A History of Germany 1918 - 2020

The Divided Nation

Mary Fulbrook

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119574248
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

The new edition of the acclaimed textbook on modern German history, written by a leading scholar inthe field

Now in its fifth edition, A History of Germany 1918-2020 provides a clear and well-balanced survey of German history from the creation of the Weimar Republic to the era of Angela Merkel's Chancellorship. Guiding readers through the complex patterns of the nation's historical development using clear and compelling narrative, this classic textbook introduces readers to the key themes of modern German history while tracing the social, cultural, and political tensions that have challenged German stability and unity across more than a century.

Fully updated for the next generation of readers, A History of Germany 1918-2020 extends its framework for exploring legacies of the past into the 21 st century. The fifth edition includes enhanced coverage of the extremes of nationalism, military aggression, and genocide under Nazism, as well as an expanded analysis of the Berlin Republic and the changing character of Germany in the Europe of 2020. Presenting readers with a panoramic overview of the past 100 years of German history, this compelling textbook:

• Provides a concise yet thorough account of the turbulent history of Germany from the end of the First World War to the present
• Examines the character and consequences of World War II and the Holocaust
• Explores the development of a capitalist democracy in West Germany and a communist dictatorship in East Germany during the Cold War
• Covers East and West German history in equal depth from the perspectives of instability, division, and reunification
• Analyses the fall of Communism and the unification of an enlarged Federal Republic in 1989-90
• Traces unified Germany's development as a globally respected state playing a pivotal role in Europe today

A History of Germany 1918-2020: The Divided Nation, Fifth Edition remains the ideal text for undergraduate students in courses on modern German or European history, as well as for general readers with interest in the subject.

1
The Course of German History

In those extraordinary months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when discussion of the unification of the two Germanies was for the first time in forty years back on the serious political agenda, many voices were raised giving views on ‘the German question’. From a variety of quarters, prejudices were aired which had lain dormant – along with the memories, gas masks and other relics of the Second World War – over the years when the Cold War and the balance of terror had seemed to ensure a fragile peace in a divided Europe. Suddenly, the prospect of a united, economically powerful, and politically sovereign Germany, active again in central Europe and in a position to mediate between East and West, aroused strong emotions among those whose view of Germany had been largely confined to an ill-assorted combination of images of Hitler and sleek West German capitalist competitors. Who were the Germans? What was their national character, if they had one? Who were those people who also called themselves Germans, from the other, Eastern, side of the rapidly crumbling Iron Curtain, who in many ways seemed not a bit like their Western brothers and sisters? Provoked into having to make a rapid response to the collapse of communist rule in Eastern Europe, many people outside Germany found they had a serious deficit of knowledge and understanding. Many Germans, too – both East and West – found that the Iron Curtain, and the proclaimed ‘zero hour’ of 1945, had raised barriers to informed interpretation. History – although it did not come to an end in 1989, as some pundits, like the American scholar Fukuyama, wished to proclaim – had indeed seemed to have stopped, as far as many textbooks were concerned, in 1945. Thereafter, politics and sociology took over – to provide partial snapshots of an apparently eternal present, unconnected with the radically different past.

But prejudices based on partial perceptions of Hitler’s rule, more than half a century earlier, combined with limited impressions of a rapidly changing present, can scarcely provide a secure basis of understanding. The ‘land in the centre of Europe’, Germany, had for decades held an uneasy position in the European and world balance of power – as well as being an extraordinary powerhouse of creativity, in cultural and intellectual as well as economic respects. The complexities of German history demand serious and detailed engagement – and many observers have seen it as a most peculiar history, thus provoking heated debates on interpretation.

