Similar to the German enterprise of science as a whole, the German Research Foundation (DFG) – originally conceived as an "Emergency Association for German Science" (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft) in 1920 – for decades considered itself as the politically authorized agency for the promotion of a patriotically accentuated science.

The authors delineate the course followed by this research foundation in the fields of science and technology, in the humanities and social sciences, medicine, and the biosciences. Initially this path was revisionistic, after 1933 racist and politically expansionistic, and finally, westernized and conservative. Additional surveys on the history of the foundation as an organization and interdisciplinary overviews by the editors raise the issues of the liberalization of German research and its extragovernmental funding during the 1960s.