Rereading German History (Routledge Revivals)

From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996

Richard J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317541882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians – mainly German, American, British and French – have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany's 'special path' to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.

Part 1
Parade of the Grand Narratives

The five essays grouped together in Part I all deal with attempts by established historians to write synthetic narratives of long stretches of German history, concentrating above all on the nineteenth century. The first of them discusses the volume in the Oxford History of Modern Europe covering German history from 1770 to 1866, written by the American historian James J. Sheehan. At the time the essay was published, the process of German reunification had only recently begun. The tone of the review reflects above all the concerns which that process was arousing early in 1990 in Britain and the USA, where worried commentators were raising the spectre of a resurgence of German nationalism and the rise of a 'Fourth Reich'. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher invited a group of eminent specialists in German history to a meeting at Chequers, her official country residence, where there was wild talk of the Germans' historic ruthlessness, aggressiveness and unreliability and the threat that reunification posed to the future stability of Europe. One of Thatcher's most trusted Ministers, Nicholas Ridley, subsequently went on record comparing Chancellor Helmut Kohl to his predecessor Adolf Hitler. Although the historians at the Chequers meeting subsequently claimed they had been misrepresented, and Ridley was forced to resign his office because of the uproar that greeted his remarks, there was no doubt that apprehensions about the re-emergence of a united German state in Central Europe were widespread among Conservatives. On the left, too, reunification rekindled historic fears of fascism and great-power politics, while on the right it revived the myth of a Britain standing alone against the might of Europe in 1940, a myth which remains central to the ideology of the 'Eurosceptic' wing of the Conservative Party. An invitation to review a new history of Germany leading up to the first unification of the 1860s offered the opportunity to reflect on these fears, and to see what light the study of Otto von Bismarck cast on the rather different figure of Helmut Kohl. German History 1770-1866 emphasized the role of chance circumstance in the process. Its sceptical view of grand theories and doctrines of historical inevitability was characteristic of much American scholarship as postmodernism, with its frontal assault on all forms of 'grand narrative' and overarching historical interpretation, made its influence felt on intellectual life in the United States.

In sharp contrast to Sheehan, the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler has devoted many of his writings to developing a structural theory of modern German history, the so-called Sonderweg argument, emphasizing Germany's unique - and uniquely damaging and destructive — path to modernity between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. Chapter 2, dealing with the third volume of Wehler's enormous 'societal history' of modern Germany, covering the years 1849-1918, takes a close look at how this argument has been modified and qualified in the light of research, and asks whether indeed it has not been so badly damaged that, even on Wehler's own account, it no longer holds together. Wehler's work also embodies a very partiular approach to the past, based on the application of neo-Weberian sociology to historical subjects. This approach has been very influential among German scholars in the last couple of decades, and Chapter 2 takes the opportunity to examine some of the advantages and disadvantages it brings with it. Wehler began his great work well before German reunification, and the implicit argument of Chapter 2 is that the modifications it has made to the original Sonderweg thesis put forward in the early 1970s owe more to the progress of historical research and debate than to the changing political circumstances in which it was written.

A very different kind of historical theory stands at the centre of the work of Thomas Nipperdey, discussed in Chapter 3 - not 'historical social science' and the search for structural causes of Nazism in German history, but 'historicism', reading the past as it was written and not in the light of what happened in the fateful years between 1933 and 1945. Here too, it is argued, is a position which involves theoretical contradictions which, in the end, their author was unable to resolve. Nipperdey too began writing before the reunification of Germany seemed even a remote possibility; yet he placed the doctrine of the historical inevitability of German unification and German nationhood at the very centre of his work. Retrospectively, therefore, he assumes something of the aura of a prophet. In the last volume of his great work, written while reunification was taking place, his drive to provide historical support for the legitimacy of German nationhood led him, Chapter 3 argues, to gloss over too many of the problematical aspects of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine eras, and in his treatment of the First World War his concern to redress the balance against what he saw as the excessively negative picture of German history in this period painted by Wehler and others too often degenerated into special pleading. Moreover, Nipperdey's belief in the inevitability of German nationhood contradicted his desire to avoid the teleological approach which he so criticized in the work of the 'critical' historians.