Over the centuries, there has been a ‘German question’. Some analysts have seen its beginnings – somewhat anachronistically – in the ‘failure’ to establish a unified state in the Middle Ages. In the days of the politically decentralized ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, the multiplicity of German lands – ranging from the more important secular and ecclesiastical principalities and city states through to the minuscule fiefdoms of ‘independent imperial knights’ – formed an interdependent system over which the emperors (often pursuing dynastic interests outside the empire) never quite gained central control. The cultural and political conflicts involved in the Reformation of the sixteenth century helped to institutionalize the decentralization of the German lands. Religious differences coincided and overlapped with political conflicts to confirm this diversity in the course of the seventeenth century, in the series of conflicts which formed the so-called Thirty Years War (1618–48). Yet the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was effectively able only to seal a stalemate: neither religious uniformity nor political centralization was achieved. The territorial rulers enjoyed sovereignty within their own states while still remaining formally subordinate to the Emperor. Clashes among states competing for domination in the emerging European state system continued in the ‘age of absolutism’ of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While, from myriad small states which made up ‘Germany’, the ever growing composite state of Brandenburg–Prussia emerged as a powerful rival to Austria, the relatively weak German lands were still easily overrun by an expansionist post-revolutionary France under Napoleon.

Under the impact of Napoleonic aggression, a fundamental reorganization of the domestic and external affairs of the German states was begun. In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was abolished. Legal, social and economic reforms were introduced, either as a direct result of Napoleonic rule or in a form of ‘defensive modernization’. After the eventual defeat of Napoleon, the formation of a German Confederation in 1815 included a strengthened and enlarged Prussia as an intended bulwark against France in the west and tsarist Russia in the east. At the same time, with territorial reorganization and a great reduction in the number of German states, other states too had increased in size and importance, many duchies having achieved the status of kingdom for the first time with the demise of the old empire.

In the course of the nineteenth century it proved to be the economically more advanced Prussia which was able to gain the edge over Austria in competition for domination over the medium-sized German states. Prussia was in the forefront of moves towards economic integration in the Customs Union, in the century which was to see those dramatic processes of transformation associated with industrialization. Attempts to achieve political unification of the German states under liberal auspices failed in 1848, and it was ultimately the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck’s policies of ‘blood and iron’ that produced the unification, fraught with tensions, of a ‘small Germany’ (Kleindeutschland), excluding Austria, in the second German Empire founded in 1871. First seeking to secure its place in Europe, and then to gain a position among the imperial powers of the world, Imperial Germany proved to be an unstable entity. It came to an end, following defeat in the First World War, in the revolutionary autumn of 1918. After Germany’s brief and ill-fated attempt at democracy in the Weimar Republic, the initial denouement was to be the genocidal rule of Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich, an empire which was supposed to last a thousand years but in the event collapsed in ruins after a mere dozen, characterized by arguably unequalled evil. It was this outcome – this Götterdämmerung – which provides a unique twist to the problem of explaining German history. And it was often under the lengthy shadow of this past that subsequent developments in Germany were perceived.

Many observers puzzled over the apparently peculiar pattern of German history – the allegedly unique German path, or Sonderweg. In the later decades of the twentieth century, diverse attempts were made to explain its course. Broadly, whether they wanted to or not, historians of Germany writing after Hitler felt they had to engage in a long-running battle, characterized by local skirmishes over particular periods and issues, on the questions of ‘what went wrong?’ and ‘when did it go wrong?’ A rearguard action was mounted by those who wanted to say that not everything did go wrong, or at least, it did not go wrong so early, or it could have been prevented. However far serious historians tried to step outside this sort of framework, the shadow of Hitler stretched a long way back, shaping even counterarguments about the diversity of trends and the non-inevitability of historical outcomes. Moreover, Nazi rule not only had a major impact on subsequent developments in Cold War Europe, divided under the superpowers but also affected the ways in which history after 1945 was viewed and interpreted, from a variety of perspectives.

