Bayreuth Market, 1904

This photo has a lot of pith if you look for it. The interesting thing is the policeman walking his beat around the square, in his spiked helmet and brass buttons. The Kaiser's Germany truly ran on obeyed rules and well defined cultural roles--what Marxists call hegemonies. Imperial Germany was social sandstone: complex societal roles you could depend on laid down in layers. It was a "buttoned down" society by popular consent. In less than twenty years it all collapsed. By 1921 urban women of the age of those in the photograph would be eating restaurant waste out of garbage cans in city alleyways. Then along came Hitler.