As a self-confessed 'historicist', Nipperdey sought to reconstruct the past as it happened, in all its aspects. Chapter 3 asks whether such an ambition is really capable of fulfilment any more, at a time when professional historians, especially in Germany, eschew many of the narrative techniques, such as character sketching, the provision of local, 'atmospheric' colour, and so on, which adorned the work of the true historicists of a century ago. In its immense breadth of coverage, Nipperdey's project sought to encompass almost every aspect of German life in the nineteenth century, and in this respect is closer to 'historical social science' than the work discussed in Chapter 4, Wolfgang J. Mommsen's massive two-volume history of Germany from 1850 to 1918. Ironically, perhaps, for an historian whose career has been closely focused on the work of the great German sociologist Max Weber, Mommsen follows the example of the nineteenth-century historians in concentrating heavily on a narrative of foreign and domestic politics at the centre and in making ample use of contemporary quotation and detail in doing so. The view he gives of German history is very much the view from Berlin. Written after reunification had been achieved, Mommsen's immensely detailed account of the creation and subsequent travails of the German nation-state in the nineteenth century returns continually to the question of comparing the two processes, and is constantly alive to the possible alternative histories that might have occurred had things been different in 1866 or 1888 or 1914. Above all, he is concerned to draw a sharp contrast between the Bismarckian unification process and the events of 1989/90; yet, in the end, he is still forced to confess that reunification has made the history of the German Empire created in 1871 more relevant than ever.

If Mommsen's view of Bismarck is overwhelmingly negative, then the interpretation advanced by the French historian Joseph Rovan goes very much to the other extreme. Covering the whole sweep of German history from the beginning to the present, Rovan's purpose is to interpret the German past for a French readership in order to overcome many of the prejudices and misconceptions under which the French, like the British, evidently continue to labour. Yet, as Chapter 5 argues, the result is an account which glosses over too many of the difficulties of German history in the interests of present-day international harmony and European integration. At many points in the narrative, Rovan's work illustrates only too clearly the perils of an excessive subordination of historical scholarship to political ends. A foreign perspective on the history of a nation can be fruitful and illuminating, as Rovan's indeed is in a number of respects; but true understanding and respect can only be based on clarity of vision, not on whitewashing. Moreover, as with Mommsen's work, Rovan offers a vision of the past which privileges high politics and powerful individuals. As with all the other studies discussed in Part I of this book, his attempt to write a grand narrative of German history runs into the inevitable problem of what to include and what to leave out, and how to weave the many different and sometimes divergent strands of the story together. It raises not only the question of how historical knowledge can be conveyed, but also the far more fundamental problem of what historical knowledge actually is.

1
Towards Unification

As German unification proceeded on its apparently inevitable course in 1989/90, and Chancellor Kohl scrambled with almost indecent haste to write his name into the history books as the second Bismarck, images sprang to mind of that previous unification, over a century and a quarter ago, and the consequences it brought to Europe and the world in the following decades. After Charlemagne's First Reich, Bismarck's Second and Hitler's Third, were we now seeing the rise of a Fourth Reich of equally imposing dimensions and equally uncertain duration? Did the new and seemingly unstoppable drive to reunify Germany in our own day mark the resumption of a submerged but ultimately ineradicable tradition of German national feeling and identity? Or did it merely register a stampede for material goods by the East Germans, their consumerist appetites whetted by years of watching West German television advertisements?

Those who seek an answer to these important questions could do worse than turn to James J. Sheehan's contribution to the Oxford History of Modern Europe,¹ a series whose own origins are themselves now virtually lost in the mists of time. His is the seventh volume to appear in the series since the publication of The Struggle for Mastery in Europe by A.J. P. Taylor, way back in 1954. The series editors, advertised on the jacket as Alan Bullock and F.W.D. Deakin, have since become Lord Bullock and Sir William Deakin, and their task is beginning to look as endless as that of painting the Forth Bridge; if the current rate of appearance - at two volumes a decade, leisurely even by Oxford standards - fails to speed up, so much more modern European history will have happened by the time it is complete that a whole new set of books will have to be commissioned to bring the story up to date.