Given this context, there was a widespread (although far from universal) tendency to castigate Germany’s past for what it was not: German history was frequently written in terms of its alleged distortions, failures, ‘turning-points where Germany failed to turn’ (to use A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase). Thus, for example, Germany ‘failed’ to become a centralized state in the Middle Ages. The ‘early bourgeois revolution’ of the 1525 Peasants’ War ‘failed’, because Germany lacked a ‘mature’ bourgeoisie at this very early date (in the view of Marxists following Friedrich Engels). The ‘failure’ to resolve the religious and political conflicts associated with the Reformation led to the petty backwater, Kleinstaaterei pattern of the eighteenth century, when a sleepy Germany produced, to be sure, some elevated cultural spirits, but remained at one remove from the real driving forces of history evident in Britain’s industrial revolution or the bourgeois revolution which put an end to the ancien régime in France. The pattern of small states allegedly nurtured the bureaucratic, subject mentality displayed by many Germans. Lutheran doctrines of obedience to worldly authority were compounded by Kantian and Hegelian philosophy in a context of absolutist rule over weak civil societies. In her rude awakening of the nineteenth century, Germany became a ‘belated’ nation, with the contradictions between an archaic sociopolitical structure and a rapidly modernizing economy ultimately proving too great to bear without unleashing domestic and eventually international conflicts. Germany’s by now rather more numerous bourgeoisie proved no less ‘immature’ in its incapacity for effective politics. And not only were there structural distortions determining Germany’s long-term road to catastrophe; the ‘land of poets and thinkers’ (Land der Dichter und Denker) was also one allegedly characterized by unique cultural patterns emphasizing docility, apoliticism, an exaggerated faith in bureaucracy, excessive militarism and so on.

Clearly a brief sketch such as this inevitably bowdlerizes to a certain extent. Nor can justice be done to the full range of attempts to interpret the long sweep of German history. But underlying many such narratives there is a basic, persistent problem which is worth making explicit. To narrate the course of German history in terms of failures and distortions presupposes a ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ pattern of development. Sometimes the (often implicit) model is the development of liberal parliamentary democracy in Britain, or the experience of a ‘proper’ bourgeois revolution in France; sometimes there is no real country providing a model but rather a schematic view of ‘stages’ of historical development. Proponents of ‘distorted’ versions of German history may come from a variety of theoretical traditions, including both liberal and Marxist perspectives. What unites them is the tendency to explain whatever is seen as nasty about recent German history in terms of long-term ‘failures’ and ‘deviations’ from some supposedly ‘normal’ pattern of development.

But there have increasingly been vigorous reactions against this older form of approach. Most historians now try to ask, with more open minds, about patterns of actual causation – rather than simple depiction of failures – in German history. Determinist views have on the whole been replaced by closer analysis of shorter-term developments in the context of longer-term traditions and trends. While some historians devote major attention to the role of individual personalities in shaping the course of political history in particular, others have concentrated their energies on exploring patterns of social, economic or cultural development in more detail. Transnational developments and interrelations, as well as historical comparisons, have been given greater attention, as the nation state has increasingly been seen as only a limited unit of analysis within a wider context. Greater theoretical awareness has led to rejections of simple empiricism and of the belief (based on the views of the nineteenth-century German historian Ranke) that one can seek to recount ‘how it actually was’. Lively debates between proponents of different schools of historiography continue with a vengeance, particularly in Germany, where the moral implications of any historical interpretation often seem heightened. Given the historical significance of the rule of Hitler, attribution of causality is also in effect allocation of blame. While this is clearly not the place to embark on a comprehensive historiographical survey, the point may be made that there is no single, universally accepted narrative of German history: the field is characterized by vigorous, sometimes quite acerbic, controversy.

Where does this leave current thinking about twentieth-century German history? There are both broad debates about long-term patterns of continuity and discontinuity, as well as more closely focused arguments on specific issues to do with the collapse of Weimar democracy, the rise of the Nazis and, of course, the explanation of the ultimately inexplicable – the mass murder of over six million people on grounds of ‘race’ in the death camps and killing fields of war-torn Europe. There are also debates about not only the causation but also the historical consequences or longer-term impact of the Third Reich. From the 1960s there were, for example, discussions about whether the Nazis actually played an important role in putative processes of ‘modernization’ in twentieth-century Germany. With broader historiographical shifts – the ‘cultural turn’, transnational perspectives, heightened awareness of previously marginalized groups and identities – over recent decades new questions and approaches emerged.

