Imperial Germany Revisited

Continuing Debates and New Perspectives

Sven Oliver Müller, Cornelius Torp, Sven Oliver Müller, Cornelius Torp

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780857459008
• eBook ISBN: 9780857452870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The German Empire, its structure, its dynamic development between 1871 and 1918, and its legacy, have been the focus of lively international debate that is showing signs of further intensification as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Based on recent work and scholarly arguments about continuities and discontinuities in modern German history from Bismarck to Hitler, well-known experts broadly explore four themes: the positioning of the Bismarckian Empire in the course of German history; the relationships between society, politics and culture in a period of momentous transformations; the escalation of military violence in Germany's colonies before 1914 and later in two world wars; and finally the situation of Germany within the international system as a major political and economic player. The perspectives presented in this volume have already stimulated further argument and will be of interest to anyone looking for orientation in this field of research.

Part I

THE PLACE OF IMPERIAL GERMANY IN GERMAN HISTORY

Chapter 1

When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us

Helmut Walser Smith

German history has traversed a long complicated terrain, with the Reformation, the convulsions of the religious wars, the precarious hold of the Enlightenment, the shock of Napoleonic invasion, the failed Revolution of 1848, and the impact of Bismarck as important markers of a tortuous past that ended, insofar as history can end, in collapse. The Third Reich was not predetermined by this history, but nor can it be thought to be without it. Otherwise, the Nazi period would seem like an unfortunate accident, divorced from any connection to a longer view of German history and culture.

To most readers, the above may seem sensible enough, but the weight of orthodoxy among professional historians, especially in the Anglo-American branch of the guild, is of a different opinion. There the prevailing view tends to saw the twentieth century off from the nineteenth, making its central catastrophes into a product not of a long-term history as such, but of an apocalyptic twentieth century. Niall Ferguson's War of the Worlds, published in 2006, is only the most recent, and upfront, work to take this position. Ferguson insists that the bloodletting of the twentieth century cannot be traced to the extreme ideologies of the nineteenth, or the dynamics of national states, or the collapse of an international system locked in colonial competition, but instead to a combination of factors—ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and the collapse of empires—that occurred in the last hundred years.¹ The real context of what Friedrich Meinecke called “the German Catastrophe” is, in this reading, not Germany at all.² As a phenomenon of historiography, this is something new. Previous generations of German historians, starting from Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, and including Hans Rosenberg and Hajo Holborn, possessed an acute sense of the chronological depth of German and European history. But this sense has left us. Why?

There are prosaic answers. The nineteenth century is farther away than it was for Meinecke and Ritter, both of whom were born in the nineteenth century, but also for Rosenberg and Holborn, born in the first decade of the twentieth. Moreover, for many historians 1989 ended the short, violent twentieth century, “the age of extremes,” and forced us to take a stand on when it began.³ As “the age of extremes” was palpably marked by global warfare, genocide, and competition among ideologically driven Empires, World War I became the fundamental break. The pressures of that war engendered the collapse of the Russian Empire, and allowed the seizure of power, first by Lenin, then by Stalin. The War also thrust most of Europe east of the Rhine into revolution, tore East Central Europe into a series of nation-states, gave cover for the Armenian genocide, and brought the United States into world politics and military struggle on a grand scale. Then too there was the senseless slaughter for “an old bitch gone in the teeth/a botched civilization,” as Ezra Pound put it.⁴