Part of the trouble is surely that the standard set by those authors who have so far managed to complete their task has been so formidably high. But Sheehan, although he appears to have been at work on German History 1770-1866 (1989) for only a decade or so, triumphantly maintains it. His book can easily stand comparison with Theodore Zeldin's on France, Raymond Carr's on Spain, or Hugh Seton-Watson's on Russia. The range and depth of his scholarship are tremendously impressive. Although the book is very long, it is a pleasure to read. Sheehan writes with elegance and clarity and enlivens his narrative with plenty of interesting detail and the occasional flash of scholarly wit. This is historical writing of the highest order. It deserves to be judged as such.

Sheehan had to compete not only with an intimidating array of distinguished predecessors in the same series, but also with a deeply entrenched tradition of writing about the process of German unification in the nineteenth century under Prussian leadership as if it were inevitable. This tradition has left is mark even on the most recent syntheses of German history in this period. German historians have a habit of reading back the kleindeutsch version of a united Germany, without Austria and under the domination of Prussia, into the early and mid-nineteenth century and even further, as if there was never any really serious alternative to it.

Sheehan's book can be read as a sustained attempt to undermine this tradition of German historical writing. At every step, he emphasizes the contingency and uncertainty of the unification process. If the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the East German vote for unity with the West in March 1990 both came as more or less complete surprises in our own day, then, Sheehan reminds us, the same was no less true of the Prussian military victory over Austria in 1866, which marked the most crucial step towards the unification of Germany completed by the war with France in 1870. Most people expected the Austrians to win. And indeed they very nearly did. Far from being the perfectly planned and executed operation of Prussian historical legend, Moltke's victory at Koniggratz was, like most battles, a tale of muddle and confusion, in which the great general was only saved from humiliation by the opportune arrival of the Prussian Second Army led by the heir to the Prussian throne. 'You are now a great man', someone told Bismarck as the Austrians retreated, 'but if the Crown Prince had arrived too late, you would be the greatest scoundrel in the world.'

It is to indicate the role of individual personality and historical chance in the process of German unification that Sheehan concludes by asking rhetorically, 'Is it a mistake to end this book with Bismarck and the Prussian victories of 1866?' In asserting that it is not, Sheehan is also paying homage to his colleague at Stanford, Gordon A. Craig, the author of the succeeding volume in the Oxford History, who opens his account of Germany 1866-1945 by asking, 'Is it a mistake to begin with Bismarck?' But when it comes to defining his approach at the beginning of the book, Sheehan takes a rather different point of view. Thomas Nipperdey started his magisterial account of German history in the nineteenth century by declaring: 'In the beginning was Napoleon.' Sheehan, commencing his narrative in the eighteenth century, feels constrained to warn the reader that modern German history did not begin with Frederick the Great. Modern German history, in other words, amounts to a lot more than the rise of Prussia. Instead, Sheehan organizes his account around three rather more wideranging developments: the rise of sovereign territorial states, the growth of economic activity and social mobility, and the emergence of a literary culture. Each of the book's four chronologically defined sections is thus divided roughly into three parts, dealing separately with politics, society and culture.

The advantage of this procedure is that it enables Sheehan to deal from a variety of perspectives with the central question of the emergence of a German national identity. He is sceptical of the idea that it had anything much to do with economy or society. The Prussian historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, writing with the false wisdom of hindsight, thought that the creation of the German Customs Union, the Zollverein, under Prussian leadership, uniting a large number of German states in a single market from the 1830s onwards, paved the way for political union under Prussian leadership in the 1860s. But as Sheehan points out, most of the member states actually fought against Prussia in the war of 1866, although their principal ally, Austria, was not a member. Indeed, the Customs Union did not even create a unified economy; as late as the 1860s there were still numerous different systems of currency, weights and measures in operation, and different parts of Germany were sometimes more closely linked to other economies than they were to each other. Sheehan is equally sceptical of the notion, popularized by the novelist Wilhelm Raabe, that 'The German Empire was founded with the construction of the first railway.' 'If one studies a map of the central European rail system in I860', Sheehan remarks, 'any number of political, social, economic and cultural connections seem possible.'