A further twist to previous debates was given by developments since 1945. Long-term explanations of the allegedly inherent instability of German history, culminating in the Nazi catastrophe, were faced with the extraordinary success and stability of the postwar Federal Republic. What had become of the supposedly irredeemable German national character? Moreover, there was in a sense a double problem: for, in a very different way, the German Democratic Republic proved to be one of the most stable and productive states in the area of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Before 1989 Western historians often chose largely to ignore the GDR, concentrating most attention on the liberal democracy of western Germany as the new culmination of German history. Even so, attempts to insert developments after 1945 into a longer view were problematic: basic repression in the communist state of the East, the allegedly clear superiority of the democratic system imposed on the West, were to a large extent the underlying premises of Anglo-American interpretations of postwar German history, while Germans themselves (East and West) were caught in the problematic of the morally and politically loaded evaluation of competing systems. In the context of the Cold War there was a tendency on both sides of the Iron Curtain simply to castigate the other system in terms of one’s own values rather than exploring with sensitivity the actual mode of functioning and inherent problems of each system – a more nuanced approach which could easily be denounced as a form of fifth columnism.

There is now, too, a final twist to the problem. Any overview of German history must now explain not only the relative stability – and apparent double solution to the German problem – produced by the division of Germany but also the dramatic historical transformation which occurred with the East German revolution in autumn 1989 and the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990. The years from 1945 to 1990 now form a clearly defined historical period. While there are particular debates about aspects of both West and East German history, scholars disagree about how, if at all, the two histories can (or on some views even should be) combined.¹ To present a coherent account of longer-term trends which culminate in the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990 is to enter into new historiographical terrain. And in the early twenty-first century, with united Germany playing a powerful role in Europe, the Third Reich seems finally to be receding into history, displaced in significance by new transnational challenges, including the impact of economic crises, international terrorism, mass migration, environmental pollution, climate change and global pandemics.

What then is the argument advanced in this book? Any narrative account is based on certain underlying assumptions about the relative importance of different factors. When dealing with large, complex patterns of historical development, and seeking to tease out the threads of continuity, dynamism and fundamental change, a certain intellectual order must be imposed on the mass of historical material. In the case of Germany since 1918 we are dealing with an extraordinary succession of sociopolitical forms yet also with some basic continuities. In my view, twentieth-century German history cannot be explained in terms primarily of personalities – whatever the undoubted importance of the actions and intentions of certain individuals, most notably of course Adolf Hitler – or in terms of global, impersonal forces, whether to do with ‘national character’, ‘cultural traditions’ or any form of long-term structural determination. The account developed here is premised on the assumption that there is a complex interplay between a number of factors and that human beings have to act within the constraints of given circumstances: both external structural and cultural conditions and ‘internal’ limits posed by their own views, knowledge and assumptions.

In seeking to explain patterns of stability and change, special attention has to be paid to Germany’s changing place in the international system; the roles, relationships and activities of different elite groups; the structure and functioning of the economy; the location and aims of dissenting groups; and what may loosely be called the patterns of political culture among different subordinate social groups. Clearly one cannot simply write an abstract formula of this sort, apply it to different historical periods, weigh up the equation and produce a neat outcome. History is not as straightforward or mechanical a process as that. But when considering the history of Germany since the end of the First World War, the formula just presented does appear to have remarkable explanatory power, as we shall see in more detail in the chapters which follow. Let me preview briefly some of the implications of the elements involved.

The ‘land in the centre of Europe’ has been intimately affected by, as well as affecting, the international balance of power. Germany played a major role in causing the outbreak of the First World War, but the Treaty of Versailles, particularly in the ammunition it gave to revisionist elements in Germany, also played a role in the causation of t...