For the twentieth century, World War I makes as much sense as a marker of its inception as does the French Revolution for the nineteenth. But as any such marker, it also obscures our view, and so we may well ask what the new marker means for our understanding of the century that preceded the “age of extremes.” This seems all the more urgent in German history, where a powerful historiography once connected the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This was a historiography represented on both sides of the Atlantic. Fritz Stern begins the first body chapter of his recently published memoirs with the arresting sentence, “There have been five Germanys I have known since my birth in 1926, but it is the Germany I don't know, the Germany of the years before World War I, that I think I understand best.”⁵ It was the Germany of his professional life, driven by an abiding sense that nineteenth-century Germany offered the keys to understanding the twentieth-century catastrophe. He was not alone, even if other American scholars marked the dividing lines differently. For Peter Gay, the place of Enlightenment remained central, even as he insisted that the Kaiserreich was to contemporaries “anything but a chamber of potential horrors.” For Gay, the enlightened spirit of liberal alertness and unrelenting but constructive criticism, which defined Weimar's community of reason (the outsiders of Wilhelminian Germany as insiders in the 1920s), was not finally forced into death, or exile, until 1933.⁶ More ponderously, Hajo Holborn placed the decisive interpretive stress on the end of German idealism, circa 1840, when German intellectuals failed to address the social question, making it impossible for German idealism to “elevate itself to the level of a national culture” and “solve the practical and intellectual problems of all classes.”⁷ Like Stern and Gay (and George Mosse and Hans Kohn), Holborn shared a sense that in the nineteenth century the track switched, to use Max Weber's famous metaphor, even if the final destination of catastrophe was not clear until 1933.⁸ A parallel tradition emphasized not the intellectual but the social dimension of nineteenth-century origins. Hans Rosenberg, to take only the most famous and influential example, argued that the agrarian constitution of East Elbia, even if formed much earlier, nevertheless proved especially deleterious in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization, creating the structural malformations that led, ultimately, to catastrophe.⁹ Alexander Gerschenkron and Barrington Moore, historical sociologists for whom it was axiomatic that nineteenth-century structures shaped twentieth-century outcomes, followed similar lines of reasoning.¹⁰

This sense of the powerful shaping force of the nineteenth century is now passing, and it is passing in Germany too. This passing has recently been the subject of a wide-ranging historical reflection by Paul Nolte, entitled “Abschied vom 19. Jahrhundert: Auf der Suche nach einer anderen Moderne.”¹¹ Suffice here that in the Federal Republic a powerful historiographical tradition analytically tied the deep structures of the nineteenth century to the catastrophes of the twentieth. This tradition included Werner Conze, who saw the Vormärz as the harbinger of a new industrial civilization; Friedrich Meinecke, who discerned a decisive break when German nationalism lost its idealist component; and Fritz Fischer, who traced strong continuities from the Wilhelminian to the Nazi period. It also included Gerhard Ritter, who saw the democratic moment of the French Revolution as the decisive break into a dark modernity—a view that, with different politics and different channels of influence, still resonates, especially in Israel and France.¹² In Germany, the tradition of seeing the nineteenth century as profoundly structuring for the twentieth century anchored the monumental synthetic works of Heinrich August Winkler and Hans-Ulrich Wehler.¹³ Their interpretations of the longue durée of German history, however different in matters of detail, turned on nineteenth-century developments, the nation-state and industrial breakthrough, and a missed revolution in civil society. This was, of course, the central thesis of the German Sonderweg, which had appeared in many guises, from the self-critical reflections of Ernst Troeltsch, to the sweeping, chronologically deep, European-wide interpretation of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, to the profound if idiosyncratic essays of Hellmuth Plessner.¹⁴ But nowhere did it appear with such concentrated vigor as in the work of a group of historians, including Winkler and Wehler, but also Jürgen Kocka and Volker Berghahn, who emphasized Germany's special path to modernity.

In what follows, I will argue that criticism of the Sonderweg thesis, while enabling historiographical innovation, also weakened our sense of the continuities of German history. This occurred because (a) no tenable continuity thesis was put in its place, and (b) the continuity thesis eventually offered—not to 1933 but to Auschwitz—ill accounted for fundamental aspects of the Third Reich's catastrophic violence. In its place, we—especially in the Anglo-American branch of the community of German historians—have come to accept an anti-Sonderweg consensus bereft of a sense for the deep continuities of German history. Put differently, when the Sonderweg left us, it left us without a convincing way to connect twentieth-century German history to the long nineteenth century. The result is a foreshortened sense, not of German history as such, but of a German history that serves to explain twentieth-century horrors.

I

The Sonderweg—that thread in German history that connected the centuries—came under attack not after 1989, but in the early 1980s, and in order to understand the current historiographical moment—characterized, I believe, by a sharp disjuncture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—it is necessary to return to that Sonderweg debate. In its crystallized form as a contest of two remarkable books, Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Das deutsche Kaiserreich, and David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley's The Peculiarities of German History, the debate left a set of interpretive signposts.¹⁵ These signposts can now be queried, not with a view to deciding the issue—was Germany on a special path or not?—but rather with an aim of understanding when, and for what reasons, the Sonderweg debate left us.

