From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century many of the territories and cities in Central Europe were the scene of witchcraft trials. As recent research shows, it was especially in the years around 1590, 1610, and 1630, and again in the 1650s, that many parts of Germany were overwhelmed by what might be called a tidal wave of witch-hunting, with thousands upon thousands of victims: women mostly, yet also men and children. So far, despite a large number of detailed studies, there is no convincing explanation of why witch-hunting should have played such a prominent role in Germany from the 1590s to the 1650s.

One of the most striking features of seventeenth-century state building was the formation of standing armies. Kings and princes throughout Europe, responding to conditions of almost constant strife, were compelled to transform ineffective feudal levies and unruly bands of mercenaries into regularized bodies of professional troops, making ever larger and more costly military establishments instruments of rational foreign policy rather than the preserves of the old nobility or freebooting condottieri. In building armies of the new type, European monarchs had to surmount determined opposition from two sources: the local representative bodies (estates) which were reluctant to grant rulers the powers of taxation necessary for the maintenance of permanent troops, and the mercenary colonels who were expected to relinquish their rights as independent recruiting masters and subordinate themselves to the state. By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, various territorial sovereigns were successfully mastering this opposition to their political authority and were able to take an essential step in the direction of true standing armies by routinely keeping strong military forces under their command at the conclusion of a campaign, thereby diminishing their reliance on contingents approved by the provincial estates or soldiers hastily raised by private entrepreneurs to meet specific emergencies.

Of the conservative theorists who rose to prominence during the last years of the Weimar Republic, none stood more directly in the eye of the storm that descended upon Germany in 1933–34 than Edgar Julius Jung (1894–1934). His Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927 and then again in a revised and expanded edition in 1930, has been called the bible of German neo-conservatism and played a major role in crystallizing antidemocratic sentiment against the Weimar Republic. But Jung was more than a theorist; he was also a political activist deeply committed to a conservative regeneration (Erneuerung) of the German state. In 1930–31, for example, Jung was actively involved in the efforts of the People's Conservative Association (Volkskonservative Vereinigung or VKV) to create a new conservative movement to the left of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) after its takeover by film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg.

The historiography of the Peasants' War is currently dominated by Peter Blickle's The Revolution of 1525. Blickle builds upon Günther Franz's Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, long the standard history of the Peasants' War. Blickle uses the concept of “the Revolution of the Common Man” to describe the Peasants' War. The common men in both the towns and villages were united in a revolutionary effort to establish the “communal Reformation.” Blickle writes: “Evangelical doctrine gripped urban and rural communities alike, and the lay community claimed the right to decide right doctrine.… Thus, the Reformation's dependence on community erased the barriers between urban and rural communities, between burghers and peasants.”