and Wehler, continued to be dominated by a "pre-modern" aristocratic elite. In the opinion of the proponents of the thesis, the crucial turning point was the Revolution of 1848, when German liberals failed to seize power and consequently either emigrated or chose to resign themselves to being ruled by a reactionary elite and to live in a society that taught its children obedience, glorification of militarism and pride in a very complex notion of German culture. During the latter half of the German Empire, from about 1890 to 1918, that