This is Koller's Habilitationsschrift, unanimously accepted by the University of Zurich, Switzerland in 2003. It builds on the author's interest in the history of nationalism by examining the concept of ‘Fremdherrschaft' (foreign rule) and its application in German political and intellectual history. The approach is rooted in current debates over historical methodology and is in part a contribution to those debates. It applies conceptual approaches from other areas of history to current approaches to nationalism and with the concept of political culture. It also integrates elements of discourse analysis. It shows that the concept of ‘Fremdherrschaft' developed in the first half of the nineteenth century as a response to the experience of Napoleonic hegemony. From the 1840s onwards, the term expanded as a concept for the interpretation of political constellations in the past and present and an important element in mythical narrations of national rebirth. Although the term was closely linked to concepts like national honour and national liberty in all political camps, it was nonetheless put to different uses. Liberals used it to depict cultural nationhood, conservatives' use of the term was more etastic, in social democracy it was used to denounce capitalist exploitation of the working class and colonial peoples. After 1918, the term became ubiquitous in rightist discourses, being used to attack the German-speaking minorities' situation in the lost and occupied territories, Germany's relations to the victors, and the alleged Jewish and Marxist dominance of Weimar democracy. After 1933, nearly all Hitler's policies were described as part of a struggle against ‘Fremdherrschaft'. After 1945 Friedrich Meinecke wrote of an ‘inner foreign rule' to describe Nazi domination. The concept's evolution is connected with the general semantic change in the transition to modernity, with an emerging nationalism and with the changing criteria of political legitimacy.