As is well known, in The German Kaiserreich, Hans-Ulrich Wehler posited the political predominance of the nobility over the middle classes in a period of rapid industrial change, and this political predominance, cemented in constitutions and in political culture alike, undermined attempts at achieving democracy. It also generated a propensity to domestic and international violence that led, via a blind flight forward, into the chaos and bloodshed of World War I. The special path consisted of Germany's relative political backwardness, especially vis-à-vis the United Kingdom, and this expressed itself most profoundly in a failed bourgeois revolution, a feudalized bourgeoisie, and the political predominance of an aristocratic caste that controlled key institutions of government, including the army and bureaucracy. Not Germany's modernity, then, but its lack of it determined subsequent disasters. Blackbourn and Eley, conversely, emphasized the modernity of the Kaiserreich, the relative strength of the bourgeoisie, and the importance of the 1890s as a political caesura in which populist politics flourished. They also stressed the formation of political movements resistant to elite manipulation, and the crystallization of political ideologies that challenged rather than stabilized the status quo. If Wehler pointed to the sclerosis of feudal structures, Blackbourn and Eley underscored the disruptive impact of modern capitalism. The modernizers, not the feudal elite, were thus the main carriers of continuity. Nevertheless, both sides emphasized continuity between the Second and Third Empires, and by extension between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Wehler these continuities rested with a feudal elite geographically centered east of the Elbe; for Blackbourn and Eley, carriers of continuity were located in the south, west and center of Germany rather than in the east, and were more important to civil society rather than to the state as such.

At the time, these positions polarized the discipline. Now, more than twenty-five years later, with smoke dissipated, similarities across battle lines appear with greater clarity. In the early 1980s, both sides shared an aversion to stand-alone intellectual or political history, and neither side emphasized diplomatic or military history or the crucial impact of the violence of war. The debate, in fact, largely turned on the form of domestic politics, whether manipulation from above or grass routes mobilization from below. The nation-state remained the frame, with the problem of how nations and societies permeate each other largely unaddressed.¹⁶ Similarly, colonialism was important for reasons of domestic politics but was not particularly important as either experience or as the practice of domination. Most decisively, the Holocaust was not a reference point. In the final analysis, the Sonderweg debate was about 1933, not 1941, about politics, not mass murder. Clarify the failure of liberal democracy, and one has already gone far to explaining the onset of genocide, both sides tacitly concurred.

The great contribution of deutsche Kaiserreich was to anchor an analysis of state power in a structural analysis of economy and society, and to demonstrate profound continuities across the significant ruptures of war, revolution, and the temporary stabilization of bourgeois Europe. It also answered the question, central to the generation of Holborn and Rosenberg, of why Germany veered from the West in terms of its passage to modernity, and it accomplished this with a wide sociological frame. Peculiarities, by contrast, diminished the importance of this veering, and convincingly showed that the model depended on an idealized understanding of British developments. But Blackbourn and Eley did more than bring down a carefully wrought edifice. In Peculiarities, they also erected a new framework, centered on a “new style” of politics and the modern elements of the Imperial society, and this, in turn, opened a space that allowed historians to connect the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich in innovative ways. Civil society, once manipulated from above, suddenly seemed to matter on its own terms. As a result, the rest of Germany, and not just Prussia, came into sharper focus, while religion, local identities, associational life, and the law all assumed a new urgency. To be sure, these topics had been the subject of intensive research before, but the new research could now claim centrality.

This was heady stuff, and it inspired a great deal of new research, some of which, especially the researches of James Retallack, has concluded that the original debate centered on false dichotomies and that Blackbourn and Eley initially underestimated the importance of battles won by conservatives and overestimated the ability of populists in the 1890s to mobilize the masses.¹⁷ Nevertheless, young scholars in the late 1980s benefited immensel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Place of Imperial Germany in German History
• Part II: Politics, Culture, and Society
• Part III: War and Violence
• Part IV: The German Empire in the World
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Subject Index
• Index of People