The political importance of such economic developments, Sheehan argues, lay in their contribution to the strengthening not of the nation, but of the state; and in so far as they benefited Prussia more than other states, they did indeed pave the way for Bismarck's victory in 1866. But that victory did not mark the realization of any deep-rooted concept of national identity. Many Austrians and South Germans, indeed, felt thoroughly alienated by it. 'You claim that you have founded a Reich', the Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer told Bismarck, 'but all you have done is to destroy a Volk.' The nationalist historians created the seductive legend of a Germany united by historical necessity. But Germany was not united in 1866, nor was it in 1871. Millions of Germans remained outside the Reich, not only in Austria but also further afield, in areas of settlement all over East-Central Europe. Yet many more millions of people belonging to other ethnic groups also lived in these areas in a tangle of different nationalities. As Sheehan remarks, the nationalist writer Ernst Moritz Arndt's 'famous declaration that the fatherland extended "as far as the German tongue is heard" was stirring poetry but woefully inadequate political geography'.

The German Reich, then, really was created by 'Blood and Iron'. It was the product of violence, not of any natural process. It is widely believed, says Sheehan, that nations and nationalism are natural phenomena. But, he goes on:

That this belief has no historical basis should be peculiarly apparent in the German case, where geography, language, culture, and politics combine to confound attempts to find a natural, objectively defined nation. Nations are inventions, the products of particular historical circumstances and movements.

In 1848 German nationalism was a predominantly liberal force. Writers and politicians saw the creation of a constitutional nation-state as the quickest way to achieve the civil freedoms and human rights which they felt the small, often semi-absolutist states of the German Confederation were denying them. It was only after unification that a more sinister variant of nationalism, based on the creation of negative stereotypes such as Slavs or Jews, and dedicated to solving the continuing dilemmas of German national identity through the conquest and subjugation of further territory beyond the borders of the Reich, gradually gained ascendancy.

If there was nothing natural or inevitable about the Bismarckian version of national unification and national identity, then there was nothing natural or inevitable about what followed it either. Nations remake themselves in every generation, and of no nation has this been more true than the Germans. The process which we are witnessing in Central Europe today represents another twist in the tale. German reunification in our own time has nothing to do with blood and iron. It was accomplished peacefully and without bloodshed. It brought together two states which occupied only two-thirds of the area of the old Bismarckian Reich. But it did so without any serious claim to territories beyond, where there are now very few ethnic Germans indeed. And it has taken place in the name not - as in 1866 - of Prussian militarism and authoritarianism, but of freedom, democracy and prosperity. Chancellor Kohl never really looked like a second Bismarck. It is simply impossible to imagine him appearing in the spurred and jackbooted military uniform that the Iron Chancellor used to wear

Sheehan does a good job of disposing of the myths of nationalist historiography, whether on a large scale, in his account of the origins of the Bismarckian Reich, or in a smaller compass, as in his assessment of the Austro-Prussian agreement at Olmiitz in 1850 to share responsibility for Schleswig-Holstein, an agreement traditionally regarded by nationalist historians as a humiliation for the Prussians. But he is less successful in finding something coherent to put in its place. This is partly because he rejects - not without good reason - the related myth of the German Sonderweg or 'special path' to modernity, which gives just as much prominence to broader historical forces in the unification of Germany under Prussia, but sees them in much more negative terms. Sheehan concedes, of course, that the liberals did not succeed in assuming political hegemony in 1848 or afterwards. But while illiberal political forces remained strong, this did not in his view reflect any peculiar weakness of the middle class in German culture and society. On the contrary, the German bourgeoisie, he says, were dynamic and modern, far from being the weak-kneed and politically apathetic creatures that many historians suppose them to have been. If they had a weakness, it lay in the fact that they were deeply divided by region, religion and relationship to the state (a large proportion of them being state servants of one kind or another). Nor did they confront a rampant neo-feudal aristocracy hell-bent on resisting the forces o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Parade of the Grand Narratives
• Patterns of Authority and Revolt
• Ideological Origins of Nazism
• Faces of the Third Reich
• Reunification and Beyond
• Index